Social memory in the age of knowledge

Susanne Kchler
Throughout the twentieth century the study of performances and an increasing plethora of social memory has remained synonymous with digital media. From remembering via things to things that the study of the unconscious and a supra-human memory (perhaps internalised, but in a self- remember was seemingly just a small step made forgetting way) whose mechanism is used, but not possible through the increasing technical sophisticontrolled, by subject-centred remembering. Both cation of the replication of cognitive processes in the stability and the potential disruption to indi- different physical systems not only organic ones, vidual identity deriving from the social aspect of like the brain, but in inorganic ones such as computing. A small step perhaps, remembering became central but one that has made overt issues in the philosophical Susanne Kchler is Professor of Anthropolthe once covert relational thought of Bergson, the psyogy and Material Culture Studies at Univernature of the operation of choanalytical writing of sity College London. She has published social and subjective rememFreud, and the autobiowidely on memory, art, and society in Papua bering, undoing thereby its graphical literature of New Guinea and in Polynesia. For the last decade she has been conducting research on quasi-magical capacity that Proust; their tension invoked materials, innovation, and society. once bound together invisible by the classical pairings of Email: ucsasak@ucl.ac.uk and visible acts of remembermneme and memoria and ing.4 Once made overt and recalled by Marcel Proust as mmoire involontaire and mmoire volontaire, by accessible in systems that feed on acts that constiWalter Benjamin as Eingedenken und Andenken, tute social memory as much as they aid its perby Aby Warburg as Sophrosyne and Mnemosyne, formance, the subject is stripped of responsibility and most recently by Aleida Assmann as towards the re-enactment of remembering.5 In the Gedchtnis and Erinnerung.1 Common to the lit- same rate as designed materials and digital media erature on social memory of the twentieth century took over tasks of condensation, storage, and was the mediatory role assigned to objects, whose retrieval of information to be shared intercapacity to provoke shared associations and the subjectively, competency in memory work began mutual, inter-subjective anticipation of actions to be associated with the ability of subjects to was seen to bind words to concepts.2 As inter- forget (Forty and Kchler 1999). In the face of what many writers have called locutors between personal recall and shared recognition of what was thus recalled, objects the rise of a culture of amnesia, heritage or public accrued a value whose measure remained, often memorials have received heightened attention as in spite of all appearance, unstable, requiring con- their role as sites of acts of commemoration tinuing reactivation through acts of social com- receded.6 Paul Connerton addresses the forgetting memoration.3 Far greater stability was assigned to specic to the culture of modernity in his most immaterial streams of information that connect recent work, capturing the trappings of a cultural persons to one another via access to the relational industry erected around the fragile recovery of nature of acts of remembering enshrined in social memory to withstand the forces of oblivion

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he deems to have been unleashed by superhuman speed, megacities that are so enormous as to be unmemorable, consumerism disconnected from the labour process, the short life-span of urban architecture, the disappearance of walkable cities (Connerton 2009, p.5). Connerton is explicit about what he considers to have been displaced by the immaterial streaming of social memory, recalling with fondness the human-scale-ness of life, the experience of living and working in a world of social relationships that are known (Connerton 2009, p.5).7 With similar nostalgic leanings, Krystoph Pomian (1999) likens the modern condition of social memory to conditions pervasive in oral traditions where a socially shared act of remembering is always the memory of someone and thus subject to the destiny and arbitrary will of an individual. A picture is cast of memory in the world of digital media and allied material technologies that depicts it as at once effervescent and pervasive as well as illusive and uid. Against the pervasive assumption that social memory in the digital age is dysfunctional or tantamount to being obliterated as analytical concept, this essay will take seriously Pomians suggestion of an afnity between social memory in societies in which transmission is governed by face to face interaction and in knowledge economies known to us since the advent of digital media. At stake in the concerns over social memory today is arguably not the question of memorys socialising capacity, but its relation to object worlds under conditions when objects have ceased to full the mediatory function, granting subjects proprietary rights to resources. Memory in the knowledge age must face up to the epistemic nature of objects that has been thrown into question precisely at the moment as we come to reconcile the idea that objects do do something other than laundering the socialness of the forces that we project onto them, by extending access to resources beyond the connes of persons (Gell 1998; Latour 1992, p.236). When the MIT Media Lab created Things that Think in 1995, objects began to take on what Carlo Ginzburg (1992) has called the forgotten sense of representation, in which representation functions as manifestation of knowledge worthy to be remembered and capable to be extended to a social body. His article, published in French in the early 1980s and informed by the rise of articial intelligence, recalled the role of funerary efgies in the institutionalisation of kingship in

