Seeing and holding time: Karawari perceptions of temporalities,calendars and clocks

Introduction

Going back in history to medieval times Lewis Mumford wrote: ‘The application of quantitative methods of thought to the study of nature had its first manifestation in the regular measurement of time’, and the new conception of time, sustained by desire for order and power, found a fertile field in the routine of the monastic life in the West (Mumford, 1963 [1934]: 12–13). Mumford maintained that clock was the key-machine of the modern industrial age. ‘Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing. As this took place, Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions’ (Mumford, 1963 [1934]: 14). Eternity found its place in the Christian concept of Heaven. The religious and later secular life in general became totally reorganized, and people began to perceive time through technology. Time was ever more quantified and the perception of it moved from hours to minutes, seconds and further still to what Ihde (2010: 66) calls micro-features of time (following the invention of the digital clock).

Technological inventions, however, were not the sole reason for the changes in the old temporal framework. In the fourteenth century, the need to adjust to economic development and the conditions of urban labour, as well as the introduction of quantitative elements into administrative structures, went hand in hand with time-measurement changes (Le Goff, 1980: 44; see also Thompson, 1967). Thus, ‘instead of a time linked to events, which made itself felt only episodically and sporadically, there arose a regular, normal time’ (Le Goff, 1980: 48). This ‘normal time’ was clock-time, a time measured by the 60-min hour, which replaced the time measured by days. This replacement, however, was not instant and absolute, although it quickly became an instrument of domination and a symbol of power. Time associated with seasonal cycles, agrarian activities and religious practices continued to be followed, especially by those who were not caught in the new labour practices in urban environments. Moreover, as Maurice Halbwachs argued, ‘a unifying time could not be imposed on all groups simultaneously’ and ‘there were as many collective notions of time in a society as there were separate groups’ (Le Goff, 1980: 38).

Intricacies of the clock-time characteristic of industrial labour practices, which had slowly ordered the world in the West and the East in a certain way, have not at all been an issue for the rural Papua New Guineans at any one point in their history. In the remote areas of Papua New Guinea the technologically mediated perception of time, and calculative activities associated with it, have neither merged with culture nor have they become embodied as self-evident and unquestioned part of people's daily lives. There was no use, reflection, and management of clock-time either. On the other hand, Christian calendar with its focus on annual events and ritualized practices did not import a different idea and classification of seasons but enabled people to participate in their own projects imbued with expectations for a radically different future.

Ambonwari

Ambonwari village in East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea has never been homogenous. Its clans, with different ancestors speaking different languages and coming from different places of origin, have always had their own specific historicities (Telban, 1998a: 68–80; see Ballard, 2014). Following their relational mode of existence, and general proneness to adopt both individuals and groups, they exchanged their ways into a shared existence. The paths, places and episodes of arrival of their first ancestors formed the basis for a template of their social organization to this day. The beginning of their coexistence, the beginning of their common temporality, became part of cosmogony and was regularly recreated in male initiation and female first menstruation rituals (Telban, 1997a, 1998a, 2008, 2014a). This ‘institutionalized’ coexistence was not limited to the village. Since mythical times, and later through past and present kin relations, marriages and other alliances, the Ambonwari became connected to other Karawari-speaking villages as well as those who spoke other languages. ¹ Dramatic episodes of their encounters continue to be recollected in myths, legends and songs. Recalling a particular past depends upon the place where one is (or talks about) and the people present. Such a world does not evolve according to a temporal sequence; it is not linear history. Temporality is rather a fragmentation of landscape into locations with names (which are simultaneously the names of spirits of land and water), to which personal names, belonging to individual clans, together with all their relationships are attached (for a recent study about the importance of names among the Iatmul, see Moutu, 2013).

The Ambonwari expanded their communication with, and knowledge about, the external world in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the northern part of Papua New Guinea was a German colony up until the beginning of First World War, and the Sepik River was called Kaiserin Augusta Fluss. Memories of this era are vague and there are no remembered episodes marking the arrival or departure of the Germans. During my initial fieldwork between 1990 and 1992 some villagers remembered the 1930s under the Australian administration, when the first copra plantation workers were recruited throughout the Sepik River region. Half a dozen Ambonwari men were among them. They were taken to Rabaul and returned to the village with Tok Pisin, salt, clothes and tools made of steel. In the 1940s, the Japanese made a camp in the vicinity of the village, and some Ambonwari men were enlisted as their servants while the others fled into the swamp. Again, only a few stories about the military behaviour of the Japanese and the Japanese names given to certain Ambonwari individuals were remembered in the 1990s. None of these contacts, however, is of a paramount importance to present day Ambonwari life-world. In the 1950s, the village was baptized by a Roman Catholic bishop and the villagers built their first church (Telban, 1997b: 25–26). The event of baptism is the only one of the above-mentioned encounters that found its way into the verses of one of their customary all-night songs. The event is recognized as the ‘official’ beginning of the Catholic Church in Ambonwari. Not a single missionary, a local priest, or an expatriate ever stayed in the village. However, as this article will show, the Christian calendar neatly fitted Ambonwari's own perception and expression of their projective temporality, with periods demarcated by ritual practices and events. The call for a radical change of their customary life came with the Catholic charismatic movement in December 1994, a few months after the last male initiation ritual had taken place in the village.

