History and Anthropology,

Vol. 16, No. 3, September 2005, pp. 261–274

Introduction: Ethnographies of
Historicity
Eric Hirsch & Charles Stewart
[email protected]
Department
EricHirsch
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History
10.1080/02757200500219289
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0275-7206
Original
Taylor
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(print)/1477-2612
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This article seeks to clarify the concept of “historicity” and how it might guide ethnographic
research. The argument is developed with particular reference to the eight studies of histo-
ricity in diverse societies ranging from the Pacific to North America contained in this special
issue. The authors contend that the standard Western concept of “history” is culturally
particular and not necessarily the best tool for cross-cultural investigations. Western history
is generally predicated on the principle of historicism: the idea that the “past” is separated
from the present. People around the world, including Western historians, recognize,
however, that the past, present and future are mutually implicated. The notion of “histo-
ricity” is intended to open out the temporal focus to a “past-present-future”. Studies of histo-
ricity address the diverse modes through which people form their presents in world societies.

Keywords: Historicity; History; Historicism; Ethnohistory; Temporality

A culture dominated by ideas of [history] can only imagine the absence of such ideas in
specific ways. (Strathern, 1988: 18; “history” has replaced “property ownership” in this
quote and the replacement signals a similar problem of analysis)

What is Historicity?
The term “historicity” rarely occurs in everyday English language usage. In a History
seminar, however, one might hear it used to raise the question of whether a given event
actually occurred in the past. If, for example, a source reports that the young George
Washington chopped down a cherry tree and then confessed to having done so, one
might question the historicity of this account—“Did it really happen, or is it just a story

Eric Hirsch is at the School of Social Sciences and Law Brunel University, UK. Charles Stewart is at the Department
of Anthropology, University College London, UK. Correspondence to: Eric Hirsch, School of Social Sciences and
Law Brunel University, Uxbridge UB8 3PH, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. Charles Stewart, Department
of Anthropology, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK. E-mail: [email protected].

ISSN 0275–7206 print/ISSN 1477–2612 online/05/030261–14 © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/02757200500219289
262 E. Hirsch & C. Stewart
made up to illustrate Washington’s honesty?” At a more general level, “historicity” may
equate to “historicality” (Geschichtlichkeit): the past of objects and persons. Everything
and everybody on earth has historicity in this sense, even if this historicity has not yet
been articulated, and even if there exists (at present) no evidence on which to base the
knowledge of this historicity.
This Introduction, and the articles that follow, depart from these standard accepta-
tions by considering that “historicity” describes a human situation in flow, where
versions of the past and future (of persons, collectives or things) assume present form
in relation to events, political needs, available cultural forms and emotional
dispositions. This usage parallels other recently introduced social science terms ending
in -ality (such as “positionality”, “materiality”, “spatiality”) to capture the reflexive,
mutual conditioning that occurs between objects and subjects. These terms call atten-
tion to the relational quality of knowledge. To put it succinctly in regard to the case at
hand: historical situations affect historical descriptions. The “historicity” of objects in
the sense described in the first paragraph is a moving target depending on the demands
of the present. This comes as no revelation to historians, who have long acknowledged
this predicament. Reconfiguring “historicity” to index the fuller qualities of this social
and personal relationship to the past and future makes it a complex social and
performative condition, rather than an objectively determinable aspect of historical
descriptions. Historicity in this sense is the manner in which persons operating under
the constraints of social ideologies make sense of the past, while anticipating the future.
Historicity is a dynamic social situation open to ethnographic investigation.
Consider, for a moment, the introduction of the term “sociality” as a parallel to
“historicity”. The analytical usefulness of “society” as a general domain or level of
human existence became problematic by the 1980s because it denoted a static morpho-
logical entity. The alternative concept of “sociality” was deployed to capture the
distinctive quality of social relations without reference to this encompassing domain
(Ingold, 1996: 57–98). Our use of “historicity” is analogous in that it draws attention
to the connections between past, present and future without the assumption that
events/time are a line between happenings “adding up” to history. Whereas “history”
isolates the past, historicity focuses on the complex temporal nexus of past-present-
future. Historicity, in our formulation, concerns the ongoing social production of
accounts of pasts and futures.
This conception of “historicity” is closely associated with the phenomenological and
hermeneutic tradition from Dilthey and Husserl through Heidegger and Gadamer.
Each, in their distinctive manner, recognized that to understand what the individual is
requires a move beyond the individual to the social and specifically the social past. In
particular, Husserl and his student Heidegger ask: “[T]o what extent and how is the
social past implicated in what the individual does and is” (Carr, 1986: 116). Of course,
anthropologists do not concern themselves with individuals per se, but with social
relations (sociality): how persons (individuals composed of unique arrangements of
relationality) come into being through relationships of various forms and scales, forg-
ing these relations anew from each “epochal” moment (Wagner, 1986). To understand
historicity in any particular ethnographic context, then, is to know the relevant ways in
 History and Anthropology 263
which (social) pasts and futures are implicated in present circumstances. Here we seek
to move away from the assumption that the past, or “change”, can be accounted for by
history alone. Rather, by attending to “ethnographies of historicity” we seek to avoid
these assumptions while raising new ways of understanding the relevance of the
connections between pasts, presents and futures in context. A focus on historicity is
thus inseparable, as we have implicitly indicated, from time and temporality. As
Gheorghi ţa Gean[abevă]r (in his article in this issue) puts it at the outset of his Heideggerian
]cetd
[li

