The Role of Memory in the Transmission of Culture

Author(s): Michael Rowlands

Source: World Archaeology, Vol. 25, No. 2, Conceptions of Time and Ancient Society (Oct.,
1993), pp. 141-151
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/124810
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The role of memory in the
transmission of culture

Michael Rowlands

Introduction

Fredrik Barth has argued recently that processes of cultural transmission and transform-
ation in non-literate societies differ quite fundamentally from those in literate societies
(Barth 1987). In his introduction to the same book, Goody contrasted the role of memory
in non-literate societies to that of verbal exegesis accompanied by texts in literate societies.
A very useful debate has grown out of the contrast made by these two authors which has
developed a more subtle understanding of the two processes of 'cultural genetics'
originally suggested by Goody (1968: 2; 1986: 9).
Kuechler, for example, has elaborated a distinction which has significant implications
for studies of the relation between material culture and memory (Kuechler 1987). She
focuses on the relation between the form given to an object and the process of its
transmission. Instead of a literate/non-literate distinction she makes one between a mode
of transmission from one generation to another through the curation of material culture
and another where objects are not preserved and transmitted but are reproduced through
memory so that 'each is reminiscent of an object seen in the past' (Kuechler 1987: 239). A
mode of transmission which emphasizes the duration of objects as a mnemonic device is
perhaps more familiar to heirs of a monumental built environment tradition than one
where objects are deliberately lost and destroyed and their imagery recalled at a later date.
Kuechler implies that whilst the first favours more rigid and conservative transmission of
cultural information, the latter encourages greater variation since no object is the exact
replica of another. A tension between constancy and variation in transmission can of
course be deemed appropriate to any process of cultural reproduction but in her analysis
Kuechler is concerned with the more general point that for every image memorized or
recalled rather than seen, there must exist a template which generates a range of possible
images and a range of possible interpretation of them (Kuechler 1987: 246; cf. Morphy
1991). Every template is known to have a stereotypic range of motifs, whilst each
reproduction of an image may use particular forms or combinations of motifs to make
statements about possession of common memory or ownership.
Whitehouse has recently made a rather similar argument about the relation between
different types of religious experience and differential demands on memory in non-literate
societies (Whitehouse 1992). He would contrast forms of experience that rely on

World Archaeology Volume 25 No. 2 Conceptions of Time and Ancient Society

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142 Michael Rowlands

codifications that are highly verbalized, decontextualized and logically integrated from
those (and he has in mind here Barth's and others' descriptions of New Guinea male
initiation rituals) which rely on non-verbal analogical codification (Whitehouse
1992: 792). Whilst the transmission of the former relies on frequent repetition, conscious
verbal exegesis and the rigorous standardization of sacred rituals, the latter are more
sporadic and rely on powerful emotions such as pain and suffering (as in the case he cites of
the initiation of young boys in New Guinea) to produce unconscious memories that
become associated in the mind with certain objects, colours and elements of performance.
In the latter, 'culture change' is largely unacknowledged and occurs as unconscious failures
to remember: what Barth in his discussion of Bakhtaman cosmologies likened to 'melting
pots' (Barth 1987: 29). In the former, it is the logical integration of ritualized verbal
exegesis that is made sensitive to innovation and brings about radical transformation of the
religious system as a whole (Whitehouse 1992: 791). Whitehouse therefore provides us
with a ritual context for the different place of memory in cultural transmission discussed by
Kuechler.
Both Kuechler and Whitehouse are concerned to de-emphasize Goody's literate/non-
literate distinction in their analyses of the different ways in which ritual codifications
structure memory in cultural transmission. A broad distinction between two processes of
'cultural genetics' emerges that does not correspond to Goody's oral and literate traditions
but rather to 'incorporating' or 'inscribing' practices, to use a distinction by Connerton
(1989: 72-9) developed by Whitehouse (1992: 7956). Inscribing practices refers to how
frequent repetition and the extensive logical integration of verbalized ritual discourse
facilitates the dissemination of religious knowledge as a transportable ideology. That
would be the stock in trade of mediums, messiahs and prophets who rely on the impact of
linguistically or otherwise encoded revelations to persuade their audience. By contrast,
the persuasiveness and enduring impact of incorporating practices depends on iconic
symbolism, the avoidance of exegetical commentary and the rigorous observance of
secrecy and exclusion (Whitehouse 1992: 794). The power of such practices lies in their
capacity to assault the senses, the effect that the infrequent transmission of cultural
materials has on evocation and cultural recall.
My argument relies on using Kuechler's and Whitehouse's insights to suggest that the
distinction between incorporated and inscribed practices is of more general significance for
material culture studies. The conservative transmission of cultural form is particularly
likely where people are exposed constantly to highly visible examples of material objects
invested with authoritative credibility. As many have argued, European material cultures
have displayed a pronounced affinity for the monumental that may be of long duration.
However, it has been claimed that a longer term view of European prehistory would show
a more complex intertwining of cycles of preservation and curation of monumental built
form with object loss in burials and ritual hoarding or the deliberate destruction of
property (Bradley 1990). Ephemeral material forms which are bound up with secrecy and
ambiguity over correct transmission but where none the less meaning is fairly constant can
be contrasted to cultural situations where continuity in form is emphasized although
meaning may be quite arbitrary.

