No past, no present: A critical‐Nayaka perspective on cultural remembering

By means of an ethnographic analysis of Nayaka life stories and trance invocations, I revisit the common wisdom that cultures classed as “immediate‐return hunter‐gatherers” show little interest in the past. I argue that Nayaka are not interested in the past in the common Eurocentric understanding thereof. They are interested, however, in a past filtered through their own sensibilities. Their specific case supports a broader critique of studying ways of remembering the past in terms of a Eurocentric past–present distinction.