dialogue - university of hawaiʻi · 2015. 4. 16. · dialogue ballard 97 they are the praxis of...

95

Dialogue

chris ballard

kirsten mcgavin

96

Oceanic Historicities

Chris Ballard

Sunlight filtered through a veil of rain, the texture of an axe handle worn smooth with use, feathers nodding above a dancer’s head, the true taste of water from one’s own stream, the tocsin call of a slit-drum, or the scent of tapa impregnated with turmeric. In different ways and for different Pacific communities, each of these sensations or intimations has been profoundly evocative of the past, summoning or condensing memories, sometimes at the limits of consciousness. We all live our histories in ways that exceed our capacity to document them, but we do so under the conditions of very different forms of historical consciousness that are both culturally and temporally specific. This invites the question of how these prompts for contemplation of the past might feature in our formal histories: how do the pasts that we convey in texts either reflect or mask the broader, vernacular pasts and ways of thinking about the past that we inhabit and practice and reproduce?

As is often the case in Pacific history, the most eloquent expression of this challenge comes from Greg Dening. In his 1991 paper “A Poetic for Histories,” Dening wrote of histories not solely as techniques of profes-sional inquiry but also as vernacular or public forms of presenting—and making present—the past. More than simply cognitive systems of memory or communication, these lived histories are fundamentally cultural artifacts and ought to be understood and appreciated as such. “We need a word,” he continued, “that includes memory but embraces all the other ways of knowing a past,” advocating what he termed a “poetic for histories”; this he defined as all of the culturally specific forms of public knowledge of the past, embracing “reminiscence, gossip, anecdote, rumour, parable, report, tradition, myth . . . saga, legend, epic, ballad, folklore, annal, chronicle,” and the ways in which we might read and understand them (Dening 1991, 348–349). These are histories that are profoundly performative—they exist in the present and are remade in the act of their communication.

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They are the praxis of historically and culturally specific forms of his-torical consciousness, each with their own grammars of expression and criteria of objectivity.

Having situated the field for his poetics of history in these terms, Den-ing stopped short of demonstrating how such an inquiry might take shape. “[I] will not offer a poetic of ‘Polynesian’ historical consciousness. The truth is that I have been so preoccupied with the dead Polynesians of the past that I have little expertise to talk of a poetic of historical conscious-ness of the living Polynesians of the present” (Dening 1991, 369). It is probably fair to observe that Dening’s self-confessed limitations are those of Pacific history more generally. It is true too that the term “poetic for histories” has not been widely taken up in Pacific history, despite the fact that its broad parameters are familiar to most of us and provide many of us with a recognizable definition of aspects of our own research.

Marshall Sahlins had written previously along strikingly similar lines in his frequently cited statement that “different cultural orders have their own modes of historical action, consciousness, and determination—their own historical practice. Other times, other customs” (1983, 518); or, as he subsequently phrased it in his introduction to Islands of History, “Different cultures, different historicities” (1985, x). What follows is an attempt to tease out the content, significance, and implications for Pacific history of this last, rather enigmatic utterance, to explore the space that opens up between Dening’s poetic for histories and Sahlins’s historicities. What role might vernacular histories and forms of historical conscious-ness play in Pacific history? And is there a pertinent body of literature and theory on which we might draw in developing our understanding of these historicities?

These questions are not new to Pacific history—indeed, they predate the reflections of Dening and Sahlins—but the ways in which I frame them here, and the seemingly eclectic sources on which I draw in mapping pos-sible responses, reflect the perspective of a personal trajectory toward his-tory. I am a historian from Canberra but evidently not a “Canberra histo-rian.” I have no formal training in history, and what I know about Pacific history I have learned from Pacific historians, salaried or otherwise. I am, instead, a recovering (but not entirely recovered) archaeologist. When I first returned to Papua New Guinea as an archaeology undergraduate, I found myself drawn to conversations with the living rather than the dead. Agarabi speakers of the Yonki Valley in the Eastern Highlands taught me to appreciate the sites of their old settlements as portals to an archive of

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memories of movement, and I lost the desire simply to dig. I became a fellow traveler among anthropologists, and after several years of work-ing with Huli speakers in the Southern Highlands on the oral history of wetland gardens and sacred landscapes, I fell among historians, recruited by Donald Denoon to work on the recent history of relationships at large-scale mines in Papua New Guinea and West Papua. I now work, mostly in Vanuatu, on the ways in which contemporary communities think about and value their pasts and on their strategies for safeguarding, reworking, and communicating those pasts in the future.

Consequently, when I read Pacific history, as a Pacific historian, I do so with a professionally disembodied but by no means jaundiced eye. I share with my graduate students the delight of rediscovering and read-ing many of the discipline’s canonical texts. But I am also bemused at the restrictions that Pacific history has imposed on itself, both in terms of its persistent focus on the histories of encounter and colonialism, or what Jim Davidson called “multicultural situations,” and in the ongoing refusal to engage seriously with orality and with language in general in a region in which oral traditions remain the most significant and widespread means of communicating the past.