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 The role of memory in the transmission of culture 143

Duration in inscribed practices

Given its origins in the European disposition towards the transmission of culture through
material form, it is not surprising that the practice of archaeology should have become
attuned to the recognition of durable patterning in material culture. The question this
raises is to what extent this is a disposition which assumes the relationship between object
worlds and spatio-temporal linearity to be universal and unproblematical.
Francis Yates (1966) in The Art of Memory showed how closely Western ideas of
memory are tied to linear conceptions of time. Aristotle's theory of knowledge, which
claims that we must first observe, perceive and learn before we can recollect, requires the
existence of a separation between an iconic image and an original sense experience.
Recollection is therefore a reflexive process; a form of reasoning by which the association
between an image and an original sense experience is worked out in causal terms.
Transformed into strictly historiographic instructions on how to read the past, the purpose
of cultural memory in the European classical tradition was to recall through reason the
exemplary nature of the past in order to instruct the present. A belief that cultural memory
is linear has been and still is basic to many Western senses of personal and group integrity
and coherence. Warnock has argued that tying memories to a linear concept of time
enables us to know simultaneously a number of separate things and hence to conceive of
ourselves as integrated, multi-dimensional wholes (Warnock 1987). A socialized memory
of this kind is not peculiar to Western conceptions of time but it does have a particular, if
changing, relation to literacy in the West which marks it with many of the features of an
'inscribed practice'.
Yates describes the origins of the classical 'art of memory' as probably lying in bardic
oral culture, although in classical antiquity memorizing a speech or a sequence of events
was related to the use of a text as a mnemonic device. In the Institutio Oratoria, the first
century Roman orator Quintillian instructs a pupil how to train an artificial memory by
attaching images and places to a speech or an order of things which are to be remembered.
The best way, we are told, is to form a series of places in the memory, such as the
distribution of objects in a room or buildings around a forum, and to attach parts of a
speech to a sequence so that each can be remembered in the correct order. One can
imagine the ancient orator moving through his memory building, 'seeing' the places,
objects and images with a piercing inner vision that brought to his lips the thoughts and
words of a speech.
The link between linear conceptions of time, socially integrative memory and sequences
of objects or forms is therefore deeply rooted in the Western tradition to the extent that it
pervades most of our discourses. Mary Carruthers has recently argued that medieval
culture in the West was fundamentally memorial, to the same profound degree that
modern culture is documentary (Carruthers 1990). Indeed the very value of a book, she
claims, was understood differently in the memorial culture of the Middle Ages compared
to the present. Then a book was a way of remembering, not a way of making texts: 'A thing
is said metaphorically to be written on the mind of anyone when it is firmly held in the
memory.... For things are written down in material books to help the memory' (Thomas
Aquinas).
A similar relation between memory and object is found in Gombrich's interpretation of