Over the course of the last decade, the perception of and attitude towards the past and future has changed substantially due to changes in religious practices (the Catholic charismatic movement abolished many customary practices), education (the introduction of an Elementary School in 2001) and the engagement with business (the sudden upsurge of rubber production in 2011). The enthusiasm of some for these changes was opposed by the reluctance of others. The opposition, driven by resentment, jealousy, greed or simply wounded vanity often resulted in bringing an end to something that people wanted to do or get (e.g. starting a village store or watching videos on a DVD player). This would include some main institutions such as the Health Centre and Primary School. The village Aid Post, for example, did not operate for over 20 years after the Aid Post Orderly (APO), lured by the urban life and wanting to avoid his debts in the village, left for the towns of Angoram and Wewak. He had been receiving a salary without doing any work in the village. When he died in 2012, the Aid Post was restored by the appointment of another trained APO from the village. The work of primary school has often been interrupted because of serious disputes between neighbouring villages. The last such incident came about in 2009. After two Ambonwari men killed a man from the neighbouring village of Imanmeri, the primary school, attended by children from both villages, was closed. It was not until late 2012 that the school was reopened.

During my last fieldwork in Ambonwari in 2011, I asked some men who visited the house, in which I stayed, during supper time, what in their opinion was the main difference between them and Europeans. Although they had already eaten in their own houses we immediately offered them plates of food. While dipping their fingers with gusto into a recently prepared sago pudding they wittily replied in Tok Pisin: ‘You, the Whites, eat on time. We, the Blacks, eat anytime!’ In short, it is not a schedule based on clock-time which determines when Ambonwari people will eat, but rather it is the food which determines when to eat. When there is a lot of food people will eat more often and they will give it away to others. While in the urban environments of Papua New Guinea, school, work and certain daily practices have become organized according to a time-schedule, in the remote village context they have not. Time-reckoning in terms of hours, minutes or seconds has never entered the daily life of Ambonwari villagers and other small-scale societies around them. Even so, there has been a primary school operating intermittently in the vicinity since 1978 and the majority of present day villagers have completed between three and six years of education. Elementary school with one preparatory class and two classes of primary school began in the village in 2001. Regardless of both schools, the clock-time, so characteristic of Western organization of work and education in particular (Adam, 1995: 65), has not had any influential role in a Papua New Guinean village. Karawari people easily ‘recognize a multiplicity of times in each moment of interaction and learning’ (Adam, 1995: 65). If Western society has ‘lost touch with other rhythms and with the multiple times of our existence’ (Adam, 1994: 514), this is not the case with the Karawari. The clock-time was made extremely flexible in both schools and the only influence outside them was when timing soccer games. On the other hand, Christian calendar achieved ‘the sociological function… of determining behaviour by “regulating” it, i.e. providing a set of rules for the timing of activities to be followed by all and sundry’ (Gell, 1992: 294).

Egalitarian temporality

During my first 18 months fieldwork in Ambonwari between 1990 and 1992 wristwatches were in great demand. However, watches were for the most part not used for telling time. They were not unlike the pens and notebooks that would be carried around by illiterate men during village meetings: these things, epitomizing literacy, played their part in not simply mimicking or reflecting the office life and social status of employees in the town of Wewak but were trying to generate them in the village context. The purpose of these inductive acts was primarily to elicit and engender the structure and order associated with these offices and by doing so, connect village to town and establish a relationship between them. All qualitative characteristics and material benefits that are seen to flow from such a relationship were expected to reach the village. At the same time, these practices also symbolized the apparent power of numbering and writing and were performed in order to ‘cut into’ their old ways of life and initiate an exchange of the old ways of life for the new ones with the goods and services otherwise inaccessible to the Ambonwari.

