Landscape, Myth and Time

Abstract

This article demonstrates the inherent relations between landscape, myth and time. Here I follow the lead of anthropologists such as Lévi-Strauss and Wagner and historians like Simon Schama. In particular, I highlight that what goes on ‘inside’ of myths is systematically connected to what occurs ‘outside’: how the intimate features of landscape form a kind of prism through which wider influences might be understood. The article considers two tidibe narratives from the Fuyuge people of highland Papua. These mythic narratives emerged at different moments in the colonial and postcolonial state project. Each narrative portrays features of landscape that simultaneously disclose a unique presence of time. This ‘time’ is different from the progress-orientated ‘time’ of government or missionaries. And yet, as I show, both are connected: through the ways government and missionaries transformed the Fuyuge people and their landscape, and how the Fuyuge landscape and tidibe came to reveal these ‘outside’ influences.