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144 Michael Rowlands

the role of repetition in the Western aesthetic tradition (Gombrich 1979). By this he meant
the Platonic tradition in which identity is prefigured in sameness and all future events
correspond in their essence to origins. Identity, truth, authenticity require a return to an
original state of being, manifested in the repetition of form such as the use of Corinthian
capitals in the decoration of European public buildings (Gombrich 1979). Although no
continuity in meaning is assumed from seventh-century BC Greek painted designs on pots
to late twentieth-century postmodernist architecture, the compulsion to rediscover a
constant form implies for Gombrich a template held in the collective mind. Freud
discussed such a possibility in his 'Note on the mystic writing pad', where he described the
unconscious process by which an ancient event might reappear as a dream (Freud 1984
[1925]). He used as a metaphor for the mind a writing apparatus comprising a celluloid
strip lain over a wax block in order to demonstrate that, although a script may have been
erased, permanent traces of the inscription would be retained, however confused and
garbled it might become through later superpositioning. Memory traces exist as marks
which are not conscious, but by appropriate stimuli they might be energized long
afterwards. As a longing to regain a lost trace, repetition in form has no meaning except as
a compulsion to engage change in a return to a sense of origin. Object traditions, rather
than language or speech, serve as the only means of gaining access to such unconscious
traces, and they do so by allowing direct re-engagement with past experience in ways that
are prevented in language. The reason therefore why heirlooms, souvenirs and photo-
graphs have this particular capacity to evoke and to establish continuities with past
experience is precisely because, as a material symbol rather than verbalized meaning, they
provide a special form of access to both individual and group unconscious processes.
Why this should be so is embedded in the function, status and role of objects as aide
memoire. Objects are culturally constructed to connote and consolidate the possession of
past events associated with their use or ownership. They are there to be talked about and
invested with the memories and striking events associated with their use. The link between
past, present and future is made through their materiality. Objects of a durable kind assert
their own memories, their own forms of commentary and therefore come to possess their
own personal trajectories (what Kopytoff (1986) has recently termed the personal
biography of things).
Remembering is therefore a form of work and is inseparable from the motive to
memorialize. To the same degree that building memorials and monuments are part of the
material culture of remembering, drying, chopping, cutting and burning are all acts of
forgetting. Hence they form important aspects of funerary rituals where importance is
attached to physically separating the polluting aspects of death from the integrity of the
living. The securing of stable hierarchy may rest on the clear separation of the two states. It
was symptomatic of the revival of kingship in France after the Hundred Years War, that
the separation of the body from an effigy in royal burial rituals was begun in earnest only
after 1498, when the body of Charles VIII went swiftly and naked into the grave, whilst it
was his effigy, clothed and crowned in the spirit that the king never dies, that was carried in
his funeral procession to Notre Dame. This is an extreme form of the general principle
recognized by Bloch for systems in which positions of authority are conceptualized as
belonging to an eternal and unchanging order (Bloch and Parry 1982: 11). Death, as a
threat to the continuity of this theoretically static world, must be negated and, as one might

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 The role of memory in the transmission of culture 145

