Group items tagged

Crucial in understanding cultural memory as a phenomenon is the distinction between memory and history. This distinction was put forward by Pierre Nora, who pinpointed a niche in-between history and memory. Simply put, memories are the events that actually happened, while histories are subjective representations of what historians believe is crucial to remember. This dichotomy, it should be noted, emerged at a particular moment in history: it implies that there used to be a time when memories could exist as such — without being representational.

Either in visualized or abstracted form, one of the largest complications of memorializing our past is the inevitable fact that it is absent. Every memory we try to reproduce becomes – as Terdiman states – a 'present past'. It is this impractical desire for recalling what is gone forever that brings to surface a feeling of nostalgia, noticeable in many aspects of daily life but most specifically in cultural products.

German Egyptologists Jan Assmann in his book "Das kulturelle Gedächtnis",

cultural memory is embodied in objectivations that store meaning in a concentrated manner; meanings to be shared. They can be texts (such as sacred texts), chronicles, or poetry. They can be monuments, such as buildings or statues, or any material signs or memorabilia erected as reminders. In addition, cultural memory is embodied in regularly repeated and repeatable practices: festivals, ceremonies, and rites. Finally, cultural memory--like individual memory--is linked to places.

Cultural memory constructs and maintains identity. As long as a group of people maintains and cultivates a common cultural memory, the group continues to exist. Yerushalmi (1982) shows that Jews consciously cultivated identity through remembrance. The frequency of the injunction "Zachor!" (Remember!) in the Jewish Bible is a case in point.

The Old Testament was created in periods of globalization, in the Persian and the Hellenistic-Roman period. The writings is a piece of memory work meant for creation of national or local identity and particularity in a global world, in the 1st millennium b.c.e. In a globalized world, counter-activity is always present, which focuses on the local, small tradition, the particular narrative, which creates its own way of coherence. The notion of "cultural memory" is used both in the humanities and in social science. Cultural memory appears as overwriting (palimpsests) and re-use of material artifacts, such as buildings, monuments, and texts, and of ritual practice. Memorization can be conscious or unconscious, incorporated in the body, and become visible material culture and monuments. The notion of landscape plays a crucial role in memory work, representing a special challenge in the project. People are never alone, but always relate to place, education, nation, family, religious and political groups, and so on. These collectives are the frames that direct people's comprehension of reality. This is the human context from which one also should look upon  memory and remembrance.

Cultural or collective memory (also known as “social memory”) has become a major issue of the last fifty years in several fields. The concept originated within sociology but has more recently taken in psychology and history (see especially Zerubavel E, 2003; Zerubavel Y., 2005) to become an interdisciplinary area of investigation (see Middleton and Edwards, 1990).

The notion of cultural memory is the decisive factor in a society's reconstruction of the past through a number of media. BiCuM investigates how memory is a fundamental instrument in the formation of cultural, religious, ethnic, and national identity in the Old Testament. The research of the Centre demands an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on relevant studies of the Eastern Mediterranean area in Antiquity.