better understand the social and symbolic processes shaping kinship even among those sectors of our society whose ethnicity has been made invisible by hegemonic processes that cast a particular cultural system as a generalized american one for whether they view themselves as having an ethnic past that is polish italian african english or in the case of just plain american one supposedly unmarked by ethnicity all these folk commonly speak of a traditional past in opposition to the modern present like japanese americans they too construct tradition by reconceptualizing the past in relation to the meaning of their actions in the present thereby transforming past and present in a dialectic of interpretation