In the 21st century, innovations have become an unquestioned sine qua non of everyday life. Our living conditions change rapidly, often without predictability, security, or critical reflexion. These ...changes easily turn into a form of political and social control of innovation-induced ruptures, keeping people on constant alert and making them abandon recently acquired practices for new ones. It can be argued that they represent a form of psychological coercion. Moreover, the growing pace of life-as-innovation, together with misguided assumptions and conclusions about life itself in the diversity of its local variations, produces new forms of inequality and misery among many societies around the globe. In the present paper, I explore how time, innovation, and values relate to each other in both academic life and life in general. I argue for prioritising well-informed reflexive works in the social sciences and the humanities against the pressures of time and frequently unfounded innovations.
Over the last decades, several different renewal movements within Christianity have had a strong impact on Melanesian societies and cultures. Even though these societies have shown a great desire for ...total transformation, they have in their transformative acts come across an insurmountable obstacle: a firm bond between their way of being and places, where their being has been realised. The Ambonwari people of the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea have faced the same problem since the Catholic charismatic movement reached the village in December 1994. Their cosmology and social organization have always been inseparable from their paths (journeys of ancestors, marriages, exchanges, adoptions) and places (old and new villages, fishing and hunting places, taboo places), and their historicity was primarily perceived and defined in terms of individual and group relations to particular named locations in tropical rainforest. As times are tightly intertwined with places, temporalities in the landscape are also possessed, seen and held by individuals and groups. The book ('Places and Times in a New Guinean Landscape') argues that it is this multiplicity of emplaced and embodied temporalities that troubles them most in their ongoing attempts to modify their life-world.
Male initiation rituals used to be of central importance for the Sepik River societies of Papua New Guinea. Among the Karawari-speaking Ambonwari they were characterized by two idiosyncratic ...song-dances: one associated with the spirit-crocodiles and the other with the bamboo flutes. Hence, the songs of the flute and crocodile were the most secret songs known only to a small number of 'big men'. Since the Catholic charismatic movement entered the village at the end of 1994, all previously important rituals were slowly abandoned and so were the song-dances of the crocodile and flute. By analysing various transpositions of meanings in the song of the flute one can detect vanishing cultural values and fading social relationships that these verses were meant to sustain.
Over the years, several different renewal movements within Christianity have had a significant impact on Melanesian societies and cultures. In people's aspirations for total transformation, however, ...there has often appeared one insurmountable obstacle: a firm bond between being and place. The Ambonwari people of the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea have faced the same problem since the Catholic charismatic movement reached the village in December 1994. Their cosmology and social organization have always been inseparable from their paths (journeys, marriages, exchanges, adoptions) and places (places of mythological ancestors, old and new villages, places of other groups, places for processing sago, fishing places, taboo places, camps), and their historicity was primarily perceived and defined in terms of place. The adherents of the Catholic charismatic movement attempt to abolish their emplaced past, transcend their territorial boundaries, and simultaneously modify their places. Because Ambonwari cosmology dealt with multiple spatio-temporalities, however, Catholic charismatic leaders find it difficult to undermine this diversity. It is this multiplicity of emplaced historicities that troubles them most and not simply time per se. //ABSTRACT IN SLOVENE: V preteklih letih je nekaj razlicnih obnovitvenih gibanj v krscanstvu imelo velik vpliv na melanezijske druzbe in kulture. Ne glede na to pa se je v teznjah ljudi po popolni preobrazbi pogosto pojavila nepremagljiva ovira: trdna vez med bitjem in krajem. Ambonwarijci iz province Vzhodni Sepik na Papui Novi Gvineji se soocajo z enako tezavo vse odkar je decembra 1994 katolisko karizmaticno gibanje doseglo njihovo vas. Njihova kozmologija in druzbena organizacija sta ze od nekdaj nelocljivi od njihovih poti (potovanj, porok , izmenjav, posvojitev) in krajev (krajev mitoloskih prednikov, starih in novih vasi, krajev drugih skupin, krajev za pridelavo sagove moke, ribolovnih krajev, prepovedanih krajev, zacasnih bivalisc ob reki), svojo zgodovinskost pa razumejo in opredeljujejo predvsem v smislu kraja. Pripadniki katoliskega karizmaticnega gibanja poskusajo odpraviti njihovo krajevno preteklost, preseci njihove ozemeljske meje in hkrati spremeniti njihove kraje. Ker pa ambonwarijska kozmologija sloni na mnogoterih krajevnih casovnostih, imajo katoliski karizmaticni voditelji tezave s spodkopavanjem te raznolikosti. Prav ta mnogoterost krajevne zgodovinskosti in ne zgolj cas, jim predstavlja najvecjo tezavo. Reprinted by permission of the Slovene Anthropological Society
Since Digicel services began to operate in remote areas of Papua New Guinea in mid‐2007, enthusiasm for mobile telecommunication devices has become a pan‐New Guinean phenomenon. During our last ...fieldwork period, between December 2010 and December 2011, no mobile phone network existed among the Karawari people in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. However, their expectations were high and some individuals had already purchased mobile phones, which they used as torches, radios, and cameras. In Ambonwari village, people were convinced that Digicel would soon build its tower on their land and enable them to ring both the living and the dead. The dead had already interfered with calls and some people were suspected of possessing phone numbers of their deceased relatives. In our article we explore the relationship between mobile phones, the increasing fascination with phone numbers, and the ways in which the Ambonwari perceive, interpret, and engage with the world.
Ambonwari people from the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, had a rich repertoire of song-dances, each of which was associated with specific events and the birth of something new. Together they ...represented the entire human life cycle as well as the cosmology at large. Visual, verbal and tactile modalities of singing and dancing were tightly interwoven; images and symbols were enacted by the dancers, in their decoration, arrangement, movements and in the whole ceremony and were firmly situated in their landscape. Accordingly, song-dances were also an important practice in male initiation ritual. The first song-dance of the ritual was the crocodile song-dance. This article analyses different transpositions of images and meanings which can be decoded from the dance, from the objects that were part of the initiation rite, and from the parallelism and rich allegory of verses. These transpositions operate at different levels until they converge upon the existential facts of birth and death. In the new millennium and under the influence of a Catholic charismatic movement, however, Ambonwari broke off their relationships with spirits, abandoned the men's houses and stopped talking about male initiation ritual. Along with other traditional song-dances the crocodile song-dance has been taken over by the song-dances of the Holy Spirit. These changes in social and cultural perspectives, which are still taking place, are at the same time products and producers of the changes in their relationship to 'space' and 'time' which are at the same time changes in visual and auditory perception and expression of their lifeworld. All these changes should not be seen merely in some abstract or symbolic terms but as tangible processes generated by people's action.
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