New grandchild and the 6 and 7 year olds are fascinated. They rush to our house to look at their photo albums where they can see themselves newborn and growing into the young people are now.
In affluent countries children can expect to have their lives documented through snapshots, CDs, videos, school pictures, documenting of important events, wedding albums, security cameras, selfies, instagrams and more. They can try on new identities, see how they look, watch the trajectories of their self images.
But what about children in a culture or time when this was not possible. What did it mean to be only who you were at that time with perhaps only faded memories of an image in a mirror years past? Did they look for themselves in others? Were their memories sharper? Did they live more in the moment? Were their self images always frozen in time? Did the past slip quietly away?
And what does it mean for us to know ourselves as historical beings with the images of our pasts always with us?
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