Repeater

A repeater brings something forward rather than recalling it, which is the difference between this and memory. Interactions always exist in the spacetime they occurred in, so nothing has to be recreated, and a rite or action that connects to a distant cluster brings it into the present rather than representing it. Marsh's own text is her example. A quotation from Heraclitus still exists in the interaction it came from, and her writing acts as a repeater for that interaction, bringing one of the many interactions making up the self of Heraclitus into the time and place of the reader. The claim is meant literally within the framework, since an interaction self persists in its interactions and something reaching one of them reaches the person. Repeaters sit alongside capacitors as the two mechanisms by which culture works. A capacitor stores an excess of anima in an object, rite or idea to be drawn on later, and a repeater connects across spacetime to a cluster that is already there, and the two together are what Marsh calls the true nature of culture. The historical examples are ordinary practice. Rites and name invocation established the continuity of a patriarchy in times when paternity was not necessarily genetic, and a man gave his name to a child he granted the right to continue him, which is a repeater doing exactly the work the definition describes.

Ritual studies has adjacent concepts, with Victor Turner and Roy Rappaport treating ritual as making the past present rather than commemorating it, and liturgical traditions describing anamnesis as re-presentation rather than recollection. Anthropology of memory after Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora's sites of memory study how groups maintain a past collectively. Physics has nothing corresponding, since the persistence Marsh relies on is a claim about interactions existing in their spacetime rather than about information. Her contribution is to treat the religious language of making present as accurate rather than devotional, which requires the persistence claim to carry it.