The snake-daughter’s tears: reversive poly-historicity in southeast Solomon Islands

François Hartog argues that different social collectives experience historicity differently, and advocates comparative study of different ‘regimes of historicity’, different weightings of the relative importance of past, present, and future. Drawing on my own and earlier ethnography of southeast Solomon Islands, I contend that different regimes of historicity correlate with different ontologies discernible in different cosmogonic traditions. I develop this thesis in three parts. First, informed by classical scholarship that contextualises Homeric tradition within an ancient Olympian cosmogony, I reanalyse Hartog’s exegesis of Odysseus’s tears as a claim that Western historicity arose in tandem with a particular cosmogonic transition: the elimination of the demi-gods as a chaotic category in the monistic Olympian cosmos. Second, I re-examine origin stories in southeast Solomon Islands for what they indicate about poly-ontological (or totemic), as opposed to monistic, historicities. Whereas monistic ontologies entail single all-encompassing regimes of past-oriented historicity, poly-ontology, I argue, entails a plurality of past-oriented historicities, or poly-historicity. Third, in light of practices through which southeast Solomon Islanders have worked to keep ancestors active and available in a state of partial reversion to origins, I conclude that poly-historicity among pre-Christian southeast Solomon Islanders was composed as a plurality of what I theorize as reversive historicities.