Research Articles

YASMINE MUSHARBASH

Boredom, Time, and Modernity: An Example fromAboriginal 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 West-

ernization. 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 specific ways of perceiving time and postcolonial temporalities as

generating the emergence of boredom. This boredom is a historically and socioculturally specific phenomenon, arising out of distinct so-

ciocultural engagements with locally particular processes of modernity. [Keywords: boredom, time, cross-cultural comparison, Australian

Aborigines, modernity]

WHAT WONDER, then, that the world goes frombad to worse, and that its evils increase more andmore, as boredom increases, and boredom is the root of allevil. The history of this can be traced from the very begin-ning of the world. The gods were bored, and so they createdman. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve wascreated. Thus boredom entered the world. And increased inproportion to the increase of population. Adam was boredalone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adamand Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then thepopulation of the world increased, and the peoples werebored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived theidea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heav-ens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, andconstitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the up-per hand. The nations were scattered over the earth, just aspeople now travel abroad, but they continued to be bored.

Kierkegaard, Either/Or

From Sren Kierkegaards facetious comments, we canraise some anthropological questions: Is boredom a facet ofhuman life, everywhere? Is it universally the same? What isits link to evil? How, in fact, should anthropologists con-ceptualize boredom? I came to ponder these questions asI wrote my dissertation on everyday life at the AustralianAboriginal settlement of Yuendumu. Going through my

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 Rightsand Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/AA.2007.109.2.307.

field notes, I realized that boredom had been a sizeable as-pect of the everyday but that, perhaps because of its nor-malcy, I had failed to collect systematic data about it and,what is more, that anthropology did not offer any frame-works within which to analyze this phenomenon. In answerto my questions, then, this article brings together subse-quent research at Yuendumu and insights from the interdis-ciplinary literature on boredom from philosophy, literaturestudies, sociology, and psychology.

Boredoms most defining feature from the available lit-erature seems to be its definitional ambiguity, acknowl-edged outright by most authors and often managed with apropensity to use metaphors in its portrayals. The recurringuse of fog, as for example in Martin Heideggers descrip-tion of boredom as drawing back and forth like a silentfog in the abysses of Dasein (1995:77) is illuminating, as isElizabeth Goodsteins description of boredom as an expe-rience without qualities (2005:1). Generally, it is describedas a reactive state to wearingly dull or tedious stimuli. Al-ternatively there is the idea that boredom is caused by hav-ing too much choice (Klapp 1986). Many writers analyzeboredom in relation to time and the subjects perceptionsthereof and often link the concept to monotony and rep-etition. Specifically, boredom is discussed as a state of be-ing where the experience of time dissolves or stops being

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of relevancea perspective I employ in the discussion ofthe Yuendumu material. In variance with some of the lit-erature, here I avoid treating boredom as a sentiment, feel-ing, or emotional state because researching boredom cross-culturally is fraught with methodologically dangers: Howcan we know what exactly people are experiencing whenthey say, or we think we see, that they are bored?

Instead, this article follows another lead from boredomresearch, which takes a social constructivist approach (seeamong others Healy 1984; Klapp 1986; Spacks 1995; Svend-sen 2005).1 This literature suggests that boredom (alsocalled modern boredom) has a distinct and fairly recenthistory, and that it is conceptually intertwined with pro-cesses of modernity. I outline tenets of this approach andemploy them in my analysis of boredom at Yuendumu, inwhich I also utilize Lars Svendsens (2005) distinction be-tween situational and existential boredom. While relat-ing the former to perceptions of personhood, I analyze thelatter through conceptualizations of being in time, draw-ing on E. P. Thompson (1967) and Edmund Leach (1968).I argue against the notion that indigenous boredom atYuendumu can, or should, be seen purely as a measure ofWesternizationas is implied by Lori Jervis and colleagues(2003), on whose study of boredom on a Native Americanreservation I draw extensively. To illustrate the particulari-ties of boredom at Yuendumu specifically and the sociocul-tural distinctness of forms of boredom more generally, I con-trast boredoms genesis at Yuendumu with the descriptionof boredom that Dennis Brissett and Robert Snow (1993)give for the United States. On the basis of these compar-isons, I argue for anthropological investigation of the phe-nomenon as a means of exploring socioculturally specificengagements with locally distinct forms of modernity.

THE BEGINNINGS OF BOREDOM

Although Kierkegaard accords boredom timeless ubiquity,much of the interdisciplinary literature suggests that whatwe call boredom has been experienced less often, by fewerpeople, and in distinctly different ways prior to moderntimes, and that it has been steadily on the rise only sincethe 18th century. Thus, Peter Conrad says that it seemslikely that prior to increased leisure and affluence, it didntmuch matter whether life was deemed interesting or bor-ing (1997:466), adding that the importance of these dis-tinctions is a peculiarity of modernity. Similarly, Svendsen(2005:21) calls boredom the privilege of modern man,elaborating that before Romanticism, boredom would havebeen a marginal issue, reserved for monks and the aristoc-racy. This social construction of boredom is argued on fourlevels: (1) through linking sociohistorical developments tothe emergence of boredom; (2) in regard to normative shiftsin perception of the sentiment; (3) on the linguistic level;and (4) through the increase in frequency both in experi-ence and considerations of boredom.

