From 'Stone-Age' to 'Real-Time': Exploring Papuan Temporalities, Mobilities and Religiosities - An Introduction

Abstract

There are probably no other people on earth to whom the image of the ‘stone-age’ is so persistently attached than the inhabitants of the island of New Guinea, which is divided into independent Papua New Guinea and the western part of the island, known today under the names of Papua and West Papua. This volume focuses on the latter region, which took its own trajectory since the colonial division of the island and especially since its controversial incorporation into the Indonesian nation-state in the 1960s. In Papua, stone-age imagery has motivated missions to ‘pacify’, ‘civilise’, ‘modernise’, ‘Christianise’ and ‘Islamise’ the local population, and mobilised a proliferation of hierarchical relations, locally and regionally. These projects of frontier transformation became particularly invasive during the authoritarian Suharto regime (1966–98), but are continuing today under different guises. Today, many Papuans are connected in 'real-time' through Facebook, YouTube and other social networking sites and are increasingly mobile within and beyond Indonesia, certainly belying the old images of isolated stone-agers. This volume explores the real-time, mobile, social and cultural aspects of contemporary Papua, including historical trajectories that collapse notions of the past with visions of the future.