Paul Connerton

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Paul James Connerton (April 22, 1940 – July 27, 2019) was a British social anthropologist best known for his work on social and body memory.

Biography

Born in

Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.[2] He was furthermore burdened by arthritis rheumatoid which caused much pain throughout his life and forced him to interrupt his studies and writing for treatments, therapies and long hospital stays. He was taken care of by his sister Clare Campbell and loyal friends.[1]

He died in 2019 at the age of 79.[1]

Works

Connerton gained wide attention in the humanities and social sciences with his trilogy on social memory: How Societies Remember (1989), How

social practices and the socially shaped human body.[3][4]

In his book How Societies Remember (1989) Connerton builds upon the basic assumption of scholars like

performances and that performative memory is bodily",[7] an argument he takes up from Bergson,[8] Proust[9] and others. His goal is to show that "bodily social memory is an essential aspect of social memory, but it is an aspect which has until now been badly neglected".[7] Connerton followed up this work with How Modernity Forgets (2009), which emphasizes what he calls "place memory," or memory that is dependent upon topography and particularly upon topography as it relates to the human body. Connerton argues that modernity is characterized by a particular sort of forgetting "associated with processes that separate social life from locality and from human dimensions: superhuman speed, megacities that are so enormous as to be unmemorable, consumerism disconnected from the labour process, the short lifespan of urban architecture, the disappearance of walkable cities."[10]

Selected publications

  • 1968: "Alain Robbe-Grillet: A Question of Self-Deception". Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol. 4 (4), pp. 347–359,
  • 1974: "The Collective Historical Subject: Reflections on Lukàcs' History and Class Consciousness". The
    British Journal of Sociology
    . 25 (2), pp. 162–178.
  • 1976 (as editor): Critical Sociology: Selected Readings. Adorno, Habermas, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Neumann. Penguin, 520 pages.
  • 1980: The Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School. University Press, 176 pages.
  • 1989: How Societies Remember. Cambridge University Press, 121 pages.
  • 2009: How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge University Press, 149 pages.
  • 2011: The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body. Cambridge University Press, 190 pages. (Collection of Essays)

References

  1. ^ a b c Boyle, Nicholas (19 August 2019). "Paul Connerton obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 31 January 2020.
  2. ^ Kastner, Jeffrey; Najafi, Sina; Connerton, Paul (2011). "Historical Amnesia: An Interview with Paul Connerton. Seven types of forgetting". Retrieved 1 February 2020.
  3. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.24.1.105
    .
  4. ^ Misztal, Barbara A. (2003). Theories of Social Remembering. Maidenhead; Philadelphia: Open University Press. pp. 70, 80.
  5. ^ Connerton, Paul (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press. p. 105.
  6. ^ Connerton, Paul (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press. p. 1.
  7. ^ a b Connerton, Paul (1989). "How Societies Remember". Cambridge Core. Retrieved 31 January 2020.
  8. ^ Connerton, Paul (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press. p. 23.
  9. ^ Connerton, Paul (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press. pp. 2, 3, 17, 89f.
  10. ^ Connerton, Paul. How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 4-5.
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