How Bodies Remember: Social Memory and Bodily Experience of Criticism, Resistance, and Delegitimation following China's Cultural Revolution

Abstract

AUL CONNERTON, writing in a widely cited essay that decisively summarizes the ideas of many social theorists, claims that collective and individual memory are so thoroughly interconnected, and that those interconnections are so central to how societies reproduce their social order across generations, that it is appropriate to analyze how societies remember.2 Basing his analysis on the integration of successive waves of interest in interpretive studies, Connerton professes that societies remember in three rather different ways: namely, through inscriptions onto cultural texts (myths, great books, monuments); by way of commemorative rituals that engage people in participatory rationality and social action; and via incorporation of social memory into the human body.3 Connerton, drawing on the work of ethnographers and social historians, elaborates this evocative formula to illustrate what societies remember: namely, historical events, social