Canon and Archive

'105 - oral cultures\n\nAlthough we cannot imagine a culture without an active cultural memory, we can well imagine a culture without a passive storing memory. In oral cultures in which the cultural memory is embodied and transmitted through performances and practices, material relics do not persist and accumulate. In such cultures, the range of the cultural memory is coextensive with the embodied repertoires that are performed in festive rites and repeated practices. Cultures that do not make use of writing do not produce the types of relicts [sic] that are assembled in archives. Nor do they produce a canon that can be enshrined in museums and monuments.\n'
'101 Working memory and canon memory\n\nCultural memory, then, is based on two separate functions: the presentation of a narrow selection of sacred texts, artistic masterpieces, or historic key events in a timeless framework; and the storing of documents and artifacts of the past that do not meet all these standards but are nevertheless deemed interesting or important enough to not let them vanish on the highway to total oblivion. While emphatic appreciation, repeated performance, and continued individual and public attention are the hallmark of objects in the cultural working memory, professional preservation and withdrawal from general attention mark the contents of the reference memory. Emphatic reverence and specialized historical curiosity are the two poles between which the dynamics of cultural memory is played out.\n'