Abstract
Introduces a series of articles on "historicity" in diverse societies in the Pacific, Europe, Greenland, and North America, seeking to clarify the concept of historicity as it may be used in ethnographic research. Western historians have long recognized the continuity of past, present, and future, but the standard Western concept of the past as being separated from the present is culturally particular. Historicity as discussed in this article concerns accounts of the past and future as parts of a continuum that incorporates present events, cultural forms, and "dispositions.