expect, the funeral is the principal means by which this negation occurs. Discontinuity
itself is denied through emphasizing continuity in a life-regenerating process which often
requires a separation of the time-bound, polluting aspects of primary rites from the
regenerative aspects of the secondary rites on which the reintegration of permanent order
depends.
War memorials are a particularly interesting example of the absolute conversion of
secondary rites into a fetishized form of duration. In the European historical experience
they have come to form an important site for the resolution of the religious force of
nationalism within the secularized ideal of remembering those sacrificed for the nation.
They are perhaps the most potent symbol of the political and emotional construction of
nationalism through the material embodiment of ritualized killing and the redemption of
those who survived. Properly orchestrated as a sense of past linked to place, war
memorials root the living in a primordial, essentialist and unifying identity which in the end
subsumes all differences in the sacrificial act. Remembering the dead by inscribing their
names on a monument that should never die requires that its form should be timeless; that
it should resonate identity with a remote past, escaping the conflicts of the present.
An instance of this is Kapferer's discussion of the war memorials which commemorate
the dead on ANZAC Day in Australia (Kapferer 1987). From April to December 1915,
Australian and New Zealand troops occupied the Dardanelles and experienced eight
months of the worst slaughter of the First World War. No town in Australia is without a
memorial to the ANZACS. The national war memorial in Sydney has more tourists than
Ayers Rock, that other great symbol of Australian unity through identity with an origin in
Nature (in contrast to the truth of an origin in penal colonies and genocide).
The main national war memorial to the ANZACS is set opposite the Parliament
building in Canberra and is built as a tomb to the sacrificed dead of the Australian nation.
All the names of the dead are engraved on slabs around the Pool of Reflection. They are
arranged alphabetically and without indication of rank or seniority. The egalitarianism of
Australian 'mateship', 'the Digger', is therefore emphasized in death. The central theme,
however, is the male sacrifice that should not have been in vain. Out of disorder and chaos,
a new unity emerged that is positively recharged every year when, as in the case of the
Canberra war memorial, the politicians and bureaucrats from the Parliament buildings
and ministries attend a midnight, torch-lit procession to the Pool of Reflection and attend a
remembrance ceremony.
The Sydney war memorial contains a central pillar of three clothed, female figures who
represent those who share the burden of male sacrifice: the Mother, the Sister/Daughter
and the Wife. They hold above their heads, on a shield, the naked body of the male, fallen
soldier - symbol of the sacrifice of potent youth in the birth of a nation. The two kinds of
sacrifice, that of the dead and that of the living, are needed to emphasize the share of all in
this sacrifice. The design of the war memorial, which was open to public competition,
aroused fierce controversy over how the nature of sacrifice should have been correctly
represented in the sculpture. The original (subsequently rejected) design was of a single
female figure (naked) nailed to a cross with the jumbled figures of clothed, dead, male
soldiers at her feet. It aroused outrage as an unheroic and ugly representation of the
sacrificed dead. The successful design was a more satisfactory representation of the
sacrifice of male potency for the preservation of female fecundity and growth. The birth of

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146 Michael Rowlands

the nation therefore did not only require sacrifice but also a promise of future
regeneration.
However, if memorializing the sacrifice of the dead is a promise for the future, then the
form it should take is that of rootedness in a primordial past. For this reason, there have
been no greater conflicts in the design of war memorials than when they propose to depart
from classical imagery to a more modernist design. The memorial to the Dutch resistance
fighters in Amsterdam, for example, was widely condemned as too modern, and
inappropriate. When the Vietnam war memorial was unveiled, it was attacked as
demeaning the mnemory of the slain. What was being objected to was its modernism; that
the monument was made from a black marble slab, sunk into the ground rather than
upstanding, and the fact that the 50,000 names of the American dead were inscribed in the
order in which they were killed, lacking any personal identity, rank or seniority. Rosalind
Krauss would call such a piece of architecture 'the characterisation of sitelessness'. By this
she means a lack of specificity, rendering it inadequate as a source of commemoration of
sacrifice (Krauss 1985: 164). Comparison by the exemplary was to the Lincoln Memorial,
built in 1922 along the lines of a classical Greek Temple, offering presence precisely by
attaching long-term cultural memory to a recent event, making the horrific or even the
banal more palatable and acceptable.
This compulsion for repetition implies a wider concern over a pair of terms which seem
bound together in what Rosalind Krauss terms a 'kind of aesthetic economy' (Krauss
1985: 169). Interdependent and mutually sustaining, the term originality, implying
uniqueness and singularity, is valorized, whilst the other term, repetition, which suggests
copying or duplication, is devalued or repressed. In other words it is the power of origins
that gives value to repetition. In his theses on the philosophy of history, Benjamin
described this process as the Re-enchantment of the World, by which he meant that a past
evoked as a dream image can re-enchant a world gone cold (cf. Buck-Morss 1991). In the
act of repetition or replication, the original occasion of its usage is in some way evoked so
that the unfolding progress of the tradition promises a future of further imitation, of
renewed simulacra. Structurally, logically and axiomatically, an original form can only be
repeated, and with each act of replication, the illusion of the original value of the object, its
genius, becomes the indisputable ground beyond which there is no further model, referent
or text. However false or fictional it might be, the illusion of singularity, authenticity,
uniqueness, and originality of culture rests on the redundant condition of a reified signifier.

