YA S M I N E M U S H A R B A S H

Research Articles

Boredom, Time, and Modernity: An Example from Aboriginal Australia

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore an anthropologically underresearched topic, boredom, utilizing ethnographic data from the Aus-

tralian Aboriginal settlement of Yuendumu and situating that research in a comparative perspective. I examine the concepts genesis and meaning at Yuendumu using the social-constructivist approach to boredom as proposed in literature studies, sociology, and philosophy. That approach provides an account of how the emergence of boredom in 18th-century Europe is linked to processes of modernity. That perspective, however, has led to claims that boredom is a Western phenomenon and that its existence elsewhere is because of Westernization. In this article, I argue against that perspective by linking instances of boredom at Yuendumu to perceptions of personhood and to conceptualizations of being in timeparticularly socioculturally specic ways of perceiving time and postcolonial temporalities as generating the emergence of boredom. This boredom is a historically and socioculturally specic phenomenon, arising out of distinct sociocultural engagements with locally particular processes of modernity. [Keywords: boredom, time, cross-cultural comparison, Australian Aborigines, modernity]

HAT WONDER, then, that the world goes from bad to worse, and that its evils increase more and more, as boredom increases, and boredom is the root of all evil. The history of this can be traced from the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world. And increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand. The nations were scattered over the earth, just as people now travel abroad, but they continued to be bored. Kierkegaard, Either/Or From Sren Kierkegaards facetious comments, we can raise some anthropological questions: Is boredom a facet of human life, everywhere? Is it universally the same? What is its link to evil? How, in fact, should anthropologists conceptualize boredom? I came to ponder these questions as I wrote my dissertation on everyday life at the Australian Aboriginal settlement of Yuendumu. Going through my

eld notes, I realized that boredom had been a sizeable aspect of the everyday but that, perhaps because of its normalcy, I had failed to collect systematic data about it and, what is more, that anthropology did not offer any frameworks within which to analyze this phenomenon. In answer to my questions, then, this article brings together subsequent research at Yuendumu and insights from the interdisciplinary literature on boredom from philosophy, literature studies, sociology, and psychology. Boredoms most dening feature from the available literature seems to be its denitional ambiguity, acknowledged outright by most authors and often managed with a propensity to use metaphors in its portrayals. The recurring use of fog, as for example in Martin Heideggers description of boredom as drawing back and forth like a silent fog in the abysses of Dasein (1995:77) is illuminating, as is Elizabeth Goodsteins description of boredom as an experience without qualities (2005:1). Generally, it is described as a reactive state to wearingly dull or tedious stimuli. Alternatively there is the idea that boredom is caused by having too much choice (Klapp 1986). Many writers analyze boredom in relation to time and the subjects perceptions thereof and often link the concept to monotony and repetition. Specically, boredom is discussed as a state of being where the experience of time dissolves or stops being

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 109, Issue 2, pp. 307317, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. C 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/AA.2007.109.2.307.

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American Anthropologist Vol. 109, No. 2 June 2007 among others, Kuhn 1976; Raposa 1999; Svendsen 2005). Used throughout the Middle Ages, acedia is a Christian term describing a state of apathy in the practice of virtue aficting the clergy. It is linked to the sin of sloth and the Demon of Noontide, an apparition held responsible for inducing monks into a dangerous form of spiritual alienation, a misery of the soul that could, like other sins, be avoided by effort or by grace (Spacks 1995:11). During the Renaissance, acedia was superseded by the term melancholy, a sentiment extended to now also afict the aristocracy (cf. Goodstein 2005; Spacks 1995; Svendsen 2005). Both terms are said to describe an essentially similar sentiment, but with crucial differences in their connotations. While acedia is linked to the moral domain, melancholy is linked to the natural; the former affects the soul, the latter the body. Acedia, through its afnity with the sin of sloth, had exclusively negative connotations while melancholy was imbued with connotations of illness as well as wisdom. The phenomenon of modern boredom is said to begin to emerge with Romanticism (Svendsen 2005). The era provided the conceptual climate for massive transformative changes including (1) secularization and the growing metaphysical void; (2) individualism with the resultant increased focus on the self; (3) the rise of the belief in ones entitlement to individual happiness; (4) a new dichotomy between work and leisure time through the expansion of capitalism; (5) an increase of the so-called overload, resulting from mass production and the evolvement and expansion of the media; and (6) bureaucratization and the rise of standardized [and] standardizing organizations of time-space (Anderson 2004:741). Once these processes underlying modernity unfolded, the concept of boredom expanded: It became democratic. Now not only the clergy, the rich, and the idle but also everyone else could experience it. The birth of modern boredom is also evident in the emergence of boredom terminology: The English verb to bore came into use after the 1760s (Svendsen 2005:24). The noun bore, for a thing that bores, is dated at 1778 and the use of bore for a tiresome person at 1812, and the rst record of the English term boredom originates from 1864 (Spacks 1995:13).2 Both the German term Langeweile and the Danish kedshomed predate the English by a few decades (Svendsen 2005:24). The older French ennui and the Italian noia came via Provencial enojo from Latin odiare, meaning to hate, abhor, abominate. The meaning of those latter terms is closely related to tristesse and melancholy and thus said to be different from modern boredom (Kuhn 1976:56; Svendsen 2005:24). Except in the last case, etymologies for words meaning boredom are generally uncertain (Klapp 1986:24; Kuhn 1976:45). Since the 18th century, boredoms increasing signicance is further underscored through a rise in academic and ctional literature about it. Philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno pondered boredom as a concept, a sentiment, an experience, or an emotion; writers like Johann

