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The Role of Memory in the Transmission of CultureAuthor(s): Michael RowlandsSource: World Archaeology, Vol. 25, No. 2, Conceptions of Time and Ancient Society (Oct.,1993), pp. 141-151Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/124810

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T h e r o l e o f memo r y in t h etransmission o f c u l t u r e

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 memoryin 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 hasdeveloped 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 implicationsfor studies of the relation between material culture and memory (Kuechler 1987). Shefocuses on the relation between the form given to an object and the process of itstransmission. Instead of a literate/non-literate distinction she makes one between a modeof transmission from one generation to another through the curation of material cultureand another where objects are not preserved and transmitted but are reproduced throughmemory so that 'each is reminiscent of an object seen in the past' (Kuechler 1987:239). Amode of transmission which emphasizes the duration of objects as a mnemonic device isperhaps more familiar to heirs of a monumental built environment tradition than onewhere objects are deliberately lost and destroyed andtheir imagery recalled at a later date.Kuechler implies that whilst the first favours more rigid and conservative transmission ofcultural information, the latter encourages greater variation since no object is the exactreplica of another. A tension between constancy and variation in transmission can ofcourse be deemed appropriate to any process of cultural reproduction but in her analysisKuechler is concerned with the more general point that for every image memorized orrecalled rather than seen, there must exist a template which generates a range of possibleimages and a range of possible interpretation of them (Kuechler 1987:246; cf. Morphy1991). Every template is known to have a stereotypic range of motifs, whilst eachreproduction of an image may use particular forms or combinations of motifs to makestatements about possession of common memory or ownership.Whitehouse has recently made a rather similar argument about the relation betweendifferent types of religious experience and differential demands on memory in non-literatesocieties (Whitehouse 1992). He would contrast forms of experience that rely on

WorldArchaeology Volume 25 No. 2 Conceptions of Time and Ancient Society? Routledge 19930043-8243/93/2502/141 $3.00/1


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142 Michael Rowlandscodifications that are highly verbalized, decontextualized and logically integrated fromthose (and he has in mind here Barth's and others' descriptions of New Guinea maleinitiation rituals) which rely on non-verbal analogical codification (Whitehouse1992:792). Whilst the transmission of the former relies on frequent repetition, consciousverbal exegesis and the rigorous standardization of sacred rituals, the latter are moresporadic and rely on powerful emotions such as pain and suffering (as in the case he cites ofthe initiation of young boys in New Guinea) to produce unconscious memories thatbecome associated in the mind with certain objects, colours and elements of performance.In the latter, 'culturechange' is largelyunacknowledged andoccurs as unconscious failuresto remember: what Barth in his discussion of Bakhtaman cosmologies likened to 'meltingpots' (Barth 1987:29). In the former, it is the logical integration of ritualized verbalexegesis that is made sensitive to innovation andbrings about radicaltransformation of thereligious system as a whole (Whitehouse 1992:791). Whitehouse therefore provides uswith a ritualcontext for the different place of memory in culturaltransmissiondiscussed byKuechler.

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 codificationsstructure memory in cultural transmission. A broad distinction between two processes of'culturalgenetics' emerges that does not correspond to Goody's oral and literate traditionsbut rather to 'incorporating' or 'inscribing' practices, to use a distinction by Connerton(1989: 72-9) developed by Whitehouse (1992: 795-6). Inscribing practices refers to howfrequent repetition and the extensive logical integration of verbalized ritual discoursefacilitates the dissemination of religious knowledge as a transportable ideology. Thatwould be the stock in trade of mediums, messiahs and prophets who rely on the impact oflinguistically or otherwise encoded revelations to persuade their audience. By contrast,the persuasiveness and enduring impact of incorporating practices depends on iconicsymbolism, the avoidance of exegetical commentary and the rigorous observance ofsecrecy and exclusion (Whitehouse 1992:794). The power of such practices lies in theircapacity to assault the senses, the effect that the infrequent transmission of culturalmaterials has on evocation and culturalrecall.My argument relies on using Kuechler's and Whitehouse's insights to suggest that thedistinction between incorporated and inscribedpractices is of more general significancefor

material culture studies. The conservative transmission of cultural form is particularlylikely where people are exposed constantly to highly visible examples of material objectsinvested with authoritative credibility. As many have argued, European material cultureshave 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 showa more complex intertwining of cycles of preservation and curation of monumental builtform with object loss in burials and ritual hoarding or the deliberate destruction ofproperty (Bradley 1990). Ephemeral material forms which are bound up with secrecy andambiguity over correct transmissionbut where none the less meaning is fairlyconstant canbe contrasted to cultural situations where continuity in form is emphasized althoughmeaning may be quite arbitrary.


