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Paul JamesConnerton (April 22, 1940 – July 27, 2019) was a Britishsocial anthropologist best known for his work on social and body memory.
Born inChesterfield to James Connerton, and his wife, Mary (born Perry), he was first educated at Chesterfield Grammar School for Boys, then studied history atJesus College, Oxford. After Graduating Connerton went toNuffield College to study the works ofneo-Marxist philosopherGyörgy Lukács who is best known for his concept ofReification. His interest in Lukács motivated him to deepen his knowledge ofliterary theory so he enrolled atGonville and Caius College, Cambridge and gained another first degree in English. From 1968 to 1972 he continued his research as an unofficial fellow of Caius. Connerton felt increasingly alienated from Lukács, canceled his dissertation project and instead turned to the works of the German neo-MarxistFrankfurt School aroundHorkheimer,Adorno,Benjamin andMarcuse, finishing this second dissertation project with his first published monographThe Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School. Paul Connerton spent his career as a private scholar lacking the financial basis that usually enables for such a path.[1] Later he became a research associate in theDepartment of Social Anthropology at theUniversity of Cambridge.[2] He was furthermore burdened by arthritis rheumatoid which caused much pain throughout his life and forced him to interrupt his studies and writing for treatments, therapies and long hospital stays. He was taken care of by his sister Clare Campbell and loyal friends.[1]
He died in 2019 at the age of 79.[1]
Connerton gained wide attention in the humanities and social sciences with his trilogy on social memory:How Societies Remember (1989),HowModernity Forgets (2009) andThe Spirit of Mourning (2011). The main focus of these theoretical works is the interplay of cognitive and non-cognitive processes that preserve and create knowledge and images of the past, repetitivehabitualizedsocial practices and the socially shaped human body.[3][4]
In his bookHow Societies Remember (1989) Connerton builds upon the basic assumption of scholars likeHalbwachs,Hobsbawm/Ranger,Nora andLowenthal[5] “that there is some such thing as acollective or social memory“", but he takes a different position "to where this phenomenon, [...] can be found to be most crucially operative”.[6] "The author argues that images of the past and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained byritualperformances and that performative memory is bodily",[7] an argument he takes up fromBergson,[8]Proust[9] and others. His goal is to show that "bodily social memory is an essential aspect of social memory, but it is an aspect which has until now been badly neglected".[7] Connerton followed up this work withHow Modernity Forgets (2009), which emphasizes what he calls "place memory," or memory that is dependent upontopography and particularly upon topography as it relates to the humanbody. Connerton argues thatmodernity is characterized by a particular sort of forgetting "associated withprocesses that separate social life from locality and from human dimensions: superhuman speed,megacities that are so enormous as to be unmemorable,consumerism disconnected from the labour process, theshort lifespan of urban architecture, the disappearance of walkable cities."[10]
