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 concept’s 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 time—particularly 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]

W 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 begin-
ning 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 heav-
ens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and
constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the up-
per hand. The nations were scattered over the earth, just as
people now travel abroad, but they continued to be bored.
—Kierkegaard, Either/Or
From Søren Kierkegaard’s 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 con-
ceptualize 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
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 answer
to my questions, then, this article brings together subse-
quent research at Yuendumu and insights from the interdis-
ciplinary literature on boredom from philosophy, literature
studies, sociology, and psychology.
Boredom’s most defining feature from the available lit-
erature seems to be its definitional ambiguity, acknowl-
edged 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 Heidegger’s descrip-
tion of boredom as drawing “back and forth like a silent
fog in the abysses of Dasein” (1995:77) is illuminating, as is
Elizabeth Goodstein’s description of boredom as an “expe-
rience without qualities” (2005:1). Generally, it is described
as 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 analyze
boredom in relation to time and the subject’s perceptions
thereof 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

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 109, Issue 2, pp. 307–317, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. ⃝ C 2007 by the American Anthropological Association.

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308 American Anthropologist • Vol. 109, No. 2 • June 2007
of relevance—a perspective I employ in the discussion of
the 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: 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; Svend-
sen 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 pro-
cesses of modernity. I outline tenets of this approach and
employ them in my analysis of boredom at Yuendumu, in
which I also utilize Lars Svendsen’s (2005) distinction be-
tween “situational” and “existential” boredom. While relat-
ing the former to perceptions of personhood, I analyze the
latter 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 at
Yuendumu can, or should, be seen purely as a measure of
Westernization—as is implied by Lori Jervis and colleagues
(2003), on whose study of boredom on a Native American
reservation 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 boredom’s 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 compar-
isons, I argue for anthropological investigation of the phe-
nomenon as a means of exploring socioculturally specific
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 affluence, it didn’t
much 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 have
been a marginal issue, reserved for monks and the aristoc-
racy. 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 experi-
ence and considerations of boredom.
Acedia is identified as the oldest documented phe-
nomenon most closely related to today’s boredom (see,
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 afflict-
ing 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 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 sentiment
extended to now also afflict 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 affinity with the sin of sloth, had exclusively negative
connotations 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 era
provided the conceptual climate for massive transformative
changes including (1) secularization and the growing meta-
physical void; (2) individualism with the resultant increased
focus on the self; (3) the rise of the belief in one’s entitle-
ment 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 me-
dia; and (6) bureaucratization and the rise of “standardized
[and] standardizing organizations of time-space” (Anderson
2004:741). 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 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 first record
of the English term boredom originates from 1864 (Spacks
1995:13).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 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 1976:5–6; Svend-
sen 2005:24). Except in the last case, etymologies for words
meaning boredom are generally uncertain (Klapp 1986:24;
Kuhn 1976:4–5).
Since the 18th century, boredom’s increasing sig-
nificance is further underscored through a rise in aca-
demic and fictional 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 sen-
timent, an experience, or an emotion; writers like Johann