Pacific history has long been aware of the significance and potential of oral history and of vernacular pasts. As early as 1954, Davidson wrote: “The historian studying multi-cultural situations must learn to use new forms of evidence, to involve himself in other men’s ways, and to avoid interpreting men’s actions in terms of the patterns of his own culture” (1966, 10). But although he acknowledged the value for Pacific history of cross-disciplinary conversation (with archaeologists and linguists in par-ticular) and was critical of those who gave what he called “unquestion-ing obedience to traditional academic dogmas,” in Davidson’s conception Pacific history was concerned primarily with “the period during which non-European societies have been in contact with the West” (Davidson 1971, 116–118).

As a description of the primary orientation of much Pacific history, this foundational definition still largely obtains, establishing a fairly pre-cise boundary at first contact with Europeans. By and large, as historians, we respect this distinction, limiting ourselves in an opening chapter or paragraph to prefatory or perfunctory prehistories (and note how often we resort to the authority of archaeology rather than oral traditions in addressing the precontact past) before settling down to the real business of the documented past.1 There is also a corresponding, if less definite, point

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of closure at the end of the colonial period, leading Nicholas Thomas to observe that “colonial transactions and representations, conceived in the broadest sense, pervade the subject matter of Pacific history” (1990, 141). There is much exemplary work on decolonization, which we might think of as the corresponding twin to histories of colonial encounter and first contacts, but overall there are fewer histories addressed substantially to the postcolonial rather than the colonial period.

Now Dening was surely correct in observing that “there is nothing—not a written-down experience, not myth or a legend, not a material arti-fact, not an archaeological site—that does not, by the expressions of it, by the collection and preservation of it, and/or by the interpretation of it and inclusion of it in a stranger’s discourse, require critical reading to separate the stranger’s cargo from the native’s past” (1991, 369). Yet while it is essential to recognize that all forms of history now available to us are inflected in this way by colonialism in its broadest sense, it does not fol-low that Pacific history should be encompassed by the early encounter or colonial experience. The resolute focus of Pacific history on “multicultural situations” or the “colonial encounter” places a double bind on the dis-cipline: truncating Islander experience and history at both ends, severing continuities with the precolonial past as well as more recent postcolonial experience; and positioning historical Islanders as agents largely through their engagement with outsiders. Well might we ask: On whose terms is this Pacific history?

The second of Pacific history’s self-imposed restrictions has to do with its continuing discomfort with oral testimony as an appropriate source for scholarly history.2 There are a number of very fine Pacific histories that have taken orality for their focus—by Judith Binney, David Hanlon,

Kambati Uriam, and Michele Stephen, among others—but they remain the exception within the discipline rather than the rule.3 It is not that Pacific historians, from Davidson on, have failed to see or on many occa-sions exploit the potential of oral sources, but rather that we have been poorly equipped—linguistically, methodologically, and theoretically—to follow our sources from texts through to oral traditions and other forms of nondocumentary historical proof.4 Learning vernacular languages in the Pacific is no small challenge, though perhaps it figures differently with increasing diversity from the eastern and central Pacific toward the southwest. But Pacific historians do not appear to suffer from a fear of languages, as we routinely develop competence in French or German or


Portuguese in order to tackle primary sources; and here in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the broadening competence among historians in reported by Damon Salesa (2012, 295) is a considerable advance on our grasp of vernacular Pacific languages elsewhere.

Our problem lies instead with the lack of a coherent theoretical and methodological platform that might allow us to hold both oral and docu-mentary sources within the same frame; oral testimonies tend to be enlisted as a source of augmentation or extension, a hazardous supplement to the central, textual proofs for the past. Pacific history, as Nick Thomas has observed (1990), risks defining itself in terms of a highly skilled but nar-row suite of methods and documentary source materials rather than ques-tions. It is not just that we tend to undervalue or overlook oral and other nondocumentary testaments, but also that we have too often failed to appreciate the ways in which they are grounded within their own vernacu-lar logics of veracity, with different ways of seeing the world, different means of expression, and different concerns (Appadurai 1981).

In recent years, inspired by Sahlins, Dening, and ethnographic approaches to Pacific history in general, anthropologists from a number of locations around the world have converged on the term “historicity” to express the broad field of their inquiries into culturally specific forms of consciousness of the past. Sahlins himself has rarely used the term since 1985, but it is possible to derive from his writing a fuller sense of his con-ception of history, which serves to define his otherwise casual reference to historicities. He has been taken to task by reviewers of Islands of History for what appears to be an inadvertent slippage between historicity as rep-resentation and as practice (Hartog 1983, Peel 1993), but I think Dening was correct in construing historicity, for Sahlins, as encompassing history, as both its representation and its practice: “For Sahlins, ‘history’ is the cultural process itself. ‘History’ is praxis, the continually changing pre-sentation of an unchanged symbolic reality. ‘History’ is inseparable from its own presentations and re-formations in historical consciousness. It is historical consciousness expressed in human actions, events and environ-ment. ‘History’ is not about something: it is something” (1986, 46).

Sahlins’s cause is not always helped by his predilection for idealized oppositions—whether between European and Hawaiian, prescriptive and performative structures, or Hawaiian and Australian Aboriginal historici-ties (Sahlins 1985, xii)—but his critical insight lies in the recognition of the fundamental equivalence of different historicities. When we speak, in conventional terms, of the historicity of an event, of its facticity, its his-

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torical realness, or “the condition of having actually occurred in history,”5 Sahlins would have us ask, “Whose historicity? Whose criteria for truth, or relevance, or significance?”

