Organisation of Memory and Forgetting
Ancient cultures are characterised by an exceptionally strong identification with their past(s), and how a given culture relates to its past informs the construction of norms, elites, and aesthetics as much as it does the organisation of coexistence or exchange and the specific mechanisms for coping with dissent. Analysing how a society interprets and uses its past is therefore central for understanding that society.
The presence of the past in a culture involves more than just concepts of memoria or remembering the past; ancient cultures also ‘control’ the past (or the representation of the past), at least partially, by processes of forgetting, which go far beyond the intentional destruction of objects and buildings or a damnatio memoriae. How such processes of memory and forgetting function in ancient cultures and how they relate to the place of texts and monuments in a given culture is a valuable area of study in the School which opens up new perspectives in all concerned disciplines. The potential of this area can be seen in topics such as the following:
i) personal forms of memory and forgetting (e.g. in the letters of Cicero or Libanius);
ii) public forms of memory and forgetting. This could include ritual and cultic regulations, specific collective forms of remembrance such as myth or memorial practices (e.g. the construction of places of remembrance, inscriptions, archives, etc.), and public forms of forgetting (e.g. the intentional destruction of objects, buildings, and visual works, forms of damnatio memoriae, etc.);
iii) the intersection of personal and public forms of memory and forgetting (e.g. the relation of the past Republic to the present Augustan state in Horace’s poems)
iv) cultural mechanisms for remembering (e.g. canonisation as means of preserving knowledge or establishing cultural memory, archiving as preservation without functionalisation, the elimination of what has survived, rituals in memory of a religious founder, etc.);
v) the relation of cultural mechanisms to social and political power (e.g. the exclusion or destruction of heterodox texts);
vi) the refunctionalisation of objects of remembrance (artefacts). One might, for instance, employ historical, archaeological, and philological methods, to analyse how and to what extent the mere presence of ‘historical’ buildings (e.g. the Colosseum) encouraged remembrance of an earlier era and engendered ‘new’ constructions and interpretations of the past.