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5 - Tradition as conversation and tradition as bodily re-enactment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Paul Connerton
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

In his Sketch for a Theory of Practice Pierre Bourdieu argues that

if all societies and all total institutions that seek to produce a new man through a process of ‘deculturation’ and ‘reculturation’ set such store on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners, the reason is that, treating the body as a memory, they entrust to it in abbreviated and practical, i.e. mnemonic, form the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture. The principles em-bodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation, cannot even be made explicit; nothing seems more ineffable, more incommunicable, more inimitable, and, therefore, more precious, than the values given body, made body by the transubstantiation achieved by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy.

I intend in what follows to look at one way in which the body is treated as a memory, in which it is entrusted in mnemonic form with the fundamental principles of the content of a culture, when the principles embodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Spirit of Mourning
History, Memory and the Body
, pp. 104 - 124
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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References

Bourdieu, P.Outline of a Theory of PracticeCambridge 1977 94CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Gombrich, E.Art and IllusionLondon 1960 170Google Scholar
Gadamer, H-G.Kleine Schriften. Vol. IITubingen1972
Gadamer, H-G.Platos dialektische EthikHamburg 1968Google Scholar
Havelock, E.A.Preface to PlatoCambridgeMA 1963Google Scholar
Lord, A.B.The Singer of TalesCambridge, MA 1960Google Scholar
Hainsworth, J.B.The Flexibility of the Homeric FormulaOxford 1968Google Scholar
Detienne, M.Les Maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïqueParis 1967 9ffGoogle Scholar
Bloch, M.‘Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation: Is Religion an Extreme Form of Traditional Authority?’Archives Européennes de Sociologie 1974 55Google Scholar
Ricoeur, P.Hermeneutics and the Human SciencesCambridge 1981 91CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Abrams, P.‘The Sense of the Past and the Origins of Sociology’Past and Present 55 1972 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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