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The role of memory in the transmissionof culture 143Duration in inscribed practicesGiven its origins in the European disposition towards the transmission of culture throughmaterial form, it is not surprising that the practice of archaeology should have becomeattuned to the recognition of durable patterning in material culture. The question thisraises is to what extent this is a disposition which assumes the relationship between objectworlds and spatio-temporal linearity to be universal and unproblematical.Francis Yates (1966) in The Art of Memory showed how closely Western ideas ofmemory are tied to linear conceptions of time. Aristotle's theory of knowledge, whichclaims that we must first observe, perceive and learn before we can recollect, requires theexistence 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 associationbetween an image and an original sense experience is worked out in causal terms.Transformed into strictlyhistoriographicinstructions on how to read the past, the purposeof cultural memory in the European classical tradition was to recall through reason theexemplary nature of the past in order to instruct the present. A belief that culturalmemoryis linear has been and still is basic to many Western senses of personal and group integrityand coherence. Warnock has argued that tying memories to a linear concept of timeenables us to know simultaneously a number of separate things and hence to conceive ofourselves as integrated, multi-dimensional wholes (Warnock 1987). A socialized memoryof this kind is not peculiar to Western conceptions of time but it does have a particular, ifchanging, 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 bardicoral culture, although in classical antiquity memorizing a speech or a sequence of eventswas related to the use of a text as a mnemonic device. In the Institutio Oratoria, the firstcentury Roman orator Quintillian instructs a pupil how to train an artificial memory byattaching 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 thedistribution of objects in a room or buildings around a forum, and to attach parts of aspeech to a sequence so that each can be remembered in the correct order. One canimagine 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 andwords of a speech.The link between linear conceptions of time, socially integrative memory and sequencesof objects or forms is therefore deeply rooted in the Western tradition to the extent that itpervades most of our discourses. Mary Carruthers has recently argued that medievalculture in the West was fundamentally memorial, to the same profound degree thatmodern culture is documentary (Carruthers 1990). Indeed the very value of a book, sheclaims, was understood differently in the memorial culture of the Middle Ages comparedto the present. Then a book was a way of remembering, not a way of making texts: 'A thingis said metaphorically to be written on the mind of anyone when it is firmly held in thememory. . . . For things are written down in material books to help the memory' (ThomasAquinas).A similarrelation between memory and object is found in Gombrich's interpretation of


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144 Michael Rowlandsthe role of repetition in the Western aesthetic tradition (Gombrich 1979). By this he meantthe Platonic tradition in which identity is prefigured in sameness and all future eventscorrespond in their essence to origins. Identity, truth, authenticity require a return to anoriginal state of being, manifested in the repetition of form such as the use of Corinthiancapitals in the decoration of European public buildings (Gombrich 1979). Although nocontinuity in meaning is assumed from seventh-century BC Greek painted designs on potsto late twentieth-century postmodernist architecture, the compulsion to rediscover aconstant form implies for Gombrich a template held in the collective mind. Freuddiscussed such a possibility in his 'Note on the mystic writing pad', where he described theunconscious 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 celluloidstrip lain over a wax block in order to demonstrate that, although a script may have beenerased, permanent traces of the inscription would be retained, however confused andgarbled it might become through later superpositioning. Memory traces exist as markswhich are not conscious, but by appropriate stimuli they might be energized longafterwards. As a longing to regain a lost trace, repetition in form has no meaning except asa compulsion to engage change in a return to a sense of origin. Object traditions, ratherthan language or speech, serve as the only means of gaining access to such unconscioustraces, and they do so by allowing direct re-engagement with past experience in ways thatare prevented in language. The reason therefore why heirlooms, souvenirs and photo-graphs have this particular capacity to evoke and to establish continuities with pastexperience is precisely because, as a material symbol rather than verbalized meaning, theyprovide 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 aidememoire. Objects are culturallyconstructed to connote and consolidate the possession ofpast events associated with their use or ownership. They are there to be talked about andinvested with the memories and strikingevents associated with their use. The link betweenpast, present and future is made through their materiality. Objects of a durable kind asserttheir own memories, their own forms of commentary and therefore come to possess theirown personal trajectories (what Kopytoff (1986) has recently termed the personalbiography of things).Remembering is therefore a form of work and is inseparable from the motive tomemorialize. To the same degree that building memorials and monuments are part of thematerial culture of remembering, drying, chopping, cutting and burning are all acts offorgetting. Hence they form important aspects of funerary rituals where importance isattached to physically separating the polluting aspects of death from the integrity of theliving. The securing of stable hierarchymay rest on the clear separation of the two states. Itwas symptomatic of the revival of kingship in France after the Hundred Years War, thatthe separation of the body from an effigy in royal burial rituals was begun in earnest onlyafter 1498, when the body of Charles VIII went swiftly and naked into the grave, whilst itwas his effigy, clothed and crowned in the spirit that the king never dies, that was carried inhis funeral procession to Notre Dame. This is an extreme form of the general principlerecognized by Bloch for systems in which positions of authority are conceptualized asbelonging to an eternal and unchanging order (Bloch and Parry 1982: 11). Death, as athreat to the continuity of this theoretically staticworld, must be negated and, as one might


