Yet what remains surprisingly absent from ethnographic histories written
"from the bottom up" and elite histories viewed upside down is an explicit engagement
with the nature of colonial memories-not only with what is remembered
and why, but with how the specifically "colonial" is situated in popular
memory at all. Our work rests on a relatively simple but disconcerting
observation: namely that "the colonial" is invoked with such certitude of its effects
by those studying it, and "colonial memory" with such assuredness of its
ever-presence, that both are treated as known and knowable quantities, rather
than as problematic sites of query in themselves.