The persuasion of incorporating practices

A second relationship between representation and remembering can be found in the way
places or things become memorialized rather than standing for something to be
remembered. In contexts where objects are destroyed or taken out of circulation through
burial or some other form of intentional symbolism, such objects become a memory in
their absence, and therefore the essence of what has to be remembered. The opportunities
for manipulating the possibilities of repetition are therefore abolished in an act of sacrifice
or destruction that severs connection with its original status.
In fact object deposition or object sacrifice exemplifies a very different kind of relation

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 The role of memory in the transmission of culture 147

between memory and representation. They cannot function as aide memoire and are thus
not made with a view towards the past, but towards the future (cf. Kuechler 1987). They do
not embody memories of past events but have themselves become embodied memories;
objectified and condensed as a thing. Disposed or destroyed objects are remembered for
themselves, not for what they might have stood for in terms of remembered pasts. When
images actually become memory they can no longer refer to any fixed past outside
themselves which they commemorate or reflect. Instead, as objectified memory, they can
give value to nothing but themselves.
This places far greater emphasis on our ability to be sure we know what an object is.
Very basic questions about the nature of matter are at stake here, since repeatedly in
ethnographic accounts we encounter objects that are never regarded as inert and simply
acted upon by human agency but are active in their own right in canalizing human labour in
suitably propitious ways. Broadly speaking, the tendency to stress the goals of
reproduction rather than production in precapitalist material social relations has as its
basis not only concerns about fertility and natural reproduction, but also a different
conception of the relation between person and thing (cf. Strathern 1988). In Melanesia,
where political power is often diffuse, objects can typically become the repositories of clan
and personal names, histories and reputations. When taken out of circulation such objects
can take on added values, but typically it is the transformation of value that takes place
through circulation that forms the basis of accumulation (Munn 1986). How to 'keep while
giving', to use Weiner's useful phrase (Weiner 1985), is a difficult problem for most
societies where exchange is the pivotal means of gaining prestige. Gregory's distinction
between class and clan-based economies recognized this problem as a difference between
ownership based on alienable rights over things in contrast to possession of inalienable
rights over things that may be disposed of but are not necessarily owned (Gregory 1981;
although Thomas 1991 denies the absence of alienable products in all the exchange systems
of the Massim). In the former, production and objectification (the making of commodities)
is the main drive; in the latter, the self-replacement of people and personification
predominates. In situations where, in Mauss's terms 'things are never completely
separable from the persons who exchange them', the merging of person and thing, such
that attributes of both may be inalienable, forms a very different basis for exchange from
that usually associated with the commodity form. Thomas argues, however, that it is rare
to find such pure types, and the reality is a complex entanglement of both forms involving a
succession of value conversions that sustain a political process (Thomas 1991: 52).
Strathern, on the other hand, is more inclined to sustain a difference between alienable
and inalienable systems based on the commodity/gift distinction, although she recognizes
that it is difficult to characterize whole societies on this distinction alone (Strathern
1988: 134).
In the light of this debate, object deposition or sacrifice take on a slightly different
connotation. Specific arguments about whether objects are taken out of circulation in
burial, or form votive deposits or are destroyed in prestige building usually assume a
modernist distinction between person and thing. Strathern's argument for Melanesia rests
not only on the premise that persons are partible and products multiply-authored but also
that qualities of persons and parts of things merge and interpenetrate in 'gift economies'
(Strathern 1988: 161). It is well known, for example, that object sacrifice will invariably

