ABSTRACT
This chapter throws into play a number of oppositions: memory and history; Western modernity and an alternative I refer to as Maussian (after the great French anthropologist Marcel Mauss); personage and individual; social person and psychological self. 1 These oppositions are unstable – they shift with time and perspective and they are not precise equivalents. They are also somewhat exaggerated and function as ideal types and heuristic devices to enhance the exploration of a cultural world rather different from one in which events like conferences entitled ‘Frontiers of Memory’ take place. It is the argument of the essay that the pairs are interdependent; specifically, here, that conceptualizations of memory and history are dependent on conceptualizations of social persons. In a Maussian universe – one in which social persons are understood as personages rather than exclusively as individuals – a distinction between ‘memory’ and ‘history’ is by no means obvious. 2