fourteenth- and fteenth-century England and France, in which they manifested the shared social knowledge of the complex sequence of the transmission of kingship and thereby immortalised the legislative powers of the king.8 Beyond matters of mere resemblance and the enticing of recollection of referential knowledge, such efgies and the access they grant to resources of knowledge became the anchor for a political economy of knowledge that nds its analogue in ethnographic case studies of small scale societies (Kchler 2002). Medieval efgies, ethnographic artefacts, and design of material technology of today have, in fact, much in common, deemed able to do the job of memory work in ways that raises questions not about the condition of social memory, but about the effect their design has on social worlds. This paper will explore what happens when oblivion is not a problem but an opportunity to recast the future in a new light, when not continuity but rupture is the default position against which the success of social worlds is measured.

The design of memory work

With social memory rising, quite literally, to the surface of things that serve as vehicles of connectivity, where, in becoming tangible and visible, immaterial streams of information are individuated and owned beyond the control of corporate institutions, it is not surprising that social memory should appear unthethered and in a permanent state of becoming.9 The texturing of immaterial streams of information with materials of seemingly unlimited number, function, and specication provides much of the subtext for the rise of a cultural industry striving to understand what of the present will seem epiphenomenal, and what resonant, from the perspective of the future. Yet judging what will stir empathy and manifest the spirit of an age and a people, what to collect and preserve for the future, is as troubling as deciding what to put into circulation in the rst place. Quite unexpectedly, a concern with the aesthetic effect of things, thought to be long surpassed by technology, has resurfaced in a manner that is unsettlingly tied to the question of the future of social memory.10 Questions of ownership and control centre on the one hand on immaterial streams of information whose open-source access is perpetually threatened with restriction by corporate, private, and state interests alike. Much less well known on the

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other hand is the contestation over the materials that, increasingly, are not merely the packaging or media for digital processing devices, but have themselves become conductive, serving as connectors in their own right.11 As materials enable the minds of persons to be extended beyond the domain of their actions at least as efciently as ideas are disseminated via any kind of media, so what happens in materials selection and take up is informing social memory as much as the consumption of social media. New materials are certainly nothing new, nor are their impacts on the creation of social memory by manifesting experiences that have bound together ways of being and thinking in unprecedented ways. In the nineteenth century the discovery of bendable and malleable Kautschuk led to the invention of pneumatic tyres and all manner of new objects, enabling many new social practices, from driving to diving, to ball games and home-making. A wave of empathy previously attributed to a limited range of selected materials and goods, from cotton to steel, began to bind together people of all different walks of life and identity.12 The advent of synthetic materials, in particular plastic, enhanced the new mobility and gave rise to new forms of behaviour and modes of social interaction that made homes and social experiences much more alike.13 It was on the back of these synthetic materials, with their lightweight, portable, and innitely variable and combinable self-similar properties, that social networking across borders could establish itself when digital technology became widely available. The attraction to colour and form that conditioned a shared sense of world-making near globally for most of the twentieth century began, however, to change radically with the advent of a new generation of chemically engineered and biologically informed materials whose quantity by the early 1990s had surpassed the number of discrete object functions. By 1996 materials libraries began to proliferate to help industry, designers, and architects locate the right material, assisted by a burgeoning publication of materials handbooks that are outdated almost as soon as they become available.14 Composite, smart, and by virtue of the reinvention of an additive mode of production called rapid-prototyping limitless in form, these materials should in theory be as formative in shaping the texture of memory as their simpler, though no less synthetic predecessors. Yet, startlingly, this is not the case.

