Asmat Horizons of the Past

Because pasts are relative to people’s ethical and political motivations in the present, it is important to understand how and in what shapes pasts emerge in relation to people’s contemporary concerns and the futures they expect. In this chapter, I explore the mobilisation of transcendental time among the Asmat people of West Papua, Indonesia, considering their experience of religious conversion and progress introduced by Catholic missionaries, the Netherlands’ colonial government, the Indonesian government, and, most recently, Islamic preachers. I analyse how the Asmat people mobilise the concept of transcendental time as imparted by both religious institutions and governmental authorities to address future anticipations that impose requirements on historical events. Through the lens of several Asmat who recently converted to Islam, I will show how for Catholics the past reveals a wonder of identity that stands in contrast to how the state and the church portray the Asmat past as a dispensable abstraction. These divergent pasts are useful for developing historian Reinhart Koselleck’s rather narrow perception of the past in his theory of futures’ past. I will suggest that if we reformulate the notion of the past to a horizon that expands and retracts in response to future concerns, this will allow us to apply Koselleck’s theory more universally.