517: Anthropological Approaches to Memory
Spring Semester 2005 Wednesday 3:00-6:00PM
Professor Janet Dixon Keller
This is a new course designed for advanced graduate students with interests in the areas
of Culture, Memory and History in Ethnography. The first few weeks of the semester will
be devoted to foundational, theoretical considerations shaping anthropological research
on social memory, individual remembering and the interaction of these processes in
representations and performance. Subsequently we will read a series of texts and shorter
works (both articles and excerpts from longer volumes); each week addressing a different
topic or critiquing a distinctive perspective in contemporary culture and memory studies.
Graduate students participating in the class will develop critical reviews throughout the
semester and present an original essay, research paper, dissertation segment, or research
project design for the final requirement.
The final presentations will involve circulation of material the week before the scheduled
date of presentation with a brief summary of the work on the presentation date followed
by critical engagement with class members. Given current course enrollment presentors
will have 20 minutes to summarize their work with 30 minutes following for discussion.
A written version of the assignment will be due during finals week.
January 19, 2005
Introduction
January 26, 2005
Bartlett, Sir Frederic C. – A Theory of Remembering (pages 197 – 214 in
Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. [1932] 1967 Cambridge
University Press.) Online.
Murphy, Gregory and Medin, Doug – The Role of Theories in Conceptual
Coherence. Psychological Review 92(3):289-316. 1985.
Durkheim, Emile – Individual and Collective Representations and The
Determination of Moral Facts (pages 1-62 in Sociology and Philosophy translated by D.
F. Pocock [1924] 1974 The Free Press.) Online.
February 2,
Halbwachs, Maurice – On Collective Memory. Edited and Translated by Lewis
Coser. [1941, 1952] 1992 The University of Chicago Press.
Micarelli, Giovanna and Gomez, Hernan – The Body of Memory: Theater
Anthropology as a Tool for Cultural and Linguistic Reaffirmation in Indigenous
Amazonia. Circa 2000.
February 9,
Connerton, Paul - How Societies Remember. 1989 Cambridge University Press.
Keller, Charles and Keller, Janet – Imagery in Cultural Tradition and Innovation.
In Mind, Culture and Activity 6(1):3-32. 1999. Online.
Wilson, Robert A. – The Embedded Mind and Cognition. (Pages 183-213 in
Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences. 2004 Cambridge
University Press. Online.
February 16,
Wertsch, James – Voices of Collective Remembering. 2002 Cambridge
University Press.
Goody, Jack – Canonization in Oral and Literate Traditions (Pages 119-131 in
The Power of the Written Tradition. 2000 Smithsonian Institution.) Online.
Wertsch, James – Narratives as Cultural Tools in Sociocultural Analysis: Official
History in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia. Ethos 28(4):511-534. Available on
AnthroSource.
February 23,
Malkki, Liisa - Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National
Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees. 1995 University of Chicago Press.
Cole, Jennifer – The Work of Memory in Madagascar. American
Ethnologist 25(4):610-633. Available on Anthro Source.
March 2,
Sutton, David – Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and
Memory. 2001 Oxford, Berg.
Sutton, David – Cooking Skill, the Senses and Memory: The Fate of Practical
Knowledge. Ms. 2004. Online.
March 9,
Stoller, Paul – Embodying Colonial Memories. Spirit Possession, Power and the
Hauka in West Africa. 1995 Routledge.
Bunzl, Matti - 1998 Counter-Memory and Modes of Resistance: The Uses
of Fin-de-Siecle Vienna for Present-day Austrain Jews. In Dagmar Lorenz and Renate
Posthofen (Eds.) Transforming the Center, Eroding the Margins: Essays on
Ethnic and Cultural Boundaries in German Speaking Countries. Columbian, SC:
Camden House:169-184.
March 16,
Hyussen, Andreas – Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsets and the Politics of Memory.
2003 Stanford University Press.
March 30, Summary and Directions
April 6, Scheduled research and writing time
April 13, Presentations and Discussion
April 20, Presentations and Discussion
April 27, Presentations and Discussion
May 4, Presentation and Discussion
Supplemental Bibliography for Anthropological Approaches to Memory:
Abercrombie, Thomas 1998 Pathways of memory and power: ethnography and
history among an Andean People. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Appardurai, A. The Past as a Scarce Resource Man. 16(2):210-219.
Bahloul, Joelle 1996 The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in
Colonial Algeria 1937-1962. trans Catherine de Peloux-Menage. Cambridge:
Cambridge U Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail 1981 Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel. The
Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bal, Mieke, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer 1999 Acts of Memory: Cultural
Recall in the Present. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Bartlett, Frederic C. 1932. Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Basso, Keith 1996 Wisdom Sits in Places: Language and Landscape among the
Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Battaglia, Deborah 1993 At Play in the Fields (and Borders) of the Imaginary:
Melanesian Transformations of Forgetting. Cultural Anthropology 8:430-442.
Ben-Amos, Dan and Liliane Weissberg (eds.) Cultural Memory and
the Construction of Identity. UCPress.
