The past always weighs heavily on the present this is inevitable.

. Discuss with reference to ethnographic case studies of historical memory and of forgetting. The linearity of time is fundamental, the past an eternity of all that has come before, the future all that is yet to come. The Present however is more than an instant in time, but a frame of mind, a way of perceiving a current period of time. Both individuals and societies may focus on the events of the past in the present or may seek to forget these events entirely. The extent to which individuals and societies as a whole can ignore or be unaffected by what has come before however is limited. The past both distant and near forms the present, the way we think, who we are and the world around us, the past therefore is inevitably intertwined with the present. Societies and individuals however, interact with the past in diverse ways, collectively forgetting, commemorating, learning from or judging past events, actions and individuals. Inevitably the past impacts upon the present, but the extent to which individuals and societies are weighed down by the past is not universal. To elucidate whether the past always weighs heavily on the present I will explore different ways in which the past weighs upon the present and how different societies are affected by, and deal with, the burden of the past. The first example of how the past seemingly weighs heavily on the present is in the formation of societal identities. No modern society is without a past, and in every past are events to be ashamed of, wars, massacres, injustice, as social paradigms shift, what is acceptable changes; slavery, racism, and homophobia for example. Societies have to live with the baggage of the past just as much as individuals have to do. To the same effect, societies are proud of elements of their past which may be immortalized and revered. It is this shared past which so often binds a community together, WWII is a key example, the victory of the Allies, the subjugation of Jews, the disgrace of Germany. These three different groups shared very different experiences of the war and remember it in different ways, but this past event has strengthened the identities of all three societies. Nationalism is a great stronghold of societal and political identity, collective memories creating a sense of nationwide community and belonging. In 1991 Estonia regained its independence from the Soviet Union, a nation that had been under the subjugation of a succession of empires since the 13th century. The new government had to re-establish the societal identity of a nation; this was achieved through the development of Estonias collective memory. This reinforcement of a collective ethnic identity, centred around invention and forgetting (Gross 2002: 342) utilising reservoirs of memory in maintaining and recreating national identity (Gross 2002: 343); in this way the past weighed heavily upon the formation of modern Estonia. Nationalism is a key part of legitimate governance, for this reason policy makers may attempt to validate present goals by appealing to continuity with or inheritance from ancestral and other precursors (Gathercole and Lowenthal 1990: 302)(Gross 2002: 343). However the present may manipulate the past just as much as the past weighs upon the present, historical facts can be interpreted in different ways and there can be a creative aspect of identity formation (Gross 2002: 352), in this respect what actually happened in the past is less important than the contemporary interpretation and application of the past. The concept of a people sharing an ancestral homeland is common across the globe. In the myths of the Merina of Madagascar, they see the land as inherited from the ancestors (Bloch 1985: 635) they believe that different generations of a descent group are made up of the same

stuff: a stuff which is limited and therefore needs to be transferred if it is not to be dispersed to nondescent group members (Bloch 1985: 634) the current generation is therefore tied to both the lands and the ways of the generations that have come before them. The past weighs heavily on the present in their mythology as different generations are consubstantial so that the body of one generation is the source of life and substance for the next (Bloch 1985: 633) different generations should act in the same way because in the end they are the same (Bloch 1985: 633), the past is heavily intertwined in the present, the past is their identity, rulebook and protection from the horror of dispersion or the devolution of land to outsiders (Bloch 1985: 634). It is the strong link to the ways of their ancestors which forms the identity of Merina society, their collective admiration of the ancestors binds the community. It is possible that in the past, the Merina ate their ancestors upon death, a feature of their myth which modern Merina are quick to deny as having ever happened, but Bloch is suspicious and questions whether this element of the past has been deliberately forgotten by the society, collective amnesia. Forgetting the past as a society, seems to act as a tool to ensure that the past does not weigh too heavily upon the present, if the past is forgotten can it still weigh upon the present? In Vietnam, the burden of the horrors of the Vietnam War (or the American war as it is called in Vietnam) still weighs upon Vietnamese society. Beliefs that the ghosts of those who died tragic deaths in this war abound in their living environment (Kwon 2008: 1) causes the war to remain an open wound in Vietnamese society. Honouring the deceased stops them from appearing as ghosts, the rituals surrounding ancestral shrines therefore are part of everyday life. These beliefs and superstitions are important to spiritual solidarity within the home and society as a whole, so much so that the communist Vietnamese state hierarchy put great emphasis on controlling commemorative practices (Kwon 2008: 2); political campaigns focussed on substituting the commemoration of heroic war dead for the traditional cult of ancestors (Kwon 2008: 2). By controlling the commemoration of the past, the state was able to partly manipulate how people remembered the war and to attempt to strengthen a new communist societal identity. The past however was not forgotten and ancestral rites... became a principal site for a contest of power between the state and the family (Kwon 2008: 2). Upon the reintroducing of the moral basis of the family as the principal unit in the new economic environment (Kwon 2008: 3) market competition developed at a greater rate, further undermining the communist state. The communist states attempt to control peoples perception and commemoration of the past backfired; neglected ancestors and rituals weighed too heavily upon the people and so became the base of a contest of power against the state. The Communist party clearly underestimated the weight that past generations maintained in Vietnamese households, Vietnamese families simply couldnt put up with having to exclude part of their genealogical identity in order to demonstrate loyalty to the political community (Kwon 2008: 14). The past here weighed heavily on the present and is still an integral part of the Vietnamese societal identity. The second key way in which the past weighs heavily on the present is in the formation of personal identities. Our personal pasts and our genealogical pasts are a key part of what forms our current identities, upon meeting a new person, the question where are you from? Is often one of the first questions to be asked; as Janet Carsten (2007) described In Langkawi, I could with reasonable certainty predict the questions that, on meeting me ... for the first time, most people would spontaneously articulate. They would ask where I was from, how many siblings I had, were my parents still alive, was I married, and, sometimes whether I had children (Carsten 2007: 31). Where

