structural amnesia,” as the British anthropologist Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard called it when studying something utterly different. Evans-Pritchard had been researching a pastoral people of the Sudan called the Nuer, who had a remarkable memory for some things and completely forgot about others. Men and women both remembered eleven generations of male ancestors, for example, but largely forgot their female counterparts. There was, the anthropologist sensed, a structure to what they remembered and forgot that was based on the power of the Nuer’s dominant institution—the kin system. Dominant
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