Acedia is identified as the oldest documented phe-nomenon most closely related to todays boredom (see,

among others, Kuhn 1976; Raposa 1999; Svendsen 2005).Used throughout the Middle Ages, acedia is a Christian termdescribing a state of apathy in the practice of virtue afflict-ing the clergy. It is linked to the sin of sloth and the Demonof Noontide, an apparition held responsible for inducingmonks into a dangerous form of spiritual alienation, a mis-ery of the soul that could, like other sins, be avoided by ef-fort or by grace (Spacks 1995:11). During the Renaissance,acedia was superseded by the term melancholy, a sentimentextended to now also afflict the aristocracy (cf. Goodstein2005; Spacks 1995; Svendsen 2005). Both terms are said todescribe an essentially similar sentiment, but with crucialdifferences in their connotations. While acedia is linked tothe moral domain, melancholy is linked to the natural; theformer affects the soul, the latter the body. Acedia, throughits affinity with the sin of sloth, had exclusively negativeconnotations while melancholy was imbued with connota-tions of illness as well as wisdom.

The phenomenon of modern boredom is said to be-gin to emerge with Romanticism (Svendsen 2005). The eraprovided the conceptual climate for massive transformativechanges including (1) secularization and the growing meta-physical void; (2) individualism with the resultant increasedfocus on the self; (3) the rise of the belief in ones entitle-ment to individual happiness; (4) a new dichotomy betweenwork and leisure time through the expansion of capitalism;(5) an increase of the so-called overload, resulting from massproduction and the evolvement and expansion of the me-dia; and (6) bureaucratization and the rise of standardized[and] standardizing organizations of time-space (Anderson2004:741). Once these processes underlying modernity un-folded, the concept of boredom expanded: It became demo-cratic. Now not only the clergy, the rich, and the idle butalso everyone else could experience it.

The birth of modern boredom is also evident in theemergence of boredom terminology: The English verb tobore came into use after the 1760s (Svendsen 2005:24). Thenoun bore, for a thing that bores, is dated at 1778 and theuse of bore for a tiresome person at 1812, and the first recordof the English term boredom originates from 1864 (Spacks1995:13).2 Both the German term Langeweile and the Dan-ish kedshomed predate the English by a few decades (Svend-sen 2005:24). The older French ennui and the Italian noiacame via Provencial enojo from Latin odiare, meaning tohate, abhor, abominate. The meaning of those latter termsis closely related to tristesse and melancholy and thus said tobe different from modern boredom (Kuhn 1976:56; Svend-sen 2005:24). Except in the last case, etymologies for wordsmeaning boredom are generally uncertain (Klapp 1986:24;Kuhn 1976:45).

Since the 18th century, boredoms increasing sig-nificance is further underscored through a rise in aca-demic and fictional literature about it. Philosophers suchas Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Kierkegaard,Friedrich Nietzsche, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, andTheodor Adorno pondered boredom as a concept, a sen-timent, an experience, or an emotion; writers like Johann

Musharbash Boredom, Time, and Modernity 309

Wolfgang Goethe, Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Mann, SamuelBeckett, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Henrik Ibsen, Gertrude Stein,and Fernando Pessoa made it their subject. Literary theoristshave worked on literary histories of boredom (Kessel 2001;Kuhn 1976; Spacks 1995). Psychologists have become in-terested in boredom (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi 1975; Hill andPerkins 1985; Kast 2001; Sundberg et al. 1991; Vodanovich2003; Vodanovich and Watt 1999), and there is a flow ofsociological boredom literature (e.g., Barbalet 1999; Brissettand Snow 1993; Conrad 1997; Doehlemann 1991; Healy1984). But this literature tells us little about forms of bore-dom outside the generative center of these transformativeprocesses, or whether people elsewhere had similar reac-tions to modern structural transformations. Curiously, an-thropologists have largely ignored these questions.

Most anthropological considerations of boredom arehidden in ethnographies, where boredom is mentionedin passing and seldom explicated upon. More elaborateengagement can be found, for example, in Richard Con-dons work with Inuit youth (Condon 1995; Condon andStern 1993) and Michael Herzfelds (2003) sensitive por-trayal of Cretan apprentices employment of boredom asmask. The work most explicitly focused on boredom itselfis Jervis and colleagues (2003) ethnopsychological studyexamining perceptions of and reactions to boredom at aNative American Reservation (Grass Creek). Central totheir study are processes of postcolonialism and their ef-fects on indigenous peoples lives, circumstances, and per-ceptions of personhood. Jervis and colleagues view bore-dom at Grass Creek as an indicator that especially reserva-tion youth were increasingly identifying with dominantAmerican cultural values, such as the notion that individualhappiness is an entitlement, that pleasure is to be derivedfrom without, and that boredom should be blamed on theexternal worlds inadequacy (2003:49). While drawing ontheir material, the question I bring to the Yuendumu exam-ple is whether boredom can in fact be seen as an indicatorof the Westernization of indigenous peoples or whethersomething else is going on.

BOREDOM AT YUENDUMU

Set up in 1946 as a ration station, Yuendumu is located ap-proximately 300 kilometers northwest of the town of AliceSprings in central Australia. Many of its residents have ex-perienced significant changes in a fairly short time span:violent frontier encounters earlier last century, followed byforced sedentization and institutionalization in the 1940s,subsequent integration into the cash economy from 1969,with the full cash payment of social security benefits di-rectly to individual residents, and the deinstitutionaliza-tion of Yuendumu in the 1970s through the introductionof an elected Council. Today, Yuendumu displays all thefeatures of a fairly typical postcolonial Aboriginal settle-ment. It has a fluctuating population of up to 800 Aborig-inal people, mainly Warlpiri speakers, as well as about 100nonindigenous Australians (mostly service providers in gov-

ernment agencies). Some Warlpiri people are employed atthe bilingual school and a number of the local communityorganizations, but the main income derives from welfarepayments.3 Substance misuse and associated problems arecommonplace, as indeed they are in many remote settle-ments in Australia. Although Yuendumu operates one ofthe more successful petrol-sniffing prevention programs inAustralia, petrol sniffing does sporadically occur. Teenagersoccasionally break into one of the two shops or the housesof nonindigenous residents. Yuendumu is a so-called drycommunity (alcohol is officially prohibited), however, alco-hol does get smuggled in and consumed in the settlement.Some people, especially those aged in their twenties, smokemarijuana. Rates of domestic and other violence are high.

