Most national myths of origin in Europe and elsewhere in the world begin with some transcendent or sacrificial story of violent revolution, warfare or liberation, like the French Revolution. This is also true for the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, a region in Papua New Guinea traumatized by a decade-long secessionist war (1988-1998), struggling to become an independent nation by 2027. In this article, I will draw upon Fran & ccedil;ois Hartog's concept of 'crisis of time' to reveal how, in Bougainville, the crisis and its aftermath generated (at least) two concurrent temporalities, one of conflict and trauma, and one of waiting, that signify the breakdown of the old colonial regime and the ensuing 'crisis of time' that people in Bougainville currently find themselves in. In this particular experience of present-ness, past experiences are overwhelmingly haunting, while futures are often hard to envision. As a result, the flow of time is blocked, inert and stagnant. Yet, Mary, the Mother of Christ, recurrently breaks into this crisis of time, creating temporal rifts that enable people to hope and aspire, and as such, make time flow again in the direction of an anticipated independent future.
Corresponding with recent global trends, a growing number of educated War-Khasi women living in the Bangladesh-Northeast India borderlands remain single. The superficial reason for this trend is that daughters tend to have greater access to higher education than sons, leading to educational incompatibility between men and women. However, delving deeper into the reasons for the singlehood of educated Khasi women, this article argues that class endogamy provides only partial explanation. Rather, the historical sedimentation of marriage norms - clan exogamy topped with religious, ethnic, and class endogamy - offers a fuller explication. Additionally, even though singlehood violates the Christian norm of procreative marriage and is stigmatized among the War-Khasi, marrying a partner without the family's approval would mean risking excommunication. Thus, the historical sedimentation of marriage rules, coupled with 'aspirational normativity' (Berlant 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ), a strong desire to fit in and to continue to belong, explain why many Khasi women remain single.
This paper examines the poetics of Waiwai community life, informed by relations with white-lipped peccaries. It seeks to understand how political leadership and its presumption of hierarchy can be more about the collectively felt experience of joy than the necessity of superiority. Considering how bodily feelings relate to food and the contentment it provides, the paper demonstrates how the presence of peccaries contributes to leadership and the good life. The conjecture, however, is that the main obstacle to an appreciative Indigenous consideration of the issue lies in our anthropological privileging of human thought over felt experience.
This article examines the Plantungan women's camp as a central instrument of gendered repression under Indonesia's New Order regime. The study argues that Plantungan functioned as a gendered carceral regime in which women's bodies were simultaneously disciplined, exploited, and morally stigmatized. To support this, I draw on fieldwork in Central Java, interviews with former prisoners, local memory traces, and various published testimonies. Through forced labour, spatial isolation, sexual violence, ideological instruction, and the enduring myth of the 'wild Gerwani,' the state produced a multilayered apparatus of domination that sought not only to punish political dissent but to reshape gendered subjectivities. The analysis situates women's testimonies within broader frameworks of biopolitics, necropolitics, and feminist theory, demonstrating how state power operated through everyday routines, embodied practices, and enforced silences. It also traces the afterlives of this violence, showing how memory erasure, local stigma, and the absence of institutional reckoning have shaped survivors' lives long after their release. Finally, the article examines contemporary artistic grassroots efforts that challenge official forgetting and reclaim gendered histories excluded from national narratives. This reconstruction of prisoners' lived experiences illuminates the intersections of gender, forced labour, and authoritarian power, while contributing to debates on memory politics and transitional justice in Indonesia.
This article reconstructs the historical fusions among Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and criollo populations through cimarronaje in eighteenth-century eastern Venezuela. It examines the spatial overlap between missionised Indigenous communities and other non-Indigenous and mixed populations situated within colonial hierarchies. First, it situates colonisation within the region's multi-ethnic Indigenous organisations. Second, it analyses interactions between Indigenous and mixed populations inside the perimeters of colonial control, with particular attention to the legal incorporation of maroons into the generic category of 'Spaniards', a juridical construct defined against missionised Indigenous populations. Third, it explores encounters on the margins of colonial authority. Finally, it argues that interethnic alliances helped produce mixed social groups that contributed to the fragmentation of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. In conclusion, cimarr & oacute;n societies help reveal how the expected colonial correspondence between ethnicity, race, and social space became unstable in this frontier setting.