analysis of Romanian mortuary rituals: “‘[H]istoricity’ refers to the human perception

of being-in-time.”

“History” as Western Category

The historical turn in anthropological research has focused valuable attention on the
historical dimension of societies, but anthropologists may have turned the corner too
quickly, without stopping to consider closely enough what they assumed “history” to
be. The standard acceptation of history in Western societies is as a factual representa-
tion (usually written) of the past, intentionally researched and composed according to
rational principles. Alongside—perhaps beneath—this set of suppositions lies the
naturalized assumption that “history” belongs to the domain of the past. The past is
separate from the present and this separation allows the recognition of history as an
object. History is over and done with—gone forever. Is “history” in this sense a univer-
sal category? Almost certainly not; for one thing, it barely emerged in the West two
centuries ago.
As Hayden White (1987: 1175) points out:
Before the late Enlightenment the term “history” denoted not a general domain or level of
human existence but rather a congeries of discrete chains of events, each of which had a
specific set of “stories” (historiae) that could be told about it. After the [French]
Revolution, however, “history” referred to the world of “civilization” in general and to the
processes of formation, expansion and contraction of the European nation-state.

Indeed, the often-used expression “making history” arose out of this transformation
and could not have been formulated before Napoleon (White 1987: 1175). We might,
therefore, need to rethink the aptness of attributing to contemporary (and not so
contemporary) Pacific Islanders, among other non-Westerners, this capacity of
“making history” (Kaplan, 2005; Peel, 1984; Sahlins, 2004). History, historical
consciousness and what Comaroff and Comaroff (1992) refer to as the “historical
imagination” (see Collingwood, 1961 [1946]) exercise powerful influences upon
Western—including anthropological—understandings. Why is this? And is it a good
thing? In addressing these questions, we hope to clarify why an anthropologically
informed appraisal of the notion of “historicity” is significant.
In a recent analysis that systematically addresses the “limits of history”, Constantin
Fasolt (2004: 27) suggests how the origins of the modern notion of history transformed
from a distinctive humanist pursuit, with very specific political goals, to a general qual-
ity of human existence: “History seemed no longer humanist but human.” The key
moment in his analysis is what Whitehead (1927) refers to as the “historical revolt”.
264 E. Hirsch & C. Stewart
This was a humanist contest against the power of the Papacy and the German kings—
or Holy Roman Emperors—that commenced during the sixteenth century. Fasolt
argues that the humanists sought to wrench control away from absolutist authorities’
determinations of history (the advent of Christ and his resurrection) as much as their
control of politics or science. As a consequence of this revolt, expectations of the
Christian doctrine of the Final Days gave way to unbounded conceptions of freedom,
contingency and the future (Koselleck, 1985; Arendt, 1977 [1961]). Past, present and
future were explicitly severed from one another.
The historicisms of the nineteenth century are the professional legacy of what was
originally a political and violent movement. The following quotation from the found-
ing father of professional historiography (in the West), the Prussian scholar Leopold
von Ranke (1795–1886), exemplifies the new direction taken by “history”:

