Searching for fish names with the Vula’a of Papua New Guinea

This article describes an ethnographic project initiated by a group of people in Irupara village, Papua New Guinea (PNG), who for a period between 2001 and 2010 self-identified as ‘historians’. At the forefront of the group’s concerns was a younger generation unfamiliar with the local language names of fish and fishing techniques. I document the collaborative project developed to address a situation perceived as a loss of language, culture, and identity. As well as providing a valuable lexicon in an Austronesian language, the research brings to light important distinctions between recording ‘history’ and ways of recalling and expressing the past commonly referred to as ‘historicity’.     

Contentious Realities: Politics of Creating an Image Archive with the Negev Bedouin in Southern Israel

This paper discusses the politics of creating an image archive amidst local Bedouin historicity in Southern Israel. To do so, it summarizes an archival initiative conducted during my fieldwork in Rāha?, Israel between 2011 and 2013, which broadly examined the presence and values of images in their society. I suggest that members compete over historical resources in attempts to augment limited cultural capital in the Negev, making efforts to collect and exhibit ‘shared’ histories contentious. This is particularly the case when local societies consider archival images rare artefacts and thus objects to be owned and protected. This paper concludes that control over archives and image objects, and the past, present, and future ideals to which they are used, is far from uniform amongst peripheral peoples in the Middle East. Visual evidence and the histories and presents it serves are indelibly localized within the prevailing status negotiations and current spatial divisions between Bedouin members in the Negev.     

Consequences of Designating the Recent Past: Korreweg-district,Groningen, The Netherlands

The article focuses on the meaning of heritage, especially on its connection to time, space and people, and is concerned with signification, representation and identity at a national scale. Key questions are how the image of Estonianness creates national heritage out of diverse legacies and how these messages fit the local circumstances. This is examined in the case of Paldiski, a small town on the Pakri Peninsula west of the Estonian capital Tallinn. The area encompasses all that is considered non‐Estonian, but nevertheless reflects the history and geography of the country and thus is used for critical examination of current heritage creation and preservation.     

Changing Inuit Historicities in West Greenland and Nunavut

Beyond a few stereotypes framed as oppositions between written and oral, history and myth, and so on, one actually knows little about Inuit historicities. This article argues that recent changes in Inuit senses of history do not represent a progress from limited interest in historical questions to some enlightened historical consciousness. Rather, these changes should be seen as paralleling the recent rapid transitions of their societies, world views and identities. Differences between West Greenlandic and Nunavut historicities may be attributed to the fact that today’s visions of the past are the outcome of divergent historical developments within a (post‐)colonial framework.     

Ritual Appropriation and Appropriate Ritual: Christian Healing and Adaptations of Asian Religions

This article analyzes the uses of the past for liberal Christians who borrow from Asian healing‐related practices such as yoga, Buddhist meditation and Reiki. It focuses on questions of historicity, both in the ways liberal Christians validate their syncretism by drawing connections to the Christian past, and in the way that longer histories of orientalism and colonialism shape current Christian interactions with Asian religions. Centred on the narratives of three North American Anglicans, and informed by attendance at their various healing services, meditation groups, yoga classes and Reiki sessions, this article is evidence of a wider liberal Christian embrace of difference via ritual. The article argues that these liberal Christians use “ritual proximity” to bring together symbols, acts and memories from various times and cultures, thus constructing new lineages of religious inheritance within webs of Christian ritual.     

From Inchoate Pronouns to Proper Nouns: A Theory Fragment with 9/11, Gertrude Stein,and an East German Ethnography

Despite the elaborate means human beings deploy to render the world predictable and transparent, we nevertheless continually confront situations which are uncertain and opaque. This is especially so in the modern world, in which supralocal institutions and information mediated from afar allow the actions of unaccounted strangers beyond our face‐to‐face knowledge to affect us closely. One of the chief means we use to gain purchase in such situations is to document them, and documentary’s main technique is to move the at‐first‐unknown persons into an understandable narrative: hence the idea that some unknown others (“inchoate pronouns”) become understandable characters (“proper nouns”). This theory is elaborated through a journalistic documentation of the attack on the World Trade Center, a literary representation of the occupation of France during the Second World War, and an ethnographic depiction of current difficulties in East Germany.     

Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity

This article seeks to clarify the concept of “historicity” and how it might guide ethnographic research. The argument is developed with particular reference to the eight studies of historicity in diverse societies ranging from the Pacific to North America contained in this special issue. The authors contend that the standard Western concept of “history” is culturally particular and not necessarily the best tool for cross‐cultural investigations. Western history is generally predicated on the principle of historicism: the idea that the “past” is separated from the present. People around the world, including Western historians, recognize, however, that the past, present and future are mutually implicated. The notion of “historicity” is intended to open out the temporal focus to a “past‐present‐future”. Studies of historicity address the diverse modes through which people form their presents in world societies.     

The politics of time during the Napoleonic Consulate, 1799–1804

ABSTRACT

The French Revolution generated an acceleration of political time that disrupted old assumptions about the legitimacy and durability of political authority. Following the coup of 18 Brumaire, Napoleon and his counsellors had to confront the challenge of erecting a legitimate regime that would endure in a political environment where regimes that endured very often appeared illegitimate. This article examines how the French Consulate (1799–1804) sought to manage revolutionary time by practising a politics of temporal dilation. The embryonic institutions of the Consulate – from the Légion d’honneur to the lycées – were designed to decompress popular perceptions of time, at least as they related to political life, by charting a verifiable pathway for the nascent regime to develop steadily and incrementally through history. The collective perception of the present was made to expand, re-validating the notion of historical experience and slowing the unruly onset of the political future. Time would cease to be the medium of rupture. This article examines how the temporal assumptions embedded within the regime discourses and political practices of the Napoleonic Consulate were central to the construction of its own legitimacy.