As Ulrich Beck (1992) noted some twenty years ago, we live in a risk-conscious age in which actions and, most importantly, new materials, are judged in terms of their potential hazard and future outcomes, whose prediction inuences decision taken at all levels. Safety concerns impact the restrictions imposed on the marketing of materials in different countries in different ways, making global distribution virtually impossible, a phenomenon that is exacerbated by the localised, complex, and small-scale production processes required by the materials. Thus, although there are some 80,000 new materials that have been patented and are potentially usable for manufacture, only a fraction are ever utilised, and not necessarily for the same purpose in different countries. This effect is likely to revert a global attachment to self-similar and mass-manufactured materials such as fabric, steel, or plastic to local recipes for materials that look, feel, and behave quite differently, with only a small number of materials reaching global distribution. When social memory is no longer controllable through the consumption of self similar objects, the remaining control over the material interface delivering access to knowledge is the new battleground for sway over hearts and minds. As the imitation of nature has become the new playground of future imaginings of new materials, everything has become possible and nothing is certain. What weight a material should have, what density it should display, and how much of its function and afnity with other materials and with nature itself should be made apparent, are all questions that plague both the scientists and designers of the twenty-rst century. Material aesthetics, long sidelined as a by-product of semiotic analysis, is back with a vengeance, asserting its importance for the understanding of the operational dynamics of social networks carried by a vehicular technology. Few may realise that there are surprising parallels between our heightened sensitivity to the materiality of information technology and the material culture of Pacic peoples well practised in knowledge economies. Yet across the island world stretching from mainland Papua New Guinea to the far eastern reaches of Polynesia, materials long served as a vehicular technology for the carriage of knowledge and ideas, binding isolated island communities into large regional systems. Made famous in the classical ethnography of Marcel Mauss (2007) as the home of the gift, in this region care-

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fully designed objects are made with future relations in mind, extending the minds of persons and conditioning empathy with ways of being and thinking in a subtle and surprisingly lasting manner. What emerges from the extensive Pacic ethnography is particularly useful for those keen to capture the changing place and articulation of social memory, and the role of design in supporting new forms of sociality made possible by digital technology. This is because the ethnography makes apparent the materiality required by thought to be extended across networks of persons, for each to be able to lay ownership to this thought and trace it back to its source. It is still common to consider thought as an abstraction, and we tend to assume that, in the form of concepts, thought hovers over a material substrate, one that is itself formed by thought without being inhabited by it.15 Concepts whose transmission matter tend to be attached to things, to habits of doing which involve things, and occasionally to images signied by things, without ever being taken for the thing itself.16 The other, quasimagical thought invoked by material aesthetics, which binds together the seen and unseen in a world of artice, we take, mistakenly, as the mere trapping of cultures that occupy the periphery of the Enlightenment. Describing the concreteness of such magical thought issued forth in material aesthetics as counterfeit science, Claude LeviStrauss came closest to recognising the systematising nature of materially oriented thought an insight that was quickly forgotten in a world dominated by images that appeared unmoored from thing-like counterparts.17 Our present condition in which materials by design are taking over the operation of social memory thus forces us to question our assumptions and to revisit theories and exemplars we deemed irrelevant to an understanding of our own object world. Among the many art traditions that explicate what Levi-Strauss (1962) called the science of the concrete, Oceanic art exemplies the concreteness of systematising thought most explicitly a fact that must be understood in connection with the arts place in large-scale regional exchange networks, in which images, recalled from memory to be fashioned into gifts, are able to make identities mobile by extending thought beyond the limitations of biographical relations. Based on concrete shapes and numbers, its art makes use of math-

ematical concepts that inform logic and measurement in ways that allow each and every artefact in their relation to one another to gather thought a gathering that is as effective as a barcode, an ISBN, or a telephone number in recalling concrete knowledge (who, where, what, and when) empathetically, allowing for intuitive and spontaneous judgement as to how what is seen relates to everything else. Under the conditions of a knowledge economy, in which it is not the proprietary rights in objects but intellectual resources that are at stake, it is the logic of inter-artefactual relations that sustains empathy with other persons and supports the mutual recognition of practices and ideas. Much of this was argued and documented using Pacic artefacts by Alfred Gell (1998) in his path-breaking Art and agency. Yet what has not been explained, and what arises as crucial in relation to the question of the control over social memory in political economies of knowledge, is why the Pacic has such extreme cultural diversity, in which the distinct boundaries to the trade in words, concepts, and things documented by archaeology and ethnography do not coincide with geographical barriers. The most famous example of such disconnection is made explicit by the attachment to carrying looped and expanding netbags across most of mainland New Guinea, and the prevalence of stiff baskets woven from coconut leaves (and today reinforced by stripes of beaten pandanus bre) in island New Guinea, the two coinciding side by side in generations of migrant labourers settling in island New Guinea over a century ago to work on plantations.18 Another example is the peculiar take-up of cloth and clothing, and its transformation into patchwork quilts, across Eastern Polynesia, where gifts of cut and stitched cloth connect burgeoning transnational populations with a spiritual homeland in ways that have become hugely signicant politically and economically, and the total absence of such practices in the western Pacic, in spite of regular womens workshops and art festivals that transport ideas and skills across the entire Pacic.19 What these breaks in empathy make apparent, however crudely they may be represented here, is an intuitive attachment to things, and a recognition of intentions realised in their fabrication and gifting, capable of stopping social networks in their tracks in ways that have been peculiarly resistant to change, making Eastern and Western Pacic into civilisations more foreign to one another than the