In 1982 Michael French Smith wrote that people in Kragur village on Kairiru Island did not get attracted to increasing productivity or temporal efficiency. They were associated with new forms of authority. People rather continued to follow ‘the unhurried time-and-motion patterns’ of their customary labour processes (Smith, 1982: 504). He went on to say that the villagers ‘frequently resist the temporal demands of external institutions’ – government, schools, the Catholic mission – ‘and the attempts of persons of authority within the village to institute a new temporal discipline’ (Smith, 1982: 504). The same attitude persists in the Karawari region of East Sepik Province regardless of all the changes I have observed over the last 24 years. The new generations oppose authority even more. Rejection of authority goes hand in hand with what I would call egalitarian temporality. This is a form of relational temporality which privileges a blend of oral, visual and sensory experiences, all of which are related to ‘truth’ and embodied in imɨnggan kay ‘way of the village’ and in kay ‘way, habit’ and wambung ‘insideneness, understanding’ of every Ambonwari person (Telban, 1998a). ²

Egalitarianism among the Sepik River societies does not mean that relationships between individuals and groups are primarily peaceful and unproblematic. While they ‘place an enormous emphasis on creating and maintaining communal consensus’ (Graeber, 2004: 25), people's and group's roles and actions are often contested. What generates egalitarian temporality is therefore both the participation of different beings (people, spirits of the dead, bush spirits; i.e. the visible and invisible realms of the world) in a continuous struggle for prestige and influence over others (see Forge, 1970: 258, 270) and their attempts to reach a temporary consensus that would create a unifying period. ³ A common set of social and moral values seem to be driven by people's continuous demand for coevalness, when the most aggressive, knowledgeable and well articulated individuals and groups have to share their achievements and goods if they do not want to be ‘cut’, that is, killed by spirits or sorcery, their gardens or business destroyed, their trees and palms cut down, their children becoming sick, and their goods stolen. In other words, people have to avoid any denial of coevalness (Fabian, 1983: 31). This kind of ‘generosity’ among the consociates (people, spirits of the dead, spirits of the land, God) that embraces both demand for and pleasure of sharing provides a balance to the well recognized resentment and spite of individuals and groups (see Telban, 1993). In other words, people's daily life is highly competitive, allowing individuals and groups to stand out only by compensating generously for their status: securing roles to others and providing goods for others. Therefore, as it will become clear throughout the article, the Sepik temporalities are primarily agentive and organized around projects – periods – rather than around some objectified notion of time.

Egalitarian temporality suppresses certain events of the past and reformulates others. One should not be surprised to find that people have problems recalling the year of birth, marriage or any other event from the past. They do, however, remember the event of a birth just as they remember the event of a marriage. These events create chronology only on the level of before and after the event. When a sequence of events is dealt with in a narrative – as it is the case in the myths of origin – the chronology becomes attached to the movements in space, though still in terms of before and after. Neither temporality nor related historicities are associated with time-reckoning, counting and numbers. Time-reckoning with numbers and efforts to control time would assert hierarchic power (see Schieffelin, 2002: S7) and have a strong impact on all other temporalities. This would be a sensitive issue. In certain circumstances, when people struggle for prestige or compete for resources, different episodes from the past are evoked, merged together, modified, criticized or even invented. This way they do become part of the living present, regardless of their actual sequence in the temporal order of history.