You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary
world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely
tell how it really was (er will blos zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen).1

This famous last line is often cited to convey one of the main tenets of “historicism”.
Historicism of the Rankean variety displaced all competing models and became the
guiding principle of scholarly history—“real” history, in Western opinion (Iggers,
1995). According to this position, the historian must use available documentary
evidence (such as archives) to render as accurate a picture of the past as possible. The
cardinal sin, one which all aspiring historians must be disabused of (in graduate school
at the very latest), is anachronism: the retrojection of present-day assumptions into the
past. The past is to be treated as a foreign country steeped in its particular institutions,
culture and forms of thought. The term “historicism” became shorthand for the prin-
ciple that everything past can be historically explained through situation in full histor-
ical context. Western historical consciousness2 sustains this legacy as it depends for “its
meaning on some tension with a real past that really challenges the present” (Fasolt,
2004: 30). The upshot of Fasolt’s intriguing thesis is that history “comforts us with the
illusion that subjects [whether human or disciplinary] can be defined by their historical
conditions and that change over time can be explained by historical development”
(Fasolt, 2004: 231).
Yet what are the limits of this conception? In his famous debate with Sartre, found
in the final chapter of The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss advanced an argument about the
historical reality of the French Revolution. He suggested that this reality is only possible
for French men and women by living one or more myths that inform the event at any
given moment and from a specific perspective (Lévi-Strauss, 1966 [1962]: 255).
History, in short, does not transcend myth, but is written with respect to its acknowl-
edged (or unacknowledged) influence—what Mali (2003) has recently labelled
“mythistory”. History is not some superior form of knowledge, but a form of knowl-
edge with conventions and limits. The view that it has superior qualities is, however,
one that largely goes unquestioned. Hegel’s resort to history as the basis of his
“Phenomenology” presents one notable example of this assumption. Another would be
Sartre’s attempt to connect authentic existence and freedom with historical process in
 History and Anthropology 265
his Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre, 1976 [1960]). This thesis replicates the
connection of freedom and historical process forged in the historical revolt. It is
precisely Sartre’s inability to recognize that history is merely one limited way of looking
at the world that Lévi-Strauss criticized. Western “history” is particular, both culturally
and historically, and it cannot be assumed to exist as a mode of knowledge outside the
West (Lévi-Strauss, 1966 [1962]: 262; Gow, 2001: 14–15).
Nevertheless, assumptions of history and historical consciousness silently rule
supreme and apparently guide contemporary studies such as Sahlins’s (1981, 1985,
2004) works on Pacific Islanders and their myriad encounters with Europeans during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Contra Lévi-Strauss, Sahlins focuses explicitly
on historical events. This is what Lévi-Strauss (1966 [1962]: 260) characterized as the
“historical code”: history as a distinct class of dates (events) organized in a linear series;
the division between past and present taken as given. Sahlins argues, by contrast, that
events never occur outside of a system or structure; that events are happenings inter-
preted with reference to a system (Sahlins, 1985: 153; Trouillot, 1995: 26). Events thus
become explicable to the natives (or to the anthropologist) by being placed in their
appropriate context (symbolic system for the native, history for the anthropologists).
Here the anthropological use of history “out-contextualizes” indigenous contextualiz-
ing efforts (Strathern, 1990: 28). Sahlins’s (2004: 9–10) creative use of historical docu-
mentation enables him to account for historical change in the encounters between
Pacific Islanders and Europeans. What goes unquestioned is the assumption that
change over time is explicable by reference to history which privileges archival sources
and depends upon narratives thereby created (White, 1973). Events are explained by
placement in chronological relation to other events, following one another in a
progression (Strathern, 1990: 28). As Csonka (in his article in this issue) notes, quoting
Clifford (1997: 338): “It has been said that history is just an arrangement to make sure
everything doesn’t happen at once. Chronology, history’s orderly ‘flow’, must be
among its least intuitive devices.”
The foregoing overview situates this collection of cross-cultural ethnographic stud-
