The Qualities of Time Anthropological Approaches

by James, Wendy; Mills, David

• ISBN13: 9781845200459
• ISBN10: 1845200454
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-03-02
• Publisher: Berg Pub Ltd

Summary

This book explores the relevance of classical ideas in the anthropology of time to the way we understand history, participate in the events around us, and experience our lives. Time is not just an abstract principle we live by or a local cultural construct: it is shaped, punctuated, organized, and suffered in complex ways by real people negotiating their lives and relations with others. Space may be opened up for politics, violence or revolutionary change within the framework of ceremonial markers of social time: holy days, festivals and carnivals. People create and recreate patterns in the way they imagine the past, present and future at such moments, through material objects, language, symbolic action and bodily experience. The rhythms of social life, including periodic episodes of sacred or special time, interact with 'historical events' in strange ways. They are fundamental not only to the human condition but to the making and remembering of history, as well as to what we recognize as the unexpected or abnormal. The Qualities of Time brings anthropologists and archaeologists together in a new conversation about the 'patterns' of our understanding and experience of time. The authors reflect on how we should interpret evidence about the distant past, andhow far the structuring of social time is a human universal. They also consider whether anthropology itself has been so oriented to the present it has still to develop ways of dealing with temporality. The interactions of time-structures, ceremonials, and specific historical events, including violence inspired by the millennium, are interrogated. The experience of individuals who feel the times are for them 'out of joint' is also examined.By combining socio-cultural, philosophical and historical approaches, this thought-provoking book moves anthropological debates about time's qualities well beyond existing studies.

Author Biography

Wendy James is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford.

David Mills is the Anthropology Coordinator at the Centre for Learning and Teaching Sociology, Anthropology and Politics, University of Birmingham.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
List of Illustrations	xi
The Contributors	xiii
Acknowledgements	xvii
Introduction: From Representation to Action in the Flow of Time	1	(18)
Wendy James
David Mills
Part I Objects and Places as Signs of the Past
The Material Culture of Memory	19	(16)
Paul Lane
`Varimu Valale': Rock Art as World Heritage in a Ritual Landscape of Central Tanzania	35	(20)
Jasper Chalcraft
The Time of Place in West Mexico	55	(18)
Trevor Stack
Part II Mythical Times, Presentism, and the Critique from History
Tiger in an African Palace	73	(22)
Richard Fardon
`Time, Too, Grows on the Moon': Some Evidence for Knight's Theory of a Human Universal	95	(24)
Ian Watts
Historical Time versus the Imagination of Antiquity: Critical Perspectives from the Kalahari	119	(18)
Chris Wingfield
Kingship, Revolution and Time: Perspectives on Materiality and Modernity	137	(18)
David Wengrow
Part III Modern Times?
Time Inscribed in Space, and the Process of Diagnosis in African and Chinese Medical Practices	155	(16)
Elisabeth Hsu
Time and the Work Ethic in Post-Socialist Romania	171	(16)
Monica Heintz
Part IV Countering the Metanarratives
Quartering Sheep at Carnival in Sud Lipez, Bolivia	187	(16)
Maggie Bolton
Bandits and Heroes: Time and Place in Central China	203	(16)
Mary Rack
The Persistence of Multiple-religious Practices in South-west Ethiopia	219	(16)
Wolde Gossa Tadesse
Time-shapes and Cultural Agency among West African Craft Specialists	235	(16)
Roy Dilley
Part V Cosmologies and the Making of History
The `Rounds' of Time: Time, History and Society in Borana Oromo	251	(16)
Gemetchu Megerssa
Aneesa Kassam
Cutting Time: Beads, Sex and Songs in the Making of Samburu Memory	267	(18)
Bilinda Straight
Old System, New Conflicts: Age, Generation and Discord among the Meru, Kenya	285	(16)
Anne-Marie Peatrik
The Kanungu Fire: Millenarianism and the Millennium in South-western Uganda	301	(16)
Richard Vokes
Part VI Persons In and Out of Time
Life Made Strange: an Essay on the Re-inhabitation of Bodies and Landscapes	317	(14)
Andrew Irving
Embodied Memories: Displacements in Time and Space	331	(18)
Julia Powles
Living in Time's Shadow: Pollution, Purification and Fractured Temporalities in Buddhist Ladakh	349	(18)
Martin A. Mills
Index	367