All
 
|
 
 


The Anthropology of Time: History and the State of the Art [Antropologiia vremeni: ocherk istorii i sovremennosti]
 
PIIS086954150017934-7-1
DOI10.31857/S086954150017934-7
Publication type Article
Status Published
Authors
Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov 
Affiliation: HSE University - St. Petersburg
Address: Russian Federation, St. Petersburg
Journal nameEtnograficheskoe obozrenie
Edition№6
Pages83-103
Abstract

This essay charts the history of the anthropology of time from the vantage point of what I see as its key contemporary problem: that of temporal multiplicity. I find it endemic to virtually every ethnographic context where one finds often radically different ways to understand time, measure it and account for the past, the present and the future. The problem is, if ethnographically time is multiple, how can we understand relations between different temporalities in such multiplicities? How are they organised? Drawing on my own ethnography and on other current work, I argue for at least two different ways to conceptualise multiplicity through relations of (1) change and (2) exchange between different temporalities.

Keywordsanthropology of time, temporality, singularity, multiplicity, history of anthropology, anthropological theory
Publication date23.12.2021
Number of characters45744
Cite  
100 rub.
When subscribing to an article or issue, the user can download PDF, evaluate the publication or contact the author. Need to register.
Размещенный ниже текст является ознакомительной версией и может не соответствовать печатной
1 Историю антропологии времени можно рассказать по-разному. Можно выстроить ее вокруг взлета и падения понятия коллективно разделяемого “социального времени” Дюркгейма. С этой точки зрения можно видеть, как интерес к коллективным представлениям уступает место вопросам агентности и когнитивным процессам (Gell 1992; Greenhouse 1996). Можно рассказать о том, как исследовательская повестка в этой области менялась в контексте глобализации западных категорий времени. Это история колонизации локальных представлений, их замещения и переработки в глобальных иерархиях “империй времени” (Galison 2004), капиталистической современности и антропоцена (Bear 2014a; 2014b; 2016; Ogle 2015; Adam 1998; Irvine 2020). Можно исходить из того, что антропология сама стала агентом этой колонизации времени. Тогда эта история о том, как классические для антропологии эволюционные, структурные и релятивистские онтологии конституируют свои объекты исследования как разницу во времени между западной современностью и культурными “Другими”, являясь, таким образом, формами имперского и “модерного” знания (Fabian 1983; Ssorin-Chaikov 2019a; 2019b).
2 Я поведу свой рассказ по-другому. В истории антропологии времени меня будет интересовать соотношение темпоральной сингулярности и множественности. Антропология времени возникла как сомнение в универсальности (сингулярности) времени физического, характерного прежде всего для естественных наук. Альтернативный тезис антропологов обычно состоит в том, что время специфично для каждой конкретной культуры. Эта альтернатива, казалось бы, противопоставляет сингулярности множественность. Но так ли это? Все зависит от того, как именно мы понимаем множественность. Если мы, к примеру, рассматриваем общества и культуры как отдельные вселенные, то мы меняем одну сингулярность (универсальное физическое время) на другую (отдельная культурная вселенная). Либо время универсально, либо специфично для каждой конкретной культуры. