By means of an analysis of Fijian children's essays about the future, this paper explores ideas of sociality, personhood and the self that are the very stuff of intersubjectivity and thus of the imagination. The material presented here bears on a single aspect of data derived from 75 essays by Fijian village children aged between 7 and 15 years old collected in April 2005: their constitution over time of a spatiotemporal orientation towards a view of generations to come. This partial analysis is the first part of the larger project, which will look at all aspects of the data derived from the essays as they vary together. The paper uses this example of spatiotemporal orientation to show how, seen through the perspective derived from long-term participant observer fieldwork, data such as these enable an ethnographic analysis of meaning-making as a transformational, historical process.
autopoiesis; children; imagination; kin