of relevancea perspective I employ in the discussion of the Yuendumu material. In variance with some of the literature, here I avoid treating boredom as a sentiment, feeling, or emotional state because researching boredom crossculturally is fraught with methodologically dangers: How can we know what exactly people are experiencing when they say, or we think we see, that they are bored? Instead, this article follows another lead from boredom research, which takes a social constructivist approach (see among others Healy 1984; Klapp 1986; Spacks 1995; Svendsen 2005).1 This literature suggests that boredom (also called modern boredom) has a distinct and fairly recent history, and that it is conceptually intertwined with processes of modernity. I outline tenets of this approach and employ them in my analysis of boredom at Yuendumu, in which I also utilize Lars Svendsens (2005) distinction between situational and existential boredom. While relating the former to perceptions of personhood, I analyze the latter through conceptualizations of being in time, drawing on E. P. Thompson (1967) and Edmund Leach (1968). I argue against the notion that indigenous boredom at Yuendumu can, or should, be seen purely as a measure of Westernizationas is implied by Lori Jervis and colleagues (2003), on whose study of boredom on a Native American reservation I draw extensively. To illustrate the particularities of boredom at Yuendumu specically and the sociocultural distinctness of forms of boredom more generally, I contrast boredoms genesis at Yuendumu with the description of boredom that Dennis Brissett and Robert Snow (1993) give for the United States. On the basis of these comparisons, I argue for anthropological investigation of the phenomenon as a means of exploring socioculturally specic engagements with locally distinct forms of modernity.

THE BEGINNINGS OF BOREDOM Although Kierkegaard accords boredom timeless ubiquity, much of the interdisciplinary literature suggests that what we call boredom has been experienced less often, by fewer people, and in distinctly different ways prior to modern times, and that it has been steadily on the rise only since the 18th century. Thus, Peter Conrad says that it seems likely that prior to increased leisure and afuence, it didnt much matter whether life was deemed interesting or boring (1997:466), adding that the importance of these distinctions is a peculiarity of modernity. Similarly, Svendsen (2005:21) calls boredom the privilege of modern man, elaborating that before Romanticism, boredom would have been a marginal issue, reserved for monks and the aristocracy. This social construction of boredom is argued on four levels: (1) through linking sociohistorical developments to the emergence of boredom; (2) in regard to normative shifts in perception of the sentiment; (3) on the linguistic level; and (4) through the increase in frequency both in experience and considerations of boredom. Acedia is identied as the oldest documented phenomenon most closely related to todays boredom (see,

Musharbash Boredom, Time, and Modernity Wolfgang Goethe, Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Henrik Ibsen, Gertrude Stein, and Fernando Pessoa made it their subject. Literary theorists have worked on literary histories of boredom (Kessel 2001; Kuhn 1976; Spacks 1995). Psychologists have become interested in boredom (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi 1975; Hill and Perkins 1985; Kast 2001; Sundberg et al. 1991; Vodanovich 2003; Vodanovich and Watt 1999), and there is a ow of sociological boredom literature (e.g., Barbalet 1999; Brissett and Snow 1993; Conrad 1997; Doehlemann 1991; Healy 1984). But this literature tells us little about forms of boredom outside the generative center of these transformative processes, or whether people elsewhere had similar reactions to modern structural transformations. Curiously, anthropologists have largely ignored these questions. Most anthropological considerations of boredom are hidden in ethnographies, where boredom is mentioned in passing and seldom explicated upon. More elaborate engagement can be found, for example, in Richard Condons work with Inuit youth (Condon 1995; Condon and Stern 1993) and Michael Herzfelds (2003) sensitive portrayal of Cretan apprentices employment of boredom as mask. The work most explicitly focused on boredom itself is Jervis and colleagues (2003) ethnopsychological study examining perceptions of and reactions to boredom at a Native American Reservation (Grass Creek). Central to their study are processes of postcolonialism and their effects on indigenous peoples lives, circumstances, and perceptions of personhood. Jervis and colleagues view boredom at Grass Creek as an indicator that especially reservation youth were increasingly identifying with dominant American cultural values, such as the notion that individual happiness is an entitlement, that pleasure is to be derived from without, and that boredom should be blamed on the external worlds inadequacy (2003:49). While drawing on their material, the question I bring to the Yuendumu example is whether boredom can in fact be seen as an indicator of the Westernization of indigenous peoples or whether something else is going on.

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BOREDOM AT YUENDUMU Set up in 1946 as a ration station, Yuendumu is located approximately 300 kilometers northwest of the town of Alice Springs in central Australia. Many of its residents have experienced signicant changes in a fairly short time span: violent frontier encounters earlier last century, followed by forced sedentization and institutionalization in the 1940s, subsequent integration into the cash economy from 1969, with the full cash payment of social security benets directly to individual residents, and the deinstitutionalization of Yuendumu in the 1970s through the introduction of an elected Council. Today, Yuendumu displays all the features of a fairly typical postcolonial Aboriginal settlement. It has a uctuating population of up to 800 Aboriginal people, mainly Warlpiri speakers, as well as about 100 nonindigenous Australians (mostly service providers in gov-

