從跨文化與跨語言的角度探究揚·阿斯曼之文化記憶概念

Although his academic field belongs to the less-popular Egyptology, German scholar Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory, which he shaped from study cases in ancient Egyptology, archeology, anthropology and ethnology, has been well-received and widely recognized in the humanities in recent years. His achievements in cultural memory research have won numerous awards in academia, such as the Max Planck Award for Research, and recognitions from politics and society, such as the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. His concept of cultural memory has brought new horizons in related academic research fields and has positively contributed at the society level. In Assmann’s view, memory is always culturally formed. Cultural memory is not the memory of the past, but the conception of how a community wants to represent itself. Cultural memory is a process of cultural identity and self-identification. His main questions include the following: What role does memory play in the formation of cultural identities? What forms of cultural memory exist, and how are they organized? Assmann develops his concept of cultural memory based on the the work of French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Levi-Strauss and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, and he differentiates cultural memory from communicative memory. This research project’s main objective is to explore the individual and collective structure, the relationship between memory and history, the discourse of communicative and cultural memory, and the concept of memory culture in the context of Jan Assmann’s cultural memory concept.