Reinterpretation, an old concept developed by Melville Herskovits, is the way in which people seek to relate and adapt their changing experiences by using the past as a marker for interpreting the present. This paper examines the genesis of the concept and how it is often used by contemporary ethnographers without recognizing its explanatory power. There follows a discussion of how the concept may be useful in reflexive anthropology, what happens when reinterpretation fails, and how its limits may be more precisely defined.