ies of historicity by opening the question of what the West has come to naturalize as
“history”. Historicism largely opened the way for modern history. The assumption
that the past is disconnected from the present has become a deeply embedded
assumption in the West. This reconfiguration constituted a key step towards moder-
nity itself, since “the past” defined “the modern” by opposition. At the same time, it
should be clear that historicism has not been the only approach to history (method-
ologically or theoretically) in the West. Greek and Roman historiography, followed
by Christian notions of history, preceded it and were grounded in social views of
time and human relations different from modern views (Meier, 1987: 56, Dix, 1945:
Chapter 11).
This thumbnail historicization relativizes historicism as but one approach to the
past. Currently it may be the most influential mode of approaching history, but not the
only option available. If we return to our earlier question—“Do we really know what
we mean by the term ‘history’ in the West?”—the answer is a little less certain. It
appears to be “historicism”, but there are other possibilities.
266 E. Hirsch & C. Stewart
The effects of colonization, Western-influenced primary and secondary educational
systems, and the international market in higher education have globally disseminated
the Western version of history adumbrated above. Ingjerd Hoëm (in her article in this
issue), for example, describes how migrants from the small Pacific island of Tokelau to
New Zealand have there absorbed Western concepts of history and rights. They then
drew upon these to stage a dramatic presentation aimed at staking social and property
claims for themselves on Tokelau. This performance by young and middle-aged
Tokelauans challenged traditional ideas about historical rights to land, which privilege
the word of elders in determining the truth of any particular claim. In the ensuing clash
between Western and non-Western modes of history, claims to individual freedom,
rights and rational logic squared off against collective solidarity, hierarchy and submis-
sion to ancestral authority. The Western formulation did not convince anyone on
Tokelau.
The distribution of the Western notion of history is actually far from uniform even
in the heartland of the West. On the basis of studies in Britain, Canada and the United
States, Pamela Klassen and Helen Cornish show (in their articles in this issue) that
pagans and eclectic Anglicans accept versions of the past based on spiritual or otherwise
personal intuitions. Klassen clearly explicates this theology of energy and how it may
guide historicizations. Of course, standard Western historiography rejects this mode of
historical authentication, and professional historians have engaged directly with
contemporary pagans to dismiss claims that present-day witches’ Sabbaths represent a
vital continuation from early modern times (see Cornish’s article in this issue).
Whether in the Pacific or the North Atlantic, changing present conditions and future
aspirations condition the emergence of new modes of accessing and representing this
past. The framework of historicity encompasses and directs attention to these variables.
The past may be assessed through states of trance as Lambek (2002) and Makris
(2000) have shown, and via spontaneous, or ritually induced, dreams (Stewart, 2003,
2005). Representations of the past may be danced (McCall, 2000), theatrically staged
(Hoëm, in this issue), or performed in choreographed dramatic performances (song
and dance) as among the Banabans on Fiji described by Hermann (in this issue). One
by one the criteria constitutive of standard Western history (presented in the opening
paragraph of this section) fall by the wayside: no directed research, no particular inten-
tion to produce a history, no writing, no narrative and no structured (linear, chrono-
logical) organization. The comparative ethnography of this variety of historicizing
modes and forms further places the precepts of Western history into relative context.
Can a dream, a song, a dramatic performance, a ritual of spirit possession or the
perception of a landscape usefully be classified as “histories”? The answer must be “yes”
if the ethnographer can make a convincing circumstantial case that the particular
community or individual is, indeed, contemplating the past and producing knowledge
about it through these idioms. It is not enough, however, to show that the genre of
representation itself has a history; to demonstrate, for example, that particular songs
belong to an age-old tradition, or that spirit possession was practiced in the past.
Everything is historical in the sense that it has a potentially recoverable past. This
special issue is not a platform for omniscient ethnographers to historicize selected
 History and Anthropology 267
practices. The ethnographers are, rather, attempting to identify unforeseen modes and
practices through which a community may engage with and produce knowledge about
its pasts while anticipating its futures.

Have We Been Here Before?