Inspired by his reading of Islands of History, François Hartog, French historian of ancient Greece, has brought Sahlins’s ideas into conversa-tion with the work of German philosopher of history Reinhart Koselleck (1985, 2002) on the semantics of historical time. Together with his col-league Marcel Detienne, Hartog convened a conference in 1993 on the topic of “Regimes of Historicity,” which has since spawned a prolific lit-erature on the different historicities of the classical world (Detienne 2000; 2007; Hartog 2003). For Hartog, a regime of historicity evokes two dif-ferent meanings: the first is a limited sense of the way in which a society “views and deals with its past,” while the second is a more expansive understanding of historicity as the “modality of understanding of the self by a living community” (Hartog 2003, 19; my translation). If historicity designates the condition of historical being, what then is the diversity of these conditions, and how are they gathered or comprehended historically as specific regimes? Certain histories or accounts of the past become pos-sible under some regimes, but not under others (Hartog 2003, 28).

In a parallel process, Caribbean historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995, 2003)—also inspired in part by Koselleck—has been writing since at least 1992 on the distinction between the conventional sense of histo-ricity, the materiality of the historical process, which he terms Historicity 1, and the representation or telling of that past, or Historicity 2: what we tell of history is powerfully constrained by the actual past, and yet that past is itself inevitably subjected to the material requirements of the pres-ent and thus never repeated in the telling in quite the same way. Though this constructivist distinction has long been familiar to philosophers of history, Trouillot focuses on the uneven and often cross-cultural struggle or contestation over interpretation that unfolds at the interface between what happened and what is said to have happened, over who gets to write history and how they promote their understanding of the past.

Returning to Sahlins, I think it is possible to propose a simple solu-tion to the dual sense of historicity expressed by both Hartog and Trouil-lot. When we refer, in the conventional sense, to historicity as historical authenticity, what really happened, we do so under the precepts or con-ventions of a singular historical consciousness, which is that of modern, professional, Western, or now global historicity (H White 2002). The rise to prominence of this notion of historicity over the course of the nine-


teenth century was dominated by scholarship on the authenticity of the events described in the Bible. The newly professional discipline of history was cutting its teeth on the canonical text of the previous, pre-Enlighten-ment regime of historicity. When we speak of “the historicity” of an event, therefore, we presume a single and unique form of the past, and knowledge of that past: the historicity. All other understandings of the past, imagined under different cultural regimes, are to be reckoned against this particular conception and, almost without exception, found wanting. This argument need not necessarily entail a radical relativism in which all versions of the past are equally good or true; rather it throws the burden of proof back on the modern notion of historicity, as a distinctively Western property, which must demonstrate that it—uniquely—is not bound by standards of authenticity that are themselves susceptible to culture, or fashion, or the demands of the times. Again, when confronted with a claim about the authenticity of an event or an understanding of the past in terms of its historicity, the voice of our ventriloquized Sahlins speaks out: “Whose historicity? Whose criteria for truth, or relevance, or significance?”

Though Hartog, Detienne, Koselleck, and Trouillot are all historians, it is in anthropology that this fresh approach to historicities has most strongly resonated and flourished over the past two decades,6 and Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s definition is widely cited: “historicity, or historical consciousness [is] the culturally patterned way or ways of experiencing and understanding history” (1990, 4). To this she added a particularly important footnote: “Although the term historical consciousness has been used more widely than the term historicity, I use the latter to avoid the inference that how people think of and experience history is always conscious.”

In a burgeoning literature that deals explicitly with historicities, per-haps the most prominent advocates have been Amazonianists such as Neil Whitehead, Carlos Fausto, Anne-Christine Taylor, and Fernando Santos-Granero, but other key studies have come from the Andes, North America and Alaska, Greece, Madagascar, and Central Australia.7 In the Pacific, as elsewhere, anthropologists have been the most enthusiastic advocates of this turn, including Eric Hirsch and Deborah Van Heekeren in Papua New Guinea, Michael Scott in Solomon Islands, Jack Taylor in Vanuatu, and Elfriede Hermann in Fiji.8 These recent studies build on a substantial body of research on Pacific forms of historical consciousness, by writers including Aletta Biersack, Rob Borofsky, Ben Burt, David Hanlon, Epeli

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tier, Buck Schieffelin, Christina Toren, John Waiko, Geoffrey White, and Polly Wiessner.9

Before we proceed to identify what this more recent research has to offer to history in the Pacific, I want to reflect briefly on how an attention to historicities might differ from earlier, similar approaches to the past; why historicities are not—or not just—histories, historiographies, folk histo-ries, ethnohistories, oral histories, or forms of historical consciousness.10

It should be evident that historicities are not history, either as a material past or in the sense of the active study of that past. Contrasted with these two senses of history, historicities appear instead as the modes of tempo-ral being and awareness specific to particular communities at particular moments in time; they inform the production of the historical past, as his-torical agents operate within the terms of their own historicities, but they also frame our conscious and unconscious awareness of temporal process.