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148 Michael Rowlands

'stand for' some aspect of the person (as in Nuer sacrifice (cf. Evans Pritchard 1956)) or
that the destruction of coppers in North West Coast potlatches involved the release of the
spirits they contained (Walens 1981: 57). A full recognition of this implies a change of
perception of the role of human agency in technical process, from the autonomous agency
of homo faber to being a facilitator in larger processes of natural reproduction in which
magic and ritual play a preponderant part (Rowlands and Warnier 1993).
Kuechler's interpretation of Malangan sculptures from northern New Ireland helps to
substantiate these points on the key problem of the relation between memory and cultural
transmission (Kuechier 1987). Western artists and collectors were attracted by Malangan
sculptures at an early period in European contact due to their visual and conceptual
complexity. The long drawn out process of carving finishes 'the work for the dead', which is
the final ceremony for the dead who will have been buried since the last ceremony was
held. The process of carving is described as tetak, literally 'making the skin'. Sculptures are
conceived as skins that replace the decomposing body of the dead and act as a container for
the life force believed to be liberated at physical death. The life force, which through the
process of decomposition is released as a kind of raw energy, merges with the material of
the sculpture, and its potency becomes inseparable from the engraved image. The visual
power of the image aims to create meaning out of pure physical sensation consistent with
the sensual character of certain kinds of religious experience (Whitehouse 1992: 780).
Barth describes this as a form of analogic communication in his discussion of Bakhtaman
initiation ritual (Barth 1975: 372).
The sculptures can be vertical, horizontal or figurative and are usually beween 1 and 3
metres long. Carved in the round, the soft wood is so richly incized that the sculptures
appear to be perforated, held together visually by painted patterns. Within this frame is an
assemblage of carved motifs comprising different kinds of birds, insects, fish and shells, but
also mythical images. The richness of design seems to suggest a heightened importance of
the sculpture in the indigenous culture. Yet, though the process of production can last up
to three months, the finished work is exhibited no longer than a few hours before it is left to
the wind and rain which soon erode all trace of the craftmanship. Their sale to Western
collectors is now a modern alternative, but basically does not detract from the central fact
that the sculptures are produced primarily for the ritual climax in the Malangan mortuary
cemetery.
Like so many other 'funerary monuments', Malangan objects have been studied by art
historians in terms of their ostensible commemorative function. Attempts have thus been
made to establish and decipher the visual code believed to express the social status of the
deceased person or the identity of the group producing the sculpture. Many examples from
the Western funerary tradition come to mind in which it would be pertinent to assume that
a sculpture placed on the grave is a memorial or, at the very least, an aide memoire.
With respect to Malangan art, such an assumption is totally misplaced. The sculpture
represents, and is itself part of, a process which could be better understood as a metaphor
for the life force, renewed through death. These images are conceived, analogous to the
life force, as renewable and relocatable entities. Northern New Irelanders differentiate six
image types made up from approximately twenty-seven motifs that are circulated
throughout the culture and recalled in the process of reproduction. Each sculpture displays
a unique combination of the motifs characteristic of its image type which is so precisely

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 The role of memory in the transmission of culture 149