The Ambonwari and their periods

In my previous work on Ambonwari cosmology and temporality (Telban, 1998a, 2001, 2013), I emphasized the importance of the concept of period, pɨsɨnɨm. Pɨsɨnɨm ‘period of limited duration’ as a concept imbued with temporality does not stand alone but always appears in a noun phrase, in combination with some other term which ‘makes’ the period. For example, there can be ayngɨndɨ pɨsɨnɨm ‘time of departure’ (lit. ‘period of jumping into canoe’), sunggwin pɨsɨnɨm ‘period of moon,’ or when somebody simply needs more time to complete a task, pɨsɨnɨm aprɨma ‘woman who gets time’. The world is perceived in its concrete, visible and tangible, mode of existence. Such a view corresponds well with the general ‘logic’ of Sepik cultures where one constantly witnesses the precedence of visual and kinaesthetic imagery in people's thought and memory (Bateson, 1958: 226; Telban and Vávrová 2014; Vávrová, 2014). Thus a period, the boundaries of which determine the beginning and end of a certain happening, is not some external dimension of people's lives which is then internalized, but is already part of their emplaced and embodied relationships and doings (Telban, 1998a: 51). In other words, people are actively engaged in what is going on in their environment and society, including matters associated with their dead (i.e. the spirits). Seasons, defined by flowering or dryness of grass, wild sugar cane and other plants, and by rising and falling water in the surrounding creeks, are only few examples of periods lived by the people. Transition between them is not automatic or ‘natural’ but needs to be influenced also by human agency and action. I say also because other beings (spirits, animals, and plants) have agency too and equally act upon the world. Thus, a severe storm followed by some days of rain can be attributed to the spirits reacting to misdeeds of humans, or to the intentional activity of villagers who, for example, need high water to be able to transport their rafts of rubber downriver. This can be done by leaving an unprocessed sago palm in the forest or by blocking a small creek with tree trunks and putting a carving of a bush spirit with betel nuts and money next to the creek. Communicating with the spirits in such a concrete manner makes them act in a desired way. Even children participate in activities which influence the transitions in the environment from one period to another. The game of spinning tops is played by boys at the end of the dry season with intention to facilitate a transition to the wet season. Through the competitive spirit and rivalry between two teams representing two seasons, kangbɨn pɨsɨnɨm ‘dry season’ and maraymɨn pɨsɨnɨm ‘wet season’, the boys (but not girls) generate lightning, which brings rain and finally ends the dry season. Conversely, cat's cradle, which is played by both boys and girls at the start of the wet season, is believed to make wild sugar cane and other plants blossom (Telban, 2007). In the same way as a man tries to stop rain with a small rite, i.e. with smoked sago grubs wrapped in a dry sago pancake and talking to the spirits (Telban, 1998a: 197), children ‘accelerate’ the budding, blossoming and growth of plants in their intimate environment by making various figures with a string. Harrison (1982) reported how the same two practices, the game of spinning tops and cat's cradle, are played at different stages of yam-growing among the Manambu. In the case of the latter game, for example, he wrote about ‘kinaesthetic identification with the growing yams, the meshing of the string suggesting the tangling together of the yam-vines as they accumulate on the poles’ (Harrison, 1982: 149). In Ambonwari, sometimes people are unable to influence their environment and other beings (whether people, spirits, animals or plants) because of their wrongdoings, and are punished by unpleasant periods, such as kambian pɨsɨnɨm ‘time of hunger’, karisikɨnbɨn pɨsɨnɨm ‘time of hardship’ and isakrarkɨr pɨsɨnɨm ‘time of fighting’. These periods, just like seasons, are not defined by any kind of measured time, i.e. timing or time-frames, but by hunger, hardship and struggles, respectively. Thus a period is defined by its visible and tangible happening. It is the repetition of people's daily activities, of a distinctive way of life, which defines a period as a temporal whole. And it is an episode with a strong impact – usually in a shockingly destructive or ritually constructive form – which separates one period from another. For example, a year-long mourning period ends with a hair-cutting ceremony when the bond between the living and the dead has also been cut. From that moment on the deceased person can join the realm of the dead, while his or her relatives can re-join the realm of the living.

To better understand how temporality of periods can be visualized let me present an alternative meaning of pɨsɨnɨm. Pɨsɨnɨm as an independent word refers to a piece of a snake/python or eel which has been chopped up along its length. Pieces with head or tail are not called pɨsɨnɨm but kanapang ‘head’ and sambɨk ‘tail’, respectively. A snake as a whole can be equated with both a place and its spirit. An eel as a whole can be equated with both a creek and its spirit. With individual names the places, creeks and their spirits become specified in the landscape in relation to their possessors (called ‘fathers’ of the land, creek or spirit).

If wakɨn ‘snake’ or warɨpa ‘eel’ is substituted for temporality, we can see that every cut refers to an episode and every piece, with a cut on both sides, to a period. The pieces of snake, just like periods, are then mixed up or placed into certain juxtaposition, losing the sequential connection between them. Because there is not just one snake/place or eel/creek, there is also not a single temporality. ⁴ Cuts or episodes are associated with particular named places and creeks which are identified with particular lineages and clans. Because of this proliferation, episodes and periods reflect the temporalities of individuals, small groups, lineages or clans. Just as places, creeks and their respective spirits belong to people, so do their temporalities. Thus it is not surprising that a story or a verse in an all-night song, capturing a particular episode from the past, also has its ‘father’ (a person, lineage, and clan). This is recognized by calling the name of a particular place, creek or spirit in a part of a story or verse. Temporality of the village provides a multiplicity of periods and episodes, with differing importance for different individuals and groups. How the villagers deal with all these temporalities depends on their kinship affiliation and social organization (both emplaced in their landscape), domination of some and submission of others, support and competition, resentment and generosity, individual desires and intentions, common motivations and goals. As I discuss below, all these issues constitute the framework and substance of egalitarian temporality of the village.

