Narrative niche construction: memory ecologies and distributed narrative identities
- PDF / 633,739 Bytes
- 23 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 22 Downloads / 215 Views
Narrative niche construction: memory ecologies and distributed narrative identities Richard Heersmink1 Received: 24 February 2020 / Accepted: 18 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Memories of our personal past are the building blocks of our narrative identity. So, when we depend on objects and other people to remember and construct our personal past, our narrative identity is distributed across our embodied brains and an ecology of environmental resources. This paper uses a cognitive niche construction approach to conceptualise how we engineer our memory ecology and construct our distributed narrative identities. It does so by identifying three types of niche construction processes that govern how we interact with our memory ecology, namely creating, editing, and using resources in our memory ecology. It also conceptualises how identity-relevant information in objects and (family) stories is transmitted vertically, i.e., across generations of people. Identifying these processes allows us to better understand the cultural information trajectories that constitute our memory ecologies. In short, what I’ll argue is that our memory ecology scaffolds our narrative identity and that engineering our memory ecology is a form of narrative niche construction. Keywords Narrative identity · Distributed self · Extended self · Cognitive niche construction · Cognitive ecology · Distributed cognition · Transactive memory · Extended mind
Introduction We often remember our personal past through interacting with objects (e.g., photos, journals, mementos, lifelogs) and reminiscing with other people (e.g., spouses, friends, colleagues). Such objects and people involved in autobiographical remembering constitute our memory ecology. Human autobiographical memory is open to incorporate and rely on resources in our memory ecology, in that way our memory systems are distributed across embodied brains and environmental resources * Richard Heersmink [email protected] 1
Politics, Media and Philosophy, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
53 Page 2 of 23 R. Heersmink
(Wegner 1986; Hutchins 1995a; Clark and Chalmers 1998; Michaelian and Sutton 2013). This has important consequences for our narrative identity because autobiographical memories are the building blocks of our narrative. An influential view on personal identity is the narrative self-constitution developed by Schechtman (1996, 2005). This view suggests that our identity and self are constituted by our autobiographical narrative. What makes you the particular person you are and what distinguishes you from other persons is your unique autobiographical narrative. So, in an important sense, we are our narrative, which can be defined as a subjective, affective, and personal story containing a mostly accurate chronological depiction of a series of connected events and experiences that constitute our identity. The upshot of integrating the distributed memory thesis and the narrative self-constitution view is this: If the memor
Data Loading...