As I returned to Yuendumu to study Warlpiri boredom,I faced two methodological dilemmas. First, the dangerthat my presence may dispel boredom. This was somewhatalleviated by my longstanding familiarity with Yuendumuresidents, my practice of coresiding with Warlpiri people,and lengthy fieldwork. A more serious problem is that thetopic itself sets limits to the effectiveness of participant-observation: informants boredom, unless verbalized, canonly be inferred, and at best confirmed in subsequent inter-views (running the risk of putting words into informantsmouths). Helpful here was Svendsens (2005) boredom ty-pology: He proposes a theoretical distinction between bore-dom as a reaction to certain things or events and beingbored as a state of being; the former he calls situative bore-dom and the latter existential boredom. Situative bore-dom, on the one hand, is the kind of boredom one expe-riences, for example, while waiting or in a lecture; it is of-ten expressed bodily through yawning, sighing, doodling,and general restlessness and distractedness. An overload ofthings or events as well as a deficiency of them can leadto this type. Existential boredom, on the other hand, is anall-encompassing boredom where the individual is bored in-dependently of or detached from the world around them.Characterized by lack of desire and perceptual engagementwith the world, it has no object. This is the silent fog ofindifference in Heideggers sense. At Yuendumu, I took sit-uative boredom to be the kind that people are reflexiveaboutthat is, the kind that is generally verbalizedandexistential boredom as the kind that deeply and profoundlyaffects the person and is more or less expressionless. Thelatter is the kind of boredom we can only infer (discussedbelow). As a first approach to the former, situative bore-dom, I noted all everyday utterances containing referencesto boredom.

Significantly, there is no Warlpiri word for boredom/bored/boring. A linguist with long Warlpiri experience,David Nash, suggested that the term jukuru might coverbored (personal communication, September 8, 2004). In theWarlpiri dictionary (Laughren et al. n.d.), jukuru is trans-lated as apathetic, unwilling to enter into secular socialactivities, not wanting, not desirous, dislike, uninterested,unenthusiastic (n.d.). Consultation with Warlpiri peopleconfirmed that this term does not denote boredom but

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rather an active disinterest in a specific activity. The Pit-jatjatjara/Yankuntjatjara dictionary for languages spokento the south translates the adjective paku as tired, weary,bored (Goddard 1996:102103). Paku seems to be a syn-onym of the Warlpiri adjective mata, meaning tired, weary,exhaustedalways in a physical sense. The lack of indige-nous boredom terminology strengthens my conviction thatparallel to pre-Romanticism times in Europe, boredom inprecontact Warlpiri life was experienced less than it is to-day, if at all.

When Warlpiri people referred to boredom, they usedthe English word, usually embedded in otherwise Warlpirisentences, for example: Nyampurla punku, boring, junga-nyiarniyi (this [place] is bad, boring, very true). Exclu-sively, boring was the term used; I never heard mention ofboredom; and bored was only used in all-English conversa-tions between young Warlpiri and nonindigenous persons.4

Warlpiri application of the term boring reveals some note-worthy similarities and differences to mainstream English.It was either applied generically (discussed below) or appliedas a descriptive label for places, people, things, and events.

Places such as Yuendumu, other Aboriginal settlements,even Alice Springs, were frequently described as boring. Im-portantly, this is always qualified; boringness is not a qualityof a place itself but a description of it at a particular time.For example, Mick (aged in his mid-forties) suggested, Weshould go camping out, take [Yasmine] to country, Yuen-dumus boring on the weekend, not enough Yapa [people]there5 (field notes, August 15, 2005). Tamsin (age 22) elab-orated on this quality: If there is nothing to do, not muchpeople in community, everyone sit one place, thats why weget bored. Sometimes people look and say that place reallyboring. When there is not much people, that makes Yuen-dumu boring (field notes, August 3, 2005). She also com-plained about a trip to Alice Springs, saying, [It was] bor-ing. Nothing happened. I stayed at Tatyanas and watchedDVDs. Thats all (field notes, September 21, 2005). Cru-cially, the boringness of a place is created by the absence ofpeople (not enough people) and a lack of social interac-tion and engagement (nothing happening).

In mainstream English, the term boring when applied topersons is always used as an adjective and, generally, a nega-tive label: Ed is boring does not reflect positively on Ed. AtYuendumu, if directly applied to persons, the term is alwaysused in the active sense, so that Millie must be boring, allalone now meant that she must feel lonely after we hadleft her to travel to another settlement. Also poignant wasa comment made when I dropped my dog off at the AliceSprings kennel: He must be boring for us, poor thing (fieldnotes, September 13, 2005). The word in these instancesdoes not express boredom but a lack of social connectiv-ity, loneliness, and pining for others. There is, however, away in which aspects of peoples behavior can be labeledboring, as in the following instance: She keeps on doingthe same thing all the time, it goes really boring, like shealways goes [to the] same house, [first] Leahs place, [thento] Womens Centre, back to West Camp, she does the same

all the time, she cant do anything different (field notes,December 14, 2005). As with places, there is always a qual-ifier: An entire person cannot be labeled boring, but theirbehavior can be.

