ABSTRACT
People do inherit ancestral wealth. As with a family member who inherits a legacy of personal effects, an anthropologist inherits numerous intellectual legacies: from her teachers, from the cultural areas in which he conducts his research, and from his or her reading in the discipline of anthropology. As with ancestors who leave a legacy of goods, heirlooms and even sentimental trinkets for people not yet born, anthropologists write with a sense of duty to leave ethnography for the readers of the future. In both cases, the problem remains what to do with it. It can be a blessing or a burden depending upon the ease with which a person can live with the restrictions peculiar to the use of any family wealth. Some people protect their legacy. The holder of a legacy cannot give it away, except to the holder in the next generation. They must care for it. Other holders lose or squander the wealth and thereby risk the network of connections between the family members who share in the legacy, and the family’s connections to their own past. Some people want nothing of the legacy, and try to give it away by dispersing the goods judiciously according to the social values they hold to be important to the present times. The person’s choice to use his or her legacy differently, to either destroy the possibility of passing it on (by dispersing the valuables), or to reject the privileges of the legacy (by not assuming them) bears most significance as it is known against the fact of their inheritance. A legacy remains inescapable. Similarly, intellectual legacies enable or hinder anthropologists because they cannot give them away. Coming to terms with the legacy remains the course of action. This chapter takes steps towards reconciliation.
