Paul Connerton is a sociologist, currently professor in the Department of Social Anthropology

Social anthropology

Social Anthropology is one of the four or five branches of anthropology that studies how contemporary human beings behave in social groups. Practitioners of social anthropology investigate, often through long-term, intensive field studies , the social organization of a particular person: customs,...

 at Cambridge University.

His single contribution to critical and cultural studies is his book How Societies Remember (1989) that opened the discussion of collective memory

Collective memory

Collective memory refers to the shared pool of information held in the memories of two or more members of a group, and was coined by the philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. Collective memory can be shared, passed on and constructed by groups both small and large...

 (per Maurice Halbwachs

Maurice Halbwachs

Maurice Halbwachs was a French philosopher and sociologist known for developing the concept of collective memory.Born in Reims, Halbwachs attended the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. There he studied philosophy with Henri Bergson, who influenced him greatly. He aggregated in Philosophy in 1901...

and others) to include bodily gestures, finding in clothing, manners, musical performance, and other socially negotiated practices locii where memory is "silted" (to use his verb) into human corporeal consciousness and praxis.