A focus on historicities can obviously be distinguished from histori-ography, the study of written history and of the writing of the past, as the latter largely addresses the elite, professional project of history pro-duction and privileges the textual over almost all other traces or expres-sions of the past. Here, historicities emerge as vernacular (in the sense that they embrace and inform—sometimes in different ways—all members of a community, including historians and their historiographies), as well as all pervasive in their encompassment of non-textual sources. Histo-ricities inform and inflect historiographies, and recent studies in compara-tive historiography have identified the debt owed by distinctive national or regional historiographic traditions to culturally specific historicities (Lorenz 1999; Rüsen 2002).

Folk history and ethnohistory suffer together from prefixes that will always carry a flavor of condescension, as lesser sorts of histories or sup-plements to history proper (Dening 1997, 427). Greg Dening’s early por-trayal of his task as an ethnohistorian speaks to a particular moment in the development of history’s awareness of non-Western sources, but it also accounts for his subsequent disenchantment with the practice of ethnohis-tory: “The ethnohistorian’s prime concern is with the description of illit-erate societies by literate observers at the time when contact between the two had not changed or destroyed the illiterate society” (Dening 1966, 25; see also 1989, 134). In his later work, Dening would recuperate ethnohis-tory as a description of his work, and others have followed him in seeing all history as ethnohistory, since it is composed according to cultural prin-ciples (Hirsch and Stewart 2005, 267); the effect, however, is to dissolve


the category of ethnohistory as meaningfully distinct from history. We still require a distinction between the histories that describe particular pasts and the historicities that span the divide between literate and non-literate and that ground all attempts, ethno- or otherwise, to know the past.

Oral traditions and oral history play a significant role in the communi-cation of historicities, in literate as well as non-literate communities, but historicities are not confined to orality, any more than they are to textual-ity. Equally, the focus on traditions has always presumed the existence of discrete bodies of knowledge that can be harvested and rendered as texts, analogous to the conventional documentary sources for history. Oral tra-ditions are expressive of particular historicities, but those historicities are also articulated through a variety of other oral forms, including those in Dening’s list (“reminiscence, gossip, anecdote, rumour” and so on), as well as non-oral and non-textual forms (Thomas 1990, 156; Cohen 1989). Historicities are something other, and something more, than oral histories or oral traditions.

Finally, and perhaps most challengingly, how do historicities relate to forms of historical consciousness? Conventional understandings of his-torical consciousness come closest to the sense of historicity that is now being advocated: “individual and collective understandings of the past, the cognitive and cultural factors which shape those understandings, as well as the relations of historical understandings to those of the pres-ent and the future.”11 Indeed, historical consciousness is often defined as being focused on the historicity of events, but this returns us to the prob-lem of the presumed universal form of historicity (Seixas 2004, 9). In the writings of many philosophers and historians, historical consciousness has become associated indelibly with Western modernity (Nandy 1995). In this conception, historical consciousness (or historicity) is also commonly positioned in relation to written history, as “the area in which collective memory, the writing of history, and other modes of shaping images of the past in the public mind merge.”12 What I think Greg Dening had in mind was something altogether more generous in extent and less propri-etary than historical consciousness; more generous in its embrace of both conscious and largely unconscious apprehensions of temporality, and less proprietary in the sense that it applied to all forms of history making, Western and non-Western, professional and vernacular. And for that, as he said, we need a word.

But enough of genealogies of usage and definition by negative example. I want to focus more positively and more concretely now on a number of


different aspects of historicities, drawing on examples from our region, in order to suggest some of the ways in which attention to the operation of historicities might renew or extend our appreciation of the possibilities of history in the Pacific. How are historicities expressed, how might we come to understand them, and how are they transformed over time and through encounter with other historicities?

It is a well-worn truism to observe that vernacular histories in the Pacific are intensely grounded in landscapes, and that the names for the land and sea are closely entwined with those of people in such a way that the two summon forth memories of each other: people are remembered through places, and places through the people that emerged from, lived in, or passed through them (Guo 2003; Hanlon 2004; Harrison 2004; Küchler 1993; Telban 1998). Epeli Hau‘ofa’s famous dictum—“We cannot read our histories without knowing how to read our landscapes (and sea-scapes)” (2008, 73)—is thus a given for Pacific communities. David Han-lon described being asked by a Pohnpeian if he planned also to “include a history of the reef, forests, mountains, hills, rivers, streams, boulders, and rocks” (1989, 5). Lamont Lindstrom has shown how the names for people in Tanna are indissolubly linked to particular plots of land and associated with unique kava drinking grounds, encoding “an island archaeology”; the names of the Tannese individuals who met Cook in 1774 are still held today, on the same lands, by their descendants; and in an echo of the “Heroic I” of Fijian chiefly history as described by Sahlins, the living bear-ers of these names speak in the first person of their encounters with Cook (Lindstrom 2011; Mark Nizette, pers comm, 2010). The sheer density of names for the land and for people can be overwhelming for an outsider, but the forms of knowledge from which they are drawn are the archives of vernacular Pacific history, and references to specific names are the essen-tial footnotes that communicate the historical truth of a claim.

