Memory in Mind and Culture

Pascal Boyer studied philosophy and anthropology at the Universities of Paris and Cambridge, where he did his graduate work with Professor Jack Goody, on memory constraints on the transmission of oral literature. He has done anthropological fieldwork in Cameroon on the transmission of the Fang oral epics and on Fang traditional religion. Since then he has worked mostly on the experimental study of cognitive capacities underlying cultural transmission. After teaching in Cambridge, San Diego, Lyon, and Santa Barbara, Boyer moved to his present position at the departments of anthropology and psychology at Washington University, St. Louis. James V. Wertsch is Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. After finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1975, Wertsch was a postdoctoral Fellow in Moscow at the USSR Academy of Sciences and Moscow State University. His research is concerned with language, thought, and culture, with a special focus on collective memory and national identity. Wertsch is the author of more than 200 publications appearing in a dozen languages. These include the volumes Voices of the Mind (1991), Mind as Action (1998), and Voices of Collective Remembering (2002).

• Part I. In Mind, Culture and History: A Special Perspective: 1. What are memories for? Functions of recall in cognition and culture Pascal Boyer; Part II. How Do Memories Construct Our Past?: 2. Networks of autobiographical memories Helen L. Williams and Martin A. Conway; 3. Cultural life scripts and individual life stories Dorthe Berntsen and Annette Bohn; 4. Specificity of memory: implications for individual and collective remembering Daniel L. Schacter, Angela H. Gutchess, and Elizabeth A. Kensinger; Part III. How Do We Build Shared Collective Memories?: 5. Collective memory James V. Wertsch; 6. The role of repeated retrieval in shaping collective memory Henry L. Roediger III, Franklin M. Zaromb, and Andrew C. Butler; 7. Making history: social and psychological processes underlying collective memory James W. Pennebaker and Amy Gonzales; 8. How does collective memory create a sense of the collective? Alan Lambert, Laura Nesse, Chad Rogers, and Larry Jacoby; Part IV. How Does Memory Shape History?: 9. Historical memories Craig W. Blatz and Michael Ross; 10. The memory boom: why and why now? David W. Blight; 11. Historians and sites of memory Jay Winter; Part V. How Does Memory Shape Culture?: 12. Oral traditions as collective memories: implications for a general theory of individual and collective memory David C. Rubin; 13. Cognitive predispositions and cultural transmission Pascal Boyer.

“Memory isn't just for psychologists, or neuroscientists, anymore. Psychologists learned a lot about memory in the 100 years after Ebbinghaus. Then cognitive neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience began to connect the psychology of memory "down" to its neural substrates. The remaining task is to connect the psychology of memory "up" to the other social sciences, viewing individual memory processes, and individual memories, in the context of social and cultural structures and processes lying outside the individual. Boyer and Wertsch have done just that. In this book, their authors summarize what we already know, and initiate a new line of research that will – it is to be hoped – remind psychologists that they are social as well as biological scientists, and foster the development of a cognitive perspective within the social sciences more generally.” —John F. Kihlstrom, University of California, Berkeley