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colonising forces of Europe and America have ever been.20 To further our understanding of the material expression of thought and its role in the fashioning of social memory in political economies of knowledge, I shall confront these socio-cognitive processes with ethnographic data from the Pacic by reection upon two texts. The texts are by Vittorio Gallese (2001), a neuroscientist known for having discovered mirror neurons, and by Annette Weiner (1992), an anthropologist known for having revised the model of gift exchange. Whereas Gallese examined the role of the perception of movement in connecting the mental with the material world by means of the latest neuroscientic experimentation, Weiner used ethnographic methodology to explore the force of the imaginary arrest of movement in the dynamic of gift giving, arguing that modalities of keeping while giving dene both the differential velocity of goods in circulation and the resulting networks of social relations. Using ethnographic data from the Pacic, I shall explore how artefacts that manifest memory work make movement visible as sequence of actions. In pointing up how the relational nature of sequences differ across the Pacic, I hope to uncover questions about what may constrain the resonance between thought and the material world, thereby cutting empathy and with it social memory and social networks in its track.

The arrest of movement

By the time of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci had famously studied memory by drawing movement from memory, a task that is virtually impossible unless one is able to dissect the movement into the temporal logic of the sequence. Drawn patterns, in turn, are variations on four rigid motions in the plane reection, translation, rotation, glide reection that need to be retraced by the mind in order for pattern to be both intuitively understood and performed as intentional action.21 Pattern analysis has long been neglected in anthropology and neighbouring disciplines,22 a tendency that perhaps will be reversed given the new understanding of how the brain analyses sensory motor information. In a way reminiscent of Alfred Gells (1998) argument in Art and agency, Gallese argues that the capacity for understanding others as intentional agents is deeply grounded in the relational nature of action (Gallese 2001, p.34). It is the ability to grasp the underlying sequence of move-

ment and its logic of transformation, enabling one to reconstruct or ll in movement that is not observed and to recognise this movement as intentional, that is identied by Gallese as the shared manifold of inter-subjectivity. Empathy with others and thus the capacity to recognise memory as social and relational in nature relies on understanding movement as intentional action. What becomes apparent in the ethnographic data from the Pacic is that the way movement is captured and concretised in artefacts reveals a crucial difference between perspectives on society, perspectives that are surprisingly stable and resistant to change. A famous example of how performed movement makes visible complex intentionality is sanddrawing, and those that have gured most prominently in advancing anthropological understanding are the sand-drawings of Malekula, Vanuatu, an island group situated south of Papua New Guinea.23 Originally documented by the English anthropologist John Layard in the rst half of the twentieth century, the images inspired the modelling of complex systems of kin relations by Claude Levi-Strauss ([1949] 1969). Drawn as a continuous line, Malekulan sand-drawing projects the totalised social ow underlying the complex six-section marriage system, supporting the institutionalisation of kinship in Malekula that comprises a continuum of past, present, and future. Sand-drawings, like string-bags and string-gures, stand out as manifestations of a continuous ow of movement seen from a distance, captured in an instance and fading with the passage of time. The sequences appear at close observation only, to scrutiny that can be compared to that required to judge the ripening of sago-palm, grown and harvested in this part of the Pacic. Sand-drawing may be the most model-like representation of relational action, yet it is not alone as a mode of capturing social agency and memory. Remo Guidieri and Francesco Pellizi (1981) have described the sculptural system of Malekula, set within an age-grade ritual structure that inaugurates men into the society of the ancestors from adulthood onward. Made of soft tree-fern, over-modelled skull-like facial representations in a myriad of barely distinguishable shapes cast biographical relations into a sequence of interconnected points along a continuum. It is almost as if these gures are a further close-up of the social ow modelled in sand-drawing, projecting outward