A striking finding was how few events were labeledboring, considering the large range of events with bore-dom potential (meetings, long drives, etc.). I heard the termused only in regard to one concert (which I unfortunatelymissed) and to a football game. A quote about the latterpointedly illustrates the criterion for boredom in these in-stances: [The last game] was good: it made us feel excited, itmade us feel scared, it made us feel proud. Not boring gamelike the under 17swe only had to cheer for twenty min-utes, then it was too easy (field notes, September 11, 2005).Events that fail to emotionally engage run the risk of beinglabeled boring. Analogous to events, the range of things la-beled boring was also small, comprising certain movies andsongs. For example, when traveling in my Toyota, the per-son in charge of music would play some songs and overagain (an interesting inversion of the negativity of repeti-tiveness) and skip others, sometimes saying boring whenthe first notes sounded. Significantly, although the personchoosing the music as well as the audiences differed fromtrip to trip, the choices did not. Nor was there ever a quarrelabout playing, repeating, or skipping a song. The consensusabout which songs were popular and which were not wasstriking.

Svendsen defines situative boredom as a boredomthat contains a longing for something that is desired(2005:42). The nature of the desire, in the Yuendumu exam-ples, is clearly for social and emotional engagement. If thisdesire is curtailedbecause there are not enough people, be-cause nothing is happening, or because something or some-one is all too predictablesituative boredom is experienced.As reactions to curtailed desires, boredom as described in theliterature and Warlpiri situative boredom seem fundamen-tally similar.

Divergences appear when considering Conrads state-ment that boredom is also in the eye of the beholder. Whatmay be boring to one person may be fascinating to the next(1997:468). In contrast, at Yuendumu, there seems to begeneral consensus about what is and what is not boring, or,more precisely, what may or may not be labeled boring ineveryday speech acts. This consensus is reminiscent of BasilSansoms (1980) description of how the word, the com-munal version of events, is established in Darwin FringeCamps. There, everyone is required to subscribe to rulesthat discriminate between what may and what may not besaid either about what is being done or about action thathas now been completed (Sansom 1980:79). A similar pro-cess seems to be at work at Yuendumu in regard to thingslabeled boring. Every utterance I recorded either assumedor invited and received agreement on the boringness of thething named, and I never witnessed any disputation anal-ogous to I found it boring versus I found it engaging.In fact, there was a distinct absence of statements using thefirst-person pronoun. Instead, the common formula of all

Musharbash Boredom, Time, and Modernity 311

utterances was it is boring. Moreover, at least in the case ofplaces and persons, boringness is always qualified; neitheris boring per se. Essentialized reductions to one quality, onelabel, are intrinsically impossible in a social context thatvalues indeterminacy (see also Povinelli 1993). Such inde-terminacy contrasts starkly with, for example, mainstreamEnglish, where a statement such as Ed is boring unam-biguously condemns Ed. Lastly, there remains the fact thatthe range of things labeled boring by Warlpiri people is notonly agreed on but also, compared to examples from theboredom literature, remarkably small. In part, of course,this is because of the remote settlement context, whichlacks, for example, theater performances and commutingto work. But many common experiences with boredom po-tential (meetings, classes, car travel, etc.) are not labeledboring. To elaborate, I discuss boredom in the context ofsomething never considered boring: ritual.

No Warlpiri person would ever call ritual boring (seeDussart 2000 for an overview of Warlpiri ritual). SomeWarlpiri people are not interested in participating in someWarlpiri ritualsfor example, for religious (fundamentalistChristian) reasons. Those participating may complain aboutthe hard work involved, and about being exhausted, usingthe term mata mentioned above, but they do not complainabout being bored. Because there is no verbal evidence, wehave to look for other indicators. One example of behav-ior indicative of situative boredom is that of Kate duringthe mortuary rituals for her close classificatory son. Kateis in her forties, a teacher at the local school, a commit-ted caretaker of children (not her own), a painter, and anavid hunter. In their Grass Creek study, Jervis and colleaguesdevised a term for people such as Kate, calling them thenot-bored and identifying a combination of avoiding sub-stance misuse and some form of meaningful engagement atthe core of a not-bored life: Most of the not-bored wereinvolved in activities from which they derived fulfillment,among which were religion (both traditional and Chris-tian), parenting and other family activities, creative endeav-ors, careers, and community/political activism (Jervis et al.2003:50). Seeing Kate appear bored during mortuary rit-ual was thus both unexpected and illuminating. Her roleof mother during the ritual placed her under severe re-strictions, such as a speech taboo, spatial limitations, andnot being allowed to work (including making fire, cooking,etc.). In my notebook, I wrote:

The key-mourners were exhausted from wailing, it wasincredibly hot, and the news was that the mourners fromAlice Springs wouldnt arrive until Saturday [to completethe ritual], meaning four more days in the hot sun withnothing to do but wailing, being exhausted, grieving.Kate sat next to me, picking up old pieces of orange peelfrom the ground, and with a pair of scissors [used ear-lier to cut off the key mourners hair] she slowly and me-thodically cut them into the tiniest little bits. [field notes,October, 17, 2005]

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

at Yuendumu. Yet, although she may well have been ex-periencing exactly what Svendsen calls situative boredom,we cannot know for sure. If we could talk about her experi-ence, then I strongly suspect that Kate would say somethinglike it was boring not being able to speak and walk and dothings rather than ritual is boring. There are two interre-lated issues here: (1) the Warlpiri hesitancy to condemnthings, events, places, or persons entirely and without qual-ifier as boring means that even though one may experiencepangs of boredom during a certain event, the event in it-self cannot be labeled boring; and (2) there exists a sharedunderstanding that rituals (meetings, classes, etc.) have asocial purpose and are undertaken with othersin short,that they are socially and emotionally engaging. Because, atleast nominally, they fulfill desires that if absent cause bore-dom, they cannot be labeled boring. Although this explainswhy rituals (and so forth) are not labeled boring, the ques-tion remains whether Kates experience can in fact be calledboredom 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 eventsare boring because I am bored by them. In this vein, Jervisand colleagues (2003:49) identified changes in perceptionsof personhood at Grass Creek through increased identifi-cation with dominant U.S. cultural values and the notionof individual happiness as entitlement, both of which trig-gered boredom. At Yuendumu, on the other hand, there isagreement that Y is boring (or, may be called boring) and Xnot.