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The role of memory in the transmission of culture 145expect, the funeral is the principal means by which this negation occurs. Discontinuityitself is denied through emphasizing continuity in a life-regenerating process which oftenrequires a separation of the time-bound, polluting aspects of primary rites from theregenerative aspects of the secondary rites on which the reintegration of permanent orderdepends.War memorials are a particularly interesting example of the absolute conversion ofsecondary rites into a fetishized form of duration. In the European historical experiencethey have come to form an important site for the resolution of the religious force ofnationalism within the secularized ideal of remembering those sacrificed for the nation.They are perhaps the most potent symbol of the political and emotional construction ofnationalism through the material embodiment of ritualized killing and the redemption ofthose who survived. Properly orchestrated as a sense of past linked to place, warmemorials root the living in aprimordial, essentialist andunifying identity which in the endsubsumes all differences in the sacrificial act. Remembering the dead by inscribing theirnames on a monument that should never die requires that its form should be timeless; thatit 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 commemoratethe dead on ANZAC Day in Australia (Kapferer 1987). From April to December 1915,Australian and New Zealand troops occupied the Dardanelles and experienced eightmonths of the worst slaughter of the First World War. No town in Australia is without amemorial to the ANZACS. The national war memorial in Sydney has more tourists thanAyers Rock, that other great symbol of Australian unity through identity with an origin inNature (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 Parliamentbuilding 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 arearranged alphabetically and without indication of rank or seniority. The egalitarianism ofAustralian '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 theCanberra war memorial, the politicians and bureaucrats from the Parliament buildingsand ministries attend a midnight, torch-litprocession to the Pool of Reflection and attend aremembrance ceremony.The Sydney war memorial contains a central pillar of three clothed, female figureswhorepresent those who share the burden of male sacrifice: the Mother, the Sister/Daughterand the Wife. They hold above their heads, on a shield, the naked body of the male, fallensoldier - symbol of the sacrifice of potent youth in the birth of a nation. The two kinds ofsacrifice, that of the dead and that of the living, are needed to emphasize the share of all inthis 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 correctlyrepresented in the sculpture. The original (subsequently rejected) design was of a singlefemale figure (naked) nailed to a cross with the jumbled figures of clothed, dead, malesoldiers 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 thesacrificeof male potency for the preservation of female fecundity and growth. The birth of


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146 Michael Rowlandsthe nation therefore did not only require sacrifice but also a promise of futureregeneration.

