The book examines the way objects and images relate to and shape notions of temporality and history. Bringing together ethnographic studies from the Lowlands of Central and South America and Melanesia, it explores the temporality inhering in images and artefacts from a comparative perspective. The chapters focus on how peoples in both regions ‘live in’ and ‘navigate’ time each through their distinctive systems of images and the processes and actions by which these come to be manifest in objects. 

Professor Were will discuss his chapter on the digital return of carvings to a New Ireland community in Papua New Guinea and the generative power of images for reinvigorating forms of power and hierarchy.