[Reader-list] Re: reader-list Digest, Vol 19, Issue 28

[Keith Hart]

Sou,

I think there is broad agreement between us on where memory comes from. 
I like your formulation concerning memory, imagination and fiction. In 
my fiction, any character is partly me, partly people I know and partly 
made up. Nor is there much controversy over what representation is. The 
key issue is whether ritual has to be collective or might be just an 
aspect of personal life. In this respect, we have Durkheim at one end 
and William James at the other. Vic Turner is nearer to Durkheim, but 
open to the more personal variety of religious experience. The guy I am 
pushing, Roy (Skip) Rappaport -- don't forget to spell it right -- has 
an even wider conception that embraces the two ends in an evolutionary 
theory that attributes the origin of humanity to the joint appearance of 
language and religion (and with it of the holy). Ritual is then the way 
we affirm our individual place in society, which is not far from 
Durkheim, but less tied to particular forms of society and more an 
aspect of our shared humanity. The basic idea is that language generates 
the lie and ritual gets us over the hump of disbelief into common projects.

For Rappaport (whose book I edited for publication after his death), 
money is the root of evil, indeed the main source of lies today. Whereas 
for me, it is the source of collective memory as well as an expression 
of individual desire, a way of keeping track of some of the exchanges we 
enter with others. I envisage the principle of personal credit replacing 
the state as money, but only within the wider framework of a common 
civilisation. The word after all comes from Juno Moneta, the mother of 
the muses and thus custodian of the arts and sciences, as well as of the 
mint. And the first meaning of the verb moneo in Latin is to bring to 
mind. In my work, I try to detach money and markets, at least 
historically and analytically, from the capitalism that makes our tiem 
an age of money in a more demonic sense.

Keith