ernment agencies). Some Warlpiri people are employed at the bilingual school and a number of the local community organizations, but the main income derives from welfare payments.3 Substance misuse and associated problems are commonplace, as indeed they are in many remote settlements in Australia. Although Yuendumu operates one of the more successful petrol-snifng prevention programs in Australia, petrol snifng does sporadically occur. Teenagers occasionally break into one of the two shops or the houses of nonindigenous residents. Yuendumu is a so-called dry community (alcohol is ofcially prohibited), however, alcohol does get smuggled in and consumed in the settlement. Some people, especially those aged in their twenties, smoke marijuana. Rates of domestic and other violence are high. As I returned to Yuendumu to study Warlpiri boredom, I faced two methodological dilemmas. First, the danger that my presence may dispel boredom. This was somewhat alleviated by my longstanding familiarity with Yuendumu residents, my practice of coresiding with Warlpiri people, and lengthy eldwork. A more serious problem is that the topic itself sets limits to the effectiveness of participantobservation: informants boredom, unless verbalized, can only be inferred, and at best conrmed in subsequent interviews (running the risk of putting words into informants mouths). Helpful here was Svendsens (2005) boredom typology: He proposes a theoretical distinction between boredom as a reaction to certain things or events and being bored as a state of being; the former he calls situative boredom and the latter existential boredom. Situative boredom, on the one hand, is the kind of boredom one experiences, for example, while waiting or in a lecture; it is often expressed bodily through yawning, sighing, doodling, and general restlessness and distractedness. An overload of things or events as well as a deciency of them can lead to this type. Existential boredom, on the other hand, is an all-encompassing boredom where the individual is bored independently of or detached from the world around them. Characterized by lack of desire and perceptual engagement with the world, it has no object. This is the silent fog of indifference in Heideggers sense. At Yuendumu, I took situative boredom to be the kind that people are reexive aboutthat is, the kind that is generally verbalizedand existential boredom as the kind that deeply and profoundly affects the person and is more or less expressionless. The latter is the kind of boredom we can only infer (discussed below). As a rst approach to the former, situative boredom, I noted all everyday utterances containing references to boredom. Signicantly, there is no Warlpiri word for boredom/ bored/boring. A linguist with long Warlpiri experience, David Nash, suggested that the term jukuru might cover bored (personal communication, September 8, 2004). In the Warlpiri dictionary (Laughren et al. n.d.), jukuru is translated as apathetic, unwilling to enter into secular social activities, not wanting, not desirous, dislike, uninterested, unenthusiastic (n.d.). Consultation with Warlpiri people conrmed that this term does not denote boredom but

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American Anthropologist Vol. 109, No. 2 June 2007 all the time, she cant do anything different (eld notes, December 14, 2005). As with places, there is always a qualier: An entire person cannot be labeled boring, but their behavior can be. A striking nding was how few events were labeled boring, considering the large range of events with boredom potential (meetings, long drives, etc.). I heard the term used only in regard to one concert (which I unfortunately missed) and to a football game. A quote about the latter pointedly illustrates the criterion for boredom in these instances: [The last game] was good: it made us feel excited, it made us feel scared, it made us feel proud. Not boring game like the under 17swe only had to cheer for twenty minutes, then it was too easy (eld notes, September 11, 2005). Events that fail to emotionally engage run the risk of being labeled boring. Analogous to events, the range of things labeled boring was also small, comprising certain movies and songs. For example, when traveling in my Toyota, the person in charge of music would play some songs and over again (an interesting inversion of the negativity of repetitiveness) and skip others, sometimes saying boring when the rst notes sounded. Signicantly, although the person choosing the music as well as the audiences differed from trip to trip, the choices did not. Nor was there ever a quarrel about playing, repeating, or skipping a song. The consensus about which songs were popular and which were not was striking. Svendsen denes situative boredom as a boredom that contains a longing for something that is desired (2005:42). The nature of the desire, in the Yuendumu examples, is clearly for social and emotional engagement. If this desire is curtailedbecause there are not enough people, because nothing is happening, or because something or someone is all too predictablesituative boredom is experienced. As reactions to curtailed desires, boredom as described in the literature and Warlpiri situative boredom seem fundamentally similar. Divergences appear when considering Conrads statement that boredom is also in the eye of the beholder. What may be boring to one person may be fascinating to the next (1997:468). In contrast, at Yuendumu, there seems to be general consensus about what is and what is not boring, or, more precisely, what may or may not be labeled boring in everyday speech acts. This consensus is reminiscent of Basil Sansoms (1980) description of how the word, the communal version of events, is established in Darwin Fringe Camps. There, everyone is required to subscribe to rules that discriminate between what may and what may not be said either about what is being done or about action that has now been completed (Sansom 1980:79). A similar process seems to be at work at Yuendumu in regard to things labeled boring. Every utterance I recorded either assumed or invited and received agreement on the boringness of the thing named, and I never witnessed any disputation analogous to I found it boring versus I found it engaging. In fact, there was a distinct absence of statements using the rst-person pronoun. Instead, the common formula of all

