Crises in Time: Ethnographic Horizons in Amazonia and Melanesia

This book considers some of the ways in which time appears – and seemingly does it work – through moments of crisis. What can different concepts of time and diverse temporal frameworks tell us about how crises are configured and apprehended? First-hand research is central to the fashioning of ethnography through fieldwork, yet always brings with it a specific time horizon. Recognizing that the ethnographer’s present is not always the best vantage point from which to grasp contemporary issues offers a fresh entry into current debates on how both past and future stimulate social action, and thus reveal its temporal multiplicities. These essays turn to present-day Amazonia and Melanesia to examine in detail the production and reproduction of specific crises and the time horizons they mobilize. The ethnographic themes explored include the transformation of crises prophesized in the past and their implications for the future; what it means to explore perceptions of crisis from the aftermath of recent armed conflict; the multifaceted nature of future horizons precipitated by changing economic policies, when these have bodily as well as social impact; and the amelioration of governmental crisis through initiatives that rely on specific temporal understandings of effective change. Such trajectories are set variously against backgrounds of continuing colonialism, environmental calamity, overt hostility, the absent or over-present state and perceptions of moral degradation.  Further analytic reflections examine the ways crisis holds the imagination through subsisting in time; configure international temporal frameworks through depictions of the climate crisis as the ‘tragedy of the horizon’; and highlight a perspective from which to compare the diverse temporal frameworks presented in the preceding chapters.

Table of Contents:
Contents Chapter 1 Relocations of time: an introduction Marilyn Strathern Chapter 2 Time and crisis in the Areruya religionVirgínia Amaral Chapter 3 The Bougainville Crisis: a Nagovisi perspectiveSimon Kenema Chapter 4 Investments without future, debts without past: commodity horizons in Indigenous central Brazil Bruno Nogueira Guimarães Chapter 5 ‘Papua New Guinea was the last, but now is our time’ Priscila Santos da Costa Chapter 6 Al Gore’s horizons, hockey sticks, holograms and hope: plotting nature and time in a crisis Tony Crook Afterword ‘Crises in time’ from the perspective of an Amazonianist’s ethnographic horizon Aparecida Vilaça Epilogue Sisters on doom and gloom: a dialogue about horizons Andrew Moutu Contributors Index

About the Author :
Tony Crook directs the Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of St Andrews. He began fieldwork in the Min area of Papua New Guinea in 1990,completing his Ph.D. at Cambridge in 1997, and publishing his monograph, Exchanging Skin in 2007. Alongside analysing the epistemological problems anthropology created for itself in the ‘Min problem’, the practical problems created by Euro-Australian mis-readings of Pacific life-worlds have featured in writings and policy work on mining and resource extraction; on gender violence in ‘Understanding Gender Inequality Actions in the Pacific’ (2016);and on the climate crisis in Pacific Climate Cultures (2018). Marilyn Strathern (Ph.D. Cambridge 1968) had the good fortune to begin her research career in Papua New Guinea, working on law, kinship and gender relations. She subsequently became involved with anthropological approaches to the new reproductive technologies, intellectual property and audit cultures. Her best known comparativist forays are The Gender of the Gift (1988) and Partial Connections (1991). Her latest book is Relations: An Anthropological Account (2020). She is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge and Life Fellow of Girton College.