Religion and Cultural Memory

In ten brilliant essays, Jan Assmann explores the connections between religion, culture, and memory. Building on Maurice Halbwachs's idea that memory, like language, is a social phenomenon as well as an individual one, he argues that memory has a cultural dimension too. He develops a persuasive view of the life of the past in such surface phenomena as codes, religious rites and festivals, and canonical texts on the one hand, and in the Freudian psychodrama of repressing and resurrecting the past on the other. Whereas the current fad for oral history inevitably focuses on the actual memories of the last century or so, Assmann presents a commanding view of culture extending over five thousand years. He focuses on cultural memory from the Egyptians, Babylonians, and the Osage Indians down to recent controversies about memorializing the Holocaust in Germany and the role of memory in the current disputes between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East and between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.

ISBN 0804745234   Pages 240 ISBN13 9780804745239 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Stanford University Press   Weight (grammes) 322 Imprint Stanford University Press   Published in Palo Alto Format Paperback   Series title Cultural Memory of the Present (Paperback) Publication date 15 Jan 2006   Height (mm) 228 Translator Rodney Livingstone   Width (mm) 151 Library of Congress 2005024771   Spine width (mm) 13 DEWEY 200.9   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

		Introduction : what is "cultural memory"?		1
1		Invisible religion and cultural memory		31
2		Monotheism, memory, and trauma : reflections on Freud's book on Moses		46
3		Five stages on the road to the canon : tradition and written culture in ancient Israel and early Judaism		63
4		Remembering in order to belong : writing, memory, and identity		81
5		Cultural texts suspended between writing and speech		101
6		Text and ritual : the meaning of the media for the history of religion		122
7		Officium Memoriae : ritual as the medium of thought		139
8		A life in quotation : Thomas Mann and the phenomenology of cultural memory		155
9		Egypt in western memory		178

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