The field of ethnohistory has long assumed that people have their own histories, and
that these are based on local, communal orientations towards the past according to
social ideas and assumptions whether political, aesthetic, religious or some amalgam-
ation of these possibilities and more. In short, history is a culturally constructed
practice. Ethnohistorians have, however, spent more time collecting or piecing
together substantive historical narratives and presenting them according to a Western
conception of history than they have analyzing local historicities. The reasons for this
are bound up with the original formation and mission of this subdiscipline of
Anthropology and/or History, which arose after the 1946 passage of the Indian Claims
Commission Act that legislated how Native Americans could lay claim to ancestral
lands (Cohn, 1968). Ethnohistorians compiled histories of people otherwise “without
history”, at least according to a Western model that could be debated in court
(Sturtevant, 1966: 9). This meant that although highly sympathetic to indigenous
ideologies of the past, ethnohistorians could not always commit themselves to repre-
senting them exclusively. Their sense of responsibility as advocates meant that they
generally adduced further data from sources to which the people in question did not
have access, and they had to downplay or edit out viewpoints they considered egre-
giously incorrect, or which would not be in the a group’s best interests to air in a court
case. Much ethnohistory was, therefore, written from an outsider’s point of view.3 As
Krech (1991: 353) puts it: “They [ethnohistorians] often display sensitivity to native
culture and society, but seldom to native perspective.” Yvon Csonka (in this issue)
documents this neglect of indigenous “regimes of historicity” in earlier studies of Inuit
peoples. His study and the recent works he cites represent current attempts to recover
local historicities in their own terms, as well as to give an account of how these histo-
ricities have changed under colonialism and post-colonialism. The current collection
develops precisely such efforts to focus on how a people perceive their past-present-
future condition instead of trying to produce a Western-style history “of” a people.
The term “ethnohistory” is, in any case, unfortunate since it focuses attention on a
set of others (ethnics or ethnê), presumably small scale, (historically) non-literate soci-
eties (Krech, 1991: 364). In principle, Western history can and should be brought into
the same frame of analysis. All history is ethnohistory since it is composed according to
cultural principles. The impetus behind this collection of articles is to transcend any
implicit assumption that “our” way of doing history is the standard against which other
versions are “ethno”. An anthropological account of standard Western historiography
would have to identify Rankean historicism as a cultural particularity.
Has mainstream anthropology come any closer to tackling the issue of historicities?
At the beginning of the historical turn in Anthropology, influential statements from
anthropologists such as Evans-Pritchard (1962 [1950]) and Lévi-Strauss (1963 [1949])
268 E. Hirsch & C. Stewart
pointed out the common missions of the two disciplines.4 They were cast as mere
variations of each other: one studied societies separated in time, the other contempo-
rary societies separated by space. As Evans-Pritchard (1962 [1950]: 25–26) put it,
“social anthropology is a kind of historiography”, differing only in technique, emphasis
and perspective, but not in “method and aim”. Yet perhaps he conflated the two disci-
plines too fully in his eagerness to wage polemic against Malinowski’s functionalism
and Radcliffe-Brown’s natural scientism. These differences of “emphasis” and
“perspective” could be quite significant as Evans-Pritchard himself later acknowledged.
Anthropologists tend to be more interested in the “present present or the past present”,
while historians cherished the diachronic sweep (and, we might add, the past past).
“Historians write history, as it were, forwards and we would tend to write it backwards”
(Evans-Pritchard, 1962 [1961]: 60).
For ethnographers of contemporary societies, history is not solely of interest for
understanding how the past has given rise to present forms, or for examining diachro-
nic transformations in the structure of a society. Ethnographers are also interested in
the issue of the “social past” (Schapera, 1962: 152)—namely, the political uses to which
versions of the past (histories) may be put, the communicative forms these histories
may take and the social occasions on which they are disseminated within any particular
community. Histories thus may be studied as another form of expressive culture along-
side myth and ritual for what they might reveal about how a particular people inhabit
their world. The ethnographic study of history as it is realized in Western societies or
elsewhere is not concerned with objectivity, accuracy and factuality in local accounts of
the past, but rather with recovering all of the social and cultural assumptions with
which a people imbue these accounts. In short, the ethnographer investigates social
ideologies of history/the past and substantive representations of the past as cultural
forms to be understood in relation to the social life of the community.
Philosophers of history do acknowledge that even the most expert academic histories
cannot avoid a presentist bias. All history is contemporary history, in Croce’s opinion;
or written with the future in mind, according to E.H. Carr (1986 [1961]: 102); while for
Collingwood (1939: 114, cited in Evans-Pritchard, 1962 [1961]), history involved a
suspension of the past in the medium of present thought and thus belonged to the
present yet was separated from it. These positions, which most professional historians
implicitly accept, reveal an essential tension in the practice of Western historiography.
The historian cannot remove the blinkers of the present even as she or he strives to
realize the Rankean vision of seeing the past exactly as it was. This is a fundamental
conundrum for historicism. Rather then trying to overcome this problem, the applica-
tion of the concept of “historicity” recognizes the situation where past, present and
future are fused as unavoidable. The Inuit, for example, embrace presentism; it is not a
problematic or contradictory way of looking at the past (Csonka, in this issue).
Historicism, on the other hand, represents a principled reaction to this condition of
historicity; it asserts that a disjunction between past and present can be effected.
For contemporary anthropological historians and ethnohistorians, “historicity” has
heretofore been used as a synonym for “ideologies of history”: culturally particular
assumptions of how the past is ordered and that guide its interpretation and
 History and Anthropology 269
representation. Neil Whitehead (2003: xi), for example, has defined “historicities” as
“the cultural proclivities that lead to certain kinds of historical consciousness within
which such histories are meaningful”. Or, in Sahlins’s (1985: x) pithy formulation:
“Other cultures, other historicities.” Surely we must lift the lid yet further on the social
and individual operation of historicities. As the quote from Sahlins suggests, historicity
is culturally variable, and the same thing has been extensively argued for time and
temporality. How are these connected?

