Valleys of Historicity and Ways of Power Among the Fuyuge‪.‬

INTRODUCTION: HISTORY AND ITS LIMITS 'History is culturally ordered, differently so in different societies, according to meaningful schemes of things'. This is, of course, the opening line to Sahlins's very influential collection of essays 'Islands of history' (1985: vii). The next line of the introductory essay states the converse, of culture being historically ordered. This is a thesis Sahlins has continued to pursue, evident in his most recent book, particularly in its subtitle: 'Apologies to Thucydides: understanding history as culture and vice versa' (2004). Leaving aside the issue of cultural ordering (see Kuper 1999) it can be reasonably asked whether it is appropriate to speak of different societies as having 'history'. In saying this I do not want to suggest that different societies do not have complex conceptions and relations with their past. However, the past is not the same thing as history. (1) To use the notion of history is to draw on a concept and discipline that has come to inform the thinking of western peoples--among others--in distinctive ways (see Burke 2002).