Memory, Narrative, and the Consequences

• Published in: Topics in cognitive science Vol. 11; no. 4; pp. 821 - 824
• Main Author: Brockmeier, Jens
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.10.2019
• Subjects: Adolescent; Cognition and language; Culture; Humans; Memory; Mental Recall; Narration; Narrative; Parents; Remembering; Social Behavior; Social memory; Cognition and language; Narrative; Social memory; Memory; Culture; Remembering
• ISSN: 1756-8757; 1756-8765; 1756-8765
• DOI: 10.1111/tops.12412

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. Brockmeier reflects on the positive consequences (e.g., socio‐cultural socialization of children) of examining conversational remembering as a process or practice that is context‐dependent and functionally oriented, relying on the interplay of narrative, cognitive and cultural resources co‐evolving over multiple time‐scales rather than just a substance or product located in people’s brains.