ABSTRACT
A mnemic building shares precisely in the notion of artificial memory described by Francis Yates in her seminal work on the art of memory. A collective body image can be so powerfully pervasive that if a mnemic building is lost through a traumatic and sudden event it could provoke a phantom limb effect, where an amputee feels pain in a lost limb. Contemporary neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran argues that it is this body image that generates the feeling of a phantom limb when an actual limb is missing, causing real feelings of pain and movement of the phantom. The ritual reconstruction on alternative sites, located next to each other, of the Grand Shrine of Ise in Japan, reoccurring every 22 years since its mythical foundation by Emperor Suinin is intriguing; clearly here the focus is not on material preservation as is or per se, entailing an all together different notion of memory where cyclical rebuilding is essential to identity making.
