Memory is not a culturally neutral process: what is attended to, what is deemed worth remembering, and how memories are organized and transmitted all vary significantly across cultural contexts. Oral cultures develop extraordinary mnemonic capacities — the Aboriginal Australian songlines are a feat of spatial and narrative memory with no equivalent in literate cultures. Studying memory across cultures reveals not only the range of human mnemonic capacity but the degree to which what we call 'natural' memory is always culturally shaped.
Each step builds on the last.