This volume 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. With original theoretical and ethnographic contributions, the book is valuable reading for scholars interested in visual and material culture and in anthropological approaches to time.

Paolo Fortis is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at Durham University. His work focuses on the relations between art, ontology, time and history in Central and South America.

Susanne Küchler is Professor of Anthropology and Material Culture at University College London. Her work focuses on the relation between image systems and the geometry of social polity in island Melanesia and Eastern Polynesia.