Boredom, it seems to me, is a different beast when un-derstandings of personhood crucially depend on related-ness (see, amongst many others, Musharbash 2003; Myers1986). If boredom is to be understood as an indicator ofWesternization, then the forms situational boredom takesat Yuendumu would indicate that Warlpiri people are lessWesternized than people at Grass Creek. However, suchan interpretation would seriously limit understandings ofWarlpiri experiences of boredom as well as of the manyguises which boredom takes. I discuss this further by ana-lyzing existential boredom at Yuendumu through exploringWarlpiri time perceptions.

BOREDOM AND TIME AT YUENDUMU

At Yuendumu, as at Grass Creek and elsewhere, the termboring is often employed as an all-purpose term of dis-approval (Spacks 1995:10). This can be humorous, as forexample during football games where the opposing teamsgoals are accompanied by refrains of booooooooring byWarlpiri spectators. Usually, though, generic use of the termfalls into what Conrad describes as a vocabulary of dis-content, indicating a sort of alienation from the moment(1997:132). Statements like nyampurla punku, boring-nyiarniyi, sick-of-it-rla, junga! (this is bad, very boring, Ihate it, true!) are brought forward especially but not ex-clusively by Warlpiri youths. Other versions are nothinghappening, too boring, true and sick-of-it, boring, always

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the same. In these cases, boringness is not associated withanything in particular (a place, person, event, or thing),nor is it qualified in any way. These statements declare theinsufferability of itlife, the universe, everything. Theyare allusions to something appropriating Svendsens object-less existential boredom. This second kind of boredom ex-presses not so much a longing for something, not only adiscontent with what is, but some deeper crisis of mean-ing. I explore this by following two leads: First, I inves-tigate the link between boredom and perceptions of time(e.g., Anderson 2004; Heidegger 1995), and especially theidea that boredom has a temporal dimension and . . . maybe in part contingent on the social organization of time(Conrad 1997:473). Subsequently, I examine the relation-ship between boredom and temporality by probing intowhat the latter stands forthat is, by looking at howmeaning is created or denied through experiencing time.

The social organization of time at Yuendumu seems tobe in flux, in a process which, at least superficially, containsparallels to the one discussed by Thompson (1967) in hisseminal essay on time and discipline among the Englishworking class. Talking about the effects of the new disci-pline, Thompson writes:

One may note that as the industrial revolution proceeds,wage incentives and expanding consumer drivesthepalpable rewards for the productive consumption of timeand the evidence of new predictive attitudes to thefutureare evidently effective. By the 1830s and 1840sit was commonly observed that the English industrialworker was marked off from his fellow Irish worker, notby a greater capacity for hard work, but by his regularity,his methodological paying-out of energy, and perhapsalso by a repression, not of enjoyments, but of the ca-pacity to relax in the old, uninhibited ways. [Thompson1967:91]

The fit is loose because Warlpiri people seem more likethe Irish than the English industrial worker (of the time), inthat their capacity to relax in the old, uninhibited waysis somewhat less affected by the imposition of new timeregimes. However, this capacity is sporadically ruptured,and then, I contend, existential boredom comes into be-ing at Yuendumu: Its genesis, as I elucidate below, lies inthe intersection of the old ways and (post)colonial (time)disciplines.

If we follow the social constructivist argument, thelack of a presettlement term indicates the possibility of aboredom-less perception of life. Contemporary complaintsabout boredom suggest this perception is being altered. I ex-plore this state of affairs by first describing the old waysof being in time, then applying Leachs (1968) theory oftime perception to the particular structures of temporalitywithin which the sociality of the contemporary settlementeveryday is embedded.6

We can glean an idea of the form presettlement being-in-time could have taken from Marshall Sahlinss descrip-tion of the industriousness of Australian hunter-gatherers.Like hunter-gatherers elsewhere, their affluence in Sahlinss

(1972) sense was in part due to the fact that securing a liveli-hood did not require long hours of labor, affording ampletime to focus on an elaborate ceremonial exchange cycleand to sleep.7 Unlike others, who seem extremely lazy bycomparison (Sahlins 1972:38), he says (drawing on Thom-son 1949) some Australian hunter-gatherers

are very different. The Murngin, for example: The firstimpression that any stranger must receive in a fully func-tioning group in Eastern Arnhem Land is of industry.. . . And he must be impressed with the fact that with theexception of very young children . . . there is no idleness.[Sahlins 1972:38]

Their affluence enabled them to fully live in the here andnow, at a leisurely pace of life and with a complete lack ofworry, or, as Sahlins describes it:

Certainly, hunters quit camp because food resources havegiven out in the vicinity. But to see in this nomadismmerely a flight from starvation only perceives the half ofit; one ignores the possibility that the peoples expecta-tions of greener pastures elsewhere are not usually dis-appointed. Consequently their wanderings, rather thananxious, take on all the qualities of a picnic outing on theThames. [1972:30]