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the geometric points covered by the movement of the hand in the sand. Relational action is made manifest in artefacts in similar, and yet so very different, ways in an island at the northern end of the Bismarck Archipelago, a string of large and smaller islands skirting the mainland of New Guinea along its eastern side. Here, in New Ireland, a myriad of intensely divided social groups, speaking more than ten different languages in the 300 km2 area of the narrow island, united themselves in adversity during the early period of colonial intervention, which saw foreign-owned plantations annexing most of the fertile coastal land. The stony earth in the north of the island allows for sago palms to grow only in certain patches, making taro the main staple. The requirement of growing taro in this area, with up to seven years fallow period for each garden, placed an enormous strain on land use when most of the accessible land had been taken over of for coconut plantations by 1840. Intense tribal warfare, aggravated by introduced weapons, had come to an end by the 1860s, surprising traders and colonial ofcials alike; and by 1870, a trader brought to Europe the rst of an uncounted number of artefacts that came to be known as malanggan.24 As in Malekula, death is the starting point for envisioning society as a continuing ow, yet here sequences of actions are marked sharply in ways that have enabled an ingenious way of transmitting structured landrights involving the creation of gardens, the ownership of a plot in a garden, and the harvesting of trees across groups not linked by kinship, but by taking part in the institution of malanggan. Today, as land registration has made the circulation of land-rights impossible, the dominant image capturing what Gallese called the shared manifold of social memory is no longer the malanggan, but a coconut-leaf basket reinforced with an outer layer of tapa, an image synonymous with the village and its renewed isolation. More than 25,000 artefacts known as malanggan have been collected from 1870 to the present day from this island, all of which are obsolete after having ofciated in ritual exchanges that served to separate a reproducible image from its temporary host. Collections of malanggan enable us to ask probing questions about the conceptual separation of a memorised and personally owned image from its temporary host, allowing an image to be moved about independently as memory, and about the kind of materiality that has continued to forge

attachments in this manner. Malanggan do this by presenting to us the manifold nature of things as not simply an expression of the social nature of thought, but of a systematising thought, one that informs the hermeneutic interpretation of the artefacts as social agents par excellence. As collections of images, not as individual artefacts, malanggan capture what cannot be recalled from memory movements and transformations and extend these as the conceptual cornerstone of culture beyond the lifetime and the reach of its people. Systematising patterns of movements and transformations run like a thread across the corpus of artefacts and impress on us themes of visual connectivity and material separation, and display their power in the emotional attachment that malanggan has helped to produce not to the island, whose foreign name underscores the insignicance people attribute to the role of placenames in the making of the future but to a way of sustaining networks of social relations that distinguish those who are members from those who are not. Against the fragile ties of blood relations, malanggan cloaks and contains, enabling thought to thread itself along the algorithm of shapes that punctuate the air like the beats of the giant slitdrum. If one thus concludes that malanggan serves social memory, one is right only in the strictest sense of the word, in that it makes thinking about thinking, and thus the projection of a system of memory, rather than just the act of remembering, possible. Now in a museum in Lausanne, the rst malanggan collected depicts the emergence of what appears to be a miniaturised gure from within a female gure: an act of birth carved from wood. The gure makes reference to an image that just a few years later had become iconic, and to a myth that is still a favourite tale of the origin of the social institution of image-based polities known as fabung (those who gather). The myth describes the swallowing of a woman by a giant rock cod (a sh which ages hermaphroditically, becoming female over time) and her ejection on the island of the dead, where she gave birth to the rst clan. The expansive network of the emerging matriline is related to us in myth as inseparable from the transformation effected by the separation of body and soul at death; malanggan sculptures make reference to the potency of such separation both visually, by referencing containment and release, and materially, by presenting gures as fragile fret-

