[ANU Pacific.Institute] Public lecture by Michael Scott on Predicting Futures in Melanesia

[Miranda Forsyth]

From: Matt Tomlinson
Sent: Tuesday, 11 September 2018 3:01 PM
To: Yanhong Ouyang <yanhong.ouyang at anu.edu.au>; Katherine Daniell <katherine.daniell at anu.edu.au>; Miranda Forsyth <miranda.forsyth at anu.edu.au>
Subject: Announcement for PI list


Hi PI gang,



I hope this announcement about Michael W. Scott's public lecture next week can be circulated to the PI list:


Public Lecture
Prophetic temporalities: Predicting and proliferating futures in Melanesia and anthropology

Michael W. Scott
Associate Professor of Anthropology, London School of Economics

Thursday, 20 September 2018
3:00 - 5:00 pm
Brindabella Theatre, JG Crawford Building

A place name, Tarai'anawe (Path-of-the-tern), predicts that an airstrip will be built nearby.  Sand cast up on a rocky coastline by rough seas reveals that something will come to the island.  The death, dismemberment, and regeneration of a freshwater eel, as narrated in an old story, foretells the death and resurrection of Jesus.  These are examples of what the Arosi people of Solomon Islands call kastom profesi (traditional prophecy).  But what do such diverse forms of prognostication imply about the nature of prophecy?  What modes of temporality and spatiality, what orientations to the future and to truth, do they presuppose?  Through a comparison of Arosi kastom profesi with academic discourses that cast prophecy as the proliferation of unpredictable futures, this lecture theorizes two modes of prophecy, one correlated with spatialized temporality and the other with pure duration.  In so doing, it also proposes a model of 'totemic prophecy' as a type of the former, bringing the theorization of temporality into dialogue with comparative ontology.

Sponsored by
Research School of Humanities and the Arts
Anthropology Program, CHL/CAP

Inquiries: matt.tomlinson at anu.edu.au<mailto:matt.tomlinson at anu.edu.au>

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