How Modernity Forgets

Paul Connerton is a Research Associate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is also an Honorary Fellow in the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London.

• 1. Introduction; 2. Two types of place memory; 3. Temporalities of forgetting; 4. Topographies of forgetting; 5. Conclusion.

'How Societies Remember was a tightly argued account of the importance of habitual, bodily memory to cultural transmission; How Modernity Forgets is a substantive cultural diagnosis of modernity, centred on the theme of cultural amnesia … It … [says] what it says with the sort of clarity that puts most cultural analysis to shame. Modernity … has displaced social life from place and replaced the known with the merely known about. In a series of superb historical vignettes Connerton shows that this has occurred in three ways: through the dismantling of the city frontier in the nineteenth century and the growth of megacities in the twentieth, through the development of superhuman speed … and through 'the repeated intentional destruction of the built environment' … via suburbanization, deindustrialization and urban renewal.' The British Journal of Sociology