Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination

Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination by
Assmann, Jan
Review by: David Gottlieb
The Journal of Religion, Vol. 93, No. 2 (April 2013), pp. 233-234
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670784 .
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 Book Reviews

A SSMANN , J AN . Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Po-
litical Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ix1319 pp.
paper. $95.00.

The growth over the past two decades of the field of the study of memorya growth
referred to by one of the fields pioneers, Jeffrey Olick, as metastatichas cen-
tered on an exploration of what scholars have come to call social or, more recently,
cultural memory Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, From Collective Memory
to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices, Annual Review of Sociology, 24
1998: 10540. The flourishing of memory studies has been attributed, at least
by some scholars in the field, to a combination of sociohistorical context post-
modernism and seismic historical event two world wars, the fall of communism.
There is broad agreement that the field is still dominated by European scholars,
for whom these formative experiences became embedded in tapestries of cultural
introspection and national commemoration. The dean of cultural memory studies
has for the past three decades been the Egyptologist Jan Assmann, now professor
emeritus at the University of Heidelberg and honorary professor at the University
of Constance. His interest in cultural memory and his collaboration on memory
studies with the cultural anthropologist Aleida Assmann also his wife have their
roots in some of the most terrible crimes and catastrophes in the whole of human
history vii. That interest took flower in the late 1980s, as the erosion of com-
munist regimes and the fall of the Berlin Wall ignited debate over the recent past
and its importance for the political reinvention both of Germany . . . and of
Europe xii.
For the Assmanns, this moment helped give rise to the thesis that the contents
of cultural memory, the ways in which they are organized, and the length of time
they last are for the most part not a matter of internal storage or control but of
the external conditions imposed by society and cultural contexts 5. At long last
available two decades after its publication in German in an elegant translation by
David Henry Wilson, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization reflects the reach of Ass-
manns scholarship. He credibly asserts that cultural memory, as currently consti-
tuted, springs from four well-defined historical sources, whose mnemotechnics
formed the basis of contemporary identity, politics, and power. In so doing, he has
authored a work of signal importance for the study of religion.
Undergirding four cultural case studies with a wide-ranging section on mem-
ory theory, Assmann articulates a socio-constructivist 33 concept of cultural
memory as a deliberate creation, rather than a natural outgrowth, of the culture
from which it arises. The careful construction of cultural memory relies on repe-
tition and interpretation, which are functionally equivalent processes in the pro-
duction of cultural continuity 72. One aspect of this reformulation of cultural
memory is retrieval, which includes and relies upon the art of deliberate forget-
ting. Employing the thought of Levi-Strauss, Assmann asserts the existence of
an alliance between power and forgetting 55 that plays a formative role in the
development of a structural amnesia that permits a society to define itself both
prospectively and retrospectively. This leads Assmann to a broad theory of political
imagination that includes the ethnological and educational stratification of cultural
memory.
The four case studies focus on two cultures Greece and Israel whose mnemo-
historical foundations have survived the eclipse of the ancient world and two
Egyptian and Hittite culture whose foundations have not. Religions role in these
trajectories receives the requisite attention; in the chapter on Egypt, Assmann cre-
ates a compelling portrait of the Egyptian temple as an embodiment of canon and a

233

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The Journal of Religion

physical repository of cultural memory. Indeed, Assmanns treatment of the rela-

tionship of canonfrom the original Greek meaning of the word through its ap-
propriation by the early churchto memory, constitutes one of the books most
compelling and compellingly articulated ideas. Throughout, the continuous re-
telling and reinterpretation of the past, so critical to cultural memory, receives
careful treatment, and it is in this area that Assmanns work will prove of greatest
interest to scholars of religion.
Within this landmark work, gaps and inconsistencies do appear. From this re-
viewers perspective, the works objectivity is undermined by its characterization of
Judaism as a form of willful self-exclusion from the world. After depicting the
Exodus, not as an historical event but as a memory figure 180, and as the in-
vention of a dissident group that seceded from the rest of society 183, the author
claims that Judaism therefore needed the basis of an elaborate set of laws, which
would have been totally unnecessary in a self-evident culture 185. As intriguing
and as carefully articulated as this theory may be, it suggests a deliberate devaluation
of the Jewish religionand a less-than-thorough appreciation of the Hebrew lan-
guage and the hermeneutical possibilities that inhere in it. As James Shiel noted,
the thought world of Judaism with its Oriental apocalyptic, ritual, blood sacrifice,
and tortuous legislation, was foreign to the Greek philosophic mind. This tension
between Jew and Greek was deep-rooted and has remained in the European
tradition James Shiel, Greek Thought and the Rise of Christianity London: Longmans
Press, 1968, 49. This tension is evident in Assmanns work.
This may contribute to an underappreciation for the role Greek philosophy
played in the cultural-mnemonic engineering of both Second Temple Judaism and
early Christianityand to the parting of their hermeneutical paths. Although this
territory is circumscribed in the chapter on Greece, its depths are not plumbed. The
author does not address the development of cultural memory in Eastern societies or
religions, whose canonical texts and ritual enactments reflect and refract profound
differences in the pathways of cultural memory.
One might wish, too, that the editing of the different studies that comprise this
volume had resulted in smoother transitions between, and more thematic focus
within, the separate chapters. Karl Jaspers Axial age is introduced with near-
identical terminology in four separate instances. Aspects of the four cultures
studied appear in the chapters on each of the other cultures, illuminating their
interconnections but potentially obscuring the vectors of cultural-mnemonic de-
velopment within each.
These inconsistencies do not diminish the range and depth of this work, its
importance to cultural memory studies generally, or its availability in translation to
the English-speaking academy more specifically. Indeed, they seem to openly invite
more scholarly work on cultural memory and a greater engagement with Assmanns
scholarship.
DAVID GOTTLIEB, Chicago, Illinois.

A LPERT, R EBECCA T. Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011. ix1236 pp. $27.95 cloth.

In her genuinely interesting, well-written, and thoroughly researched account of

black-Jewish relations in early baseball, Rebecca Alpert concludes: The Jews of
black baseball ended in obscurity, their customs and practices no longer acceptable.
But as the children of immigrants and descendants of slaves, they accomplished
more than what was expected of them. Their lives and legacies confirm the com-

234

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