Scrimshaw as Archive

Scrimshaw is often mistakenly treated as a folk art, an example of Americana. In fact, these etched sperm whale teeth produced by whalemen at sea were global artifacts linked to histories to imperialism. In the nineteenth century, scrimshaw passed between white whalemen and Indigenous communities in Fiji, where whale teeth, sometimes already carved with Western motifs, had an afterlife as tabua. This paper explores how, for both white skrimshanders and Indigenous Fijians, whale ivory was a temporal medium—a kind of archive of time. This is not to say that time meant the same thing for these two groups of people. Timekeeping was a hugely contested issue in the colonial period across Oceania, particularly as imperial powers worked to standardize time zones and date lines. For whalemen, whale enamel was a surface on which to keep time—a medium associated the centrality of clocks and calendars in maritime navigation. For Fijians, tabua functioned as ceremonial gifts, used to mark genealogical change and events of personal, tribal, and national significance. Temporality was a matter of both colonial control and of native sovereignty. By examining Western and Indigenous ideas of time as well as the notion of animal rhythms, a non-human time, I argue that whale ivory was a material that registered the tensions between multiple, conflicting temporalities.