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From Cultural Memory to Poetic Memory: Ancient Greek Practices of History Beyond the “Great Divide”

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Abstract

In a recent comparative confrontation between the Peloponnesian war and the Polynesian war, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins asked for the agents of history: individuals? communities? the social classes? the economic structures? the social structures? Actually, for the American anthropologist, “no history without culture.” But the question is to focus on the different discursive forms which transforms the events of history in historiography, in a (referential and not fictional) story; these different (often poetic) forms of historiography shape a collective and cultural memory. The Greek case is particularly significant under that point of view as far as historiography is always situated between oral tradition and written tradition (Jack Goody), between poetic forms and forms of prose, with an important political, social, religious, and ideological impact.

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Notes

  1. In a translation by Amanda L. Iacobelli this paper has been presented at the Department of History at Fudan University on October 10, 2013 by an invitation of Prof. Wei Zhang. It develops along cultural memory themes a thesis already sketched out in “Mémoire poétique et pratiques historiographiques: la Grèce classique,” AWAL. Cahiers d’études berbères 40–41, 2009–2010: 121–128.

  2. The idea of configuring historic time through emplotment was developed by Ricœur (1983: 101–109); it would be preferable to widen the concept to that of placing into discourse, in order to take the enunciative dimension of historical discourse into account: see Calame (2006a: 18–40).

  3. On the discursive, provisional, and unstable nature of any « historic truth, » see for example Traverso (2005: 66–79).

  4. See Benveniste (1966: 237–250 and 258–266), as well as Benveniste (1974: 79–88) (on the “formal apparatus of enunciation.” In referring to this distinction between “history/narrative” and “discourse,” the ways in which the Greeks approach a heroic past has allowed me several times to show how extensively both of these levels are intermingled with discursive reality: see especially my study of 2009.

  5. On auxiliary uses of writing in Greek poetry of the Classical period, see the study by Ford (2003); for references to different forms of genealogical historiography in Classical Athens, see Thomas (1989: 15–34 and 155–195).

  6. On the importance of visual witnessing in Greek historiography, see Hartog (2005: 45–88); on rhetorical and deictic procedures meant to “place before the eyes,” see Calame (2012: 45–88), as well as Calame (2006a: 54–64).

  7. On this concept of the cultural creation of human in different ways, see the contributions by Affergan (2003).

  8. Some examples of these ritualized poetic forms of memory in Ancient Greece, from Homeric songs to tragedy, dithyramb, epinicion, and religious song, can be found in my study (Calame 2006b; see also Calame 2009).

  9. For these questions having to do with an attempt at transcultural translation, please see the critical study on myth and history, 2011a: 19–81.

  10. Lycurgus, Against Leocrates, 98–101, quoting Euripides, Erechtheus fr. 360 Kannicht (=14 Jouan-Van Looy). The dual role assumed by Praxithea as mother and as citizen is well defined by Sebillotte-Cuchet (2006); see also Sissa and Detienne (1989: 238–245).

  11. The etiological conclusions of Euripides’ tragedies are far from being the poet’s own invention, and generally correspond to the religion practiced; on this controversial question, see esp. Sourvinou-Inwood (2003: 414–422).

  12. Euripides, Erechtheus fr. 370, 55–100 Kannicht (=fr. 22, 55–100 Jouan-Van Looy); the figure of Poseidon-Erechtheus is described in all his different functions by Darthou (2005).

  13. For details on this, see Calame 2011b (on the Erechteion and its construction, see references I made in footnotes 7 and 42).

  14. The founding nature of the « evolutionist paradigm » and what is at stake in nineteenth-century anthropology are the subject of a critical analysis by Kilani (2009: 211–228).

  15. Lycurgus, Against Leocrates 102–104, quoting Homer, Iliad 15, 494–499. For the model of warrior virtues furnished by « Homer » in classical Athens, see for example Aristophanes, Frogs 1036, and for classical rhetoric, Isocrates, Panegyricus 159.

  16. The concept of regimes of temporality was developed especially by Hartog (2003: 11–30); on the passage from regimes of historicity to logics of temporality and regimes of (historic) truth, see Calame (2006a: 64–79); on the idea of discursive formation, see Foucault (1969: 149–154).

  17. On the essential relationship of any discursive configuration of the past with the present where it functions as collective and active memory, see especially the study by Kilani (2003); on belief as an indispensable social construction in assuring the pragmatics of both native (memorial) knowledge and of anthropological knowledge, refer to the decisive critical study of Kilani (1994: 236–262).

  18. On modern imperialist war, and on the “clash of civilizations,” see Kilani (2006: 74–87).

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    Claude Calame

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Calame, C. From Cultural Memory to Poetic Memory: Ancient Greek Practices of History Beyond the “Great Divide”. Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. 7, 639–652 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-014-0046-7

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