This chapter is centered on the scientific conceptualization of the term “photography” and its relationship with the photographer, the photographed, and the viewer, including that which is existent between the photographer and the camera, especially the chemistry between both lenses — biological and technological — the synergy and the differences. Photographs, according to the chapter, are representations of the reality of a particular timeframe. By answering certain expedient questions, the author engages his collections (with pictorial evidence) to illustrate the nature of photography vis-à-vis other factors that contribute to the shot, such as the camera and how it is received by the people. Moreover, the chapter views photography as a “social contract” between the photographer and the photographed, and “construction” as the process of taking the shot and reproducing the image. As for the interpretation of the picture by the viewer, it is believed that the pictures themselves dictate how they are to be interpreted or engaged, although this is also highly dependent on the viewer’s understanding. In addition, the chapter explores the effect of photography at its dawn and what its exclusion of African peculiarity, color-wise, meant.

This chapter furthers the discourse on “narrative” with specificity on “magic, memory, myth, and metaphor.” Herein, the chapter shows that the knowledge of the past is preserved in oral vehicles as “songs, images, poems, rituals and religions, stories and myths,” as memories not only preserve but sustain them by transporting them to succeeding generations, using narrative when evoked. It also examines memory’s limitations, especially when compared to history. They include “bias (of the narrator), misinformation, infallibility and the impossibility of rightly (in)validating (individual) memories”–the lack of corroborator. It is also prone to manipulation and subject to the narrator’s interest, while the information processed and stored as memory can also fade over time owing to the collection of new memories. In the Yoruba context, the chapter highlights the relationship between “Itan” and “Aroba,” with the major distinguishing factor being their timeframe from the period of happening. The chapter also dwells on collective memory, which relies on individuals’ narration to become one because no one person was present everywhere to witness everything at once. Lastly, there is the clarification of the different problems in African epistemology, such as magic and the likes.

This chapter explores cultural themes in Africa with “narrative politics” and its cultural values central to the discourse. In expounding “narrative,” the chapter brings to the fore its two most potent modes (literature and history), which reflect reality but are different in their modus operandi – through imagination (creativity) and verifiable facts. Written beautifully and with references, this chapter blurs the contrast between the two “narrative devices” and focuses instead on espousing their working togetherness. This is because a co-adoption of both in the narrative adds creativity to facts presentation, which thus makes it interesting to read and sustain readers’ interest just as their Yoruba derivative, Alo and Itan, is often a mixture of both.

The chapter also asserts the importance of autoethnography and how through personal experience and identity, the society’s “collective consciousness” is exhibited and manifested. Also, there are references made to the cultural relevance and implication of “time and season,” “taboos and superstitions,” “greetings and reverence,” as well as “namings and places” in Yorubaland.

Since the Ogdoad, the Ennead, and the Source are described as beyond verbal description, how can written language convey anything at all about this ultimate experience of gnōsis? Discussion of oral transmission by means of logos, dissemination of written treatises, and the paradoxes of hermeneutics as understood in terms of Deconstruction (Derrida) and Hermeneutics (Gadamer).

Chapter 2 introduces Bergson’s claim that thinking has a processual character that distinguishes it from judging. It analyses Bergson’s claim in Time and Free Will that the structure of our mental lives is different in kind from the way we understand the external world. It shows how Bergson’s later work develops an account of the interrelations of durational thinking and judging. Drawing on Bergson’s early untranslated lectures on Kant, it shows how Bergson pinpoints a lacuna in Kant’s account of the imagination, and attempts to argue that it is only by understanding thinking as operating through a process of dissociation, rather than the synthetic association of Kant’s model of the imagination, that we can understand the emergence of a meaningful world.

Los informantes by Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Diário da Queda by Michel Laub both use family narratives to explore ontological and political relationships. In Los informantes, this chapter demonstrates that the father and son embody Nancy’s notions of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘democracy’ respectively. Their weaknesses reveal weaknesses of such systems of governance, which Vásquez examines in relation to the historic and contemporary Colombian political context. It is through tactile associations and ‘sharing’ emblematized in the character of a physiotherapist, that the possibility of a ‘horizontal’ politics of ‘interdependence’ is explored. Likewise, in Diário da Queda, a lack of touch and familial intimacy frustrates the happiness of a father and son who are the second and third generation, born to a Holocaust survivor who moved to Brazil. This chapter tackles the novel’s radical critique of Holocaust memory used to bind together a Jewish ‘operative’ community, and to justify violence in the present.

How does conflict (both enacted and potential) change, shape, destroy and otherwise modify and affect material culture? In addition to these questions, this chapter examines how “things” can act as propaganda, as mechanisms of survival, and as creations of the destabilizing and stabilizing effects of war, peace, and the gray area in between. As scholars increasingly interrogate the meaning and chronology of war, peace, occupation, and the definition of categories such as refugee, how do they incorporate material culture?

This epilogue concludes the volume with an investigation of the legacy of William the Conqueror and his age in public culture, international politics, media, and social memory.