Something of the complexity of this mutual imbrication of people, land-scape, and names was brought home to me one afternoon in the Haea-pugua Basin, in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, when walking with Walubu-Agiru around his landholdings in the hameigini (parish) of Dobani. We came to rest under shade in a small garden, and he casually indicated a particular spot—a gap between two sweet potato mounds; this, he said, was where Walubu-Mara had shot and killed his elder brother, Newe. I marked the spot and wrote down their names on my map of the garden, but it was some months before I heard the story of this fratricide from an elder in the clan. Mara had returned home to find


his wife committing adultery with Newe; the tale was replete with details of weather conditions at the time, Mara’s suspicions of their affair, and the identification of quite specific locations. Everything about this event, from the precision of its spatial emplotment to the casual form of the narrative (scarcely a tradition), suggested a recent event. But, for many Huli people, “yesterday” is capable of considerable temporal extension, and when I found Mara and Newe in my notes on Dobani genealogy, they proved to be Agiru’s great-great uncles. The slaying had taken place in about 1860; and yet, for the next century or more, that innocuous spot in the garden had retained its salience for at least one small subclan. The historicity of this event resides in the lived, embodied memory of their relationship to that space, as much as it does in the partially formalized utterance of the communicated narrative.

In terms of broader Huli historicity, 1860 really is just yesterday, just as the historic intimacy of the corner of that garden is scarcely exceptional. I spent much of twenty months walking over and mapping some three thou-sand garden blocks at Haeapugua and learning their names and the names of the people who had lived, and gardened, and fought in each spot (Bal-lard 1995). Huli gardens are not easily misplaced, because their boundar-ies are marked out by gana ditches up to five meters deep. Across the Huli landscape, hundreds of thousands of these ditches link up together to form a material grid of considerable density. Ownership and use of these gar-dens has obviously changed many times over the past few centuries, but the identity of the first person to demarcate the boundaries of the garden with a ditch is usually retained and located genealogically.

Huli genealogies form a matching temporal grid, extending vertically to more than fifteen generations and laterally to encompass men, women, and the connections made through them, as well as siblings in their cor-rect birth order and those who died in infancy. The knowledge held by certain individuals, sometimes on behalf of others in their community, constitutes a vast network of social proofs and possibilities. Together, these two grids—the social and the material—combine to create a matrix of extraordinary historical potential, within which the formal narratives of events such as wars are embedded. Narratives that are shorn of this contextual knowledge and presented as historical texts hold no meaning for Huli people, because they neither draw on nor feed back into the body of knowledge that renders them meaningful. The preference of Huli historians is to travel to the right location and perform the narrative sur-rounded by the relevant material proofs, the oral testimony combining


with the visual and sensory evidence to impress on the audience the truth of the past.

Historicities privilege the performative and the sensory. If a contextual knowledge of names and events is critical to the appreciation of a particu-lar history, so too is the context of its performance or utterance, or even of its reading. This renewed emphasis on the performance of histories, evi-dent in the work of Vilsoni Hereniko (1995), Geoffrey White (2003, 167) and other Pacific colleagues, is an extension of the critique of our relent-less urge to textualize experience and then to see in the past only what is textual or capable of being rendered as text. While there is widespread acceptance of the perils of “scriptocentrism” and the relative neglect of oral sources in Western history (Burke 2002, 196), there is also recogni-tion of the need to move beyond the simple opposition of textuality and orality and to extend our horizons to all of the other ways in which history is performed and perceived. In a burgeoning field, Peter Charles Hoffer has set something of a standard in his Sensory Worlds in Early America (2005), by reframing the history of early cross-cultural encounters in the region through close consideration of the ways in which each of the senses was engaged on all sides of the encounter.

Our senses manage to both recall and transmit the past in the same moment: Consider the sound made by an old man, on the island of Lelepa in Central Vanuatu, beating out on a table with his fingers the rhythm of large vertical slit-drums that have not been seen or heard in his lifetime; or recollect the extraordinary performance at the Pacific History Association meeting in Goroka in 2010 of a drum master and his team from the mouth of the Sepik River, recounting the histories of different clans through tone and rhythm. The ways in which people manage their bodies in public con-texts simultaneously evoke and communicate history, while storing that memory in the body; this is evident most obviously through the medium of dance, as Adrienne Kaeppler (1991), Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman (1991), and Katerina Teaiwa (2012) have so elegantly demonstrated, both on the page and in performance.

A sense of smell attends historical events. Women and men in the New Guinea Highlands old enough to recall their very first encounters with Europeans often remarked on the stench of these outsiders: as a Huli elder said to me, “We could smell you even before we saw you, and it was ter-rible”—referring, I hope, to the 1930s and to the (Heroic) You. Christina Toren described at length the smells associated with specific ancestors, of flowers worn for particular ceremonies, and of the recently deceased


(1995, 176); and Vince Diaz has written of the need for “an olfactory history of Oceania” (2012, 326), drawing his inspiration from Epeli Hau‘ofa’s powerfully irreverent Kisses in the Nederends. Perhaps when Hau‘ofa referred to the slow silencing through academic achievement of his childhood abilities as a storyteller (1996, 205) he was also reflecting on the closing of each of his senses as he learned to become a chronicler and a writer of texts.

