Imagining ‘Our Ancestors’

Ben Pitcher

In a culture where we worry about ecological ruin and feel cut off from the natural world, it’s not difficult to understand the appeal of the distant past. Stone circles, foraging, rewilding, and folklore resonate in contemporary Britain as ways of reconnecting to the landscape and those who once dwelled within it.

The books that cater to this desire are easily identified by their covers decorated with fluttering leaves, distant hills, perhaps a Morris troupe or a charismatic megalith or two. The illustrations presented here parody the hand-crafted woodcut style that has become synonymous with this genre. I use them to explore a subtext that is often present, but seldom acknowledged, in contemporary writing on Britain’s ancient past.

These illustrations begin the argument I set out more fully in my article ‘Imagining "Our Ancestors": Liberal Indigeneity and the Repudiation of Colonialism in Postimperial Britain’: that the lure of the ancients can be usefully understood as a negotiation of Britain’s postimperial present. The conceptual field of indigeneity describes these perceived connections to the distant past: beyond the explicit racism of right-wing nativism, ‘liberal indigeneity’ provides a refuge from colonial guilt by offering points of identification that long precede the nation’s imperial and colonial history.

As elements of British culture begin, in fits and starts, to recognize the destructive legacies of empire, liberal indigeneity tells the story that in the longue durée we are all its victims. My article asks what this means for our contemporary cultural politics of race.

Read Ben’s article ‘Imagining ‘Our Ancestors’: Liberal Indigeneity and the Repudiation of Colonialism in Postimperial Britain’.

Ben Pitcher is Reader in Sociology at the University of Westminster. He is the author of ‘Back to the Stone Age: Race and Prehistory in Contemporary Culture’ (2022), ‘Consuming Race’ (2014), and ‘The Politics of Multiculturalism’ (2009). He is currently Director of Westminster’s Centre for Social Justice Research.

Email: b.pitcher@westminster.ac.uk