rather an active disinterest in a specic activity. The Pitjatjatjara/Yankuntjatjara dictionary for languages spoken to the south translates the adjective paku as tired, weary, bored (Goddard 1996:102103). Paku seems to be a synonym of the Warlpiri adjective mata, meaning tired, weary, exhaustedalways in a physical sense. The lack of indigenous boredom terminology strengthens my conviction that parallel to pre-Romanticism times in Europe, boredom in precontact Warlpiri life was experienced less than it is today, if at all. When Warlpiri people referred to boredom, they used the English word, usually embedded in otherwise Warlpiri sentences, for example: Nyampurla punku, boring, junganyiarniyi (this [place] is bad, boring, very true). Exclusively, boring was the term used; I never heard mention of boredom; and bored was only used in all-English conversations between young Warlpiri and nonindigenous persons.4 Warlpiri application of the term boring reveals some noteworthy similarities and differences to mainstream English. It was either applied generically (discussed below) or applied as a descriptive label for places, people, things, and events. Places such as Yuendumu, other Aboriginal settlements, even Alice Springs, were frequently described as boring. Importantly, this is always qualied; boringness is not a quality of a place itself but a description of it at a particular time. For example, Mick (aged in his mid-forties) suggested, We should go camping out, take [Yasmine] to country, Yuendumus boring on the weekend, not enough Yapa [people] there5 (eld notes, August 15, 2005). Tamsin (age 22) elaborated on this quality: If there is nothing to do, not much people in community, everyone sit one place, thats why we get bored. Sometimes people look and say that place really boring. When there is not much people, that makes Yuendumu boring (eld notes, August 3, 2005). She also complained about a trip to Alice Springs, saying, [It was] boring. Nothing happened. I stayed at Tatyanas and watched DVDs. Thats all (eld notes, September 21, 2005). Crucially, the boringness of a place is created by the absence of people (not enough people) and a lack of social interaction and engagement (nothing happening). In mainstream English, the term boring when applied to persons is always used as an adjective and, generally, a negative label: Ed is boring does not reect positively on Ed. At Yuendumu, if directly applied to persons, the term is always used in the active sense, so that Millie must be boring, all alone now meant that she must feel lonely after we had left her to travel to another settlement. Also poignant was a comment made when I dropped my dog off at the Alice Springs kennel: He must be boring for us, poor thing (eld notes, September 13, 2005). The word in these instances does not express boredom but a lack of social connectivity, loneliness, and pining for others. There is, however, a way in which aspects of peoples behavior can be labeled boring, as in the following instance: She keeps on doing the same thing all the time, it goes really boring, like she always goes [to the] same house, [rst] Leahs place, [then to] Womens Centre, back to West Camp, she does the same

Musharbash Boredom, Time, and Modernity utterances was it is boring. Moreover, at least in the case of places and persons, boringness is always qualied; neither is boring per se. Essentialized reductions to one quality, one label, are intrinsically impossible in a social context that values indeterminacy (see also Povinelli 1993). Such indeterminacy contrasts starkly with, for example, mainstream English, where a statement such as Ed is boring unambiguously condemns Ed. Lastly, there remains the fact that the range of things labeled boring by Warlpiri people is not only agreed on but also, compared to examples from the boredom literature, remarkably small. In part, of course, this is because of the remote settlement context, which lacks, for example, theater performances and commuting to work. But many common experiences with boredom potential (meetings, classes, car travel, etc.) are not labeled boring. To elaborate, I discuss boredom in the context of something never considered boring: ritual. No Warlpiri person would ever call ritual boring (see Dussart 2000 for an overview of Warlpiri ritual). Some Warlpiri people are not interested in participating in some Warlpiri ritualsfor example, for religious (fundamentalist Christian) reasons. Those participating may complain about the hard work involved, and about being exhausted, using the term mata mentioned above, but they do not complain about being bored. Because there is no verbal evidence, we have to look for other indicators. One example of behavior indicative of situative boredom is that of Kate during the mortuary rituals for her close classicatory son. Kate is in her forties, a teacher at the local school, a committed caretaker of children (not her own), a painter, and an avid hunter. In their Grass Creek study, Jervis and colleagues devised a term for people such as Kate, calling them the not-bored and identifying a combination of avoiding substance misuse and some form of meaningful engagement at the core of a not-bored life: Most of the not-bored were involved in activities from which they derived fulllment, among which were religion (both traditional and Christian), parenting and other family activities, creative endeavors, careers, and community/political activism (Jervis et al. 2003:50). Seeing Kate appear bored during mortuary ritual was thus both unexpected and illuminating. Her role of mother during the ritual placed her under severe restrictions, such as a speech taboo, spatial limitations, and not being allowed to work (including making re, cooking, etc.). In my notebook, I wrote:
The key-mourners were exhausted from wailing, it was incredibly hot, and the news was that the mourners from Alice Springs wouldnt arrive until Saturday [to complete the ritual], meaning four more days in the hot sun with nothing to do but wailing, being exhausted, grieving. Kate sat next to me, picking up old pieces of orange peel from the ground, and with a pair of scissors [used earlier to cut off the key mourners hair] she slowly and methodically cut them into the tiniest little bits. [eld notes, October, 17, 2005]

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at Yuendumu. Yet, although she may well have been experiencing exactly what Svendsen calls situative boredom, we cannot know for sure. If we could talk about her experience, then I strongly suspect that Kate would say something like it was boring not being able to speak and walk and do things rather than ritual is boring. There are two interrelated issues here: (1) the Warlpiri hesitancy to condemn things, events, places, or persons entirely and without qualier as boring means that even though one may experience pangs of boredom during a certain event, the event in itself cannot be labeled boring; and (2) there exists a shared understanding that rituals (meetings, classes, etc.) have a social purpose and are undertaken with othersin short, that they are socially and emotionally engaging. Because, at least nominally, they fulll desires that if absent cause boredom, they cannot be labeled boring. Although this explains why rituals (and so forth) are not labeled boring, the question remains whether Kates experience can in fact be called boredom if she herself does not think of it in such a way. Boredom, Svendsen says, presupposes subjectivity, i.e. self-awareness (2005:32); places, people, things, or events are boring because I am bored by them. In this vein, Jervis and colleagues (2003:49) identied changes in perceptions of personhood at Grass Creek through increased identication with dominant U.S. cultural values and the notion of individual happiness as entitlement, both of which triggered boredom. At Yuendumu, on the other hand, there is agreement that Y is boring (or, may be called boring) and X not. Boredom, it seems to me, is a different beast when understandings of personhood crucially depend on relatedness (see, amongst many others, Musharbash 2003; Myers 1986). If boredom is to be understood as an indicator of Westernization, then the forms situational boredom takes at Yuendumu would indicate that Warlpiri people are less Westernized than people at Grass Creek. However, such an interpretation would seriously limit understandings of Warlpiri experiences of boredom as well as of the many guises which boredom takes. I discuss this further by analyzing existential boredom at Yuendumu through exploring Warlpiri time perceptions.