The fifth chapter establishes Calvin’s dependence upon tradition in two different manners. First, it does so by examining those theologians upon whom Calvin relied. The chapter considers Calvin’s use of John Chrysostom, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Augustine of Hippo. Each case shows the earlier theologian’s authority for and influence upon Calvin. Then the chapter turns to three different doctrinal loci. These are the establishment of infant baptism, the Trinity, and predestination. In each instance, Calvin had to place his confidence in traditional sources, either to bolster his biblical work, or to replace what was impossible to produce biblically, as in the case of infant baptism.

The Introduction explains the history of Haiti and the Dominican Republic and the evolution of the border between the two from the colonial period through the twentieth century. It focuses on the transformation of the border that began with the US occupation and culminated in the genocidal policy of Trujillo. The Introduction presents the ways in which Trujillo’s government confronted the contradictory problem posed by a population that the state recognized as Dominican citizens, but that the state rejected as ethnically and racially undesireable. It demonstrates that the perpetrators of the 1937 Haitian Massacre understood that they were unleashing violence against their own citizens, and not only immigrants and squatters. It considers the 1937 Haitian Massacre in light of its remarkable absence within the evolving field of genocide studies, as well as its comparative significance in relationship to other twentieth-century histories of anti-Black violence in the Americas.

Continuing the volume’s fourth thematic strand (Cultural Perspectives), this chapter studies the writing of history and memory in the age of William the Conqueror. After a discussion of Normandy’s first dynastic chronicle composed by Dudo of Saint-Quentin, it directs its focus onto monastic historical narratives produced in Normandy, England, and their neighbouring territories, before turning to a range of contemporary secular narratives. The chapter is rounded off with considerations of Anglo-Norman historical writing in the broader context of north-western Europe and its transmission in manuscripts.

Information-seeking is usually conceived of as gathering information to make better decisions by observing and sampling from the external world. But for humans and many other intelligent agents, much of that information, once gathered, is also stored to guide future decisions, necessitating mechanisms for seeking information in some form of inner space. Here we survey various types of evidence suggesting that strategies adapted for search in external spatial environments are also used to seek information internally from memory. These include foraging strategies such as area-restricted search, which adaptively balances exploitation of locally clustered resources with exploration for resources more widely dispersed. We also describe how internal search satisfies the predictions of external foraging theory via the Marginal Value Theorem and show how these predictions can be used to investigate individual differences in memory search such as those caused by aging and cognitive impairment. Finally, we consider evidence that the structure of inner space may be a result of the very processes we use to search it.

We know a lot about Jack the Ripper’s crimes, but have no idea as to who he was. His crimes had a sexual character, and his dislike of women could be because he caught venereal disease from one. He targeted, amongst other regions, the women’s sex organs. We don’t know the identity of the Zodiac Killer, who targeted courting couples. It is likely that he felt envy towards them. Although Albert DeSalvo was widely believed to be the ‘Boston Strangler’, not everyone is in agreement about this and he was not found guilty of these crimes. However, his toxic upbringing and his characteristics of offending fit the pattern of other known serial killers. He showed evidence of dissociation. DNA evidence points to his involvement in at least one of the murders. A perspective of motivation might cast some light on these cases.

Through a focus on memories, Chapter 4 continues the story of migrant integration and postimperial nation-building from the mid-1970s and 1980s up to the present day. Since the turn of the millennium, the returnees have become much more visible again in the public sphere. This final chapter analyzes this return of "the return" in a memorial boom of sorts, its nostalgia, its use of markers of authenticity, and its narrative frameworks. It contextualizes these memories within the current worldwide battles over the legacies of empire, but also within the Portuguese context of the fortieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in 2014, which coincided with a severe economic crisis and harsh austerity measures. The chapter maintains that the recent upsurge of memorial activities on and by retornados that tend toward identity building should be challenged by historical thinking that looks toward truth.

Shifting gears toward a social history of decolonization in the metropole, Chapter 2 looks at the housing provided for the refugee-like groups of returnees that depended on public welfare to put a roof over their heads. Bringing to light both the achievements and the limits of the state’s deliberate policy of integration, the chapter argues that the aid provided to the returnees served as laboratory for building a new welfare state aligned with the Western European model that Portuguese elites wished to espouse. Zooming in on the living conditions of residents, it also shows, however, that a lack of adequate facilities and resources frequently led to considerable hardships for the returnees. What is more, state-fostered integration was starkly unequal and tendentially racialized: Migrants who were non-Portuguese, nonwhite, or both were overrepresented in the housing facilities that offered the most difficult conditions. The success story of integration that dominates some academic and most popular accounts of the returnees’ history so far is in urgent need of qualification.

Memory provides information for decision making and determines partly what animals can and cannot do. Here we categorize memory systems in animals in terms of their generality and their temporal characteristics, and we explore how evolution has tailored memory systems, considering both the benefits of having access to information and the costs of acquiring and remembering information. General associative memories are flexible and can last for years. In contrast, general short-term memories decay rapidly. We find no evidence of general memory systems used to store sequences of stimuli faithfully. Importantly, seeming limitations of general memory systems may be adaptive as they minimize storage and learning costs. In addition to general memory systems, animals have evolved specialized memories when they need more faithful or longer-lasting memories than afforded by general memory systems. We discuss the consequences of these findings for animal cognition research.