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work. In line with earlier ideas underlying headhunting, which had attributed the capacity of augmentation and social reproduction to the snatching of the souls and the names of the murdered, this same separation of immortal soul from mortal body became the impetus for an image system that carried the immortalising of the soul to new social heights. The comparison with Kantorowiczs famous study of the role of efgies in medieval political theology, effecting the fashioning of the body politic through the severing of immortal ofce from mortal title-holder, is obvious and cogent, enabling one to grasp the connection between the creation of articial, image-based social systems and the emergence of expansive and integrative networks of social relations capable of being administrated independently of the knowledge of the biography of persons. In New Ireland, the new system of malanggan proved effective in liberating the possession of land and other modes of entitlement from biographical relations. Between 1885 and 1900 alone, more than 2,000 sculptures (without counting masks) were taken aboard ship, rst by captains and soon after by specially assigned government researchers and collectors. From the beginning collecting seems not to have been a problem, as the efgy, like the body before it, had ceased to be important after the effective separation of image and soul from its temporary container. The structure of the image-based polity that emerged through what is colloquially known as the work for the dead has proved resistant to change over the last century and a half, leaving people across the island to associate, via name and reference to image-based resources, with three main and six subsidiary polities that span the entire island like a giant spiders web. Visually, the images make reference to processes of absorption, containment, and release, which structure the narrative of life-giving death by reversing the changes that occur in the relation between the deceased, the mourners, and the soul at death. The complex rituals that follow upon death take on a pan-island scale with the death of an elder, whose demise triggers the ending of funerary work for all those buried in the same cemetery, usually encompassing between fty or more people buried over the previous ten years or so. Through tuning of scale, proportion, multiplication, and dimension, efgies make visible the identity and the relative relation of the local com-

munity to the extended polity whose assets are redistributed following the death of its members. Tall, vertical efgies are composed of assemblages of two or more individual gures. The oldest and most visually eloquent narration of the mythical departure of the souls to the island of the dead is the so-called soul canoe, collected in 1890. Smaller efgies occasionally stress connections vertically, while others project details onto the horizontal plane in two dimensions, which in turn can be extended as separate three-dimensional gures. By virtue of owning even the smallest part of an image, which may never have been materialised in its entirety, members can lay claim to land and its spoils to varying degrees those that can make shared claims to a more encompassing image can assert the right to work on each others land, while others may just share the right to harvest plots within existing gardens, or even just to harvest each others fruit- and nut-carrying trees. Seemingly complex, the relations efgies make manifest in their partial connection to other, strictly absent, efgies of both the past and the future reect the sequential structure of both the ritual actions and the actions involved in sustaining gardens. The three named polities of images, each subdivided into opposing pairs, give imagistic expression to the ritual action of absorption, containment, and release that seeks to effect the separation of body and soul, culminating in the symbolic death and destruction of the gure and the resurrection of the everlasting image. At the same time, the tripartite structure of ritual action mirrors the sequence of gardening, with the tubers of the rst garden being planted in the second and the third, before returning back to the original plot, the entire sequence lasting around six years, with the seventh seeing the rst new garden in the old plot. Annette Weiners (1992) reections on the manner in which society keeps hold of its possessions while giving them away, appears hugely pertinent when comparing malanggan with Malekulan artefacts, two of the largest corpus ever to be collected from relatively small societies over a short period of time. Their inability to pick up the complex intentions made manifest in the art appears to have made Pacic art more desirable to collectors, not less, while simultaneously enabling these societies to retain a sense of control over their own actions and future that, given the scale of European intervention in the region, is astonishing.

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In Eastern Polynesia, artefacts in the form of large, elaborately stitched patchwork quilts have similarly kept alive a complex system of social memory, despite the emigration of most of its population. In the Cook Islands, where such migration is especially pronounced, the gifting of quilts at all major life-cycle stages connects a vast transnational society in ways that appear surprising, as the quilts are neither usable, not being made of colour fast cloth, nor displayed.25 In fact, it is the quilts differential construction, made in three distinct ways as piece-work, appliqu, and cutout, which projects the structuring of exchange networks. Rather than making relational action manifest as continuous social ow as in Malekula, or as sequences of a cycle as in malanggan, Cook Island quilts manifest generationally perceived networks whose actions rarely overlap. This emphasis on generational networks would not make any sense from a Malekulan or malanggan point of view, which perceive the present to be the ip side of the burial place of memory, where all pasts are equally present.26 It is the projection of perspectives on relational action, calling for different materialities, which appears to matter hugely in the framing of social memory in the three cases discussed. One would be hard pressed to think of a more apt materials than sand or lightweight, fragile tree-ferns for projecting a model of Malekulan society, their transitory durability belying the temporal nature of the sequences of actions required to sustain a sense of continuous ow in which stoppages, even death itself, are an anathema. The soft wood (Alstonia scholaris) used for the making of malanggan, taken from huge trees in the interior marked by their towering branches that lter out all daylight, is similarly tting: again lightweight and fragile, just heavy enough to allude to a momentary arrest, and sufciently malleable to allow for connections to be made manifest in carving. Equally

materially and sensorially t for purpose is the cloth preferred in the Cook Islands: heavy and coarse, allowing for shredding and re-stitching, while anchoring the bodies of the dead, who are covered in the quilted shrouds at the end of the lifetime of both. The empathy each one of these artefacts unleashes is social, a reection of intuitive understandings of the actions that sustain social relations, as much as of the imagination required to understand and ultimately predict the actions perceived in things.