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 in-
terested 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 flow 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 bore-
dom outside the generative center of these transformative
processes, 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 are
hidden in ethnographies, where boredom is mentioned
in passing and seldom explicated upon. More elaborate
engagement can be found, for example, in Richard Con-
don’s work with Inuit youth (Condon 1995; Condon and
Stern 1993) and Michael Herzfeld’s (2003) sensitive por-
trayal 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 ef-
fects on indigenous people’s 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 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 world’s inadequacy” (2003:49). While drawing on
their material, the question I bring to the Yuendumu exam-
ple is whether boredom can in fact be seen as an indicator
of the “Westernization” of indigenous peoples or whether
something 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 Alice
Springs 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 by
forced 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 introduction
of an elected Council. Today, Yuendumu displays all the
features 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 100
nonindigenous Australians (mostly service providers in gov-
Musharbash • Boredom, Time, and Modernity 309
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 settle-
ments in Australia. Although Yuendumu operates one of
the more successful petrol-sniffing prevention programs in
Australia, petrol sniffing 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 officially prohibited), however, alco-
hol 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 fieldwork. A more serious problem is that the
topic itself sets limits to the effectiveness of participant-
observation: informants’ boredom, unless verbalized, can
only be inferred, and at best confirmed in subsequent inter-
views (running the risk of putting words into informants’
mouths). Helpful here was Svendsen’s (2005) boredom ty-
pology: He proposes a theoretical distinction between bore-
dom as a reaction to certain things or events and being
bored 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 of
things or events as well as a deficiency of them can lead
to this type. Existential boredom, on the other hand, is an
all-encompassing boredom where the individual is bored in-
dependently 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 Heidegger’s sense. At Yuendumu, I took sit-
uative boredom to be the kind that people are reflexive
about—that is, the kind that is generally verbalized—and
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 first approach to the former, situative bore-
dom, I noted all everyday utterances containing references
to 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 cover
bored (personal communication, September 8, 2004). In the
Warlpiri dictionary (Laughren et al. n.d.), jukuru is trans-
lated as “apathetic, unwilling to enter into secular social
activities, not wanting, not desirous, dislike, uninterested,
unenthusiastic” (n.d.). Consultation with Warlpiri people
confirmed that this term does not denote boredom but
310 American Anthropologist • Vol. 109, No. 2 • June 2007
rather an active disinterest in a specific activity. The Pit-
jatjatjara/Yankuntjatjara dictionary for languages spoken
to the south translates the adjective paku as “tired, weary,
bored” (Goddard 1996:102–103). Paku seems to be a syn-
onym of the Warlpiri adjective mata, meaning tired, weary,
exhausted—always in a physical sense. The lack of indige-
nous boredom terminology strengthens my conviction that
parallel to pre-Romanticism times in Europe, boredom in
precontact Warlpiri life was experienced less than it is to-
day, 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, junga-
nyiarniyi” (this [place] is bad, boring, very true). Exclu-
sively, boring was the term used; I never heard mention of
boredom; 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 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. Im-
portantly, this is always qualified; 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, Yuen-
dumu’s boring on the weekend, not enough Yapa [people]
there”5 (field notes, August 15, 2005). Tamsin (age 22) elab-
orated on this quality: “If there is nothing to do, not much
people in community, everyone sit one place, that’s why we
get bored. Sometimes people look and say ‘that place really
boring.’ 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 Tatyana’s and watched
DVDs. That’s all” (field notes, September 21, 2005). Cru-
cially, the boringness of a place is created by the absence of
people (“not enough people”) and a lack of social interac-
tion and engagement (“nothing happening”).
In mainstream English, the term boring when applied to
persons is always used as an adjective and, generally, a nega-
tive label: “Ed is boring” does not reflect 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” (field
notes, September 13, 2005). The word in these instances
does not express “boredom” but a lack of social connectiv-
ity, loneliness, and pining for others. There is, however, a
way in which aspects of people’s 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, [first] Leah’s place, [then
to] Women’s Centre, back to West Camp, she does the same
all the time, she can’t 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 their
behavior can be.
A striking finding was how few events were labeled
boring, considering the large range of events with bore-
dom 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 in-
stances: “[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 17’s—we 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 being
labeled boring. Analogous to events, the range of things la-
beled boring was also small, comprising certain movies and
songs. For example, when traveling in my Toyota, the per-
son “in charge” of music would play some songs and over
again (an interesting inversion of the negativity of repeti-
tiveness) and skip others, sometimes saying “boring” when
the first notes sounded. Significantly, 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 defines situative boredom as a boredom
that “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 this
desire is curtailed—because there are not enough people, be-
cause nothing is happening, or because something or some-
one is all too predictable—situative boredom is experienced.
As reactions to curtailed desires, boredom as described in the
literature and Warlpiri situative boredom seem fundamen-
tally similar.
Divergences appear when considering Conrad’s state-
ment 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
Sansom’s (1980) description of how “the word,” the com-
munal 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 pro-
cess 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 anal-
ogous to “I found it boring” versus “I found it engaging.”
In fact, there was a distinct absence of statements using the
first-person pronoun. Instead, the common formula of all

