Afterword

Juliette Harrisson and Phoebe Roy

Memory, whether personal, collective or cultural, can be experienced in either an active or a passive way. On a personal level, one might remember something in a passive way by recalling the details of an event without particular effort.

Aleida Assmann has outlined the chief methods of actively remembering an event on a cultural level as those involving selecting and collecting objects of memory, creating a canon or actively maintaining memory through monuments or museums. Cultural memory may be transmitted more passively through archives and store houses.¹ We could perhaps add unorganized story­sharing or using a name whose individual significance is lost to the different ways in which cultural memories may be transmitted in a passive fashion.

This distinction between active and passive memory is particularly inter­esting in a religious context. The performance of religious ritual is the most passive transmission of memory of all, as participants engage in particular activities on a regular basis chiefly for the reason that this is what has always been done. On the other hand, the transmission of religious tradition is almost aggressively active. This is especially the case in the proselytizing, scripture-prioritizing religion of Christianity, but it is the case also in more fluid traditions, where the mythology may shift, but the deliberate trans­mission of the newly configured mythology is of paramount importance.

As Assmann has demonstrated, forgetting can be active or passive as well and this is something that has been highlighted in this volume.

However, most of the papers in this volume have dealt with the more active side of cultural remembrance. The active manipulation of cultural memory to the point of memory alteration has been a running theme throughout the work. From the developing mythological tradition (Dowden) to the Christianizing of Egypt (Westerfeld) to the re-Orientalizing of a Hellenized goddess (Harrisson), memory in ancient religious and urban contexts is not just actively maintained, but actively manipulated.

The benefit of this volume, however, is not just where it has taken us, but to where it might lead. The range of themes and contexts covered is further proof of the wide application of cultural memory as a theoretical tool for engaging with the ancient world; in the future, the importance of this approach in contemporary scientific research in emerging psychological and biological fields will become more marked. Since 11 September 2001, a number of studies of cultural reactions to significant political events and to cultural trauma have provided us with new insight into the way cultural memory works, and will continue to do so.³ Perhaps the next area of psychological study historians of cultural memory should look to concerns the creation of false memories. That entirely false memories can be planted in an individual has long been known.⁴ However, the application of this knowledge on a cultural level, particularly in the field of history, is less well-studied.

Whatever the answers, it seems clear that the interaction of memory and history will continue to provide a fruitful avenue of inquiry, particularly into the theoretically complex area of religion. Whether approached through the lens of literary study, history, archaeology or theory of religion, this is an area that can only benefit from increased interdisciplinary dialogue, such as we see in this volume, and further investigation of the part memory and forgetting play in the development of religious tradition on a cultural level.

Notes

1 A. Assmann 2010: 99.

2 Ibid.

3 See, for example, Comin, Manier and Hirst 2009; Kansteiner and Weilnbock 2010: 233-4.

4 See further, Loftus 2004: 145; Schacter and Dodson 2001: 1385-6.

Bibliography

Assmann, A., 2010. ‘Canon and Archive’, in A. Erll, A. Nünning and S. B. Young (eds), A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, Berlin and New York, 97-108.

Comin, A., D. Manier and W. Hirst, 2009. ‘Forgetting the Unforgettable through Conversation: Socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting of September 11 memories’, in Psychological Science, Vol. 20, No. 5, 627-33.

Kansteiner, W. and H. Weilnbock, 2010. Against the Concept of Cultural Trauma’, in A. Erll, A. Nünning and S. B. Young (eds), A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, Berlin and New York, 229-40.

Lofter, E. F., 2004. ‘Memories of Things Unseen’, in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 13, No. 4, 145-7.

Schacter, D. L. and C. S. Dodson, 2001. ‘Misattribution, False Recognition and the Sins of Memory’, in Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, Vol. 356, No. 1413, 1385-93.