Conclusion
Virtually all theories of memory have assumed the perceptually driven nature of the representations that are active in recollection. This article has argued that with the demise of an economy based on proprietary relations extended through objects, and with the rise of knowledge economies with rights extended through knowledge-based resources, we need to question how the mind is active in perception and in making the representations that gure prominently in the activation of social memory. How to sustain social memory in the face of a knowledge economy where memory is individually owned and largely untouched by external control is a problem that appears peculiar to our time, and yet is not at all unique to us. As Israel Roseneld (1992, p.4) said in his study of the relation between thought and memory some time ago, human memory may be unlike anything we have thus far imagined or successfully built a model for. And consciousness may be the reason why. Designers, aware of the importance to create things that matter to people and that connect persons to one another, are in need of research that explores the counter-factuality of social memory, in terms of its rupture and curtailment, and the long term conditioning of social empathy that follow in the wake of its failure.

Notes
1. Assmann and Hart (1993). 2. Carlo Ginzburg (2001); Krzysztof Pomian (1990). 3. See James Young (1993) on Holocaust memorials. 4. Cf. Bloch (1998). 5. Walter Benjamin referred to a similar ending of acts that harbour the relational nature of recollection on which empathy relies in his essay on the Storyteller (Eiland and Jennings 2006), recalled by Claude Levi-Strauss ([1955] 1992) in his Triste tropique. Following in this tradition of reections on the ending of acts that conditioned

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inter-subjective modalities of recognition and identity, Emily Martin (1992) considers the rise of body consciousness in the context of the termination of the Fordist mode of production during the 1970s. 6. Cf. Lowenthal (1993), Huyssen (1995), and Terdiman (1993), among others. 7. See also his earlier work, How societies remember (Connerton 1992), for a detailed description of the social and bodily practices which modernity is deemed to have forgotten. 8. See also Kantorowicz (1957) and Giesey (1960). 9. Halbert (2005). 10. See Ashby and Johnson (2002) and Ball (1997). See also Reckwitz (2002) for a very good discussion of the status of the material in theories of social science. 11. See Kchler (2008). 12. Meikle (1995); Mossmann and Smith (2008). 13. See Rbel and Hackenschmidt (2008) on the impact of plastic furniture on the use of space in the home. 14. See Kchler (2010) for a discussion of this phenomenon. 15. Fodor (1998). 16. Connerton (1992). 17. Levi-Strauss (1966). 18. See Kchler (1999) and Hauser-Schublin (1996). 19. Kchler and Eimke (2009).

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20. For a debate on the Melanesia and Polynesia divide, see Thomas (1989); for a theoretical perspective on the cutting of networks, see Strathern (1996). 21. Washburn and Crowe (1988), Ascher (1991), and Gell (1998). 22. Were (2010). 23. Rio (2005). 24. For further elaboration on the historical emergence of the ritual institution of malanggan, see Kchler (2002). 25. See Kchler and Eimke (2009). 26. MacDonald (1987).

