This chapter, like the previous one, deals with a social field marked by heterogeneity, by the imposition of colonial rule over indigenous peoples, but the focus of attention shifts from political control to perceptions of the past and the implications of the introduction of writing. While writing the paper in 1950 I began to think about our concept of history, so beginning a line of discussion carried further some twenty years later in my paper on Levi-Strauss (Chapter 9).

The paper is based on observations made in the field in central Africa between 1946 and 1949. Writing so soon after I had left the field I described what I had seen in the present tense; it would have seemed excessively pedantic to have written about customary practice of such recent date in the past tense. Now, nearly forty years later, the present tense has become inappropriate in the light of the major changes that have occurred during the intervening period. I have therefore changed the tenses as necessary, partly to emphasize that the situation I describe no longer holds, and partly to avoid any suggestion that I am writing in what anthropologists call ‘ the ethnographic present’ tense, a literary device intended to detach tribal societies from their historical context so that they could be studied as museum specimens, uncontaminated by Western influences. This is precisely what I do not want to do. […]