Periods, with the set of activities that define them until the final cut, are generally not epochs or eras. Many periods are repeated over time and characterized by clear cuts at their beginnings and ends, while epochs and eras are rather ‘ways of life’, kar kay. As a way, habit or state of being, kay is confronted by an open future (see Telban, 1998a: 228). For instance, the timeless era of the ancestors finds its way into the present, spreads like a morning mist, and can never be totally cut off. When brought into the present in the form of a ritual (kay) ancestral time has the power to cut. Thus an era can be condensed into a powerful ritualized episode, as was the case with male initiation ritual. The era of the ancestors and the event of initiation were perceived and talked about in the same way: as kupambɨn kay ‘way of the ancestors, ancestral ritual, custom’.

The times of the Germans or Japanese are not talked about in terms of pɨsɨnɨm. Their times are remembered as the ‘ways of the Germans’ and the ‘ways of the Japanese’ or ‘when the Germans came’ and ‘when the Japanese came’ or as ‘when the Germans walked around’ and ‘when the Japanese walked around’. As the Ambonwari did not embody the ways of life of the Germans and Japanese, and did not participate in the exchange of these ways, they belong to other people's kay. When the Germans and Japanese left, they took their kay ‘way of doing things’ and their era with them.

Nor can episodes be equated with periods. Some are simply part of a common imɨnggan kay ‘way of the village’, while others, filled with intentionality of a ritualized event, have the power to cut into the present mode of existence. These latter episodes are something special and out of the ordinary. They are focused on cosmogony and the beginning of a new period. They are very intensive and are produced by an agency, not just by human agency alone but also by its cooperation with the agencies of other beings mainly belonging to the invisible realm: God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Virgin Mary, spirits of the land, spirits of different men's houses, spirits of the dead, animals and plants. Episodes can be destructive for some and constructive for others, as in the above example of a man-made storm to increase the river flow. In short, the temporary mode of existence which defines an intense episode, manifesting presence of all of the above-mentioned beings, needs to be created and unveiled from their relational and interdependent life-world driven by their agencies (wambung ‘the inner part of a being’, ‘understanding, thoughts and feelings’) and ways of doing things (kay ‘way, habit, ritual, being’) (Telban, 1998a, 1998b). Thus to induce change from one period to another, people need to cut themselves off from things past. This can be done, for example, by some kind of a final ceremony, i.e. by washing hands, yanggri mɨn krar ‘he/she washed his/her hands (Lit. ‘he/she cut his/her hands’), which ends a period of restrictive taboos surrounding birth, by hair-cutting ceremony, which ends a year-long period of mourning, or in the past by skin cutting ceremony at the end of a male initiation ritual, iman kay (Lit. ‘way of the men's house’). These episodes not only end the periods of transitional seclusion and observation of specific taboos but also change the ways of life that preceded them (i.e. before birth, death or initiation). Of course, destructive or negative changes are also induced in the same way by, for example, kaprin kay ‘sorcery’ (Lit. ‘way of poison’).

The periods, and episodes which separate them, dominate people's relationship to temporality and determine how collective life is experienced, perceived, remembered and anticipated. For example, when local Catholic charismatic leaders saw that their society had been stricken by recurring sickness and death they organized a week of camping-out with a group of the most enthusiastic followers praying on behalf of the whole village. A short episode of intensive prayers, a ritualized event, tried to heal the illnesses in and of society. Such an episode thereby becomes a marker between two distinct periods, a period of illness and a period of wellbeing.

Episodic temporality and the importance of radical discontinuity

Several anthropologists who worked in Melanesia, especially in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea (among the Iatmul, Manambu, Abelam, Bun, and Karawari in particular), have argued for the dominance of episodic time as opposed to a gradual evolutionary one. These studies are highly relevant to present day discussions about radical changes due to different Christian movements. Customary perception of periods and episodes, producing not a gradual, but a sudden and radical change in ways of life, continues to dominate people's attitudes not only towards change, but towards any work, achievement and temporality in general. One exceptional example of episodic conceptualization of temporality is provided by Simon Harrison (1982) in his account of yam-growing among the Manambu. He writes that ‘it is yam-growing, the magical and ritual acts associated with it, and the changes in the environment significant for it, that provide almost all the reference-points in the yearly calendar’ (Harrison, 1982: 147). The Manambu call a gardening season, which extends from the beginning of clearing until the beginning of the harvest, nambi. There are two each year and they overlap over a period of four months. Nambi cannot be seen as an abstract unit of time but rather as a sequence of tasks, as a time-reckoning embedded in activities (Harrison, 1982: 147). A similar case regarding yam-growing practices was recorded for the Abelam by Scaglion (1999), who writes that the Abelam divide the past into eras or epochs: ‘time of the ancestors’, ‘time of the Germans’, and so on. He notes that the Abelam perceive ‘sharp discontinuities between epochs’ with no attention paid to their sequential order. It is not clear if the Abelam distinguish between periods and epochs as the Ambonwari do, but they nevertheless emphasize the radical cuts between their larger units of time. As places and objects are ‘touchstones of history’ (Scaglion, 1999: 217), chronology and succession of events are unimportant for them.

