Structural Amnesia

On forgetting as civilizational necessity, and what happens when nothing can be forgotten

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, about an anthropologist studying a small-scale society somewhere in West Africa. He was mapping kinship relations, asking elders to recount their genealogies, when he noticed something strange. The genealogies he recorded one year did not match the genealogies he recorded five years later. Ancestors had appeared and disappeared. Lineages had shifted. The past, it seemed, was not fixed.

When he asked the elders about the discrepancies, they were not troubled. They did not consider themselves to be lying or mistaken. The genealogies they recounted were true true to present needs, true to current social arrangements, true to who mattered now. The ancestors who had become irrelevant had simply been forgotten. The past had been revised to serve the present.

The anthropologists who studied this phenomenon called it structural amnesia: the systematic forgetting of information that no longer serves social function. It is not pathology. It is not error. It is a feature of how oral societies maintain coherence—by continuously pruning their pasts to fit their presents.

I want to suggest that structural amnesia is not unique to oral societies. It is a fundamental requirement of all functioning civilizations. And I want to explore what happens when technology makes such amnesia impossible.