TY - JOUR
T1 - Oceanic historicities
AU - Ballard, Chris
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - "We need a word that includes memory but embraces all the other ways of knowing a past," wrote Greg Dening, in advocating the notion of a "poetic for histories": culturally specific forms of knowledge of the past that embrace "reminiscence, gossip, anecdote, rumour, parable, report, tradition, myth... saga, legend, epic, ballad, folklore, annal, chronicle" (1991, 348-349). To this list we might want to add a range of other performative and sensory modes of engaging-con-sciously or unconsciously-with the past, including dancing, gardening, carving, smell, sound, and touch. Drawing on a large but diffuse body of global literature, and illustrating my argument with material from local historians, I consider how we might set about describing these historicities, or cultural logics of temporal process, in an Oceanic setting: how are they expressed, how might we come to understand them, and how are they transformed over time and through encounter with other historicities?.
AB - "We need a word that includes memory but embraces all the other ways of knowing a past," wrote Greg Dening, in advocating the notion of a "poetic for histories": culturally specific forms of knowledge of the past that embrace "reminiscence, gossip, anecdote, rumour, parable, report, tradition, myth... saga, legend, epic, ballad, folklore, annal, chronicle" (1991, 348-349). To this list we might want to add a range of other performative and sensory modes of engaging-con-sciously or unconsciously-with the past, including dancing, gardening, carving, smell, sound, and touch. Drawing on a large but diffuse body of global literature, and illustrating my argument with material from local historians, I consider how we might set about describing these historicities, or cultural logics of temporal process, in an Oceanic setting: how are they expressed, how might we come to understand them, and how are they transformed over time and through encounter with other historicities?.
KW - Historical consciousness
KW - Historicities
KW - History
KW - Oceania
KW - Pacific
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84896267991&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1353/cp.2014.0009
DO - 10.1353/cp.2014.0009
M3 - Article
SN - 1043-898X
VL - 26
SP - 96
EP - 124
JO - Contemporary Pacific
JF - Contemporary Pacific
IS - 1
ER -