Diverging and merging regimes of historicity along the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea

Using Hartog’s regimes of historicity as a heuristic device, I analyze three case studies from the Nyaura (West Iatmul) of the middle Sepik to show how different ways of being-in-time interact with and impact on each other. Discussing the ways that Christian and modern regimes of historicity have come to interact with Nyaura ways of being-in-time, I highlight that historicity has a strong practical component and can be analyzed by studying people’s actions during temporal crises. While historicity is usually understood as a singular mode of temporal being and awareness shared by a cultural group, I demonstrate that multiple regimes of historicity can co-exist in the same society and that people may move forth and back between different dominant orders of time. Secondly, I propose that different regimes of historicity are linked to different cosmo-ontological premises and that the (in)commensurability of these premises crucially affects the ways that the Nyaura have come to engage with Christianity and modernity. Finally, I emphasize that humans are historical actors who evaluate and represent the past in relation to individual and collective future aspirations. Thus, I argue that regimes of historicity have to be understood in the context of power relations and politics.