Biersack, A. 1991 Clio in Oceania: Towards a Historical Anthropology.
Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Borofsky, Robert 2000 Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake
History. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
Bunzl, M. 1995 On the Politics and Semantics of Austrian memory: Vienna's
Monument against War and Fascism." History and Memory 7(2):7-40.
Bunzl, M 1998 Counter-Memory and modes of Resistance: The Uses of Fin-deSiecle Vienna for Present-day Austrain Jews. In Dagmar Lorenz and Renate
Posthofen (Eds.) Transforming the Center, Eroding the Margins: Essays on
Ethnic and Cultural Boundaries in German Speaking Countries. Columbian, SC:
Camden House:169-184.
Bunzl, M. 2000 Modes of Nostalgia and figurations of 'Austria' in the Exil
(auto)biographien of Richard Beer Hoffmann and Stefan Zweig. In Donald
Daviau (Ed.) Austria in Literature. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 48-59.
Cole, Jennifer 2001 Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in
Madagascar. UCPress, Berkeley.
Cole, Jennifer 1998 The Work of Memory in Madagascar. American Ethnologist
25:610-633.
Comaroffs, J and J 1992 Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder:
Westview.
Connerton, P. 1989 How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge U Press.
Csordas, Thomas 1996 Imaginal Performance and Memory in Ritual Healing. In
Carol Larderman and Marianna Roseman (eds) The Performance of Healing. New
York: Routledge pp 91-114.
D’Andrade, Roy 1995 The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
De Silva, Cara (Ed) In Memory's Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin
Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc.
Doumanis, Nicholas 1997 Myth and Memory in the Mediterranean: Remembering
Fascism's Empire. London: Macmillan.
Dove, Michael 1999 The Agronomy of Memory and the Memory of Agronomy:
Ritual Conservation of Archaic Cultigens in Contemporary Farming Systems. In
Ethnoecology: Situated Knowledge: Located Lives (edited by) Virginia Nazarea
Tucson: University of Arizona Press
Durkheim, Emile [1924] 1974 Sociology and Philosophy translated by D. F.
Pocock NY:The Free Press.
Duruz, Jean 1999 Food as Nostalgia: Eating the Fifties and Sixties. Australian
Historical Studies 113:231-250.
Engen, Trygg 1991 Odor, Sensation and Memoir. NY: Praeger.
Fabian, Johannes 2002 Forgetting Africa. Journal of Romance Languages. lst or
second volume.
Fabian, Johannes 1996 Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History
in Zaire. Berkeley: UC Press.
Fabian, Johannes 2001 Africa's Belgium. In Fabian, Johannes Anthropology
with an Attitude. Standford: Stanford University Press.
Feld, Stephen and Keith Basso (Eds.) Senses of Place.
Feld, Stephen 1982 Sound and Sentiment. 2nd edition. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Fentriss, James and Chris Wickham 1992 Social Memory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Finnegan, Ruth 1977 Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance and Social Context.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Forty, Adrian and Susanne Kuchler (eds.) 1999 The Art of Forgetting. Oxford:
Berg.
Gatewood, John 1985 Actions Speak Louder than Words. In J. W. D. Dougherty
(Ed.) Directions in Cognitive Anthropology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Goody, Jack 2000 The Power of the Written Tradition. Smithsonian.
Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger 1983 Invention of Tradition.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Halbwachs, Maurice 1980 [1950] The Collective Memory. New York: Harper
and Row.
Handler, Richard and Eric Gable 1997 The new history in an old museum:
creating the past at Colonial Williamsburg. Durham, NC : Duke University Press.
Herzfeld, Michael 1982 Ours once more : folklore, ideology, and the making of
modern Greece. Austin : University of Texas Press.
Hirst, William, David Manier and Ioana Apetoasia 1997 The Construction of the
Remembered Self. In The Self Across Psychology: Self-Recognition, SelfAwareness and the Self Concept edited by Joan Snodgrass and Robert Thompson
NY: NY Academy of Sciences pp 162-79.
Holland, Dorothy and Jean Lave (Eds.) 2001 History in person : enduring
struggles, contentious practice, intimate identities. Santa Fe, N.M : School of
American Research Press, Oxford: James Currey.
Hoskins, Janet 1998 Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Story of People's
Lives. London: Routledge.
Hutchins, Edwin 1995 Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Huyssen, Andreas 1995 Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of
Amnesia. NY: Routledge.
Hyussen, Andreas 2003 Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsets and the Politics of
Memory. Stanford University Press.
Hymes, Dell 1985 Language, Memory and Selective Performance: Cultee's
"Salmon Myth" as Twice Told to Boas. ???? 98:391-434.
Keller, Charles and Janet Keller - Imagery in Cultural Tradition and Innovation.
In Mind, Culture and Activity 6(1):3-32. 1999.
Keller, Charles M. and Keller, Janet D. 1996 Cognition and Tool Use: The
Blacksmith at Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Keller, Janet Dixon and Takaronga Kuautonga Nokonofo Kitea/ We Keep On
Living This Way. A Hkai ma Tagi i West Futuna, Vanuatu/ Myths and Music of
West Futuna Vanuatu. Belair, Australia: Crawford Publishing House, Ltd. In
press.
