Department seminars: Associate Professor Jaap Timmer

As part of a series of writings in which I chart the wide variety of connections that an evangelical movement on the island of Malaita in Solomon Islands establishes with Israel as a dynamic sense of religiosity, historicity, nationality, and ‘stateness’, this presentation explores the emergence of temporal sovereignty through the idea that there is an original state in Malaita’s divine past. This original state is a source of unity that provides the basis and moral compulsion for engagement with a contemporary nation and for the obviation of present and past cultural and historical inequalities. Much of this can be understood by paying attention to ‘kinshipping’ (sulagwaua) – ‘moving through time and space by means of relationship and exchange’ (Shryock, Trautmann, and Gamble 2011: 32) – to Hamitic descendance.

By exploring genealogies that ground a sense of Malaita’s sovereignty, partly in biblical narrative and partly in evolving historicities, I will highlight how kinshipping challenges the residual coloniality of the history of Solomon Islands, its state, and religion.
Kinshipping forges connections with past and present Israel and is not just about moving through (ostensibly inert) time and space. It is about the production of spatio-temporal categories that are important for Malaitans now and for the future. Kinshipping, then, can be best understood as a particular temporal engagement with the ongoing becoming of a Malaitan nation.

Jaap Timmer is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at Macquarie University, Australia, and currently AIAS-COFUND Fellow at Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University. Thematically his research focuses on culture change, the experience of time, and political theology. His regional interest is in the Southwest Pacific and Southeast Asia, with particular emphasis on Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, West Papua, Maluku, and Kalimantan. He is the author of Living with Intricate Futures (2000), a monograph on knowledge and religion among the Imyan of West Papua. More recently, he has begun to focus on historicity, Christianity, and lost tribes in Solomon Islands, and Islamic historiography versus Christian theocracy in West Papua.