But this recreation of dead men’s l

But this recreation of dead men’s life-history takes place against the background practices from which the Foi’s everyday understanding of temporality acquires its significance. One’s life is envisioned as the serial inhabitation of a set of places upon which one has effected some productive or appropriative transformation – the making of a garden, the erecting of a house, the setting of semi-permanent animal trap lines and fish dams, the paths they habitually created and used, and so forth. Foi women reveal these precise links in their songs. By serially listing place- names, a temporal span is automatically invoked, a sense of life as productive movement is appealed to.