The Spirit of Mourning

How is the memory of traumatic events, such as genocide and torture, inscribed within human bodies? In this book, Paul Connerton discusses social and cultural memory by looking at the role of mourning in the production of histories and the reticence of silence across many different cultures. In particular he looks at how memory is conveyed in gesture, bodily posture, speech and the senses – and how bodily memory, in turn, becomes manifested in cultural objects such as tattoos, letters, buildings and public spaces. It is argued that memory is more cultural and collective than it is individual. This book will appeal to researchers and students in anthropology, linguistic anthropology, sociology, social psychology and philosophy.

• Contains an exceptionally wide range of references to marginalised traditions in the West as well as to widely disparate specialist culture-areas outside the West
• Carries forward the breakthroughs accomplished by Merleau-Ponty and Foucault by showing that the priority of the body occurs as memory
• Written by an established Cambridge author who has written two other books on the theme of cultural memory