BOREDOM AND TIME AT YUENDUMU At Yuendumu, as at Grass Creek and elsewhere, the term boring is often employed as an all-purpose term of disapproval (Spacks 1995:10). This can be humorous, as for example during football games where the opposing teams goals are accompanied by refrains of booooooooring by Warlpiri spectators. Usually, though, generic use of the term falls into what Conrad describes as a vocabulary of discontent, indicating a sort of alienation from the moment (1997:132). Statements like nyampurla punku, boringnyiarniyi, sick-of-it-rla, junga! (this is bad, very boring, I hate it, true!) are brought forward especially but not exclusively by Warlpiri youths. Other versions are nothing happening, too boring, true and sick-of-it, boring, always

This image of Kate stays clear in my mind as one of the starkest nonverbal expressions of boredom I witnessed

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American Anthropologist Vol. 109, No. 2 June 2007 (1972) sense was in part due to the fact that securing a livelihood did not require long hours of labor, affording ample time to focus on an elaborate ceremonial exchange cycle and to sleep.7 Unlike others, who seem extremely lazy by comparison (Sahlins 1972:38), he says (drawing on Thomson 1949) some Australian hunter-gatherers
are very different. The Murngin, for example: The rst impression that any stranger must receive in a fully functioning group in Eastern Arnhem Land is of industry. . . . And he must be impressed with the fact that with the exception of very young children . . . there is no idleness. [Sahlins 1972:38]

the same. In these cases, boringness is not associated with anything in particular (a place, person, event, or thing), nor is it qualied in any way. These statements declare the insufferability of itlife, the universe, everything. They are allusions to something appropriating Svendsens objectless existential boredom. This second kind of boredom expresses not so much a longing for something, not only a discontent with what is, but some deeper crisis of meaning. I explore this by following two leads: First, I investigate the link between boredom and perceptions of time (e.g., Anderson 2004; Heidegger 1995), and especially the idea that boredom has a temporal dimension and . . . may be in part contingent on the social organization of time (Conrad 1997:473). Subsequently, I examine the relationship between boredom and temporality by probing into what the latter stands forthat is, by looking at how meaning is created or denied through experiencing time. The social organization of time at Yuendumu seems to be in ux, in a process which, at least supercially, contains parallels to the one discussed by Thompson (1967) in his seminal essay on time and discipline among the English working class. Talking about the effects of the new discipline, Thompson writes:
One may note that as the industrial revolution proceeds, wage incentives and expanding consumer drivesthe palpable rewards for the productive consumption of time and the evidence of new predictive attitudes to the futureare evidently effective. By the 1830s and 1840s it was commonly observed that the English industrial worker was marked off from his fellow Irish worker, not by a greater capacity for hard work, but by his regularity, his methodological paying-out of energy, and perhaps also by a repression, not of enjoyments, but of the capacity to relax in the old, uninhibited ways. [Thompson 1967:91]

Their afuence enabled them to fully live in the here and now, at a leisurely pace of life and with a complete lack of worry, or, as Sahlins describes it:
Certainly, hunters quit camp because food resources have given out in the vicinity. But to see in this nomadism merely a ight from starvation only perceives the half of it; one ignores the possibility that the peoples expectations of greener pastures elsewhere are not usually disappointed. Consequently their wanderings, rather than anxious, take on all the qualities of a picnic outing on the Thames. [1972:30]

The t is loose because Warlpiri people seem more like the Irish than the English industrial worker (of the time), in that their capacity to relax in the old, uninhibited ways is somewhat less affected by the imposition of new time regimes. However, this capacity is sporadically ruptured, and then, I contend, existential boredom comes into being at Yuendumu: Its genesis, as I elucidate below, lies in the intersection of the old ways and (post)colonial (time) disciplines. If we follow the social constructivist argument, the lack of a presettlement term indicates the possibility of a boredom-less perception of life. Contemporary complaints about boredom suggest this perception is being altered. I explore this state of affairs by rst describing the old ways of being in time, then applying Leachs (1968) theory of time perception to the particular structures of temporality within which the sociality of the contemporary settlement everyday is embedded.6 We can glean an idea of the form presettlement beingin-time could have taken from Marshall Sahlinss description of the industriousness of Australian hunter-gatherers. Like hunter-gatherers elsewhere, their afuence in Sahlinss

