At first glance, memory seems something inert, caught prior to now - a memory of one thing that has happened and stopped in time. However a better look reveals that memory is dynamic and connects the three temporal dimensions: evoked at the current, MemoryWave Official it refers to the past, however at all times views the future. Throughout their conference entitled ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’, researchers Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann, both professors on the College of Konstanz, addressed this dynamic character of Memory Wave. Jan spoke on the durability and symbolic aspects of cultural memory, emphasizing their role in the development of identities, whereas Aleida prioritized contemporary historic narrative, specializing in mnemonic processes related to the formation of latest nation-states. The event, held on May 15 at IEA, opened the convention cycle ‘Spaces of Remembrance’, which the researchers uttered within the country from Might 15 to 21 as part of the Year of Germany in Brazil.
The cycle has been a realization of the Federal College of Paraná (UFPR) and the Institute for Advanced Research on Social and Cultural Mobility, with the assist of IEA and different establishments. Jan made a distinction between two types of memory: the communicative one, associated to the diffuse transmission of memories in everyday life by way of orality, and cultural memory - through which the speech was centered - referring to objectified and institutionalized recollections, that may be stored, transferred and reincorporated throughout generations. Cultural memory is formed by symbolic heritage embodied in texts, rites, monuments, celebrations, objects, sacred scriptures and different media that serve as mnemonic triggers to initiate meanings associated with what has occurred. Additionally, MemoryWave Official it brings back the time of the mythical origins, crystallizes collective experiences of the previous and may last for millennia. Therefore it presupposes a data restricted to initiates. Communicative memory, then again, is limited to the latest previous, evokes personal and autobiographical recollections, and is characterized by a brief time period (80 to a hundred and ten years), from three to 4 generations.
Due to its informal character, it doesn't require experience on the a part of those that transmit it. Jan pointed out the connections between cultural memory and identity. In accordance with him, cultural memory is ‘the college that allows us to build a narrative image of the past and by means of this course of develop an image and an identification for ourselves’. Subsequently, cultural memory preserves the symbolic institutionalized heritage to which people resort to construct their very own identities and to affirm themselves as a part of a gaggle. This is possible as a result of the act of remembering entails normative features, so that ‘if you wish to belong to a community, you have to follow the principles of how and what to remember’, as acknowledged by the researcher. He also highlighted that, by working as a collective unifying pressure, cultural memory is taken into account a hazard by totalitarian regimes. For example, he talked about the case of the Bosnian battle, when Serbian artillery destroyed the Library of Sarajevo in an attempt to undermine the memory of the Bosnians and minorities in the region.
The objective, he mentioned, was to make culture a blank slate in order that it might be doable to start out a new Serbian identity from scratch: ‘This was the technique of the totalitarian regime to destroy the past, because if one controls the present, the previous also gets under management, and if one controls the previous, the future additionally gets below control’. Aleida opened her conference calling consideration to a characteristic phenomenon of the latest a long time: a disbelief in the concept of the longer term and the emergence of the previous as elementary concern. In accordance with the researcher, from the 1980s, confidence in the future as a promise of higher days lost power and gave rise to the restlessness before the past: ‘the thought of progress is increasingly out of date, and the previous has invaded our consciousness’. This phenomenon, she stated, is the effect of the interval of extreme violence of the twentieth century and new problems faced by contemporary society, such because the environmental crisis, for instance.
But she cautioned that it's not mere nostalgia or rejection of modern occasions, since cultural memory is all the time directed to the long run, ‘remembering ahead, so to speak’. Thus, memory appears as a gadget to guard the previous in opposition to the corrosive action of time and to offer subsidies for people to grasp the world and know what to count on, ‘so they do not should reinvent the wheel and start each technology from scratch’, because the researcher defined. Based on the concept of ‘les lieux de mémoire’ (places of memory) prepared by the French historian Pierre Nora, Aleida talked in regards to the modifications which have taken place in the development of national memory within the post- World Conflict II and publish-Berlin Wall. Considering from the case of France - a rustic that can be defined by the triumphant character of its people -, the concept of places of memory refers to concrete symbolic objects corresponding to monuments, museums and archives, linked to a self-image of heroism and pride by the nations.