Klein, Norman 1997 The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of
Memory. Verso.
Kuberski, Philip 1992 The Persistence of Memory: Organism, Myth and Text.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kuchler, Susanne 1993 Landscape as Memory: The Mapping of Process and its
Representation in Melanesian Society. In Landscape: Politics and Perspectives
edited by Barbara Bender Oxford:Berg pp. 85-106.
Kuchler, Susanne 1987 Malangan: Art and Memory in a Melanesian Society. Man
22:238-55.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson 1999 Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied
Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought.
Lambek, Michael and Paul Antze (eds) 1998 Tense Past: Cultural Essays in
Trauma and Memory. London: Routledge.
Langer, Lawrence L. 1991 Holocaust testimonies : the ruins of memory
New Haven : Yale University Press.
Linde, Charlotte 1987 Explanatory Systems in Oral Life Stories. In D. Holland
and N. Quinn (eds.) Folk Models of Language and Mind? Cambridge: Cambridge
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Lord, Albert 1960 The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Lord, Albert 1953 Homer's Originality: Dictated Texts. Transactions and
Proceedings of the American Philological Association 84:124-34.
Lowenthal, David 1985 The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Mageo, Jeannette 2001 Culture Memory: Reconfiguring History and Identity
in the Post Colonial Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
Malkki, Liisa 1995 Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology
Among Hutu Refugees. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Maschio, Thomas 1994 To Remember the Faces of the Dead: The Plentitude of
Memory in Southwestern New Britain. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press.
McGrath, Barbara Burns 2002 Seattle Fa'a Samoa. Contemporary Pacfic
14:2:307-340.
Merlan, Francesca 1998 Caging the Rainbow: Places, Politics and Aborigines in
a North Australian Town. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
Micarelli, Giovanna and Gomez, Hernan – The Body of Memory: Theater
Anthropology as a Tool for Cultural and Linguistic Reaffirmation in Indigenous
Amazonia. Circa 2000.
Mueggler, Erik 2001 The age of wild ghosts : memory, violence, and place in
Southwest China. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Murphy, Gregory and Medin, Doug 1985 The Role of Theories in Conceptual
Coherence. Psychological Review 92(3):289-316.
Murphy, John 1986 The Voice of Memory: History, Autobiography and Oral
Memory. Historical Studies 22:157-75.
Nazarea, Virginia 1998 Culture Memory and Biodiversity Tucson: University of
Arizona Press.
Neisser, Ulric (ed) 1982 Memory observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Neisser, Ulric and Eugene Winograd (Eds.) 1988 Remembering Reconsidered :
ecological and traditional approaches to the study of memory. Series: Emory
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Novick, Peter 1999 The Holocaust in American Life. Boston : Houghton Mifflin.
Orta, Andrew 2004 Catechizing Culture: Missionaries, Aymara and the "New
Evangelization." NY: Columbia University Press.
Orta, Andrew 2000 Syncretic subjects and body politics: doubleness, personhood
and Aymara catechists. American Ethnologist 26(4):864-889.
Parmentier, Richard 1987 The Sacred Remains: Myth, History and Plity in Belau.
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Pierre Nora 1989 Between Memory and History: Les Leius de Memoire.
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Proust, Marcel 1982 Remembrance of Things Past. Vol. 1, trans. by C.K. Scott
Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Vintage.
Radley, Alan 1990 Artefacts, Memory and a Sense of the Past. In Middleton and
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Rappaport, Joanne 1998 The Politics of Memory. Chapel Hill: Duke University
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Sahlins, M. 1981 Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the
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Seremetakis, C. N. (ed) 1994 The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as
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Shore, Bradd 1996 Culture in Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sperber, Dan 1989 Epidemiology of Representations. In Hirschfeld, L. and S.
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Stewart, Kathleen 1996 A Space By the Side of the Road. Princeton: Princeton
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Stoller, Paul 1995 Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power and
the Hauka in West Africa. New York: Routledge.
Stoller, P. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology.
Philadelphia: U of P Press.
Andrew Strathern 1996 Body Thoughts. Ann Arbor: U of M Press.
Sutton, David 2001 Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and
Memory. New York: Oxford.
Sutton, David – Cooking Skill, the Senses and Memory: The Fate of Practical
Knowledge. Ms. 2004
Taylor, Ann Christine 1993 Remembering to Forget: Identity, Memory and
Mourning among the Jivaro. Man 28:653-78.
Tonkin, Elizabeth 1992 Narrating Our Pasts: the Social Construction of Oral
History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Torren, Christina 1993 Making History: The Significance of Childhood Cognition
for a Comparative Anthropology of Mind. Man 28:461-478.
Wertsch, James 2002 Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge, U.K. New
York : Cambridge University Press.
Wertsch, James – Narratives as Cultural Tools in Sociocultural Analysis: Official
History in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia. Ethos 28(4):511-534.
Wilson, Robert A. 2004 Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile
Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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