Gregory Bateson noted earlier that ‘when a Iatmul native is asked about some event in the past, he can as a rule give an immediately relevant answer to the question and does not require to describe a whole series of chronologically related events in order to lead up to the event in question. The Iatmul indulge very little in the sort of chronological rigmarole…’ (Bateson, 1958: 223–224). In a similar vein Schuster (1990) and Wassmann (1990) have argued for the same Iatmul people that events are precisely positioned only according to place and not according to time. Schuster writes of Aibom that ‘history becomes precise where it is at the same time “geography”’ (1990: 18), while Wassmann observes that for the Nyaura ‘… the flow of time within each period is not particularly important; interest is focused on the precise spatial (geographical), not the temporal position of events’ (1990: 30). All these could be said for the Ambonwari too. Significant episodes are then remembered through named places in myths, stories and all-night songs. Time is tied to the place, and people continuously produce both themselves as spatio-temporal beings and the space-time of their wider socio-cultural world (Munn, 1983: 280, 1992: 106). Every person is invested with the cultural meanings of space and time as much as space and time are invested with personal meanings (Telban, 2001: 76). Through a firm bond between being and place the latter becomes a mnemonic device for past events and relationships. ⁵

However, when absolute change is anticipated at a broader social and cultural level (kay), as it is in the case of the Catholic charismatic movement, these same places represent the most severe obstacle for a total and radical change (Robbins, 2004: 179–181; Telban and Vávrová, 2010: 27–28; Telban, 2013). Among the Urapmin, as Robbins (2004) writes, the new Christian cosmology rapidly and completely replaced the ancestral one after a charismatic revival swept through the area in 1977, 18 years before it reached Ambonwari. However, despite this ‘cultural rupture’, the Urapmin continue to perceive their landscape as populated and owned by traditional nature spirits called motobil (Robbins, 2004: 168, 209). These spirits continue to harm people and inflict illness on those who have violated different taboos. Robbins argues that rupture lies at the beginning of Christian history, in conversion and in millennial imaginings. He says: ‘In all three cases, something does not just happen in time but rather happens to it. One temporal progression is halted or shattered and another is joined. It is this kind of thinking about the possibility of temporal rupture that allows people to make claims for the absolute newness of the lives they lead after conversion and of the ones they hope they will lead in the millennial future’ (Robbins, 2007: 12). However, as people's temporalities are emplaced in the surrounding landscape (in other words, there is a mutual dependence between space and time; see Telban, 2013), as time is never empty time but always time of something (i.e. way of doing things), and as a specific kind of coexistence of oscillating temporalities is embedded in their egalitarian temporality, there are constant barriers in people's aspiration for a total transformation.

Those anthropologists who have dealt with episodic time and have differentiated between either simple (an event is responsible for a single transition between two states) or neo-episodic views (a series of events is responsible for transition between many states) have all emphasized that change is not a gradual but an abrupt one involving a drastic reorganization of society and culture (Counts and Counts, 1976; Errington, 1974; Gellner, 1964; Kempf, 1992; McDowell, 1985, 1988; Scaglion, 1999; Schieffelin, 1976). Nancy McDowell has argued that cargo cults should not be treated ‘as a manifestation of some cross-cultural category such as millenarian movements’ but rather as ‘an example of how people conceptualize and experience change in the world’ (McDowell, 1988: 122). She has shown how the Bun on the Yuat River conceive neither of the past nor of the future as a series of interconnected events in a cause-and-effect chain, but as dramatic, total and radical change (McDowell, 1988: 124, 1985). The Bun ‘expect dramatic revolutions; if one thing changes, everything will change – they only need to find the key(s) for controlling and directing the change, preventing or effecting it’ (McDowell, 1988: 124–125, emphasis mine). I agree with McDowell who says that such a view of change is not new but rather a consequence of something the Bun have always done through work and ritual. It is a part, I would say, of their cosmology, of the emplacement of their existence.