I can only speculate whether the same was true forWarlpiri people. However, the tenor of stories by olderWarlpiri people who lived in the bush before the found-ing of Yuendumu resonates strongly. Moreover, the abil-ity to fully be in the here and now has also been iden-tified among contemporary Australian Aboriginal people,including Warlpiri, as a crucial social trait. Tony Swaindescribes Aboriginal life as perceived through rhythmedevents (1993:19). Sylvie Poirier highlights the Aboriginaldisinterest in chronological, measured time by examples ofwhat she calls their infinite patience (2005:59), illustratedthrough what happened when the car broke down duringa trip:

Far from being concerned or in a hurry to repair it, thefriends with whom I was traveling took it as an opportu-nity to invest themselves in the immediate place wherethe event occurred. Some wandered about looking foranimal tracks or edible plants, while others sat aroundor gathered firewood. In other words, they establishedcamp. It was as if the breakdown was an occasion to en-gage themselves with the place, an opportunity to feelthe place and the moment and see what would happenin that space, that time, that moment. [Poirier 2005:5960]

Wendy Baarda, a linguist who has been living at Yuen-dumu for over 30 years, calls the attitude underlying infi-nite patience, the ability and willingness to be in the mo-ment wherever one is, no matter what happens, living inthe absolute present (personal communication, September12, 2006). The dynamics of living in the absolute presentand the break necessary to experience boredom are betterunderstood by following Leach (1968) and examining thetension between two basic experiences: (1) that certain phe-nomena of nature repeat themselves and (2) that life change

Musharbash Boredom, Time, and Modernity 313

FIGURE 1. Time oscillation (following Leach 1968).

is irreversible. Leach explicates that the oscillations of phe-nomena that repeat themselves are between points that arethe same but different, as illustrated in Figure 1 (1968:131).

The A and the B may stand for day and night, orany such pair of binary oppositions between which timeoscillates. Although there is endless repetition (from day tonight to day to night), in fact each day and each night isunique. They are unique because each is experienced andthus different from previous ones and the ones which fol-low. This interplay between time and experience is crucialin understanding existential boredom at Yuendumu. Leachsays that we talk of measuring time, as if time were a con-crete thing waiting to be measured; but in fact we createtime by creating intervals in social life (1968:135). I addthat it is vital to conceptualize this creating of time not asan act but as process; in other words, following AnthonyGiddens (1984), we need to pay attention to structuringstructures. Not only do we create intervals, but through ex-periencing them, they in turn create us, which in turn hasan impact on our way of creating them.

Let us look then at the structures of temporality atYuendumu, where time flows, trickles, passes, and stag-nates in various ways. There are the recurrent rhythms oftime structured as weekdays and weekends, school termsand holidays, the oscillations of day and night, hot timeand cold time, and the ebbing and flowing of pensionweek versus nothing week. These flows are suspendedoccasionally through events such as the annual YuendumuSports Weekend and initiation ceremonies. And unplannedevents punctuate the flows of time irregularly, such as mor-tuary rituals, fights, and so forth. Intervals such as day andnight, or hot time and cold time, are different from eachother through their physicality, their feel, and their emo-tional valencies. Each interval is again divided into differentsegmentsfor example, the day into mungalyurru (morn-ing), kalarla (midday), wuraji (afternoon), wuraji-wuraji (lateafternoon)and every segment affects different social andspatial practices.

Above these temporal streams, the Yuendumu schoolsiren, audible over the entire settlement, punctuates eachweekday of school term seven times. The first siren is wake-up time; the second indicates that school (and other busi-ness) start(s); the third rings at the beginning of cup-of-tea

time; the fourth rings to announce its end; the fifth andsixth ring for the beginning and end of lunch time; andthe seventh announces the end of school. Although Poirier(2005:40) interprets the siren at Balgo (an Aboriginal settle-ment 500 km away) as a neocolonial attempt to call peopleto work and to teach clock time, the Yuendumu siren dis-tinctly does not instill such ideas.8 In summer, it is rungan hour earlier than it is in winter, thus people know thatschool starts at the second siren, but most do not know whattime that is; wrist watches and clocks are uncommon. In allthe camps I lived in, confusion reigned daily about clocktime, first siren, and shop-opening timeespecially asthe latter shifts occasionally, and quite unpredictably.

I take the siren to epitomize the postcolonial nature ofYuendumu temporalities. It serves well to symbolize set-tlement time, an idiosyncratic temporal jumble that isdistinctly neither Warlpiri nor mainstream. Following itslogic, the siren announces to a settlement of mainly unem-ployed people such absurd moments as cup-of-tea timein the morning of a Thursday during nothing weekin cold time. Within this time regime, living in the abso-lute present as the standard Warlpiri mode of being meansthat Warlpiri people follow Leach to the letter in their expe-riences of time: They make something out of every moment,where cup-of-tea time today is not the same as cup-of-tea time tomorrow, last week, or next year, nor are theother cup-of-tea times relevant. Frustrated Warlpiri excla-mations about nothing happening, always the same in-dicate that occasionally a shift occurs in this perception, inwhich Leachs movement (i.e., experience) between oscil-lations, distinguishing one oscillation from the next, col-lapses. During such shifts, instead of new moments, theflows of time are experienced as an endless repetition of thesame. The present becomes oppressive, like a cage in whichone is caught, in which one experiences the same thing overand over again without any possibility of escape. Boredomhappens when all cup-of-tea times merge into one. Thislink between boredom and time (or more specifically, par-ticular local forms of temporality) at Yuendumu can be fur-ther documented by looking at what commonly are termedreactions to boredom.

