Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research among Indo-Fijian smallholders, this paper operationalizes historicity as lived practice, showing how agricultural labour enables people to inhabit history through embodied memories, everyday work, and claims to belonging in the present.

Paper long abstract

In this paper I examine how Indo-Fijian farmers construct subjectivities through historically oriented everyday practice, arguing that working the land constitutes a primary site through which history is embodied and experienced in the present. Based on long-term ethnographic research among Indo-Fijian smallholders, I show how agricultural labour operates as a mode of historicity by linking past labour, present practice, and future obligation in everyday life.

Methodologically, I operationalize historicity as a duality. First, I approach it as an ethnographic mode that provides access to people’s experience of moving through time as a “human situation in flow” (Hirsch and Stewart 2005). Life histories, farming routines, and ritual engagements with land are treated not as sources for reconstructing past events, but as situated expressions of how temporal relations are lived and negotiated in the present. Second, I conceptualize historicity as lived experience and cognitive practice: a way of inhabiting the present shaped by embodied memories of indenture, hardship, and moral labour.

Among Indo-Fijian farmers, narratives of ancestors who “broke the land” and “sacrificed their bodies,” together with practices such as cultivation and ritual offerings, embed individual biographies within longer histories of marginalization. Through these practices, land becomes a material and moral archive through which claims to dignity, autonomy, and belonging are articulated under conditions of precarity.

Building on this ethnography, I suggest that treating land as an archive offers a concrete way of developing an ethnography of historicity, allowing temporal experience to be traced through practice rather than inferred from narrative alone.