Memory, Narrative, and the Consequences

Abstract

Drawing on papers from three different areas - evolutionary psychology, developmental psychology, sociolinguistics analysis - this commentary states that there is by now an empirically grounded and theoretically reflected memory research that has begun to break with the traditional individual-centric orientation of the memory sciences. This break, it is argued, is the consequence of a new interest in the dialectics between memory and language, between social (or collective or collaborative) remembering and narrative. On this view, memory is taken less as a substance and more as a set of practices, of intersubjective and interpretive acts of a remembering subject.

Keywords: Cognition and language; Culture; Memory; Narrative; Remembering; Social memory.