However, if memorializing the sacrificeof the dead is a promise for the future, then theform it should take is that of rootedness in a primordial past. For this reason, there havebeen no greater conflicts in the design of war memorials than when they propose to departfrom classical imagery to a more modernist design. The memorial to the Dutch resistancefighters in Amsterdam, for example, was widely condemned as too modern, andinappropriate. When the Vietnam war memorial was unveiled, it was attacked asdemeaning the memory of the slain. What was being objected to was its modernism; thatthe monument was made from a black marble slab, sunk into the ground rather thanupstanding, and the fact that the 50,000 names of the American dead were inscribed in theorder in which they were killed, lacking any personal identity, rank or seniority. RosalindKrauss would call such a piece of architecture 'the characterisation of sitelessness'. By thisshe means a lack of specificity, rendering it inadequate as a source of commemoration ofsacrifice (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 byattaching long-term cultural memory to a recent event, making the horrific or even thebanal more palatable and acceptable.This compulsion for repetition implies a wider concern over a pair of terms which seembound together in what Rosalind Krauss terms a 'kind of aesthetic economy' (Krauss1985: 169). Interdependent and mutually sustaining, the term originality, implyinguniqueness and singularity, is valorized, whilst the other term, repetition, which suggestscopying or duplication, is devalued or repressed. In other words it is the power of originsthat gives value to repetition. In his theses on the philosophy of history, Benjamindescribed this process as the Re-enchantment of the World, by which he meant that a pastevoked as a dream image can re-enchant a world gone cold (cf. Buck-Morss 1991). In theact of repetition or replication, the original occasion of its usage is in some way evoked sothat the unfolding progress of the tradition promises a future of further imitation, ofrenewed simulacra. Structurally, logically and axiomatically, an original form can only berepeated, and with each act of replication, the illusion of the originalvalue of the object, itsgenius, becomes the indisputable ground beyond which there is no further model, referentor text. However false or fictional it might be, the illusion of singularity, authenticity,uniqueness, and originalityof culture rests on the redundant condition of a reified signifier.

The persuasion of incorporating practicesA second relationship between representation and remembering can be found in the wayplaces or things become memorialized rather than standing for something to beremembered. In contexts where objects are destroyed or taken out of circulation throughburial or some other form of intentional symbolism, such objects become a memory intheir absence, and therefore the essence of what has to be remembered. The opportunitiesfor manipulating the possibilities of repetition are therefore abolished in an act of sacrificeor 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 transmissionof culture 147between memory and representation. They cannot function as aide memoire and are thusnot made with a view towards the past, but towards the future (cf. Kuechler 1987). They donot embody memories of past events but have themselves become embodied memories;objectified and condensed as a thing. Disposed or destroyed objects are remembered forthemselves, not for what they might have stood for in terms of remembered pasts. Whenimages actually become memory they can no longer refer to any fixed past outsidethemselves which they commemorate or reflect. Instead, as objectified memory, they cangive 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 inethnographic accounts we encounter objects that are never regarded as inert and simplyacted upon by human agency but are active in their own rightin canalizing human labour insuitably propitious ways. Broadly speaking, the tendency to stress the goals ofreproduction rather than production in precapitalist material social relations has as itsbasis not only concerns about fertility and natural reproduction, but also a differentconception 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 clanand personal names, histories and reputations. When taken out of circulation such objectscan take on added values, but typically it is the transformation of value that takes placethroughcirculation that forms the basis of accumulation (Munn 1986). How to 'keep whilegiving', to use Weiner's useful phrase (Weiner 1985), is a difficult problem for mostsocieties where exchange is the pivotal means of gaining prestige. Gregory's distinctionbetween class and clan-based economies recognized this problem as a difference betweenownership based on alienable rights over things in contrast to possession of inalienablerights over things that may be disposed of but are not necessarily owned (Gregory 1981;although Thomas 1991denies the absence of alienable products in all the exchange systemsof the Massim). In the former, production andobjectification (the makingof commodities)is the main drive; in the latter, the self-replacement of people and personificationpredominates. In situations where, in Mauss's terms 'things are never completelyseparable from the persons who exchange them', the merging of person and thing, suchthat attributes of both may be inalienable, forms a very different basis for exchange fromthat usually associated with the commodity form. Thomas argues, however, that it is rareto findsuch pure types, and the reality is a complex entanglement of both forms involving asuccession of value conversions that sustain a political process (Thomas 1991:52).Strathern, on the other hand, is more inclined to sustain a difference between alienableand inalienable systems based on the commodity/gift distinction, although she recognizesthat it is difficult to characterize whole societies on this distinction alone (Strathern1988: 134).In the light of this debate, object deposition or sacrifice take on a slightly differentconnotation. Specific arguments about whether objects are taken out of circulation inburial, or form votive deposits or are destroyed in prestige building usually assume amodernist distinction between person and thing. Strathern'sargument for Melanesia restsnot only on the premise that persons are partible and products multiply-authored but alsothat 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)) orthat the destruction of coppers in North West Coast potlatches involved the release of thespirits they contained (Walens 1981:57). A full recognition of this implies a change ofperception of the role of human agency in technical process, from the autonomous agencyof homo faber to being a facilitator in larger processes of natural reproduction in whichmagic and ritualplay a preponderant part (Rowlands and Warnier 1993).Kuechler's interpretation of Malangan sculptures from northern New Ireland helps tosubstantiate these points on the key problem of the relation between memory and culturaltransmission (Kuechler 1987). Western artists and collectors were attracted by Malangansculptures at an early period in European contact due to their visual and conceptualcomplexity. The long drawn out process of carvingfinishes 'the work for the dead', which isthe final ceremony for the dead who will have been buried since the last ceremony washeld. The process of carvingis described as tetak, literally 'makingthe skin'. Sculpturesareconceived as skins that replace the decomposing body of the dead and act as a container forthe life force believed to be liberated at physical death. The life force, which through theprocess of decomposition is released as a kind of raw energy, merges with the material ofthe sculpture, and its potency becomes inseparable from the engraved image. The visualpower of the image aims to create meaning out of pure physical sensation consistent withthe sensual character of certain kinds of religious experience (Whitehouse 1992:780).Barth describes this as a form of analogic communication in his discussion of Bakhtamaninitiation ritual (Barth 1975:372).The sculptures can be vertical, horizontal or figurative and are usually beween 1 and 3metres long. Carved in the round, the soft wood is so richly incized that the sculpturesappear to be perforated, held together visually by painted patterns. Within this frame is anassemblage of carved motifs comprisingdifferent kinds of birds, insects, fishand shells, butalso mythical images. The richness of design seems to suggest a heightened importance ofthe sculpture in the indigenous culture. Yet, though the process of production can last upto three months, the finished work is exhibited no longer than a few hours before it is left tothe wind and rain which soon erode all trace of the craftmanship. Their sale to Westerncollectors is now a modern alternative, but basically does not detract from the central factthat the sculptures are produced primarilyfor the ritualclimax in the Malangan mortuarycemetery.Like so many other 'funerarymonuments', Malangan objects have been studied by arthistorians in terms of their ostensible commemorative function. Attempts have thus beenmade to establish and decipher the visual code believed to express the social status of thedeceased person or the identity of the groupproducing the sculpture. Many examples fromthe Western funerarytradition come to mind in which it would be pertinent to assume thata 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 sculpturerepresents, and is itself partof, a process which could be better understood as a metaphorfor the life force, renewed through death. These images are conceived, analogous to thelife force, as renewable and relocatable entities. Northern New Irelanders differentiate siximage types made up from approximately twenty-seven motifs that are circulatedthroughout the culture and recalled in the process of reproduction. Each sculpturedisplaysa unique combination of the motifs characteristic of its image type which is so precisely