reproduced from memory that sculptures of a particular type, produced more than a
century apart, retain a visual constancy.
Gombrich's problem of repetition is therefore posed anew but in a different setting.
Reproduced not as constant repetition of external form but remembered for themselves,
Malangan images are conserved as something to be held in the social memory. They
become memory through the act of object destruction which is at once metaphorical and
actual. The sculptured image is literally destroyed on the grave by having money thrown at
it, which is said to 'strip the skin' - just as stripping the skin by spirit beings is conceived to
be one of the main causes of human deaths. The destruction of the image releases the life
force, literally its smell, which can be reactivated and rechannelled to the living. The
remaining 'empty shell' (the sculpture) is then discarded in the forest where it is left to rot.
Paramount to the analysis of Malangan art, therefore, is the nature of its transmission
through object destruction, sacrifice and image reproduction.
The distinctive character of this relationship can be clarified by making a brief
comparison with another well-known Melanesian exchange system, the Kula. In the Kula,
shell valuables are passed from island to island; as they travel, they produce history, which
in turn increases the fame of the shells and of the transactors. The age of the shell and the
path it forms as it is moved around the islands define the history it creates and the fame that
it bestows upon its temporary owner. Kula shell valuables thus change visibly as they
continue on their path around the islands of the Massim. Through handling, their
epidermis is removed and red striations are formed on the shell surface. Time is literally
inscribed into the shell surface which increases in value with age (Campbell 1983). By
contrast, Malangan funeral rites do not create lasting relationships between objects and
persons and there is no sense of 'marriages' between images, as is said of the meeting of
Kula shells. There is indeed no sense of two transactions being linked or separated through
time. Malangan transactions are dramatized as sacrifice and the objective is the production
of memory. Sacrifice and the production of memory are thus intertwined in the New
Ireland material. This technique of gift production through mnemonics allows its imagery
to be spread over an expanding region and to serve as a means for the creation and the
apprehension of new forms of ranking.
Malangan sculptures are by no means unique as collections of objects made for
destruction. Potlatch ceremonials of the North West Coast served equally to construct
memory and bestow fame through the destruction of objects. More recently, Richard
Bradley (1990) has argued for the same model for Bronze Age metalwork deposits in
Europe. And when compared with the work of Kristian Kristiansen (1978) on consump-
tion and circulation of metalwork, we would appear to have elements of both Malangan
and Kula type memory systems functioning in the European Bronze Age.
The contrast can be clarified by comparing both to the precepts underlying our Western
classical and medieval 'art of memory'. Whether made for destruction or exchange, the
point that unifies the Melanesian type of memory systems is their objectification in things,
in particular mobile things. We see this either in terms of a transformation of value through
movement in space/time or the transformation from one object form to personhood, as in
the Malangan reactivation of life force in the mortuary rituals.
By contrast, our medieval inheritance ties memory to linear conceptions of time and, in
particular, a stress on sequence or serialization. Most cogently put in the Annales tradition

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150 Michael Rowlands

of historiography, memory as a sequence of events that can be literally retraced gained a

dominant position in the elite discourse of early modern Europe. Goody's argument seems
pertinent that this memory system can be traced back to the spread of literacy based on,
first, the Greek alphabet and, subsequently, the printed book and the rationality of
book-keeping and calculation that this encouraged (Goody 1987). Resonant with a sense
of memory loss, MacDonald has recently interpreted Milton's Paradise Lost as the last of
the underworld narratives of classical tradition; the last occasion for the living to visit and
learn in that place where 'all the pasts are equally present, allowing people to rework their
relations with a past idealised world' (MacDonald 1981).

Conclusion

Goody's distinction between two forms of cultural genetics that separate modern literacy
from premodern orality in processes of cultural transmission is very attractive as an overall
contrast. Yet it repeats the problems of his earlier distinction between literate and
non-literate societies, stemming largely from an overemphasis on an essentially linear
western/non-western dichotomy. Borrowing extensively from Kuechler, Whitehouse and
others, I have been concerned with elaborating the distinction between inscribed and
incorporated practices as of more general use in the comparison of memory in the
processes of cultural transmission. Rather than following a literate/non-literate distinc-
tion, it seems more interesting to show how these different modes of cultural transmission
fit with different forms of legitimation and political strategies and with different forms of
religious life. Moreover it seems that the constancy of certain dispositions towards the
monumental and durable, versus the mobile and the transient, have more long-term
implications about the nature of order and cohesion in different cultural settings that seem
to bypass particular contingent political occasions and are simply part of the available
materials out of which local histories can be formed.

29.iii .93 Department of Anthropology

University College London

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Abstract

Rowlands, M.

The role of memory in the transmission of culture

Following earlier discussions of the roles played by memory in oral and literate societies, this paper
distinguishes between inscribed and incorporated practices in the process of cultural transmission.
Instead of adopting the distinction between literate and non-literate societies, it shows how different
modes of cultural transmission can be associated with different kinds of political strategy and with
different forms of religious life.

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All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms