| Notes | '5. Institutions and Carriers (114-118)\n\n{115} The cultural memory always has its specialists, both in oral and in literate societies.\n{116} The participation structure of cultural memory has an inherent tendency to elitism; it is never strictly egalitarian.\n\n{117} nice comparative table\n\nTransitions and transformation account for the dynamics of cultural memory. Two typical directions have a structural significance and should at least briefly be mentioned in this context. One concerns the transition from autobiographical and communicative memory into cultural memory, and the other concerns, within cultural memory, the move from the rear stage to the forefront, from the periphery into the center, from latency or potentiality to manifestation or actualization and vice versa. {like Masada?}\n \n'
'4. Identity 113-114\n\n{113 The distinction of different forms of memory looks like a structure but it works more as a dynamic, creating tension between the various poles....there are always frames that relate memory to specific horizons of time and identity on the individual, {114} generational, political, and cultural levels.\nRemembering is a realization of belonging, even a social obligation. One has to remember in order to belong...\n\n '
'3. Time Frames112-113\nDiscusses Jan Vansina, \"who worked with oral societies in Africa...\" \"tripartite structure\" - \"informal\" communicative memory, relatively shallow, reaching back \"not beyond three generations\" and memory of remote past, ontogeny and origins, institutionalize and ritualized. The two (corresponding to Assman\'s distinction btw communicative and cultural memory) separated by \"floating gap.\"\n\n{113} All studies in oral history confirm that even in literate societies living memory goes no further back than eighty years after which, separated by the floating gap, come, instead of myths of origin, the dates from schoolbooks and monuments.\nIn the context of cultural memory, the distinction between myth and history vanishes. Not the past as such, as it is investigated and reconstructed by archaeologists and historians, counts for the cultural memory, but only the past as it is remembered.\n'
'2. Culture as Memory 110-112\n\n{112} On the social level, with respect to groups and societies, the role of external symbols becomes even more important, because groups which, of course, do not \"have\" a memory tend to \"make\" themselves one by means of things meant as reminders such as monuments, museums, libraries, archives, and other mnemonic institutions. This is what we call cultural memory. In order to be able to be reembodied in the sequence of generations, cultural memory, unlike communicative memory, exists also in disembodied form and requires institutions of preservation and reembodiment.\n....Communicative memory is non-institutional; it is not supported by any institutions of learning, transmission, and interpretation; it is not cultivated by specialists and is not summoned or celebrated on special occasions; it is not formalized and stabilized by any forms of material symbolization; it lives in everyday interaction and communication and, for this very reason, has only a limited time depth which normally reaches no farther back than eighty years, the time span of three interacting generations. Still, there are frames, \"communicative genres,\" traditions of communication and thematization and, above all, the affective ties that bind together families, groups, and generations. {But what about memories of political negotiations, for example? Are those then cultural memories, because they are recorded by institutions? I think they\'re overlooking forms of institutional memory that may be apart from their understanding of culture.}\n'
'1. Memory: Individual, Social, and Cultural 109-110\n\n{109} On the inner level, memory is a matter of our neuro-mental system. This is our personal memory, the only form of memory that had been recognized as such until the 1920s. On the social level, memory is a matter of communication and social interaction...Halbwachs....Memory enables us to live in groups and communities, and living in these groups and communities enables us to build a memory.\n{110} The term \"communicative memory\" was introduced in order to delineate the difference between Halbwach\'s concept of \"collective memory\" and our understanding of \"cultural memory.\" Cultural memory is a form of collective memory, in the sense that it is shared by a number of people and that it conveys to these people a collective, that is, cultural, identity. Halbwachs, however, the inventor of the term \"collective memory,\" was careful to keep his concept of collective memory apart from the realm of traditions, transmissions, and transferences which we propose to subsume under the term \"cultural memory.\" We preserve Halbwach\'s distinction by breaking up his concept of collective memory into \"communicative\" and \"cultural memory,\" but we insist on including the cultural sphere, which he excluded, in the study of memory.\n'
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