Radical qualitative change was also people's intention during early Christianization in the Sibog region of the Rai Coast in the 1920s (Kempf, 1992) as it was in the Karawari region in the 1950s (Telban, 1997b). In both cases men's houses and ritual paraphernalia were removed and destroyed, not in expectation of simply becoming Christian, but rather in expectation of a general lifestyle that would accompany such a radical change from the habitual way of living to a Christian one. In both cases, the early Christianisation was followed by tragedy, that is, by many deaths (another abrupt discontinuity), and in both cases the final result was revitalization of ritual objects and associated secrecy (Kempf, 1992: 77; Telban, 1997b: 26). Kempf argues that a (neo-) episodic concept of change has structured Sibog perceptions and expectations of Christianity: ‘The phase initiated by a discontinuity (i.e. the public destruction of secret objects) was brought to an end by another discontinuity (i.e. the death of all those individuals involved in the destructive action) thus, in effect, restoring the original continuity’ (Kempf, 1992: 81). The focus of the above-mentioned studies was episodes, that is to say those events which cut into existing ways of life and were themselves social or cultural change. The majority of authors, however, do not provide much information on how eras, periods, episodes or events are talked about in people's own vernacular. While terms for time are probably absent in the local languages, it would seem that some of the authors relied on the lingua franca Tok Pisin in which expressions such as taim bilong… ‘time of…’ are used by people all over Papua New Guinea. The possessive bilong ‘of, belonging to’ reflects people's perception of the world showing that time of a period or era needs to be part of some activity or happening which defines it.

In my introduction to Dancing through time (Telban, 1998a: 8–9) I argued against any kind of dichotomy imposed on the concept of time, including the one which opposes episodic and evolutionary time. These kinds of oppositions first create and then perpetuate an artificial distinction between the West and the Rest. Although I fully agree that the ethnographies I have mentioned, which argue for the prevalence of episodic time and succinctly show how episodes or events (‘cuts’) are characteristic of Melanesian temporalities, they do at the same time ignore the presence and importance of episodic time among societies of the West (see Munn, 1992: 112). They start from the premise that Papua New Guineans lack something.

Some anthropologists have argued that events such as, for example, the arrival of the Pentecostal movement, produce ruptures and completely change traditional New Guinean cultures into Christian ones (Robbins, 2003, 2007). However, while Melanesians generally anticipate immediate and complete change – be it the result of initiation ritual, religious movement, or economic activity – the actual change rarely meets people's expectations (see McDowell, 1985: 34; Telban, 2008, 2013). A total ‘cut’, a complete erasure of the past and a complete accomplishment of desired future, is hard to achieve and often requires a generational shift and a radical change in people's landscape. Moreover, any collective temporality, even the egalitarian one, has never been a complete homogenous whole. Every common temporality includes multiple temporalities of different groups based on relationships between groups and their struggle for domination and over resources. Thus, while egalitarian temporality seemingly represents some kind of a unified life-world, it is in fact filled with heterogeneity, competitiveness and changeability. It is achieved through temporary consensus around organized ritualized events and cuts into existent ways of being. I would go so far as to say that arguments emphasizing either continuity of tradition or a total cultural change in fundamentally acephalous societies lead to a deadlock and do not take us very far. They completely fail to reflect the coexistence and complexity of multiple temporalities possessed by and identified with different individuals and groups.

After the arrival of the Polish Catholic Priest to Amboin in 2006 and his structural reorganization of Catholic Church in Amboin Parish (with a Parish Steering Team, four Area Steering Teams and 16 Community Steering Teams), and many meetings, seminars and new projects for each year, the Christian calendar began to serve as a template for yearly events in the area. Catholic charismatic movement (see Telban, 2009) with its own projects has contributed toward both a radical rejection of the past and reorganization of the Catholic Church generally. New gardens were cut at previously tabooed places rearranging the landscape (Telban and Vávrová 2010). Before the beginning of the Catholic charismatic movement in 1994 a few celebrations of Christian dates such as Christmas and Easter in the local church complemented the weekly Sunday holiday. After 1994, the Christian calendar became much more important in organizing people's lives throughout a year. It also began to include outreach practices and organized workshops. These events significantly shaped temporalities of the participants as well as others. The perception of temporality in terms of the Christian calendar has become part of all of the above-mentioned practices.

Yet the domination of the Catholic charismatic movement was abruptly cut short after 15 years with the emergence of the rubber trade, when almost everyone in Ambonwari became focused on selling the latex. Several competitive men took on a mediating role between the buyers and the villagers and some of them became buyers in their own right (the village councillor even got a bank loan to start his own rubber business). Leading members of the charismatic movement now view the sudden outburst of rubber business as the achievement of their prayers. Because everyone is now able to actually see and hold the money, which they have received for selling the latex, the results of a rupture with the past have become visible. Seeing and holding time does not necessarily mean that time is always visible and tangible but rather that the main goal of people's projects is to make the desired period and its temporality visible and tangible.

