Chapter 2: Living Memories in the Wild

Steve Brown and Paula Reavey propose a remarkable paper that follows three lines of memory work: retracing their own intellectual journey, the history of psychology and social science, and the stories of people on psychiatric wards. Its overall goal is theoretical, and entails defining a nondualistic psychology, as well as a vocabulary that allows accounting for remembering not as a pure cognitive process “in the skull,” but rather, as context dependent, distributed and mediated activity. In this chapter, I summarize their core theoretical proposition, that can be seen as midrange model, and then undertake an exercise in abduction by trying out their model in two other case studies. The model can account for these cases, yet new aspects come to the fore, which may inspire further theoretical developments.