I explore the socio-political implications of 'the time that remains' for evangelical believers in Solomon Islands. Drawing on Fran & ccedil;ois Hartog's concept of regimes of historicity and Reinhart Koselleck's ideas of temporalization, I apply these frameworks to an ethnographic study of the evangelical movement All Pacific Arise in North Malaita. The movement's prophet-leader divides Malaita's history into three 'invasions of God,' linking the island's past to biblical and modern Israel. I show that this prophetic regime of historicity reshapes the understanding of history, emphasizing the awareness of remaining time and its challenge to modern chronological dominance. This time that remains is entangled with modernity's chronos, as the 'contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous' (Koselleck), and gives it political power.
If we accept that anthropology of history transforms history into a subject of investigation rather than just a form of knowledge and social practice, then the ethnography of history must delve into local ways of thinking, living, and acting. The language of the people is key to gaining insight into the relational and temporal modes of existence of society. Among the Karawari people of Papua New Guinea, these modes play an important role in various aspects of cosmological and social life, all of which are intimately connected to land. The Karawari term kunaypa (debt, obligation, duty; moral value and law) underscores the view that relationships at all levels - cosmological, social, national, international - should be based on generosity and reciprocity. It is the undeniable quality of human and non-human agency. Kunaypa refers to the specific past (event, being, practice) and at the same time to the specific future. The multiple instances of kunaypi (plural of kunaypa) lead to multiple intergenerational commitments, as various emplaced historical experiences lie dormant. When these experiences are recalled and concrete actions are taken, they emphasize the interconnectedness, indeed equation, of past and future.
This article examines the emergence of the term kalsa in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea, as an alternative understanding of cultural heritage in contrast to the older term kastam, and explores whether this shift signals a significant change in people's orientation in historical time. Drawing on Fran & ccedil;ois Hartog's concept of regime of historicity, the article contrasts kastam, which valorizes the past through traditional exchange practices and kinship obligations, with kalsa, which reimagines cultural heritage as a platform for innovation, identity, and economic opportunity, especially through tourism and performance. Through two ethnographic case studies, a cultural festival on Baluan Island and the personal journey of an urban Manus woman, the paper illustrates how individuals navigate tensions between the entangled temporalities of tradition and modernity. The analysis suggests that kalsa embodies a forward-looking temporal orientation, reflecting changing subjectivities and aspirations. Ultimately, this evolving cultural lexicon may indicate a broader transformation in how Manus people conceptualize time, tradition, and agency within contemporary social and economic contexts.
Objects in museum collections have always evoked differing ideas of how museums should label, conserve, display and return objects, especially when human remains are at play. Discussions around these types of material culture are now heightened and often contentious as public opinion and museum staff are becoming increasingly aware of the afterlives of colonial practices in today's world. This paper focuses on a set of ten wooden figures from the Raja Ampat Islands (Southwest Papua, Indonesia), collected in the 1920s, of which one sculpture's head is a human skull. Named 'the Raja Ampat Altar' since their collecting, the figures have been on display in West Papua, the Netherlands, the UK and France and have seen the involvement of the Raja Ampat village communities, but also that of Dutch colonial administrators, missionaries, museum staff, museum visitors, Raja Ampat and Papuan communities in the diaspora, Polynesian museum advisors and artists. By tracing a century of narratives - from the 1920s to the 2020s - around the display and the naming of ancestral remains in so-called 'World Museums' that, from the nineteenth century onwards attempted to present culture in an organized way, the paper discusses the different historicities at play for the people implicated in viewing, naming, displaying or removing these Raja Ampat objects from display. This leads to the question: what is at stake in terms of people's constructions of time and identity in relation to the 'altar'?
