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Cultural Memory and Biodiversity. Virginia D. Nazarea. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998. 189 pp.

In 2015, analog synthesizers are resurgent in popular appeal. Robert Moog is often celebrated as the central and originary figure who launched a so-called revolution in sound by making synthesizers widely available in the late 1960s and early '70s. This essay examines the figure of the humble tinkerer, as exemplified by Moog, along with other historically specific and archetypal forms of masculinity that are embodied by the male subjects at the center of electronic music's historical accounts. Critical readings of audio-technical discourse, and of the periodization of synthesizer histories, reveal that women are always already rendered out of place as subjects and agents of electronic music history and culture. Yet a set of letters, written by young women across the United States to Harry F. Olson at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in the mid-1950s and analyzed in this article, demonstrates that women were an enthusiastic audience for the RCA synthesizer a decade before Moog built his prototypes. As they did with new media, including wireless radio and the phonograph, in the early twentieth century, women played a key role at midcentury in enabling the broad-based market for analog synthesizers that greeted Moog and others in the 1960s once these instruments were made available for widespread use.

This edited collection explores the political dimensions of cultural memory work in its varied forms of representation, from public monuments to literary texts. Addressing the different ways that cultural texts represent the past in the present, the collection demonstrates that cultural memory is something actively made: the site of a struggle over meanings that can serve a range of political and cultural purposes. The collection offers essays that discuss the politics of cultural memory both in theory and in practice, and features work by some of the leading scholars in the field including Susannah Radstone, Graham Dawson, Felicity Collins and Therese Davis. Contributors explore the ways in which memory comes to be articulated through particular cultural practices, from film and photography to literature and public monuments, all of which have their own codes and conventions, modes of address and audiences. As such this volume brings together scholars working in a range of disciplines (literary studies, history, art history, film studies) and in so doing seeks to establish a dialogue between different disciplines and methodologies and to explore cultural memory work in a range of different intellectual fields, cultural forms and political and historical contexts, for instance, the Holocaust, Northern Ireland, Australia, Palestine, and the former Soviet Bloc.The collection will be of interest to students, researchers and scholars working in the area of cultural memory studies, for whom it will represent an invaluable collection of current work in the field. It will also interest scholars working in the particular areas with which it engages, for instance, postcolonial studies, Holocaust studies, Eastern European Studies, Irish Studies, Art History and English Studies.

The volume consists of 15 papers discussing a vast array of issues and aspects relating to the concept of cultural memory. Taking as a standpoint the Halbwachs/Assman critical tradition, the individual contributions trace the relevance of the concept in the context of a wide range of areas, from medieval studies, through Victorian culture.

""I can't even speak my own language," were the words overheard in a collage staffroom that triggered the writing of this book. Calling something 'my own' implies a personal, proprietorial relationship with it. But how can it be your own if you cannot speak it?The Cultural Memory of Language looks at unintended monolingualism - a lack of language fluency in a migratory cultural situation where two or more languages exist at 'home'. It explores family history and childhood language acquisition and attrition. What is the present everday experience of language use and life between two cultures? Examining interview data, Samata uncovers a sense of inauthenticity felt by people who do not fully share a parent's first language. Alongside this features a sense of concurrent anger, and a need to assign blame. Participation in the language, even to the extent of phatic or formulaic phraseology, occasions feelings of authentic linguistic and cultural inclusion. The book thus uncovers appreciable (and measurable) benefits in positive self-image and a sense of well-being. Looking at how people view language is essential - how they view the language they call their own is even more important and this book does just that in a qualified applied linguistic environment"--

Intro -- Contents -- Preface: The Question of Experience -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. The Concept of Cultural Memory -- 2. The Power of Image: Our Lady of Guadalupe -- 3. The Power of Secrecy and Ceremony: Yaqui Resistance and Spirituality -- 4. The Power of Narrative: Archbishop Oscar Romero and the Option for the Poor -- 5. The Power of Syncretism/Inculturation: The Tzeltal Maya of Chiapas, Mexico -- 6. Final Thoughts -- Appendix 1. Summary of Post-independence Political Movements in Mexico -- Appendix 2. Short Summary of International Events and Their Impact on Indigenous Political Movements -- Appendix 3. The San Andrés Accords, or the Law on Indian Rights and Culture, 1996 -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Autobiographical Statements -- Index.

The subject of cultural memory, and of the body's role in its creation and dissemination, is central to current academic debate, particularly in relation to performance. Viewed from a variety of theoretical positions, the actions of the meaning-bearing body in culture and its capacity to reproduce, challenge or modify existing formulations have been the focus of some of the most influential studies to emerge from the arts and humanities in the last two and a half decades. The ten essays bro

This is the introduction to the special issue of the Journal of European Studies devoted to the cultural memory of the Great War since the war's end. It outlines briefly some of the political and cultural legacies for Europe, suggesting a few ways in which culture has measured and recorded, but also served as a way to articulate, the manifold ways in which Europeans continued to experience the war beyond its outbreak. It offers a brief introduction to the five articles that constitute the issue.

This article addresses issues of cultural memory arising from the use of classical music on film soundtracks. The phenomenon is considered in three forms: (1) historical layering, as in Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady and Kieslowski's Three Colours: Blue ; (2) memory and nostalgia, especially in Benigni's Life is Beautiful , and in the possibilities available to classical music in European compared with US films; (3) musical memory in a given culture, from It Happened Here (Brownlow/ Mollo) through to various directors of the New German Cinema. The reception histories of the 'Deutschlandlied' and of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony are enriched by consideration of their frequent use in West German films of the 1970s, as part of a quest for national identity. Alongside the established critical tool of scopic regimes, the article pleads for attention to acoustic regimes as a neglected aspect of cultural studies.

Cultural memory studies addresses the question of how the "past" is created and recreated within sociocultural contexts. What is the place of "family"–and of family memories–in this burgeoning field? And how can the concept of memory be used as a tool in comparative family research? This article presents, first, the main notions of Maurice Halbwachs's theory of mémoire collective and asks how the sociologist places family within collective memory. Second, it discusses how the "new memory studies" of the 1980s and 1990s, which clearly showed a bias towards large-scale, often national memories, can be refocused through the lens of small-scale family memories. Third, it provides an overview of current research on the dynamics of remembering within families. It discusses how new approaches, which are based mostly on qualitative interviewing, have adopted innovative transgenerational, transnational, and media culture perspectives.

This handbook represents the interdisciplinary and international field of "cultural memory studies" for the first time in one volume. Articles by renowned international scholars offer readers a unique overview of the key concepts of cultural memory studies. The handbook not only documents current research in an unprecedented way, it also serves as a forum for bringing together approaches from areas as varied as sociology, political sciences, history, theology, literary studies, media studies, philosophy, psychology, and neurosciences