IDENTITY, PROCESS, AND REINTERPRETATION - THE PAST MADE PRESENT AND THE PRESENT MADE PAST

Reinterpretation, an old concept developed by Melville Herskovits, is the way in which people seek to relate and adapt their changing experi ences by using the past as a marker for interpreting the present. This paper examines the genesis of the concept and how it is often used by contemporary ethnographers without recognizing its explanatory power. There follows a discussion of how the concept may be useful in reflex ive anthropology, what happens when reinterpretation fails, and how it s limits may be more precisely defined.