ABSTRACT
Traditionally, anthropologists have treated the past of the peoples they study as that which provides the legitimation of existence in the present. For instance, groups rich in myths are sometimes treated as using their myths to legitimate socio-structural discrepancies in contemporary life. Alternately, such myths are seen as providing frameworks for particular views of the world and appropriate way(s) of acting in it. A similar assumption appears to have been shared by some philosophers of history. Thus, Collingwood. who was among the first to introduce the now common idea in anthropology of the past as an aspect of or ‘incapsulated in’ the present (1939:113-14), was very clear about this. He argued that it is because the past is a living past, so to speak, that it is deemed worthwhile to study. Were it the question of a ‘dead’ past there would be no reason for us to study it. While such views would not deny that there is a link between the past and the present to the future (and the future as the goal towards which human beings progress in their daily strivings), it is still the past that has been given weight in analyses of the present.