I can only speculate whether the same was true for Warlpiri people. However, the tenor of stories by older Warlpiri people who lived in the bush before the founding of Yuendumu resonates strongly. Moreover, the ability to fully be in the here and now has also been identied among contemporary Australian Aboriginal people, including Warlpiri, as a crucial social trait. Tony Swain describes Aboriginal life as perceived through rhythmed events (1993:19). Sylvie Poirier highlights the Aboriginal disinterest in chronological, measured time by examples of what she calls their innite patience (2005:59), illustrated through what happened when the car broke down during a trip:
Far from being concerned or in a hurry to repair it, the friends with whom I was traveling took it as an opportunity to invest themselves in the immediate place where the event occurred. Some wandered about looking for animal tracks or edible plants, while others sat around or gathered rewood. In other words, they established camp. It was as if the breakdown was an occasion to engage themselves with the place, an opportunity to feel the place and the moment and see what would happen in that space, that time, that moment. [Poirier 2005:59 60]

Wendy Baarda, a linguist who has been living at Yuendumu for over 30 years, calls the attitude underlying innite patience, the ability and willingness to be in the moment wherever one is, no matter what happens, living in the absolute present (personal communication, September 12, 2006). The dynamics of living in the absolute present and the break necessary to experience boredom are better understood by following Leach (1968) and examining the tension between two basic experiences: (1) that certain phenomena of nature repeat themselves and (2) that life change

Musharbash Boredom, Time, and Modernity

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FIGURE 1. Time oscillation (following Leach 1968).

is irreversible. Leach explicates that the oscillations of phenomena that repeat themselves are between points that are the same but different, as illustrated in Figure 1 (1968:131). The A and the B may stand for day and night, or any such pair of binary oppositions between which time oscillates. Although there is endless repetition (from day to night to day to night), in fact each day and each night is unique. They are unique because each is experienced and thus different from previous ones and the ones which follow. This interplay between time and experience is crucial in understanding existential boredom at Yuendumu. Leach says that we talk of measuring time, as if time were a concrete thing waiting to be measured; but in fact we create time by creating intervals in social life (1968:135). I add that it is vital to conceptualize this creating of time not as an act but as process; in other words, following Anthony Giddens (1984), we need to pay attention to structuring structures. Not only do we create intervals, but through experiencing them, they in turn create us, which in turn has an impact on our way of creating them. Let us look then at the structures of temporality at Yuendumu, where time ows, trickles, passes, and stagnates in various ways. There are the recurrent rhythms of time structured as weekdays and weekends, school terms and holidays, the oscillations of day and night, hot time and cold time, and the ebbing and owing of pension week versus nothing week. These ows are suspended occasionally through events such as the annual Yuendumu Sports Weekend and initiation ceremonies. And unplanned events punctuate the ows of time irregularly, such as mortuary rituals, ghts, and so forth. Intervals such as day and night, or hot time and cold time, are different from each other through their physicality, their feel, and their emotional valencies. Each interval is again divided into different segmentsfor example, the day into mungalyurru (morning), kalarla (midday), wuraji (afternoon), wuraji-wuraji (late afternoon)and every segment affects different social and spatial practices. Above these temporal streams, the Yuendumu school siren, audible over the entire settlement, punctuates each weekday of school term seven times. The rst siren is wakeup time; the second indicates that school (and other business) start(s); the third rings at the beginning of cup-of-tea

time; the fourth rings to announce its end; the fth and sixth ring for the beginning and end of lunch time; and the seventh announces the end of school. Although Poirier (2005:40) interprets the siren at Balgo (an Aboriginal settlement 500 km away) as a neocolonial attempt to call people to work and to teach clock time, the Yuendumu siren distinctly does not instill such ideas.8 In summer, it is rung an hour earlier than it is in winter, thus people know that school starts at the second siren, but most do not know what time that is; wrist watches and clocks are uncommon. In all the camps I lived in, confusion reigned daily about clock time, rst siren, and shop-opening timeespecially as the latter shifts occasionally, and quite unpredictably. I take the siren to epitomize the postcolonial nature of Yuendumu temporalities. It serves well to symbolize settlement time, an idiosyncratic temporal jumble that is distinctly neither Warlpiri nor mainstream. Following its logic, the siren announces to a settlement of mainly unemployed people such absurd moments as cup-of-tea time in the morning of a Thursday during nothing week in cold time. Within this time regime, living in the absolute present as the standard Warlpiri mode of being means that Warlpiri people follow Leach to the letter in their experiences of time: They make something out of every moment, where cup-of-tea time today is not the same as cup-oftea time tomorrow, last week, or next year, nor are the other cup-of-tea times relevant. Frustrated Warlpiri exclamations about nothing happening, always the same indicate that occasionally a shift occurs in this perception, in which Leachs movement (i.e., experience) between oscillations, distinguishing one oscillation from the next, collapses. During such shifts, instead of new moments, the ows of time are experienced as an endless repetition of the same. The present becomes oppressive, like a cage in which one is caught, in which one experiences the same thing over and over again without any possibility of escape. Boredom happens when all cup-of-tea times merge into one. This link between boredom and time (or more specically, particular local forms of temporality) at Yuendumu can be further documented by looking at what commonly are termed reactions to boredom.