KILLING TIME

Although some authors emphasize boredoms positive po-tential, many view boredom as a trigger for engagementin meaningless or destructive practices, such as substancemisuse, promiscuity, vandalism, depression, and violence.9

Understood as attempts to ward off boredom, these prac-tices are commonly labeled killing time (see, esp., Raposa1999). Thus, Grass Creek informants explicitly linked bore-dom to trouble, a multifaceted construct that nearly al-ways involved alcohol or drugs. Other activities that fellunder the rubric of trouble included sensation seeking be-haviors, such as impromptu car racing, vandalism, and var-ious illegal activities (Jervis et al. 2003:41). At Yuendumu,not all practices of killing time are harmful, and there

314 American Anthropologist Vol. 109, No. 2 June 2007

seems to be a different causeeffect relationship. Warlpiripractices of killing time literally involve revolts againsttime regimes. In typical Warlpiri fashion, they are neverundertaken alone.

The most immediate response to suffering temporalconstraints is spatial escape, both throughout the settle-ment and between settlements. Cruising around all daylong, 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 (seeMusharbash 2003). Sometimes, Warlpiri people choose toescape the seemingly oppressive time regime of settlementlife by indulging in vast amounts of amorphous unstruc-tured time. For example, groups of teenagers may watchtelevision uninterrupted for days on end, and older womenengage in endless card games that go on until the last cent,then the last piece of clothing, and finally the last blan-ket is gambled away (see also Barbalet 1999:642643). An-other strategy is the often described recourse to drugs andviolence. Substance misuse seems to make people immuneto settlement temporality, substantiated by the disregardpeople under the influence demonstrate toward temporalrulesfor example, the common practice of drunks wak-ing up others at night to socialize and to ask for moneyor cigarettes, sniffers interrupting meetings, and so forth.Last, violence (both domestic and feud-related) ruptures thesettlements time flows, as all other activity is halted to par-ticipate, watch, or help.

At Yuendumu, practices of killing time, rather thanbeing triggered by boredom, are aimed against the samecircumstances that create the potential for existential bore-dom. Accepting that people kill time not because theyare bored but as a reaction against the circumstances thatalso generate boredom means problemitizing the explicitlink between boredom and trouble in some of the litera-ture. Although we can postulate that time disciplines play acrucial role in fashioning the circumstances for the poten-tial of boredom or the engagement in practices of killingtime, we need to investigate further what exactly it is thatmakes specific time disciplines in particular places so re-voltable against; in short, what are the meanings encapsu-lated in these experiential encounters with temporalities? Idelve deeper into this by investigating the nature of distinctrelationships between boredom and modernity.

BOREDOM AND MODERNITY

As outlined above, the interdisciplinary literature colocatesthe emergence of boredom with that of modernity, link-ing boredom to secularization, an increased focus on theself, the belief in ones entitlement to happiness, the workleisure distinction, overload, and standardizations of timeorganization. Jervis and colleagues locate Grass Creek peo-ple on a parallel trajectory, diverging only in regard to over-load. They identify scarce employment, few recreational op-tions, and transportation difficulties to be the key issues un-

derlying boredom at Grass Creek. The implication of this isthat despite

assertions that overload is more often responsible forboredom in contemporary societies than is underload(Klapp 1986), on Grass Creek the converse seemed tobe true, with boredom deriving from understimulation,along with a feeling of being deprived of the pleasurethat is presumably available elsewhere [knowledge ofwhich is conveyed through popular culture]. [Jerviset al. 2003:5253]

At Yuendumu, such an overall parallel trajectory is notas 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 ethno-graphic study; instead, they introspectively situate bore-dom in an abstracted United States stripped of all differ-ence, a place populated by U.S. citizens devoid of class,ethnicity, gender, and age differences. They describe anequally abstracted, preboredom, industrial United States,characterized by vivid contrasts of sounds, smells, noises,and silences, a place that contains commonalities with theboredom-inducing time regimes at Yuendumu, exemplifiedby the Yuendumu siren. At Yuendumu, boredom is en-gendered by a process akin to Thompsons process of em-placing time disciplines, while their dissolution creates thebreeding ground for boredom in Brissett and Snows UnitedStates. Their United States is not real, it is an image basedon what they identify as core cultural features: cultural ar-rhythmia, affluence, and the decline in the opportunitiesfor uncertaintyvalues that in tandem generate boredom,although the opposite can be shown for Yuendumu.

The first of these features, arrhythmia, they say orig-inates in an obsession with speed coming at the priceof rhythm and contrast and resulting in the practice ofcoalescing multiple activities into single settings, such aswork[ing] while jogging or playing golf, spend[ing] qualitytime 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-the-Thames quality of presettlement life; in fact Brissett andSnows depiction of a world where people to work, shop,and play at all hours, seven days a week (1993:245) is an aptdescription, ironically, of presettlement Warlpiri life. Differ-ences transpire in cause (obsession with speed vs. being inthe absolute present) and effect (boredom vs. no boredom).

Their second core cultural feature, affluence, presents asimilar scenario: In Brissett and Snows United States, massaffluence is a key ingredient to the rise of boredom; at Yuen-dumu, affluence (in Sahlins sense) is a key feature of pre-settlement, boredom-free life. By no stretch of the imagi-nation can (U.S.-style) affluence be seen as part of contem-porary settlement life but boredom is. Brissett and Snowdescribe the third key feature, the decline in opportunitiesfor uncertainty, as a cultural ideal [that] seems to be rep-resented by those individuals who know specifically wherethey are headed, how they will get there, and how theywill know when they arrive (1993:250). Boredom becomes

Musharbash Boredom, Time, and Modernity 315

possible through an assured future without anticipation:When survival is no longer problematic, when work isno longer instrumental, when leisure is plentiful and af-fordable, boredom is often engendered (Brisset and Snow1993:246). The future, Brisset and Snow claim, is too cer-tain, without mystery and with nothing at stake, divorcingthe individual from being involved in life; boredom in thissense is a disinterest in what one already has (Brissett andSnow 1993:240). At Yuendumu, on the other hand, it isnot an assured future that induces boredom but the repeti-tive drills of an oppressive-seeming present encapsulated insettlement temporalities that do not allow any glimpses ofsomething else.

