Anthropology Debate: Is the past a foreign country?

To state that the past is a foreign country one must separate his or her self from his or her own histories. But the past is generative of the present, the separation of the two can only be though on as an abstraction. We exist through, and because of, our pasts.

There are two notions of memory that may be postulated in this debate. The first is memory presenting itself through “acts of recollection or commemoration”, in what Tim Goldman refers to as “authentic reconstruction”. An example of authentic reconstruction is nostalgic memory. Through nostalgia, memory is distorted by the thick glass of time, idealized and even repainted by the whims of solitude, old age and feelings of either spatial or temporal distances.
In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book, 100 Years of Solitude, Pietro Crespi, a young suitor from Europe, reminisces about his far away home, while sitting on a porch in Macando with his bride to be:

‘“I have been to this park in Florence”, Pietro would say, going through the cards. “A person can put his hand out and birds will come to feed”. Sometimes, over a watercolor of Venice, nostalgia would transform the smell of mud and putrefying shellfish of the canals into the warm aroma of flowers.”

In Pietro`s case, nostalgia not only turned the past into a foreign country, but into an invented one. This is an example of how authentic reconstruction, “far from bringing the past to bear in the present, tends to highlight the disjunction between the two.” The “going over again of past events…entailed in the production of history…establishes the horizons of the present, dividing the witnessing of events from their commemoration, perception, and recollection.” I argue that the past only becomes a foreign country by the conscious disassociation of the past from the present.

The second conceptualization of past is that of internalized memory. The notion of internalized memory argues that “remembering is not so much something that you do, as something that is implicated in all that you do…it underwrites our capacity to act effectively and with out accident in our surroundings.” In this sense, the “past has an interactive and transformative relationship to the present”, it shapes our decisions and abilities.

Memory is essential to Being. Our everyday activities and skills are mastered through apprenticeship, which corresponds to repetition and memorization. The effectiveness of “memory in the performance of [everyday] tasks is concealed behind their smooth and successful accomplishment” and “it is when things go wrong, due to an insufficiency or deterioration of know-how that our normal dependence of mnemoic processing (or memory and past experiences) becomes painfully evident.”

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Town of Macondo is stuck with a plague of insomnia, which leads to a plague of forgetfulness. When the whole town begins to loss their grip on memory and of know-how, reality also begins to slip away.

(exeprt)

This is an excellent literary metaphor illustrating the importance of memory, not only in the sense that it provides the very foundation for our knowledge and skills, but that memory also provides us with an understanding of the world in which we live. This “disease of forgetfulness” can be related to the real disease of alzheimers. It has been made clear that when our past leaves us, we are lost in the present.

Connecting past to present: Memory has an ability to. The ways in which we react to present situation are largely dictated by past experiences.

100 years of solitude starts off with a memory and only catches up with itself half way through the novel. Through out the book Marquez demonstrates his ability to bend the limits of spatial and temporal borders, moving between past, present, and future with perceptive fluidity. In 100 years of Solitude, Marquez has reconstructed the way we view past, present, and future- offering a new reworking of our conceptualization of time.