KILLING TIME Although some authors emphasize boredoms positive potential, many view boredom as a trigger for engagement in meaningless or destructive practices, such as substance misuse, promiscuity, vandalism, depression, and violence.9 Understood as attempts to ward off boredom, these practices are commonly labeled killing time (see, esp., Raposa 1999). Thus, Grass Creek informants explicitly linked boredom to trouble, a multifaceted construct that nearly always involved alcohol or drugs. Other activities that fell under the rubric of trouble included sensation seeking behaviors, such as impromptu car racing, vandalism, and various illegal activities (Jervis et al. 2003:41). At Yuendumu, not all practices of killing time are harmful, and there

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American Anthropologist Vol. 109, No. 2 June 2007 derlying boredom at Grass Creek. The implication of this is that despite
assertions that overload is more often responsible for boredom in contemporary societies than is underload (Klapp 1986), on Grass Creek the converse seemed to be true, with boredom deriving from understimulation, along with a feeling of being deprived of the pleasure that is presumably available elsewhere [knowledge of which is conveyed through popular culture]. [Jervis et al. 2003:5253]

seems to be a different causeeffect relationship. Warlpiri practices of killing time literally involve revolts against time regimes. In typical Warlpiri fashion, they are never undertaken alone. The most immediate response to suffering temporal constraints is spatial escape, both throughout the settlement and between settlements. Cruising around all day long, sleeping here one night, in another camp the next, then off to Balgo, to Alice Springs, and after that to Papunya, always moving, always looking for something to happen, is a very common way of being for Warlpiri people (see Musharbash 2003). Sometimes, Warlpiri people choose to escape the seemingly oppressive time regime of settlement life by indulging in vast amounts of amorphous unstructured time. For example, groups of teenagers may watch television uninterrupted for days on end, and older women engage in endless card games that go on until the last cent, then the last piece of clothing, and nally the last blanket is gambled away (see also Barbalet 1999:642643). Another strategy is the often described recourse to drugs and violence. Substance misuse seems to make people immune to settlement temporality, substantiated by the disregard people under the inuence demonstrate toward temporal rulesfor example, the common practice of drunks waking up others at night to socialize and to ask for money or cigarettes, sniffers interrupting meetings, and so forth. Last, violence (both domestic and feud-related) ruptures the settlements time ows, as all other activity is halted to participate, watch, or help. At Yuendumu, practices of killing time, rather than being triggered by boredom, are aimed against the same circumstances that create the potential for existential boredom. Accepting that people kill time not because they are bored but as a reaction against the circumstances that also generate boredom means problemitizing the explicit link between boredom and trouble in some of the literature. Although we can postulate that time disciplines play a crucial role in fashioning the circumstances for the potential of boredom or the engagement in practices of killing time, we need to investigate further what exactly it is that makes specic time disciplines in particular places so revoltable against; in short, what are the meanings encapsulated in these experiential encounters with temporalities? I delve deeper into this by investigating the nature of distinct relationships between boredom and modernity.

BOREDOM AND MODERNITY As outlined above, the interdisciplinary literature colocates the emergence of boredom with that of modernity, linking boredom to secularization, an increased focus on the self, the belief in ones entitlement to happiness, the work leisure distinction, overload, and standardizations of time organization. Jervis and colleagues locate Grass Creek people on a parallel trajectory, diverging only in regard to overload. They identify scarce employment, few recreational options, and transportation difculties to be the key issues un-

At Yuendumu, such an overall parallel trajectory is not as easily established. To draw out the structural differences, I contrast the Warlpiri material with Brissett and Snows (1993) treatise about boredom. Theirs is not an ethnographic study; instead, they introspectively situate boredom in an abstracted United States stripped of all difference, a place populated by U.S. citizens devoid of class, ethnicity, gender, and age differences. They describe an equally abstracted, preboredom, industrial United States, characterized by vivid contrasts of sounds, smells, noises, and silences, a place that contains commonalities with the boredom-inducing time regimes at Yuendumu, exemplied by the Yuendumu siren. At Yuendumu, boredom is engendered by a process akin to Thompsons process of emplacing time disciplines, while their dissolution creates the breeding ground for boredom in Brissett and Snows United States. Their United States is not real, it is an image based on what they identify as core cultural features: cultural arrhythmia, afuence, and the decline in the opportunities for uncertaintyvalues that in tandem generate boredom, although the opposite can be shown for Yuendumu. The rst of these features, arrhythmia, they say originates in an obsession with speed coming at the price of rhythm and contrast and resulting in the practice of coalescing multiple activities into single settings, such as work[ing] while jogging or playing golf, spend[ing] quality time with family members while shopping, and listen[ing] to books while driving (Brissett and Snow 1993:247). These practices are not dissimilar to Sahlinss picnic-on-theThames quality of presettlement life; in fact Brissett and Snows depiction of a world where people to work, shop, and play at all hours, seven days a week (1993:245) is an apt description, ironically, of presettlement Warlpiri life. Differences transpire in cause (obsession with speed vs. being in the absolute present) and effect (boredom vs. no boredom). Their second core cultural feature, afuence, presents a similar scenario: In Brissett and Snows United States, mass afuence is a key ingredient to the rise of boredom; at Yuendumu, afuence (in Sahlins sense) is a key feature of presettlement, boredom-free life. By no stretch of the imagination can (U.S.-style) afuence be seen as part of contemporary settlement life but boredom is. Brissett and Snow describe the third key feature, the decline in opportunities for uncertainty, as a cultural ideal [that] seems to be represented by those individuals who know specically where they are headed, how they will get there, and how they will know when they arrive (1993:250). Boredom becomes

