Gerhard Böck: Kultur als Gedächtnisphänomen. Das mnemonische Paradigma

Abstract. – After linguistic, interpretive, iconic, and other turns now others seem to come on the stage, like communicative and material turns. Do we need further turns or does it make more sense to base all these aspects on a more crucial term: the mnemonic paradigm? The neurobiological revelations of the last decade seems to have triggered a transdisciplinary debate. Ethnologists are expected to take part. Their special methodologies, like fieldwork, but also their seemingly long neglected ethnological objects in the museums seem to be apt tools to control and correct narrow-minded and Eurocentric perceptions of some other cognitive sciences, whose laboratory experiments would otherwise lead to wrong generalizations and, therefore, eventually produce completely wrong results. Especially focusing on mnemonic objects of nonliteral societies could now in combination with the new neurobiological and psychological detections deliver interesting perceptions for a new understanding of human mind and local culture and, thus, help to establish a more global debate on human history and culture, based on one outstanding human ability: the human memory, which is trained, triggered, and stimulated every second, not only by words and gestures but mostly unwittingly by every artificial and some natural objects. [Memory, mnemonics, cognition, cognitive science, culture, mnemonic turn, mnemonic paradigm]