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Time in Anthropology

The nature of time is a topic of commanding interest to scholars in many different academic disciplines. Anthropology has been concerned with time in two major ways. The first is how human beings create and express time, including the generic, universal, homogenous time of science that many people take for granted. The second concern is the issue of representations of temporality, particularly in the anthropologist's ethnography, and how such representations “freeze” cultures in an effectively timeless or eternal state.

The Past

The legacy of modernism in the anthropological study of time is the challenge to the singular nature of time. By the late 1800s, a centuries-old opinion had begun to settle in as received wisdom; namely, that time was a uniform and universal yardstick of human existence and experience. Newtonian time was assumed to hold everywhere; Kantian time, while individually experienced, was a unitary phenomenon. Time tended to be conceived as a public, universal phenomenon.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, the universalist tendency came under closer scrutiny. Newly formed social science disciplines, such as psychology and sociology/anthropology, undertook studies oftime. The result was a growing sense that far from being public and universal, time and the experience of it was private and somewhat idiosyncratic. By the 1910s, a growing number of scholars came to believe that time was far from universal.

Several scholars figured prominently in the reformulation of time as privately held. Henri Bergson's writings on duration helped ground time conceptually in the perception of the temporal subject. Bergson's notion of durée was an expression of the flow of consciousness. And William James's now famous neologism “stream of consciousness” was itself an attack on those who would divide temporal consciousness into discrete units—as he said, like describing a river in terms of bucketfuls of water.

The Present

Émile Durkheim and his followers investigated temporality from an analytic and theoretical stance midway between public and private, shared and idiosyncratic. Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Henri Hubert conceived of time as variable across social groups—variably perceived, variably expressed. But they also considered time a shared phenomenon in its cultural expression. Hence a midpoint between the public and the private—time may be individually expressed and experienced, but it is at heart a social construction, a product of the social group, and must therefore be public and shared but variable across different social groups.

Most of the early work of these scholars involved sketching this position theoretically. The empirical investigations tended to center on calendars and the rhythmicization of time. That is, what are public expressions of time, and what social work do they accomplish? Calendars are an obvious answer, and Hubert's now-famous work on the representation of time examines how time is constructed calendrically. Part of the thrust of Hubert's argument is that time is a necessary component of magical and religious representations. The work of the calendar is not to measure time in the sense of giving magical or religious acts a fixed date, but to give tempo or rhythm to time, to regulate the intervals of the sacred and the profane.

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