Oldal 17 [17]
16 | Digital Media and Storytelling in Higher Education
experience in the individual narrative cannot be entirely individual, because
it also repeats the central narrative of the culture. The circle is thus closed;
as Heller puts it:
Saint Augustine could not have experienced what his Self had experienced three
hundred years earlier, or if he had been born in India. [...] The autobiographic
Self cannot be ,transposed’ into another world, another community, another
age than that in which it lived. (2015, p. 138)
The ancestral histories of cultural memory and the rituals associated with
them allow the connection of the remembering individuals and those who are
remembered now, and the uniting of the past and the present. Heller cites as
examples the story of the Exodus from Egypt (linked to the Jewish Passover)
and its revival, as well as the story of the crucifixion of Jesus (linked to the
Christian Easter). Both the Torah and the Bible are manifestations of the
identity of a community, of Judaism and Christianity. Heller distinguishes
between religious and nation-shaping cultural narratives since, in the case of
the nation-shaping narrative, credibility is enhanced if the event is closer in
time to the present and can be linked to a kind of collective experience (e.g.,
the funeral of Imre Nagy) - in this case, the main role is played by collective
memory rather than cultural memory.
1.3 Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology
In the interpretation of evolutionary and cultural psychology, the emergence
of the narrative was an important stage in the process of becoming human.
Storytelling through language is an important social act, the key to
transmitting and maintaining culture.
The theory of the social embeddedness of memory emerged in the early 20"
century. Although the idea that individual memory cannot be independent
of the cultural-social environment was already expressed in Bartlett's theory
of memory, Halbwachs explicitly made social communication a prerequisite
for cognitive processes. The group plays an important role in the act of shared
storytelling as it functions as a kind of filter, bringing out the individuals
narratives which are relevant to the group through dialogue. Thus, narratives
that emerge within a group thus also create the collective memory of a group
(Halbwachs, 1925/1950; Pléh, 2003, 2019). However, collective memory is not
the same as cultural memory. Heller (2015) differentiates the two concepts
along the time dimension of stories told in local groups. According to this
notion, collective memory stories are common experiences lived in the same
period of time (such as a shared experience ofa fire or a theater performance),
while cultural memory either refers to events in the past or is a narrative that