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The role of memory in the transmissionof culture 149reproduced from memory that sculptures of a particular type, produced more than acentury 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. Theybecome memory through the act of object destruction which is at once metaphorical andactual. The sculpturedimage is literallydestroyed on the grave by having money thrown atit, which is said to 'stripthe skin' - just as strippingthe skin by spiritbeings is conceived tobe one of the main causes of human deaths. The destruction of the image releases the lifeforce, literally its smell, which can be reactivated and rechannelled to the living. Theremaining '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 transmissionthrough object destruction, sacrifice and image reproduction.The distinctive character of this relationship can be clarified by making a briefcomparison 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, whichin turn increases the fame of the shells and of the transactors. The age of the shell and thepath it forms as it is moved around the islands define the history it creates and the fame thatit bestows upon its temporary owner. Kula shell valuables thus change visibly as theycontinue on their path around the islands of the Massim. Through handling, theirepidermis is removed and red striations are formed on the shell surface. Time is literallyinscribed into the shell surface which increases in value with age (Campbell 1983). Bycontrast, Malangan funeral rites do not create lasting relationships between objects andpersons and there is no sense of 'marriages'between images, as is said of the meeting ofKula shells. There is indeed no sense of two transactionsbeing linked or separated throughtime. Malangantransactions are dramatized as sacrifice and the objective is the productionof memory. Sacrifice and the production of memory are thus intertwined in the NewIreland material. This technique of gift production through mnemonics allows its imageryto be spread over an expanding region and to serve as a means for the creation and theapprehension of new forms of ranking.

Malangan sculptures are by no means unique as collections of objects made fordestruction. Potlatch ceremonials of the North West Coast served equally to constructmemory and bestow fame through the destruction of objects. More recently, RichardBradley (1990) has argued for the same model for Bronze Age metalwork deposits inEurope. 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 Malanganand Kula type memory systems functioning in the European Bronze Age.The contrast can be clarifiedby comparingboth to the precepts underlying our Westernclassical and medieval 'art of memory'. Whether made for destruction or exchange, thepoint that unifies the Melanesian type of memory systems is their objectification in things,in particularmobile things. We see this either in terms of a transformationof value throughmovement in space/time or the transformation from one object form to personhood, as inthe Malangan reactivation of life force in the mortuary rituals.

