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WHEN speaking about cultural memory, I do not have in mind traces of the past stored in a kind of collective consciousness ready for recall, nor do I propose a collective unconscious buried under the ruins of forgetting and retrievable only systematically, if at all.' Rather, cultural memory is embodied in objectivations that store meaning in a concentrated manner; meanings to be shared. They can be texts (such as sacred texts), chronicles, or poetry. They can be monuments, such as buildings or statues, or any material signs or memorabilia erected as reminders. In addition, cultural memory is embodied in regularly repeated and repeatable practices: festivals, ceremonies, and rites. Finally, cultural memory-like individual memory-is linked to places. It is linked to places where a significant or unique event has taken place, or to places where a significant event is regularly replayed. For example, in Europe every village has a Calvary Hill, where Christ's passion is replayed every Good Friday.
Cultural memory constructs and maintains identity. As long as a group of people maintains and cultivates a common cultural memory, the group continues to exist. Yerushalmi (1982) shows that Jews consciously cultivated identity through remembrance. The frequency of the injunction "Zachor!" (Remember!) in the Jewish Bible is a case in point. Whenever cultural memory is lost, a group of people disappears, irrespective of their recorded history or lack thereof. The Chinese Communist government was aware of this connection when it commanded the destruction of every place of memory after the occupation of Tibet in 1951. The presence or absence, the very life or decay of a people, does not depend on the biological survival of an ethnic group, but on the survival of shared cultural memory.
The building of strong and complex cultural identities represented the ascending high cultures of the axiological age. It suffices to refer to Homer, whose Illiad and Odyssey remained the basic texts and living memory of all Hellenes, or to the first versions of the first five books of the Jewish Bible, or the holy sites where the festivals of the changing seasons were fused with the maintenance of cultural memory. Religions were the greatest cultural identity builders, as were the political institutions imbued with religious practices by particular ethnic groups. In...