What Time is it Now? Toward Ethnographies of Historicity

Time, as anthropologists (among others) have noted, has a diffuse, continually ramify-
ing character. Much recent attention has been devoted to issues of “temporalization”:
time as symbolic process, recurrently manifested in everyday forms of conduct and
power relations (Munn, 1992, Gell, 1992, Greenhouse, 1996). Munn (1992: 115) has
argued through numerous ethnographic illustrations that “the past-present-future”
relation is intrinsic to all temporalizations irrespective of focus, inasmuch as people
operate in a present that is always infused, and that they are infusing, with pasts and
futures. Time reckoning is intrinsic to the way people operate in the present. There is
both the right and wrong time to do something that time reckoning or measurement
attends to with respect to the passage of time (Gell, 1992: 217; Munn, 1992: 105).
History, like clocks, calendars and other measurements, is a kind of time-reckoning
device—a way of attending to events.
The Ancient Greek word for this kind of time was “kairos”, which meant a seasonal
or appropriate time, as opposed to “khronos”, chronological time. Eleni Papagaroufali’s
study (in this issue) of changing views of the past in a Greek town illustrates the
“kairotic” aspect of historicity.5 The descendants of Asia Minor refugees did not pay
much attention to their past until their town began to explore the possibility of twin-
ning with the Turkish town their forebears had fled in 1922. At about the same time,
the older generation began to die off. The younger generations had, in fact, absorbed
considerable knowledge about their refugee past, but only now did emotions such as
nostalgia activate this information as historically meaningful. Visits to Turkey and the
visits of Turks to Greece further fed the reconfiguration of self, identity, the past and
expectations of the future. Papagaroufali thus conveys how developments in the
present, some of them inevitable turns of the life cycle, may stimulate a distinctive
historicity.
The fusion of past, present and future at issue in such cases does not always occur
consciously or voluntarily. Indeed, the Greek inhabitants of Fokaeis could not fully
comprehend what was happening to them or where it would lead. Geană’s study (in
ab[ve]r