While some charismatic members, overwhelmed by the success of their prayers and access to money, now prefer to listen to the radio, play cards, get drunk and smoke marijuana, others get angry with them for doing this and ask for the re-establishment of the praying sessions. What was at the beginning a movement engaging the whole village has now become an association of a small group of followers. Before this happened in Ambonwari the leader of the East Sepik Province charismatics from Kanduanam village on the Sepik River left the movement and took up a job as a local politician. Thus, an era and the ways of the Catholic charismatic movement were suddenly cut short in 2011 by a series of episodes marking the new beginning of the rubber trade. This does not mean that the charismatic movement came to an end. Just as any ‘traditional’ custom is always latent and can be re-activated at any given time by, as people would tell you, putting a branch of betel nuts on a slit-drum and calling the names of the spirits, so can the Catholic charismatic movement be re-activated by organizing intensive camping-out prayer events. Thus, for example, at the meeting in August 2011, attended by 21 members of the charismatic movement, one of the future projects was to focus on healing the deaf, blind and crippled, with the final goal of bringing the dead back to life. The latter miracle, the participants emphasised, could have been performed only by those individuals who had in their dreams received a special gift from God.

Conclusion

Those anthropologists who paid special attention to episodic time in Papua New Guinea and in East Sepik Province in particular have all emphasized drastic discontinuities and the absence of chronology as the main characteristics of people's temporalities. Several recently published studies focused on Pentecostal temporalities and the role of events in radical religious transformation (Coleman, 2011; Robbins, 2007, 2010). However, it was not my aim in this article to engage in discussions about the Pentecostal Christian movements. Rather, by elucidating upon Ambonwari's own concepts of pɨsɨnɨm ‘period’ and kay ‘way of doing things’, which are both emplaced and embodied, and thus visible and tangible, I aimed to show that their framework of drastic ruptures has always been at the heart of their egalitarian temporality. These ruptures could either recreate continuity or produce change. An example par excellence was the male initiation ritual where it was not only the case that the young boys became Ambonwari men (a radical change from ‘non-being’ to being) but also that the whole cosmos became re-created (Telban, 1997a). Therefore, while in the past kupambɨn kay ‘way of the ancestors, custom, ritual’ was simultaneously a method, a project, and a goal in terms of engendering the future, nowadays it is the way of God and the Holy Spirit.

Pɨsɨnɨm and kay and their temporalities are inseparable from specific doings or happenings which define them. Only temporality that is agentive, with periods and ways of doing things organized around and defined by future oriented projects, can bring a desired world into existence. Episodes or ‘cuts’ so as to be meaningful require people's active participation and conscious engagement. Such a view has not appeared suddenly with Christianity and the Catholic charismatic movement but has always been a part of Ambonwari relational emplacement of their doings.

Today, a unifying and hierarchical tendency of clock-time is rejected as a domineering regulator of coexisting plurality of times. ⁶ It restricts people's desire to focus on their own projects and exchange their own temporalities for those of others. Moreover, if constant change and creation become the main focus of a society (while forgetting that exchange is a necessary part of change and creation), then ruptures become the aim in themselves – which seems to be the case in the Western world today – losing sight of what these ruptures are actually meant to create. One is left with constant innovation, discontinuity, disorientation and displacement. This is not what Ambonwari aim for.

While people are not interested in time-reckoning and time-measuring with mechanical or digital clocks, the Christian calendar found a fertile ground in the whole Karawari region only after its inhabitants became active participants in socio-religious events. These episodes break up temporality into segments characterized by particular happenings, i.e. short or long periods. Each of these episodes represents a ‘cut’ into the life of the village. Sunday, for example, is a non-working day when disputes of the previous week can be settled in public meetings and individual and collective working plans can be made for the forthcoming week. Church festivals, organized around dates on the calendar, are focused on Christian temporality and cosmology as a whole. They ‘heal’ the ills of society and sustain the well being of the villagers and their environment. While people do make use of time-reckoning with the Christian calendar defining their activities within each year, remembering the years and connecting them sequentially in terms of before and after is not something that they regard as important.

A ritualized episode or a series of them kick off a new period. It is the successful healing of the sick, abundance of garden food or nowadays the success in rubber business and access to money which substantiates a particular action. Episodic orientation reveals people's engagement in creative exchange and manifestation of a particular relational kay – that includes ancestors, spirits, Whites, God, the Holy Spirit, business, office or town – and its temporality. It is everyone's drive towards participation in collective endeavours, followed by materialization and emplacement of a particular kind of life, that egalitarian temporality, with its visibility and tangibility, is all about.