Abstract
Because pasts are relative to people’s ethical and political motivations in the present, it is important to understand how and in what shapes pasts emerge in relation to people’s contemporary concerns and the futures they expect. In this chapter, I explore the mobilisation of transcendental time among the Asmat people of West Papua, Indonesia, considering their experience of religious conversion and progress introduced by Catholic missionaries, the Netherlands’ colonial government, the Indonesian government, and, most recently, Islamic preachers. I analyse how the Asmat people mobilise the concept of transcendental time as imparted by both religious institutions and governmental authorities to address future anticipations that impose requirements on historical events. Through the lens of several Asmat who recently converted to Islam, I will show how for Catholics the past reveals a wonder of identity that stands in contrast to how the state and the church portray the Asmat past as a dispensable abstraction. These divergent pasts are useful for developing historian Reinhart Koselleck’s rather narrow perception of the past in his theory of futures’ past. I will suggest that if we reformulate the notion of the past to a horizon that expands and retracts in response to future concerns, this will allow us to apply Koselleck’s theory more universally.
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout the world, the difficulties of living with a past in which your grandparents were bad is a present reality for many who descent from parents involved in fascism, genocide, and other forms of violence. There is a sizeable body of literature on this trauma, but it largely excludes Oceania, with notable exceptions such as studies on memories of the Second World War (Kwai, 2017), domestic violence (Macintyre, 2019), military violence (Ballard, 2002), and torture (Hernawan, 2018).
- 2.
As a meta-term for the Pacific region, mana is arguably most accurately defined by Valerio Valeri as an “invisible substance” that is “the efficacy of a working ‘fellowship’” such as reciprocal relations with gods or ancestors (Valeri, 1985, p. 99).
- 3.
Fumeripitsj is alternatively spelled as Fumeripic, Famaripic, or Famiripitsj and is known as Fimbiriw in the villages of Ewer and Yepem (see Voorhoeve, 1986).
- 4.
Ending headhunting raids did of course not happen overnight and resurgences happened regularly into the 1960s (Van der Schoot, 1998, p. 298). To assume that at present headhunting is no longer part of Asmat life is not correct; it needs at least to be qualified. One way of doing that is by looking at the way people juxtapose Asmat pasts and futures with the linearity of Catholic time.
- 5.
- 6.
See Hermkens and Timmer (2022) for an elaboration of the idea of emblems and pacification in relation to a tension between impermanence and permanence in Asmat critiques of church and government art programmes and tourists and art collectors embodying the ills of pacification.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my Asmat interlocutors and everyone who helped me in Asmat land. The first version of this chapter was presented in the panel on Christian Temporalities during the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Vancouver on 21 November 2019. A second version was presented in the Department of Anthropology’s Research Seminar of the London School of Economics on 4 December 2020. I thank those who generously provided feedback during these two gatherings, especially Laura Bear, Yazan Doughan, Kathy Gardner, Michael W. Scott, Daniel Tranter-Santoso, and Wonu Veys. Bert Voorhoeve still has a keen interest in Asmat society, and I appreciate him sharing his insights in continuities and changes between the present I sketch and the 1960s he remembers well. Finally, appreciation goes to Sophie Chao, Roberto Costa, Chris Houston, Hans Pols, Jojada Verrips, and the editors of this volume for their remarks, guidance, and encouragement. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie SkƗodowska-Curie grant agreement No 754513 and The Aarhus University Research Foundation.
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Timmer, J. (2024). Asmat Horizons of the Past. In: Hermkens, AK., Coleman, S., Tomlinson, M. (eds) Christian Temporalities. Contemporary Anthropology of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-59683-4_9
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