So we apprehend the world and recall the past through all of our senses, combining our understanding of location or setting, with a parallel appre-ciation of our auditory, olfactory, and tactile surroundings. And we then draw on this same range of senses to communicate that past, through what Greg Dening calls a “dramatic unity” of performance (1991, 361): “We dance our histories, we paint them, sing them, picture them, film them, mime them, as well as write them” (1997, 426).13 We are not always conscious of these intimations of the past or capable of articulating them through speech or through text, but we achieve and transmit our under-standing of ourselves as temporal beings through something akin to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (1977, 78–79).14

Another aspect common to all historicities is their emphasis on the concerns of the present. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney identified four principal properties of historicities: (a) that they are highly selective in terms of what they remember or forget; (b) that they are subject to the play of power and are always contested and fractured internally; (c) that they emphasize the connection between past and present; and (d) that the past is inevitably interpreted in the light of present motivations and intentions (1990, 20). David Hanlon offered a succinct summary of the qualities of history generated through Pohnpeian understandings of the past: “oral in form, personal in its concerns and interests, event centred, locally focused, attentive to sequence, literal in its representation of events, multiple in the versions and variations of a single event, privileged in terms of access, and contested as to detail, meaning and significance” (Hanlon 1992a, 110). And of the challenges of publishing the biography of Kwara‘ae elder Sam-uel Alasa‘a, Ben Burt wrote that “there is hardly an incident in his stories which someone might not regard as more or less contentious” (1998, 105).

History, as Claude Lévi-Strauss famously contended, is never just history but always “history-for” (1966, 259). For even the most impartial of pro-fessional histories is implicated in the politics of its times and deploys the contemporary conventions of conviction, the rhetorical strategies designed to impress on readers and listeners its essential or even unique fidelity to


the historical record. Rather than mourning this corruption of the past through its entanglement in the concerns of the present, we might explore more closely the politics of memory—the operation of power, interest, and authority in the construction and reconstruction of the past—as have Lin Poyer, for Ngatik recollections of an 1837 massacre, and Rob Borofsky, in his comparison of changing Pukapukan and anthropological understand-ings of the social organizational principle of Akatawa (Poyer 1993; Borof-sky 1987). The requirements of the times reflect interests and objectives that are both culturally and historically distinctive, as well as the opera-tion of different conventions for the making of history—in short, differ-ent historicities. Just as there are culturally distinctive forms of authority over the past, so too are there culturally ordered—and gendered—ways of remembering and forgetting (Jolly 1999).

If historicities direct our attention to the present, to questions of who is telling history, and why, and for whom, they are also grounded firmly in a sense of the future. Different temporalities, or cultural presumptions about temporal process, hinge as much on the variously imagined ends of history as they do on its origins. The logic that underlies a particular sense of temporality is its cosmology, its account of the origins and the end of the known universe, and the anticipated trajectory for history that links these two points—the teleology that leads, inexorably, to the world’s end. A community’s cosmology is thus its frame of reference for compre-hending its present position within a historical trajectory of change. “The frame of reference is important,” said Ashis Nandy, “for history cannot be done without ordering its data in terms of something like a frame of return . . . , [or] progress . . . , or stages” (1995, 48).

Differences in historicity revolve to an important extent around the differences in these cosmological frames of reference. Western cosmolo-gies have historically shifted from the highly contested visions of Judg-ment Day and end-times promoted by different Christian sects, through to the equally teleological post-Enlightenment meta-narratives for history that are characteristic of Marxist thought or secular modernist notions of progress and now globalization (Iggers 2002, 107).

Moving in entirely the opposite direction, Huli cosmology is predicated on an understanding of the world as being in a permanent process of decline—an entropic teleology, in which the fertility of the earth is contin-uously subject to loss and decline:15 “Before, bananas, pigs, taro . . . every-thing grew better. The swamps were all brimming with water, but now they are dry. . . . Before everything was large, but now it is all small. . . .


The long memories of yesteryear have grown short. Distances have grown smaller” (Mabira Walahuli, interview, 1992). A corresponding deteriora-tion in the behavior of people and an increasing failure to observe custom-ary practices is central to Huli accounts of impending doom: “All that our fathers told us not to eat we now eat. All that our fathers told us not to see we now see. All that our fathers told us not to say we now say” (Pudaya Aio, interview, 1992).

More than just the nostalgia of old men and women for a lost Golden Age, this deep-seated belief in time’s falling arrow has historically impelled Huli to marshal their resources to combat the world’s tendency to decline. Until the establishment of the first government post and mis-sions in the 1950s, they sought to achieve this through ritual, raising and sacrificing ever larger numbers of pigs—and, an outsider might suggest, further depleting the land’s fertility in so doing. But whether Huli notions of entropic decline or Western belief in progress (which has always been tempered by a corresponding entropic tendency) are accurate or not as accounts of their own histories, the critical consequence is that people have historically acted on these beliefs—Huli have turned to raising larger herds of pigs, while those of us laboring under modernity’s yoke work longer hours on the assumption that our futures will be played out in a world much improved on that of the past. As present conditions change, the past is reevaluated and redrawn, and so too is the future. Historicities are not so much about the relationship between past and present, as they are about the ways in which people navigate between the demands of past and future from the perspective of a constantly shifting present.