Synchronization refers to the coordination of different time schemes. How the time schemes held by persons are synchronized towards specific purposes in a social context will depend on the arrangements of power that hold in such contexts. The notion of historicity is also connected with time, with how conceptions of past and future are related in any given present. The article suggests that historicity is objectified - made concrete - through synchronization; when persons and things are placed in a simultaneous time and space such actions disclose local conceptions of historicity. This is examined through the ways synchronization and historicity are made manifest among two Melanesian peoples from highland and coastal Papua. Through these case studies, the paper also considers the relevance of the 'regime of historicity' concept in the Melanesian context.
This article explores why hundreds, possibly thousands, of Inuit children from Greenland were placed into Danish families between the 1950s and 1970s, examining postcolonial ideals of modernization and humanitarianism. It highlights the creation of the 'vulnerable Greenlandic child', the coexistence of formal and informal adoptions, and the lasting effects of historical silence around them.
In this article we analyse the intersection of system collapse, the crisis of the embodied citizen-subject, and the experiential dimension of wide-reaching social and political change. As Cubans from all walks of life perceive an acute sense of deterioration of revolutionary values, certain groups experience with more intensity the permanent state of emergency that has been present in the country since the early 1990s. Their coping strategies both challenge and, paradoxically, support the government's claims at continuity and devotion to the revolutionary project. The paper discusses the social relations that emerge from the economies of late socialism and the limits and possibilities of agency, reconfigured in various moments of economic and social transformation.
We offer a new way of thinking about remainder economies in this special issue on 'gleaning' (the practice of claiming leftovers). We trace how people in many different places and times justify taking leftovers by claiming to seek some higher social end, over and above their own private interest. Gleaners take useful scraps not just by right but also by obligation: they assert both an entitlement to things that are too accidental, insignificant, or indeterminate to be privatized and a responsibility to see that this shared material is well managed. As such, gleaning cracks private property open to collectivist claims; it opens up holistic social imaginaries. Asserting the right to take scraps situates speakers as part owners of the whole from which scraps come. The essays collected here show this logic at work across many different social settings, from twenty-first-century cities and artisanal gold mines to twentieth-century socialist and Fordist factories, and all the way back to early Christian monasticism. Together, they ask us to think beyond liberal private property logics by dwelling in the indeterminate gap where worthless things are still useful. Shifting attention from circulation and value to the entitlements and obligations remainders make possible, we take gleaning seriously as a way to understand how these claims continue to function today. This project has made us realize how many pockets of indeterminate property there still are in the world, and we hope the same for you.
This article examines the transformation of religious and communal boundaries among Bukharan Jews from their origins in Central Asia to their lives in Austria. It analyzes how memories of Jewish life in Muslim-majority Central Asia are reshaped in light of contemporary understandings of religious identity, and how these changes influence present-day perceptions of and interactions with Muslims. The study identifies distinct narrative strands through which the past is reconstructed, highlighting a shift away from earlier memories of shared linguistic, cultural as well as religious repertoires towards a new notion of religious difference. These developments intersect with contemporary Austrian political discourses, in which minority politics are instrumentalized for strategic purposes. Drawing on interview research and ethnographic fieldwork, including an intercommunal reading group, the article demonstrates how reactivating shared linguistic and historical frameworks can temporarily unsettle hardened communal boundaries and engage modes of relationality.
Using Hartog's regimes of historicity as a heuristic device, I analyze three case studies from the Nyaura (West Iatmul) of the middle Sepik to show how different ways of being-in-time interact with and impact on each other. Discussing the ways that Christian and modern regimes of historicity have come to interact with Nyaura ways of being-in-time, I highlight that historicity has a strong practical component and can be analyzed by studying people's actions during temporal crises. While historicity is usually understood as a singular mode of temporal being and awareness shared by a cultural group, I demonstrate that multiple regimes of historicity can co-exist in the same society and that people may move forth and back between different dominant orders of time. Secondly, I propose that different regimes of historicity are linked to different cosmo-ontological premises and that the (in)commensurability of these premises crucially affects the ways that the Nyaura have come to engage with Christianity and modernity. Finally, I emphasize that humans are historical actors who evaluate and represent the past in relation to individual and collective future aspirations. Thus, I argue that regimes of historicity have to be understood in the context of power relations and politics.
