memory studies

Note: This post is a continuation of the last, which began with musings on memory 1-10. 

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.                                       – Walter Benjamin

11. There is a branch of sociology (and other disciplines) called memory studies. (I am so happy about this.) It investigates things like the ways memory impacts culture and the role memory plays in collective and individual identity.

12. This makes me think of how tremendously satisfying it can feel to remember together, how it can forge and strengthen connections with others.

13. A sociologist named Paul Connerton, a pioneer in the field of memory studies, has posited that there are seven types of forgetting.

14. One of the seven types of forgetting, repressive erasure, refers to the forced forgetting of language and customs by which a government or state may seek to control a people. Forgetting as a form of violence.

15. Families do this, too. Continue reading Memoir and Memory II: the Theater of Memory and Ways We Forget