Finally, it seems that historicities are also potentially unknowable, in at least two senses. David Hanlon alerted us to the first of these, when he asked how we interpret Indigenous histories that feature explana-tions, such as sorcery, that challenge modern understandings of causality (1992b). Tessa Morris-Suzuki expressed the same concern when she wrote of her difficulty in fully accepting Gurundji attribution of the 1924 flood at Wave Hill Station in Central Australia to the agency of rainstones and the rainbow serpent (2011, 15–16). But both authors acknowledged, as I have in the case of Huli attempts to control their universe, that the issue is not one of contending causalities so much as the need to appreciate the operation of different historicities; without vernacular exegesis, these may remain unknown and unknowable, but we can still observe their effects in the world. Though we may not understand other historicities or appre-ciate their particular rules for authenticity, we must respect the fact that


they serve as the bases for the very real decisions and actions of historical or contemporary actors. We may never gain access to the full subtlety or quality of Pacific pasts, but we have to conceive of the past in terms of the operation of something like historicity in the lives and actions of historical actors. To lapse into the language of our own times, we must allow for these “known unknowns.”

A second sense in which historicities are unknowable has to do with the difficulty of apprehending them in time and understanding their bounds in space. We glimpse the effects of historicities in the past and their practice in the present, but no sooner have we described and defined their operation than they’ve changed, responding to the demands of successive presents and through the ceaseless encounter with other historicities. Open-ended, contested, unevenly distributed, and never in a state of being so much as always in the process of becoming, historicities resist description in a fro-zen present. There can be no pure, original, authentic historicities, because the press of historical circumstance forever forces their revision and reca-libration; and to define historicities as hybridized or creolized is to evoke the specters of bounded forms of culture and pure historicities (Ohnuki-Tierney 2005, 190; Clifford 2009, 246). Groups and individuals operating under the terms and precepts of different historicities come into contact, but historicities on either side are transformed in the process of encounter. It is not a question of understanding the impact of European views of his-tory on Pacific Islanders, but rather one of appreciating the mutual influ-ence of different historicities and their almost immediate entanglement (Cruikshank 2005, 4). The historicities of Western Europe, transformed already through the American, African, and Asian encounters, were never again the same after their encounter with the Pacific.16 An important focus for our inquiry must center on the ways in which historicities transform with the adoption of new religions, with incorporation into colonial or postcolonial states, and with the emergence of bureaucratic and profes-sional elites seeking to define “the agenda of history” (Khalidi 2002, 54).17

In certain respects, there is little in what I have said here that is new to Pacific history. Pacific historians have often engaged with oral histories, worried about language, and reflected at length on their own historiogra-phy and questions of historical consciousness (see the admirable collection of essays in Borofsky 2000). Yet, despite this broad familiarity with many of the individual components of an understanding of historicity, Pacific history has not generated a coherent body of theory or methodology that addresses the substantial and very significant field of vernacular history.


As Hau‘ofa suggested, our professional allegiance to particular forms of producing or writing history may have placed unnecessary limits on our openness to many of the other ways in which history is generated, enacted, and recalled in the Pacific.

Historicities, or something like the modes of historical consciousness that I’ve attempted to portray here, prescribe and help us to describe the practices of both vernacular and professional historians, and position them both within a common framework of understanding and analysis.18 Rather than displacing, or obviating the need for, conventional histories, a focus on historicities serves to situate colonial and document-based his-tories within the broader array of possible histories being produced and reproduced in the region, recuperating a vast store of lived and relived experience that currently receives much less attention than it deserves. Sig-nificantly, oral and performative expressions of historicity should be seen as complementing rather than precluding Indigenous histories produced through the careful analysis of more conventional documentary sources, ranging from Jonathan Osorio’s rereading of nineteenth-century Hawai-ian history (2002) to Bronwen Douglas’s identification of Indigenous countersigns in the images and texts produced by outsiders (2009).

Matching an obvious emphasis on Indigenous Pacific historicities is the scope for a comprehensive account of the historicities of the historians, an ethnography of Pacific history, which is itself irredeemably cultural. His-toricities promote not just counter-histories or histories of resistance but, much more profoundly, histories of equivalence that unsettle the notion of a “neutral” history, and decenter professional, modernist history and the potentially dangerous positioning of its practitioners as the ultimate arbiters of historical truth for the Pacific (Linnekin 1997, 16; Hereniko 2000; T Teaiwa 2004).

Never entirely or purely of the Pacific, these historicities are bound-less; they are not so much Pacific as Oceanic historicities and, following Hau‘ofa, I invoke the Oceanic in its topological rather than topographic sense. Whether Oceanic historicities possess a distinctive character or not is open to debate, but there are modes of inquiry and an ethics of engage-ment already widely practiced in the Pacific that might provide us with the means to make a distinctive contribution to world history. I refer not just to the relative recency of encounters in some parts of our region, which allow us to chart in considerable detail the ways in which contrasting historicities engage and become mutually entangled, but also and more importantly to the exceptional continuities in place of many Pacific com-


munities and their traditions, and the persistence of their will to possess and assert their own understandings of the past.

Communities in the Shepherd Islands, to the north of Efate in central Vanuatu, have begun to address what they see as novel challenges to the transmission of local histories and traditions, running “seminars” for the large proportion of their populations that now reside in Port Vila or abroad but who return to the islands during the Christmas break. Chil-dren, youth, and adults are shown around the community’s domain, listen to stories, and participate in competitions that privilege local language. But there is a hunger for more—for colonial records and early photographs and recordings, for access to artifact collections held in distant museums, and even for dialogue with “stranger historians,” to use Dening’s term. It is through collaboration with these communities and an appreciation of the insights of contrasting historicities that, as Pacific historians, we find a role for ourselves that is at once respectful and welcomed and capable of generating and sharing real insights with world history.

