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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