This paper explores the gendered historicities of women's political leadership in Papua New Guinea (PNG) through an ethnographic examination of the life and death of Nahau Elizabeth Kambuou Rooney, one of PNG's pioneering female politicians. By introducing the conceptual frames of mortuary time and archival space, the paper interrogates how Indigenous and state temporalities get entangled and converge in practices of remembrance, mourning, and historical documentation. Drawing on film, ritual, and personal and public archives, it examines how Nahau's death catalysed gendered reflections on leadership, heritage, and national memory. The interplay of grief, ritual, political discourse, and archival curation reveals how mortuary events serve as performative acts of historicity, while archival practices animate questions of cultural sovereignty and epistemological pluralism. The paper contends that a gendered perspective on the evolving historicities around Rooney's death, situated in the intersecting spaces of kinship, state, and memory, is vital for honouring the constitutional vision of women's equal political participation in PNG.
Fran & ccedil;ois Hartog argues that different social collectives experience historicity differently and advocates comparative study of different 'regimes of historicity', different weightings of the relative importance of past, present and future. Drawing on my own and earlier ethnographies of southeast Solomon Islands, I contend that different regimes of historicity correlate with different ontologies discernible in different cosmogonic traditions. I developed this thesis in three parts. First, informed by classical scholarship that contextualizes Homeric tradition within an ancient Olympian cosmogony, I reanalyze Hartog's exegesis of Odysseus's tears as a claim that Western historicity arose in tandem with a particular cosmogonic transition: the elimination of the demigods as a chaotic category in the monistic Olympian cosmos. Second, I re-examine origin stories in southeast Solomon Islands for what they indicate about poly-ontological (or totemic), as opposed to monistic, historicities. Whereas monistic ontologies entail single all-encompassing regimes of past-oriented historicity, poly-ontology, I argue, entails a plurality of past-oriented historicities, or poly-historicity. Third, in light of practices through which southeast Solomon Islanders have worked to keep ancestors active and available in a state of partial reversion to origins, I conclude that poly-historicity among pre-Christian southeast Solomon Islanders was composed as a plurality of what I theorize as reversive historicities.
In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated that all humans were endowed with conscience. The Declaration then added that freedom of conscience should be protected through the law. This article examines what is at stake in saying that to be human is to have a free conscience and that this should be legally protected? In doing so, it turns to one moment in the history of claims to freedom of conscience: British citizens who refused to fight against Fascism in the Second World. We can understand the UN's claim that all humans are endowed with a free conscience as a direct response to the horrors of the Second World War. The British citizens who refused to fight Fascism therefore help us confront both the limits and potentials of the legal protection of conscience. The central argument of the essay is that legal processes of protection can turn a form of conscience understood as free and reflective, into something pre-determined and fixed. This is a form of conscience and a vision of humanity that is therefore beyond legal protection.
Throughout the history of industrial labour relations, workers have used the scraps of production to make useful things to take home. This essay gathers stories of such 'self-made' things from many different places and times: from early modern England to Fordist, state-socialist, and present day factories. Across these disparate settings, people tell similar stories: downplaying private profit and market sake, they speak not of resistance and justified theft, but of their right to the material scraps by virtue of social belonging. Drawing on Marx's thoughts on the 'Theft of Wood' I argue that such narratives open a sort of commons, bringing speakers out of liberal property relations into a form of ownership that - as EP Thompson writes of the parish - is also a form of belonging. A right to the scraps entails a stake in the enterprise.