Musharbash Boredom, Time, and Modernity possible through an assured future without anticipation: When survival is no longer problematic, when work is no longer instrumental, when leisure is plentiful and affordable, boredom is often engendered (Brisset and Snow 1993:246). The future, Brisset and Snow claim, is too certain, without mystery and with nothing at stake, divorcing the individual from being involved in life; boredom in this sense is a disinterest in what one already has (Brissett and Snow 1993:240). At Yuendumu, on the other hand, it is not an assured future that induces boredom but the repetitive drills of an oppressive-seeming present encapsulated in settlement temporalities that do not allow any glimpses of something else. This comparison illustrates how boredom emerges in two almost diametrically opposed settings. In each setting, boredom happens at the juncture of specic values (Brissett and Snows core cultural features vs. Warlpiri ways of being in the absolute present and understandings of relatedness as integral to subjectivity) and particular circumstances (e.g., local versions of temporalities). Put differently, this comparison suggests that boredom arises when values and circumstances fail to correspond, when ways of being in the world and the world jar. This jarring, as the examples show, can happen in any number of settingsmeaning that as anthropologists we have to understand boredom as locally engendered and socioculturally specic. Thus, at Yuendumu, boredom is generated at the intersection of the old ways and (post)colonial (time) disciplines, but for it to be experienced, a lack in meaning needs to be felt. This happens when the values underlying Warlpiri ways of being in the world and the world, encountered through settlement realities, are recognized as coming together in a meaningless t.

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opposition to Grass Creek, Yuendumu time disciplines do not signify a mainstream just beyond reach. Rather, Yuendumu temporalities encapsulate the absurdities of a particular form of modernity, they epitomize a meaninglessness felt as entrapment and expressed as boredom. Here, as elsewhere, we must understand boredom to be a problem of meaning (see also Barbalet 1999; Kessel 2001; Kuhn 1976; Raposa 1999; Spacks 1995; Svendsen 2005). Here, as elsewhere, we must understand such meaning (or meaninglessness) as locally and socioculturally constituted. Boredom comes into being in the nexus of old and new regimes; it is felt through time, but its meaning, clearly, must be related to the times and how they are perceived on the ground. As our task as anthropologists is to engage with local understandings of the world, I propose focusing the anthropological gaze onto boredom: to examine it comparatively as a socioculturally and historically specic phenomenon above and beyond a universal sentiment, and to analyze its qualities as a response to rather than a byproduct of modernity. Such studies should foster anthropological understanding of the phenomenon itself and may well contribute important insights into the complex processes of modernity across spaces and cultures.

YASMINE MUSHARBASH Discipline of Anthropology and Sociology, The University of Western Australia, Crawley 6009, Australia NOTES
Acknowledgments. Research for this article was undertaken as an academic visitor with The Australian National University and as a postdoctoral fellow with the University of Western Australia. I presented earlier drafts of this article at both universities and thank the audiences for their stimulating debate. Special thanks go to Sallie Anderson, Victoria Burbank, Debbie McDougall, Kevin Murphy, Nic Peterson, Lars Svendsen, Bob Tonkinson, David Trigger, and Raelene Wilding for insightful comments on various earlier drafts. I am particularly grateful to Benjamin Blount and the AA reviewers for their profound engagement with and excellent comments on earlier drafts of this article. 1. I found only one reference maintaining that boredom has existed throughout all ages and across cultures in essentially the same form (Decher 2003). 2. Note that the term interest came into existence at the same time (Healy 1984; Spacks 1995), a linkage enforced in some psychological literature that conceives of boredom as the opposite of interest (e.g., Hunter and Csikszentmihalyi 2003; Kast 2001). 3. Employment often is administered through the Community Development and Employment Project Scheme (CDEP program), a federal governmentrun program similar to work on the dole (see Musharbash 2001). 4. For example, a young Warlpiri man asked a nonindigenous person in an all-English conversation to borrow a disc for his PlayStation because I am bored (eld notes, November 23, 2005). The term bored was also frequently used by Tamsin, one of my main informants, who was fully aware of my research topic. She delighted in starting conversations by saying Yasmine, I am soooooooo boredproviding wonderful insights to my questions as to why, on the one hand, and underscoring the dangers of prompting responses, on the other. 5. I translated Warlpiri utterances into English and use pseudonyms throughout.

CONCLUSION: BOREDOM AND MEANING Boredom at Yuendumu displays distinctly Warlpiri features: Situational boredom is consensual, existential boredom is communal, and even the killing of time is always undertaken with others. Warlpiri situational boredom arises out of desires curtailed, overlapping with but different than desires that when curtailed may create boredom in other sociocultural contexts. Warlpiri existential boredom comes into existence at the experiential encounter of Warlpiri ways of being in the world and conicting and constraining time regimesand the meanings they and their entanglement carry for Yuendumu residents. I view these time disciplines as examples of a particular localized image of modernity. Settlement reality is a strange mix of neither-there-anymore (the boredomfree presettlement past) and a not-there-at-all (the mainstream), exemplied here through a siren that regiments the days of an overwhelmingly unemployed population to its own tune (not clock time). Reading Warlpiri boredom as a measure of Westernization, analogous to Grass Creek, would mean to misrecognize the thing-in-itself qualities of the phenomenon as well as its sociocultural dimensions. In

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6. I am not concerned here with conceptualizations of time in the ontological sense as for example in Gell (1992), Munn (1992), and many Australian Aboriginal ethnographies that include a chapter on time and the Dreaming (for a small selection, see Dussart 2000; Myers 1986; Poirier 2005). 7. See, however, Gells (1992:210216) critique of Sahlins in regard to the value of the time available to hunter-gatherers. 8. See Harris (1991) on clock time in Aboriginal settlements; Levine (1997) on sociocultural regimes of clock time and event time around the world; and Foucault (1979) and Bourdieu (1977) on the ways in which time regimes are embodied. 9. For positive examples, see Barbalet (1999), Nietzsche (1964), Raposa (1999), Russell (1930), and Spacks (1989).

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