Lenge Nahau i mat: articulating gendered historicities between mortuary time and archival space

This paper explores the gendered historicities of women’s political leadership in Papua New Guinea (PNG) through an ethnographic examination of the life and death of Nahau Elizabeth Kambuou Rooney, one of PNG’s pioneering female politicians. By introducing the conceptual frames of mortuary time and archival space, the paper interrogates how Indigenous and state temporalities get entangled and converge in practices of remembrance, mourning, and historical documentation. Drawing on film, ritual, and personal and public archives, it examines how Nahau’s death catalysed gendered reflections on leadership, heritage, and national memory. The interplay of grief, ritual, political discourse, and archival curation reveals how mortuary events serve as performative acts of historicity, while archival practices animate questions of cultural sovereignty and epistemological pluralism. The paper contends that a gendered perspective on the evolving historicities around Rooney’s death, situated in the intersecting spaces of kinship, state, and memory, is vital for honouring the constitutional vision of women's equal political participation in PNG.