this issue) of ancestor cult rituals in Romania also addresses the death of the older
generation, but in more general terms. He adopts Heidegger’s view that being is
fundamentally orientated towards the future, towards the moment of death, and it is
the contemplation of this end that energizes the commitment to “be” in the present.
Papagaroufali’s case study confirms this while also showing how renewing the present
involves re-conceptualizing the past. Geană does not contend that Romanians are
ab[ev]r
270 E. Hirsch & C. Stewart
consciously aware of the logic of their historicity. They do not intellectually analyze the
rituals; rather, they represent their existential temporality to themselves through
symbols such as the tree and the clay pot that evoke, however subliminally, synthetic
images of past, present and future. These rituals thus form a background of historicity
upon which everyday life is lived. Historicity in both the Romanian and Greek cases
emerges as an inevitable by-product of the kairoi of human existence.
Attention to the measurement of time in all its varied modes “comes from our over-
whelming need to act in a timely manner, in order to realize our desires” (Gell, 1992:
173). Timeliness depends on the way beliefs about events are entertained (e.g., the
enactment of a religious rite or the calling of an election) and effort needs to be devoted
to ascertaining that “now” is that time. Yet there is another sense in which “now” is
evoked and this is connected with, but different from, time reckoning. Bergson refers
to this as “duration”, while Husserl captures this in his model of internal time
consciousness: the horizons of “protentions” and “retentions” of a temporally
extended present (Gell, 1992: 221–228, 317–318). Wagner (1986: 81–95) has elabo-
rated this notion in a specifically anthropological manner. This “presence of time” (in
contrast to its passage that we measure) is what he calls “epoch”. It is the manner in
which social-event processes achieve a resolution in their meaning within the contours
of the “now” disclosed—that is, the image (and illusion) of simultaneity. This is the
“time” disclosed in dreams, myths, rituals—such as the Romanian mortuary practices
mentioned above—kin relations and other stylized forms that render “the present”
apparent or obvious. The conventional use of the concept of “epoch” in history can be
understood in a similar sense: it is an “organic” time,

for the events occurring within it have a definitive and nonarbitrary—in fact, an organic
or constitutive—relationship to the sequence as a whole, as in the plot of a myth. … [I]ts
events are in themselves relations, each one subsuming and radically transforming what
has gone before. (Wagner, 1986: 81).

The epoch of the French Revolution as narrated in Schama’s (1989) Citizens is, in this
respect, comparable to the “epoch” of the “The Fetching of Water” dance-theatre piece
described by Hermann (in this issue): both disclose the presence of time, “now”, in
unique ways.
Whereas people cannot avoid their orientation towards the future and in this sense
the past is always future-orientated, epoch, by contrast, is past and future that exist in
a simultaneous manner. Epochs can be of varying duration, whether a dance-theatre
performance or a “long, historical” period. Each is realized through distinct actions,
imagery and representations, and each render the present “obvious” in unique ways.
However, unlike personal or “private” futures that just “are” in their diverse, fragmen-
tary ways, the ways epochs are realized have a possible or potential unity or whole.
Elfriede Hermann’s study (in this issue) of Banabans re-settled in Fiji captures the
potential unity of epoch they have constructed to make sense of their current political
predicament. This is displayed through an organically linked series of emotional states
from their past “happiness” on Banaba to their current “anger” on Rabi Island (where
they were re-located) and the annexation of Banaba by supposedly “ethnically” similar
 History and Anthropology 271
Kiribati peoples. Although these islanders draw on the idiom of historical periods or
“chapters” to characterize this state of affairs, what they especially render evident
through their dramatic performances is a distinct ethnic identity as it was on Banaba
and as they anticipate it will be again in the future. These Islanders sustain a
commitment to actualize the possibilities they know to exist, but have not yet been
able—positively prevented, in their view—to bring about.
It is the local commitment to the realization of these possible forms that
ethnographies of historicity describe. In this sense, we might say that historicity is the
commitment to the possibilities that already are, but are present only as the “not yet”
of the actual—the manner in which people imagine they reproduce the future, where
past and future are simultaneously connected (c.f. Chakrabarty, 2000: 205). Historicity
in this anthropological or ethnographic sense is a concomitant of sociality: social
relations are implicated in myriad epochal moments (“nows”). The kind of historicity
Hermann describes for these Pacific denizens is different from what is conventional
in modern Western societies, where, as we have discussed above, historicism domi-
nates (Chakrabarty, 2000: 22–23). The temporal outlook associated with this latter
kind of historicity is one in which the future is potentially open, unknown and which
thus leads to a predisposition towards personal “creativity”. The saying that “you
cannot tell where you are going unless you know where you are coming from” (Fasolt,
2004: ix) is a poignant expression of the continual expansion and proliferation of the
creation of (historical) epochs—professional and popular (Samuel, 1994). These
appear as much in narrative as in material forms (Lowenthal, 1985).
It is not a coincidence, then, that the Western understanding of epoch is one where
the prevalent meaning is historical. In fact, it is a virtually uncontested feature that is
intrinsic to the understanding and writing of history:

