In the third decade of this century, the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and the art historian Aby Warburg independently developed1 two theories of a "collective" or "social memory." Their otherwise fundamentally different approaches meet in a decisive dismissal of numerous tumof-the-century attempts to conceive collective memory in biological terms as an inheritable or "racial mern~ry,"~ a tendency which would still obtain, for instance, in C. G. Jung's theory of archetypes.3 Instead, both Warburg and Halbwachs shift the discourse concerning collective knowledge out of a biological framework into a cultural one. The specific character that a person derives from belonging to a distinct society and culture is not seen to maintain itself for generations as a result of phylogenetic evolution, but rather as a result of socialization and customs. The "survival of the type" in the sense of a cultural * This text was originally published in Kultur und Gedachtnis, eds. Jan Assmann and Tonio Holscher (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1988) 9-19.
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