References
Additional references common to Memory Studies can be found at the end of this dossier in the selected bibliography, pp.197202. Ascher, M., 1991. Ethnomathematics: a multicultural view of mathematical ideas. New York: Chapman & Hall. Ashby, M. and Johnson, K., 2002. Materials and design: the art and science of material selection in product design. Oxford: ButterworthHeinemann. Assmann, A. and Hart, D., 1993. Mnemosyne: Formen und Funktionen der kulrurellen Erinnerung. Frankfurt: Fischer Tacshenbuch Verlag. Ball, P., 1997. Made to measure: new materials for the 21st century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Beck, U., 1992. Risk society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bloch, M., 1998. Internal and external memory: different ways of being in history. In: M. Bloch (ed.) How we think they think: anthropological approaches to cognition, memory and literacy. Boulder, CO: Westview, 6785. Connerton, P., 1992. How societies remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connerton, P., 2009. How modernity forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eiland, H. and Jennings, M., 2006. Walter Benjamin, selected writings, volume 3: 19351938. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Fodor, J., 1998. Concepts: where cognitive science went wrong. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forty, A. and Kchler S. (eds), 1999. The art of forgetting. Oxford: Berg. Gallese, V., 2001. The shared manifold hypothesis: from mirror neurons to empathy. Journal of consciousness studies, 8 (57), 3350. Gell, A., 1998. Art and agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giesey, R. E., 1960. The royal funeral ceremony in Renaissance France. Geneva: Mounton. Ginzburg, C., 1992. Reprsentation das Wort, die Vorstellung, der Gegenstand. Freibeuter, 53, 323. Ginzburg, C., 2001. Wooden eyes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Guidieri, R. and Pellizi, F., 1981. Nineteen tableaux on the cult of the dead in Malekula, Eastern Melanesia. RES, 2, 197. Halbert, D., 2005. Resisting intellectual property (ripe studies in global political economy). London: Routledge. Hauser-Schublin, B., 1996. The thrill of the line, the string and the frond: or why the Abelam are a noncloth culture. Oceania, 67 (2), 91106. Huyssen, A., 1995. Twilight memories: marking time in a culture of amnesia. New York and London: Routledge.

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Kantorowicz, E. H., 1957. The kings two bodies: a study in medieval political theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kchler, S., 1999. Binding in the Pacic: the case of malanggan. Oceania, 69 (3), 145157. Kchler, S., 2002. Malanggan: art, memory and sacrice. Oxford: Berg. Kchler, S., 2008. Technological materiality: beyond the dualist paradigm, Theory, culture and society, 25 (1), 101120. Kchler, S., 2010. Materials and design. In: A. Clarke, ed. The Anthropology of design. Vienna: Springer, 130145. Kchler, S. and Eimke, A., 2009. Tivaivai: the social fabric of the Cook Islands. London: British Museum Press and Te Papa Press. Latour, B., 1992. Aramis ou Lamour des techniques, Paris, La Dcouverte. [Aramis, or the love of technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996] Levi-Strauss, C., [1949] 1969. Les structures lmentaires de la parent. La Haye-Paris: Mouton. [Elementary structures of kinship. Beacon Press, 1969] Levi-Strauss, C., [1955] 1992. Triste tropique. London: Penguin Books. Levi-Strauss, C., 1962. La pense sauvage. Paris: Plon [The savage mind. New York: Pelgram, 1966]. Lowenthal, D., 1993. Memory and oblivion. Museum management and curatorship, 12, 171182. MacDonald, R., 1987. The burial places of memory: epic underworlds in Virgil, Dante and Milton. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Martin, E., 1992. The end of the body. American ethnologist, 19 (1), 121140. Mauss, M., 2007. Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de lchange dans les socits archaques. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Meikle, J. L., 1995. American plastic: a cultural history. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Mossmann, S. and Smith, R., 2008. Fantastic plastic: product design and consumer culture. London: Black Dog Publishing. Pomian, K., 1990. Collectors and curiosities: origins of the museum. London: Polity Press. Pomian, K., 1999. History: from moral science to the computer. Diogenes, 47 (1), 3448. Reckwitz, A., 2002. The status of the material in theories of culture: from social structure to artefacts. Journal for the theory of social behaviour, 32 (2), 195217. Rio, K., 2005. Discussions around a sand-drawing: creations of agency and society in Melanesia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 11 (3), 401423.

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Rosenfield, I., 1992. The strange, familiar and forgotten: an anatomy of consciousness. London: Picador. Rbel, D. and Hackenschmidt, S., 2008. Formless furniture. Frankfurt: Hatje Cantz. Strathern, M., 1996. Cutting the network, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2, 517 535. Terdiman, R., 1993. Present past: modernity and the memory crisis. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Thomas, N., 1989. The force of ethnology: origins and signicance of the Melanesia/Polynesia divide. Current anthropology, 30 (1), 2741. Washburn, D. K. and Crowe, D. W., 1988. Symmetries of culture: theory and practice of plane pattern analysis. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Weiner, A., 1992. Inalienable possessions. Berkeley, CA: University California Press. Were, G., 2010. Lines that connect: rethinking pattern and mind in the Pacic. Honolulu: Hawaii University Press. Young, J., 1993. The texture of memory: holocaust memorials and meaning. Boston, MA: Yale University Press.

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