Abstract

‘We need a word that includes memory but embraces all the other ways of knowing a past’, wrote Greg Dening, in advocating the notion of a ‘poetic for histories’: culturally specific forms of knowledge of the past that embrace ‘reminiscence, gossip, anecdote, rumour, parable, report, tradition, myth... saga, legend, epic, ballad, folklore, annal, chronicle’. To this list we might want to add a range of other performative and sensory modes of engaging – consciously or unconsciously – with the past, including dancing, gardening, carving, smell, sound and touch. Drawing on a large but diffuse body of global literature, and illustrating my argument with material from local historians, I consider how we might set about describing these historicities, or cultural logics of temporal process, in an Oceanic setting: how are they expressed, how might we come to understand them, and how are they transformed over time and through encounter with other historicities?

 

 

Chris Ballard é Professor Associado em História do Pacífico no College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University em Camberra, Austrália. É o editor de The Journal of Pacific History e um polifacetado autor como vasta experiência de pesquisa como arqueólogo, historiador e antropólogo em Papua Nova Guiné, Vanuatu e Indonésia Oriental. As suas publicações include livros ou números especiais de revista em temáticas diversas de antropologia, agricultura, arqueologia e história.