Books by Paul Connerton

First published in 1980, this essay on the Frankfurt School deals with one of the most important threads in the story of cultural migration from Europe which began in the 1930s. The purpose of this book is to convey an overall sense of the continuities and discontinuities in the concerns of the school's core members over two generations.

In treating memory as a cultural rather than an individual faculty, this book provides an account of how bodily practices are transmitted in, and as, traditions. Most studies of memory as a cultural faculty focus on written, or inscribed transmissions of memories. Paul Connerton, on the other hand, concentrates on bodily (or incorporated) practices, and so questions the currently dominant idea that literary texts may be taken as a metaphor for social practices generally. The author argues that images of the past and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained by ritual performances and that performative memory is bodily. Bodily social memory is an essential aspect of social memory, but it is an aspect which has until now been badly neglected. An innovative study, this work should be of interest to researchers into social, political and anthropological thought as well as to graduate and undergraduate students.