utterances was “it is boring.” Moreover, at least in the case of
places and persons, boringness is always qualified; 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 inde-
terminacy contrasts starkly with, for example, mainstream
English, where a statement such as “Ed is boring” unam-
biguously 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 po-
tential (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 rituals—for 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 behav-
ior indicative of situative boredom is that of Kate during
the mortuary rituals for her close classificatory son. Kate
is in her forties, a teacher at the local school, a commit-
ted 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 sub-
stance 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 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 role
of “mother” during the ritual placed her under severe re-
strictions, such as a speech taboo, spatial limitations, and
not being allowed to work (including making fire, 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 wouldn’t 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 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 of
the starkest nonverbal expressions of boredom I witnessed
Musharbash • Boredom, Time, and Modernity 311
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 something
like “it was boring not being able to speak and walk and do
things” rather than “ritual is boring.” There are two interre-
lated issues here: (1) the Warlpiri hesitancy to “condemn”
things, events, places, or persons entirely and without qual-
ifier as boring means that even though one may experience
pangs of boredom during a certain event, the event in it-
self cannot be labeled boring; and (2) there exists a shared
understanding that rituals (meetings, classes, etc.) have a
social purpose and are undertaken with others—in short,
that they are socially and emotionally engaging. Because, at
least nominally, they fulfill desires that if absent cause bore-
dom, they cannot be labeled boring. Although this explains
why rituals (and so forth) are not labeled boring, the ques-
tion remains whether Kate’s 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) identified changes in perceptions
of personhood at Grass Creek through increased identifi-
cation with dominant U.S. cultural values and the notion
of individual happiness as entitlement, both of which trig-
gered 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 un-
derstandings of personhood crucially depend on related-
ness (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 ana-
lyzing 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 dis-
approval” (Spacks 1995:10). This can be humorous, as for
example during football games where the opposing team’s
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 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, I
hate it, true!) are brought forward especially but not ex-
clusively by Warlpiri youths. Other versions are “nothing
happening, too boring, true” and “sick-of-it, boring, always
312 American Anthropologist • Vol. 109, No. 2 • June 2007
the same.” In these cases, boringness is not associated with
anything in particular (a place, person, event, or thing),
nor is it qualified in any way. These statements declare the
insufferability of “it”—life, the universe, everything. They
are allusions to something appropriating Svendsen’s object-
less existential boredom. This second kind of boredom ex-
presses not so much a longing for something, not only a
discontent 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 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 relation-
ship between boredom and temporality by probing into
what the latter “stands for”—that is, by looking at how
meaning is created or denied through experiencing time.
The social organization of time at Yuendumu seems to
be in flux, in a process which, at least superficially, 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 disci-
pline, Thompson writes:
One may note that as the industrial revolution proceeds,
wage incentives and expanding consumer drives—the
palpable rewards for the productive consumption of time
and the evidence of new “predictive” attitudes to the
future—are 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 ca-
pacity to relax in the old, uninhibited ways. [Thompson
1967:91]
The fit 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 be-
ing 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 ex-
plore this state of affairs by first describing the “old ways”
of being in time, then applying Leach’s (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 being-
in-time could have taken from Marshall Sahlins’s descrip-
tion of the industriousness of Australian hunter-gatherers.
Like hunter-gatherers elsewhere, their affluence in Sahlins’s
(1972) sense was in part due to the fact that securing a liveli-
hood 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 Thom-
son 1949) some Australian hunter-gatherers
are very different. The Murngin, for example: “The first
impression 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 the
exception of very young children . . . there is no idleness.”
[Sahlins 1972:38]
Their affluence 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 flight from starvation only perceives the half of
it; one ignores the possibility that the people’s expecta-
tions of greener pastures elsewhere are not usually dis-
appointed. Consequently their wanderings, rather than
anxious, take on all the qualities of a picnic outing on the
Thames. [1972:30]
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 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 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 infinite 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 opportu-
nity 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 firewood. In other words, they established
camp. It was as if the breakdown was an occasion to en-
gage 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 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 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 phe-
nomena of nature repeat themselves and (2) that life change

