Towards a Cognitive Sociology of Memory: Symbols, Body, Emotions, and Interaction Rituals

Abstract

This article proposes a cognitive sociological theory of memory that articulates the body, emotion, symbol, and interaction rituals as key axes of analysis. Drawing from the embodiment turn and the theories of embodied and extended cognition, it examines how interaction rituals generate symbols charged with emotional energy, which function as epistemic artifacts that organize memory and meaning. A sociology of the symbol is developed through the works of Randall Collins and Norbert Elias, and the relationship between memory, symbol, and situated cognition is explored in depth. Finally, Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus is incorporated to understand how ritualized symbolic repertoires sediment enduring embodied dispositions, shaping an embodied form of social memory. Here, memory is understood as a socio-technical, distributed, relational, and bodily situated practice.