The question is not … whether history should be periodized; to ask the question is as
tautological as to ask whether water should be wet. The problem is rather what are the
criteria, if any, by which one epoch is distinguished from another. (Leff, 1969: 130)

Historical epochs are, of course, not the only epochs (“nows”) by which Western
temporality is socially and personally lived. From birth to death there are countless
dreams, rites, public and domestic institutions through which an organic time is recur-
rently made (as the cases of Cornish, Geană , Klassen and Papagaroufali in this issue all
ab[ev]r

differently illustrate). The way such different kinds of epochs overlap, intersect and
transform—never adding up to a “whole”—is what contributes to the view of Western
societies as inherently “complex”, but this does not mean that Western historicity is
any more “rational” than other historicities.
What, by contrast, is distinctive of many of the ethnographies collected here, those
from outside this Western realm, is how the future has a quite different cast. Instead of
a future geared to continual change, we find futures that are known and anticipated,
but their achievement is uncertain and often contested (see Biersack, 1991). Here we
find a multiplicity of epochs such as kinship and marriage exchanges, death rites and
nowadays different versions of Christian ritual. However, there is also a sense in which
these are viewed explicitly or implicitly as all versions of a singular epochal form:
272 E. Hirsch & C. Stewart
ancestors, mythical creator, a “tradition” or “custom”. De Lannoy’s account (in this
issue) of Malakula Christian grave-building provides an illustration. He describes how
grave-building in this mode has transformed in tandem with Malakulan ideas of their
own Christianity and that of their ancestors. During early Christian conversion on the
island, the pre-Christian period was referred to as “darkness”, while nowadays early
pagan converts are likened to Biblical patriarchs and similar lengthy life spans are
inscribed on regenerated tombstones. The significance attributed to grave-building
ceremonies in terms of time and resources, de Lannoy suggests, connects this “new”
Christian convention to the past secondary burials that were an aspect of the “grade
societies” performed in the region. Implicitly, past “pagan” rites and present Christian
rites articulate a singular ancestral form: the present permanence of concrete can be
understood as analogous to the skulls of high ranked men in the past. Malakulan
historicity makes evident the powerful presence of ancestors, whether in pagan or
Christian form.
The contrast we are drawing between a historicist and ahistoricist historicity is not
meant to essentialize Westerners or its “others”. Rather as the quote at the beginning
of this discussion emphasizes: “[a] culture dominated by ideas of [history] can only
imagine the absence of such ideas in specific ways” (Strathern, 1988: 18). We cannot
assume that we know what ethnographies of historicity will reveal. What we do know
is that it cannot be assumed that these are some versions of the historicity that we
conventionally know and often take for granted. The present collection aims to go
beyond general cultural relativist assertions to offer more purchase and potential meth-
odological traction on historicity. The way forward is through the mutual work of
conceptual clarification and critique, and the ethnographic study of particular cases.

Notes
[1] These lines appeared in his first book, History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, 1494–1514
1

(1824); cited here as quoted in Stern (2000).

[2] This is potentially a confusing term since it can mean (a) awareness of a concept of “history”,
2

such as the Rankean historicist distinction of the past as opposed to the present; or (b) the
awareness of particular historical information and narratives, such as knowing the history of a
nation. Here we are using “historical consciousness” in sense (a).
[3] With notable exceptions such as Rosaldo (1980) and Price (1983).
3

[4] Lévi-Strauss (1963[1949]: 23): “The famous statement by Marx, ‘Men make their own history
4

…’, justifies first, history, and second, anthropology. At the same time, it shows that the two
approaches are inseparable.”
[5] Thanks to Murray Wax for his discussion of kairos (personal communication).
5

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