| Cultural memory has become an important topic in the emergent field of cultural studies, where it has displaced and subsumed the discourses of individual (psychological) memory and of social memory. In other words, the term cultural memory signifies that memory can be understood as a cultural phenomenon as well as an individual or social one. Despite our differences in theoretical orientation and disciplinary background, we contributors to this book share this primary assumption. We also view cultural memorization as an activity occurring in the present, in which the past is continuously modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the future. |
| Neither remnant, document, nor relic of the past, nor floating in a present cut off from the past, cultural memory, for better or for worse, links the past to the present and future. It is that process of linking that we explore in this volume. Most particularly, we invoke the discourse of cultural memory to mediate and modify difficult or tabooed moments of the pastmoments that nonetheless impinge, sometimes fatally, on the present. |
| The memorial presence of the past takes many forms and serves many purposes, ranging from conscious recall to unreflected reemergence, from nostalgic longing for what is lost to polemical use of the past to reshape the present. The interaction between present and past that is the stuff of cultural memory is, however, the product of collective agency rather than the result of psychic or historical accident. This volume grew out of the authors' conviction that cultural recall is not merely something of which you happen to be a bearer but something that you actually perform, even if, in many instances, such acts are not consciously and wilfully contrived.1 |
| To be sure, memory can be so habitual that it appears to be automatic, just as it can be manipulated by others. When walking in a wet street, for example, one avoids stepping into a puddle, not because of a conscious decision but because "somehow" one knows that not avoiding the puddle results in wet feet. This knowledge comes from memory. Such background memories help the subject survive in a community where the behaviors they inform are part of "normal" life. They are so strongly routine-basedso like conditioned reflexesthat it seems a bit silly to consider them in terms of memory at all. But the underlying "rule" that determines such unreflective acts can surely |
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