Description: This text introduces students, scholars, and interested educated readers to the issues of human memory broadly considered, encompassing both individual memory, collective remembering by societies, and the construction of history. The book is organized around several major questions: How do memories construct our past? How do we build shared collective memories? How does memory shape history? This volume presents a special perspective, emphasizing the role of memory processes in the construction of self-identity, of shared cultural norms and concepts, and of historical awareness. Although the results are fairly new and the techniques suitably modern, the vision itself is of course related to the work of such precursors as Frederic Bartlett and Aleksandr Luria, who in very different ways represent the starting point of a serious psychology of human culture.
Brief description: Pascal Boyer studied philosophy and anthropology at the Universities of Paris and Cambridge, where he did his graduate work with Professor Jack Goody, on memory constraints on the transmission of oral literature. He has done anthropological fieldwork in Cameroon on the transmission of the Fang oral epics and on Fang traditional religion. Since then he has worked mostly on the experimental study of cognitive capacities underlying cultural transmission. After teaching in Cambridge, San Diego, Lyon, and Santa Barbara, Boyer moved to his present position at the departments of anthropology and psychology at Washington University, St. Louis.
Review Quotes: "Boyer and Wertsch present a much needed edited volume combining the most recent results of memory studies in cognitive psychology with studies in history and anthropology. The basic argument, that we need to pay attention to how memories are formed before we can discuss what they mean, is compelling. The contributors to this volume cogently discuss the impact of repeated retrieval and feedback patterns, as well as encoding and priming processes, and link them to specific instances of individual and social remembering, drawing examples from autobiographies, small-scale oral societies, as well as nation-states. This book provides a solid foundation for informed, interdisciplinary discussions on memory."
--Lucia Volk, San Francisco State University