By contrast, our medieval inheritance ties memory to linear conceptions of time and, inparticular, a stress on sequence or serialization. Most cogently put in the Annales tradition


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150 Michael Rowlandsof historiography, memory as a sequence of events that can be literally retraced gained adominant position in the elite discourse of early modern Europe. Goody's argumentseemspertinent 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 ofbook-keeping and calculation that this encouraged (Goody 1987). Resonant with a senseof memory loss, MacDonald has recently interpreted Milton's Paradise Lost as the last ofthe underworld narratives of classical tradition; the last occasion for the living to visit andlearn in that place where 'all the pasts are equally present, allowing people to rework theirrelations with a past idealised world' (MacDonald 1981).

ConclusionGoody's distinction between two forms of cultural genetics that separate modern literacyfrom premodern orality in processes of cultural transmission is very attractive as an overallcontrast. Yet it repeats the problems of his earlier distinction between literate andnon-literate societies, stemming largely from an overemphasis on an essentially linearwestern/non-western dichotomy. Borrowing extensively from Kuechler, Whitehouse andothers, I have been concerned with elaborating the distinction between inscribed andincorporated practices as of more general use in the comparison of memory in theprocesses of cultural transmission. Rather than following a literate/non-literate distinc-tion, it seems more interesting to show how these different modes of cultural transmissionfit with different forms of legitimation and political strategies and with different forms ofreligious life. Moreover it seems that the constancy of certain dispositions towards themonumental and durable, versus the mobile and the transient, have more long-termimplications about the nature of order and cohesion in different culturalsettings that seemto bypass particular contingent political occasions and are simply part of the availablematerials out of which local histories can be formed.29.iii.93 DepartmentofAnthropology

University College London

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The role of memory in the transmission of culture 151Connerton, P. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Evans Pritchard, E. 1956. Nuer Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Freud, S. 1984 [1925]. Note on the mystic writing pad. In On Metapsychology. Harmondsworth:Penguin.Gombrich, R. 1979. A Sense of Order. London: Thames & Hudson.Goody, J. (ed.) 1968. Literacyin Traditional Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Goody, J. 1986. The Logic of Writingand the Organisation of Society. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.Goody, J. 1987. The Interfacebetween the Writtenand the Oral. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.Gregory, C. 1981. Gifts and Commodities. New York: Academic Press.Kapferer, B. 1987. Legends of People, Mythsof State. Washington: Smithsonian Press.Kopytoff, I. 1986. The cultural biography of things. In The Social Life of Things. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.Krauss, R. 1985. Art and a Theory of the Avant Garde. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Kristiansen, K. 1978. The consumption of wealth in Bronze Age Denmark. In New Directions inScandinavian Archaeology (eds K. Kristiansen and C. Paludan-Muller). Copenhagen: NationalMuseum.Kuechler, S. 1987. Malangan: art and memory in a Melanesian society. Man (N.S.), 22(2): 238-55.MacDonald, M. 1981. Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in 17th Century EnglandCambridge: Cambridge University Press.Morphy, H. 1991. Ancestral Connections. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Munn, N. 1986. The Fame of Gawa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Rowlands, M. and Warnier, J. P. 1993. The magical production of iron in the Cameroon Grassfields.In The Archaeology of Africa (eds T. Shaw, P. Sinclair, B. Audah and A. Okpoko). London:Routledge.Strathern, M. 1988. The Gender of the Gift. Los Angeles: University of California Press.Thomas, N. 1991. Entangled Objects. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Walens, S. 1981. Feasting with Cannibals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Warnock, M. 1987. Memory. London: Faber.Weiner, A. 1985. The Trobriandersof Papua New Guinea. New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston.Whitehouse, H. 1992. Memorable religions: transmission, codification and change in divergentMelanesian contexts. Man (N.S.) 27(4): 777-99.Yates, F. 1966. TheArt of Memory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.AbstractRowlands, M.The role of memory in the transmission of cultureFollowing earlier discussions of the roles played by memory in oral and literate societies, this paperdistinguishes 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 differentmodes of cultural transmission can be associated with different kinds of political strategy and withdifferent forms of religious life.

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