1st Edition

Time and Its Object A Perspective from Amerindian and Melanesian Societies on the Temporality of Images

Edited By Paolo Fortis, Susanne Küchler Copyright 2021
    214 Pages 41 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    214 Pages 41 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This volume examines the way objects and images relate to and shape notions of temporality and history. Bringing together ethnographic studies from the Lowlands of Central and South America and Melanesia, it explores the temporality inhering in images and artefacts from a comparative perspective. The chapters focus on how peoples in both regions ‘live in’ and ‘navigate’ time each through their distinctive systems of images and the processes and actions by which these come to be manifest in objects. With original theoretical and ethnographic contributions, the book is valuable reading for scholars interested in visual and material culture and in anthropological approaches to time.

              Introduction

              Paolo Fortis & Susanne Küchler

              I. Attending to Time: Process, Action and Sequence

    1. Asia-Pacific Legacies In Eastern Kula Ring Outrigger Canoes
    2. Frederick H. Damon

    3. The Living Shape of Time: Time and Technics in the case of Abulës-Speakers Yams
    4. Ludovic Coupaye

    5. The Lost Writing and the Drawn Thought: Shamanic Reflections on Knowledge and Temporality among the Marubo (Western Amazonia)
    6. Pedro de Niemeyer Cesarino

      II. Navigating Possible Worlds: Surfaces, Patterns and Shapes

    7. Primeval Skins: the Rugged and the Smooth Surface. Cultural Keynotes and Accords in the Middle Sepik, Papua New Guinea
    8. Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin

    9. A Meditation on Time: Pattern and Relational Ontologies in Northwestern Amazonia
    10. Els Lagrou

    11. Biographical Relations in Amerindian and Melanesian Societies
    12. Paolo Fortis & Susanne Küchler 

      III. Moving between Intersecting Worlds: Witnessing and Questioning

    13. Changing Houses: Architectural Transformations in the Ecuadorian Amazon
    14. Victor Cova

    15. Returned not Remade: Visuality, Authority and Potentiality of Digital Objects in a Melanesian Society

    Graeme Were

    Epilogue by Carlo Severi

    Biography

    Paolo Fortis is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at Durham University. His work focuses on the relations between art, ontology, time and history in Central and South America.

    Susanne Küchler is Professor of Anthropology and Material Culture at University College London. Her work focuses on the relation between image systems and the geometry of social polity in island Melanesia and Eastern Polynesia.