“History may be written by the victors,” conceded Reinhart Koselleck, but he insisted that over time it is “the vanquished [who] become the source from which historical gains in knowledge proceed” (2002, 76). The labels of victor and vanquished are not comfortably applied to the history of the Pacific, but particular forms of history making have certainly tri-umphed or come to dominate the ways in which we talk about history in the Pacific, while others have been near absent in the literature. I hope to have shown that there are real gains to be made for historical knowledge and conversations about the past in the Pacific by opening ourselves to questions about how Pacific communities and individuals think about, talk about, and enact their lives as historical beings, and by reflecting on the extent to which we, as professional historians, do precisely the same thing, albeit under different terms. Together, Dening’s vision of a poetic for histories, and Sahlins’s disarmingly simple proposition—“Different cultures, different historicities”—open up a series of spaces for reflection rather than prescribe how we might go about filling those spaces. In simi-lar fashion, the rubric of historicities offers Pacific history an expanded palette of sources, perspectives, and tools that augments rather than nar-rows our disciplinary focus. “Suddenly,” as Sahlins concluded in the paper that introduced this particular notion of historicities, “there are all kinds of new things to consider” (1983, 534).

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Notes

1 I draw here on David Hanlon’s notion of “prefatory histories” in anthropo-logical writing on Micronesia (1999, 70); see also Hau‘ofa 2008, 63.

2 Ken Inglis spoke for many of his contemporaries in Pacific history when he declared “the oral history of primitive societies” to be a “perilous” activity (1967, 17); David Hanlon lists many of the common and more persistent objections to oral traditions (1992b, 23).

3 Binney 1987; Hanlon 1988; Lacey 1975 1992; Neumann 1992; Reilly 2009; Stephen 1974; Uriam 1995.

4 Harry Maude’s verdict delivered more than forty years ago still stands: “Unfortunately Pacific historians are as yet seldom given training in the difficult techniques of interviewing and recording nor, unlike most African historians in American universities or Far Eastern historians in Australia, are they required to learn the rudiments of a Pacific language as the prerequisite for a doctorate” (1971, 21). See also Leckie 1983, 19; Routledge 1985, 83, 89–90.

5 Webster’s New World College Dictionary, online at http://websters.yourdictionary.com/historicity [accessed 12 Nov 2012]

6 Note the 2004 Symposium in honor of Marshall Sahlins, entitled “Cultures and Historicities,” and the resulting special issue of History and Anthropology (Hirsch and Stewart 2005).

7 Whitehead 2003; Fausto and Heckenberger 2007; Rappaport 1998; Nabo-kov 2002; Cruikshank 2005; Stewart 2012; Cole 2001; and Hokari 2011.


8 Hirsch 2007; Van Heekeren 2012; Scott 2007; Taylor 2008; Hermann 2005.9 For earlier research on historical consciousness in the Pacific (in addition

to those already cited), see Biersack 1990; Borofsky 1987; Burt 1998; Hanlon 1992a; Hau‘ofa 2008; Kame‘eleihiwa 1992; Miyazaki 2004; Parmentier 1987; Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991; Toren 1999; Valeri 1991; Waiko 1982; G White 1991; Wiessner and Tumu 1998.

10 See J D Y Peel’s enlightening review of alternatives (1993, 176–177), though his conclusions differ strongly from the argument made here.

11 Website of the Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness, University of British Columbia: http://www.cshc.ubc.ca/about/ [accessed 12 Nov 2012]

12 Website of the journal History and Memory: http://www.indiana.edu/~rcapub/v17n1/17sb.html [accessed 12 Nov 2012]

13 Lindstrom and White’s 1993 article provides an exemplary study of sung history and quotes Fran Hezel’s contrast between history as dance in Yap, as song in Truk, and as theatrical tableaux in Pohnpei.

14 This is an insight derived from Sahlins (1983, 524; 1985, 139), though I would not subscribe to the apparent equation of habitus with the cultural con-sciousness of Hawaiian commoners as opposed to the “Heroic I” of their chiefs.

15 For further details of Huli notions of entropy, see Frankel 1986; Ballard 1998. Similar cosmologies are documented for other neighboring groups, includ-ing the Paiela (Biersack 1990).

16 See, in particular, Smith 1960 for the Pacific and Abulafia 2008 on trans-atlantic encounters.

17 Note that “encounters” between historicities can be near fatal, as Sadik Al-Azm argued in the case of the “total displacement of the indigenous historio-graphical traditions” in the Arab encounter with Western paradigms (2002, 121).

18 As Hayden White observed (2002), professional or modern history need not necessarily be defined as “Western” history, as its roots were never exclusively Western, but rather as the forms of history practiced in history departments, pub-lished in professional journals, and policed by professional associations.

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Abstract

“We need a word that includes memory but embraces all the other ways of know-ing a past,” wrote Greg Dening, in advocating the notion of a “poetic for histo-ries”: culturally specific forms of knowledge of the past that embrace “reminis-cence, gossip, anecdote, rumour, parable, report, tradition, myth . . . saga, legend, epic, ballad, folklore, annal, chronicle” (1991, 348–349). To this list we might want to add a range of other performative and sensory modes of engaging—con-sciously 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?

keywords: historicities, Oceania, Pacific, history, historical consciousness

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