This comparison illustrates how boredom emerges intwo almost diametrically opposed settings. In each setting,boredom happens at the juncture of specific values (Brissettand Snows core cultural features vs. Warlpiri ways of beingin the absolute present and understandings of relatedness asintegral to subjectivity) and particular circumstances (e.g.,local versions of temporalities). Put differently, this com-parison suggests that boredom arises when values and cir-cumstances fail to correspond, when ways of being in theworld and the world jar. This jarring, as the examples show,can happen in any number of settingsmeaning that as an-thropologists we have to understand boredom as locally en-gendered and socioculturally specific. Thus, at Yuendumu,boredom is generated at the intersection of the old waysand (post)colonial (time) disciplines, but for it to be expe-rienced, a lack in meaning needs to be felt. This happenswhen the values underlying Warlpiri ways of being in theworld and the world, encountered through settlement real-ities, are recognized as coming together in a meaninglessfit.

CONCLUSION: BOREDOM AND MEANING

Boredom at Yuendumu displays distinctly Warlpiri features:Situational boredom is consensual, existential boredom iscommunal, and even the killing of time is always under-taken with others. Warlpiri situational boredom arises outof desires curtailed, overlapping with but different than de-sires that when curtailed may create boredom in other socio-cultural contexts. Warlpiri existential boredom comes intoexistence at the experiential encounter of Warlpiri ways ofbeing in the world and conflicting and constraining timeregimesand the meanings they and their entanglementcarry for Yuendumu residents.

I view these time disciplines as examples of a par-ticular localized image of modernity. Settlement reality isa strange mix of neither-there-anymore (the boredom-free presettlement past) and a not-there-at-all (the main-stream), exemplified here through a siren that regimentsthe days of an overwhelmingly unemployed population toits own tune (not clock time). Reading Warlpiri boredom asa measure of Westernization, analogous to Grass Creek,would mean to misrecognize the thing-in-itself qualities ofthe phenomenon as well as its sociocultural dimensions. In

opposition to Grass Creek, Yuendumu time disciplines donot signify a mainstream just beyond reach. Rather, Yuen-dumu temporalities encapsulate the absurdities of a partic-ular form of modernity, they epitomize a meaninglessnessfelt as entrapment and expressed as boredom. Here, as else-where, we must understand boredom to be a problem ofmeaning (see also Barbalet 1999; Kessel 2001; Kuhn 1976;Raposa 1999; Spacks 1995; Svendsen 2005). Here, as else-where, we must understand such meaning (or meaningless-ness) as locally and socioculturally constituted.

Boredom comes into being in the nexus of old and newregimes; it is felt through time, but its meaning, clearly,must be related to the times and how they are perceivedon the ground. As our task as anthropologists is to engagewith local understandings of the world, I propose focus-ing the anthropological gaze onto boredom: to examine itcomparatively as a socioculturally and historically specificphenomenon above and beyond a universal sentiment, andto analyze its qualities as a response to rather than a by-product of modernity. Such studies should foster anthropo-logical understanding of the phenomenon itself and maywell contribute important insights into the complex pro-cesses of modernity across spaces and cultures.

YASMINE MUSHARBASH Discipline of Anthropologyand Sociology, The University of Western Australia, Crawley6009, Australia

NOTESAcknowledgments. Research for this article was undertaken as anacademic visitor with The Australian National University and as apostdoctoral fellow with the University of Western Australia. I pre-sented earlier drafts of this article at both universities and thankthe audiences for their stimulating debate. Special thanks go to Sal-lie Anderson, Victoria Burbank, Debbie McDougall, Kevin Murphy,Nic Peterson, Lars Svendsen, Bob Tonkinson, David Trigger, andRaelene Wilding for insightful comments on various earlier drafts.I am particularly grateful to Benjamin Blount and the AA reviewersfor their profound engagement with and excellent comments onearlier drafts of this article.

1. I found only one reference maintaining that boredom has existedthroughout 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 psychologi-cal 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 De-velopment and Employment Project Scheme (CDEP program), afederal governmentrun program similar to work on the dole (seeMusharbash 2001).

4. For example, a young Warlpiri man asked a nonindigenous per-son in an all-English conversation to borrow a disc for his PlaySta-tion because I am bored (field notes, November 23, 2005). Theterm bored was also frequently used by Tamsin, one of my main in-formants, who was fully aware of my research topic. She delightedin starting conversations by saying Yasmine, I am sooooooooboredproviding wonderful insights to my questions as to why,on the one hand, and underscoring the dangers of prompting re-sponses, on the other.

5. I translated Warlpiri utterances into English and use pseudonymsthroughout.

UserHighlightHere, as elsewhere,we must understand boredom to be a problem ofmeaning (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.

316 American Anthropologist Vol. 109, No. 2 June 2007

6. I am not concerned here with conceptualizations of time in theontological sense as for example in Gell (1992), Munn (1992), andmany Australian Aboriginal ethnographies that include a chapteron 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 regardto 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 timearound the world; and Foucault (1979) and Bourdieu (1977) on theways in which time regimes are embodied.

9. For positive examples, see Barbalet (1999), Nietzsche (1964), Ra-posa (1999), Russell (1930), and Spacks (1989).

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