AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY AND SUPERNATURAL BELIEFS: SOCIAL CONTAGION OF MEMORIES

Non-institutionally transmitted supernatural and religious beliefs often occur in form of personal experience narratives (memorates). In general we could expect that personal memories should be unique, but these stories are often similar to other narratives known in the society and contain traditional motifs and elements. Interesting question is how the culturally spread beliefs can get into someone's autobiographical memories? This paper presents findings based on author's field research in rural area of northern Slovakia (Kysuce) and on cognitive theories of human memory. Psychological studies show that autobiographical memory is not passive information storage and recall device, but an active process of repeated construction of our personal past. During this process people incorporate scripts, concepts, audio-visual pictures, or whole episodes from their cultural and social environment into their personal past, without being aware of it. Author suggests that these psychological findings can be used to explain the formation of autobiographical memories containing traditional beliefs. Following his field material he claims that the tendency to incorporate narrative elements concerning supernatural beliefs from social environment, into personal experience memories, depends on two conditions: (1) emotional arousal connected with the experience, and (2) social context of similar stories heard by the person, that means: who in his social environment was the source and who was the object of similar personal experience stories of others.