Culture And Memory Paper

Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel, a political activist and professor stated “Without memory there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no emotion, no society, and no future.” Our memories allow us to filter, imagine, preserve, share, and develop our experiences with others and to ourselves. Sometimes we may not fully be aware or conscious of what has taken place and others times it can feel as if our memory is playing tricks on us, by creating events that seem very real but has never taken place. Culture tends to shape mind developments contributing factors on how one’s prospective of memory can be autobiographical and other times collective. In this paper I want to examine the pairing of culture and memory in how it filters our remembrance …show more content…
The experiment was intentional created to be cross sectional to compare the results between countries. The experiment selected random subjects and a list of words were called the participants duty was to cluster the words in how they saw fit. Observing the cognitive learning patterns of each culture and getting to see how their learning effects their processes of memory. The results showed that the Kpelle students showed a totally different pattern in cluttering the word pairings than the American students. Noted findings in the experiment looked at the accuracy of one’s memorization and the different approaches of memorizations by the Kpelle tribe and American students. In the article there is an example given where a person who has just arrived in a new town asked a young boy to deliver a …show more content…
The Americans developed memory through organization and achievable performance. While the Kpelle’s took the steps to memorization through storytelling, constructing folk stories that structure what the subject had recalled (Cole & Gay, 1082). Siegel discussed a little bit more about storytelling in his book, “stories embody cultural rules and expectations, exploring the reasons for human behavior and consequences of deviations from the cultural norm. Meaning embedded in culturally transmitted stories can directly influence how individuals interpret overwhelming events, as well as how those events are subsequently processed” (Siegel,2012,p.84). The concept of storytelling for the Kpelles definitely aligns with how Siegel sees memory as a processes being constructed and embedded through actions like storytelling to interpret meaning from an