Abstract
The construction of culture as a nonhereditary memory of the community is selective, with cultural forgetting functioning as one of its internal mechanisms. Based on Lotmanian Semiotic typology, cultural forgetting should be divided into such three types as forgetting of the text, forgetting of the rule and forgetting of the code. The main function of cultural forgetting is to ensure the formation and maintenance of cultural memory, which is manifested in three aspects: establishing cultural identity concerning the infusion of new texts, rules and codes, the external function concerning non-culture and anti-culture in the process of cultural interaction and expansion, and the internal cultural function concerning old culture and the past in the process of internal changes in specific cultures.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