someone grew up and which country they have the strongest genealogical ties too are often factors deemed important to discovering who a person is. This can be a problem with adoptees, they may know nothing about their genealogical heritage and the circumstances in which they were conceived and born into, and this sometimes triggers a search into finding their biological parents. Upon interviewing Scottish adoptees Carsten was very struck by the insistence with which, when asked why they had been motivated to carry out a search for their birth parents, those I interviewed said to find out who I am or youve got to know where you came from; they felt that it was self evident that meeting their birth parents could have the power to reshape a persons sense of self (Carsten 2007: 32). It seemed inevitable to the adoptees interviewed that the past should weigh heavily on the present and claimed that it did in their lives, as one adoptee said I really, really wanted to know why I had been given up for adoption (Carsten 2007: 36), in this case the lack of knowledge of the past, and the deemed importance of this knowledge, was a burden to her. Others worried that their birth might have been the result of violence or rape (Carsten 2007: 40), try as they might, adoptees simply couldnt forget that they lacked knowledge of their past. However, John Triseliotis, who conducted the most authoritative study of adopted peoples search for their origins in Scotland in the 1970s, suggests that only a small minority of adoptees seek access to their birth records (Triseliotis 1973, 1984)(Carsten 2007: 35), this fact puts into question whether it is inevitable that the past always weighs heavily upon the present, as the majority of adoptees do not seek their records it can be assumed that at least some if not many adoptees are able to put their past behind them and not allow it to weigh upon the present. Carstens research involved interviewing a small number of adoptees who had attempted to find their birth parents, she didnt interview adoptees who didnt search and thus her findings are skewed to some extent towards highlighting the importance of peoples personal histories. Providing a contrast to her studies in Scotland, Carsten did however cite her more in depth research within Malaysia which provides a crucial example of how the past does not necessarily weigh heavily on the present. The village of Langkawi is home to a community of migrants, the histories of the local people involves extensive demographic movement (Carsten 1995: 318), the pasts of individuals are therefore ignored and forgotten to maintain cohesion in society. In Langkawi society, instead of having a vertical kinship pattern based on genealogy, the focus is far more centred on horizontal kinship, individuals have stronger kinship ties with their friends and neighbours than with grandparents and ancestors. Horizontal kinship allows the past to be forgotten to a greater extent, the past therefore loses its weight in the present, forgetting this past is part of an active process of creating a new and shared identity (Carsten 1995: 317). In this society the past does not weigh at all upon the present in the way that it most often does, through kinship ties, as seen with the Merina for example. Similarly, in the example of Balinese commoners, kinship is Downward looking in the sense that a man sees himself, so to speak, producing structure below him rather than emerging from it above him (Geertz & Geertz 1964)(Carsten 1995: 325), this is in essence a future centric view of kinship, which, like in Langkawi, is not impacted upon by the past. In Langkawi, genealogical amnesia (Carsten 1995: 324) has the effect of negating the past as a factor in the formation of present kinship, clearly in this instance the past does not weigh heavily upon the present. The past, in a literal sense, inevitably weighs heavily upon the present, as even the horizontal kinship pattern in Langkawi for example, exists only due to the migration of the past; but in terms of the cultural weight which the past has in different societies and in the lives of individuals,

the extent to which the past impacts at all is highly diverse. As events travel further and further into the past, they have less and less weight in the present. In societies where events are not written down or actively remembered, these events slip into the deep and forgotten past even sooner. History itself is subject to the writings and interpretation of present scholars, as Winston Churchill famously said, History is written by the victors, in this sense what actually happened in the past is unimportant in comparison to what the people of the present believed happened. This effect is clear in the writings on the re-establishment of Estonia, historical facts can be interpreted in different ways and there can be a creative aspect of identity formation (Gross 2002: 343), the past has little weight on the present in this instance as the present has the power to rewrite history and bend the past to political needs. In Madagascar the Merina people have a strong focus on vertical kinship, their ancestors and the past but their written history is weak and easily forgotten, whether they ate their ancestors in the past or not is entirely inconsequential as the entire society is in agreement to deny the possibility that this myth could be true. In Vietnam the communist government for a time displayed how powerful manipulation of the commemoration of the past can be, a large proportion of family ancestors were relegated to the margins of collective memory (Kwon 2008: 13), the weight of the past here counteracted for a period by the stronger weight of current political pressure. Although the past has weight in many, if not a majority of societies, the present is not always or inevitably weighed upon by the past. The power for those in the present to rewrite the past, reinterpret the past or forget the past often weighs heavier upon the past than the past can upon the present. Bibliography: Kwon, Heonik 2008, The Ghosts of the American War in Vietnam. Asia-Pacific Journal Carsten, Janet 2007, How do we know who we are? Questions of Anthropology Carsten, Janet 1995, The politics of forgetting: Migration, Kinship and Memory on the periphery of the Southeast Asian State. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 1, No. 2 Bloch, Maurice 1985, Almost eating the ancestors. Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Gross, Toomas 2002, Anthropology of collective memory: Estonian national awakening revisited. Trames, University of Tartu