Time travels in whaling boats

Abstract

Reading this article is to embark on an adventure through certain ethnographic and archaeological texts about a specific form of boat construction. The voyage sets out from the village of Lamalera in Eastern Indonesia where whaling boats continue to be built according to traditions passed on by the ancestors. However, while researchers write about boats, they simultaneously board the boats in order to construct the sequence of their narratives. Whether they journey back through the eastern archipelagos in search of the origin of a boat's design; or follow the plank by plank construction sequence; or whether they find a leak in previous boat building discourse - all are involved in intricate relations of becoming through the materiality of the very boats they desire to observe and describe. Narratives are premised on unquestioned notions of linear time and travel. In this article, however, readers find themselves carried along on a different voyage, where time and travel are always in the here and now.