The last chapter showedwhy heritage alters history; how it does so is the subject of this chapter. Three modes of revision stand out. One is to update the past by garbing its scenes and actors in present-day guise. A second is to highlight and enhance aspects of the past now felt admirable. A third is to expunge what seems shameful or harmful by consigning it to ridicule or oblivion. These processes repay separate scrutiny, yet they are often concurrent: a present-minded view of the past is bound to celebrate and forget selectively. Selective bias in heritage is, I show, as widely acceptable to the public as the autobiographical fictions just discussed.

UPDATING

History and heritage both refashion the past in present garb. But the former does so to make the past comprehensible, the latter to make it congenial, as shown in Chapters 5 and 6. For historians, presentist reshaping is unavoidable, a translation needed to convey things past to modern audiences. For heritage, as we saw in the last chapter, updating is not just a necessity but a virtue that fructifies links with the past. In this section I show how such linkages are contrived.

Where tradition is orally transmitted, updating is a matter of course, because no past witnesses—books or other records—survive to gainsay it. “The notion of the past as a charter for the present carries more relevance” in oral societies, declares Jack Goody, noting how Tiv tribesmen in Nigeria disowned genealogies British administrators had written down for them fifty years before because these no longer accorded with the ancestors the Tiv now felt they needed.