Memory. Places and Communities Memory in “Powdered Modernity” between Literature, History and Anthropology

Abstract

Contemporaneity is bent and plagued by an unprecedented pestilence: the shattering of individual and collective memory, which alters its being and perceiving itself as a community, making the present dead and diaphanous. As highlighted here, the deafening of memory has been foreseen by writers, thoroughly researched by historians and analyzed analytically by anthropologists; it is now perceived and experienced with dismay by the most aware part of public opinion. A possible, albeit partial, antidote, already widely practiced and with broad margins for improvement, consists in the creation of “mnestic granaries”, museums and educational displays that, punctuating the territory, protect its memory. Here “life stories” with a heuristic value sometimes unrecognized are stocked. When rigorously collected and creatively proposed, they consign to the future a cognitive heritage that otherwise, being originated and in many ways confined to the past, risks being extinguished forever.