FIGURE 1. Time oscillation (following Leach 1968).
is irreversible. Leach explicates that the oscillations of phe-
nomena 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 fol-
low. 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 con-
crete 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 ex-
periencing 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 flows, trickles, passes, and stag-
nates 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 flowing of “pension
week” versus “nothing week.” These flows are suspended
occasionally through events such as the annual Yuendumu
Sports Weekend and initiation ceremonies. And unplanned
events punctuate the flows of time irregularly, such as mor-
tuary rituals, fights, 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 emo-
tional valencies. Each interval is again divided into different
segments—for example, the day into mungalyurru (morn-
ing), 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 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
Musharbash • Boredom, Time, and Modernity 313
time”; the fourth rings to announce its end; the fifth 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 settle-
ment 500 km away) as a neocolonial attempt to call people
to work and to teach clock time, the Yuendumu siren dis-
tinctly 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,” “first siren,” and “shop-opening time”—especially 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 “set-
tlement time,” an idiosyncratic temporal jumble that is
distinctly neither Warlpiri nor mainstream. Following its
logic, the siren announces to a settlement of mainly unem-
ployed 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 abso-
lute present” as the standard Warlpiri mode of being means
that 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 the
other “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, in
which Leach’s movement (i.e., experience) between oscil-
lations, distinguishing one oscillation from the next, col-
lapses. During such shifts, instead of new moments, the
flows 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 specifically, par-
ticular local forms of temporality) at Yuendumu can be fur-
ther documented by looking at what commonly are termed
“reactions to boredom.”
KILLING TIME
Although some authors emphasize boredom’s positive po-
tential, 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 prac-
tices are commonly labeled “killing time” (see, esp., Raposa
1999). Thus, Grass Creek informants explicitly linked bore-
dom to “trouble,” a multifaceted construct that “nearly al-
ways involved alcohol or drugs. Other activities that fell
under 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 cause–effect 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 settle-
ment 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 unstruc-
tured 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 finally the last blan-
ket is gambled away (see also Barbalet 1999:642–643). An-
other 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 influence demonstrate toward temporal
rules—for example, the common practice of “drunks” wak-
ing 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
settlement’s time flows, as all other activity is halted to par-
ticipate, 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 bore-
dom. 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 litera-
ture. Although we can postulate that time disciplines play a
crucial role in fashioning the circumstances for the poten-
tial of boredom or the engagement in practices of “killing
time,” we need to investigate further what exactly it is that
makes specific time disciplines in particular places so “re-
voltable against”; in short, what are the meanings encapsu-
lated 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, link-
ing boredom to secularization, an increased focus on the
self, the belief in one’s entitlement to happiness, the work–
leisure distinction, overload, and standardizations of time
organization. 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 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. 2003:52–53]
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 Snow’s
(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 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, exemplified
by the Yuendumu siren. At Yuendumu, boredom is en-
gendered by a process akin to Thompson’s process of em-
placing time disciplines, while their dissolution creates the
breeding ground for boredom in Brissett and Snow’s United
States. Their United States is not real, it is an image based
on what they identify as core cultural features: cultural ar-
rhythmia, affluence, and the decline in the opportunities
for uncertainty—values 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 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 Sahlins’s picnic-on-the-
Thames quality of presettlement life; in fact Brissett and
Snow’s 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. Differ-
ences transpire in cause (obsession with speed vs. being in
the absolute present) and effect (boredom vs. no boredom).
Their second core cultural feature, affluence, presents a
similar scenario: In Brissett and Snow’s United States, mass
affluence 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 Snow
describe the third key feature, the decline in opportunities
for uncertainty, as a “cultural ideal [that] seems to be rep-
resented by those individuals who know specifically where
they are headed, how they will get there, and how they
will know when they arrive” (1993:250). Boredom becomes

possible through an “assured” future without anticipation:
“When survival is no longer problematic, when work is
no longer instrumental, when leisure is plentiful and af-
fordable, boredom is often engendered” (Brisset and Snow
1993:246). The future, Brisset and Snow claim, is too cer-
tain, 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 repeti-
tive 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 specific values (Brissett
and Snow’s 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 com-
parison suggests that boredom arises when values and cir-
cumstances 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 settings—meaning 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 ways”
and (post)colonial (time) disciplines, but for it to be expe-
rienced, 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 real-
ities, are recognized as coming together in a “meaningless
fit.”
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 under-
taken with others. Warlpiri situational boredom arises out
of desires curtailed, overlapping with but different than de-
sires that when curtailed may create boredom in other socio-
cultural contexts. Warlpiri existential boredom comes into
existence at the experiential encounter of Warlpiri ways of
being in the world and conflicting and constraining time
regimes—and the meanings they and their entanglement
carry for Yuendumu residents.
I view these time disciplines as examples of a par-
ticular localized image of modernity. Settlement reality is
a 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 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
Musharbash • Boredom, Time, and Modernity 315
opposition to Grass Creek, Yuendumu time disciplines do
not signify a mainstream just beyond reach. Rather, Yuen-
dumu temporalities encapsulate the absurdities of a partic-
ular form of modernity, they epitomize a meaninglessness
felt as entrapment and expressed as boredom. Here, as else-
where, 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 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 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 focus-
ing the anthropological gaze onto boredom: to examine it
comparatively as a socioculturally and historically specific
phenomenon above and beyond a universal sentiment, and
to 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 may
well contribute important insights into the complex pro-
cesses 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 pre-
sented earlier drafts of this article at both universities and thank
the 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, 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 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), a
federal government–run program similar to work on the dole (see
Musharbash 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). The
term bored was also frequently used by Tamsin, one of my main in-
formants, who was fully aware of my research topic. She delighted
in starting conversations by saying “Yasmine, I am soooooooo
bored”—providing 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 pseudonyms
throughout.
316 American Anthropologist • Vol. 109, No. 2 • June 2007
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, Gell’s (1992:210–216) 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), Ra-
posa (1999), Russell (1930), and Spacks (1989).
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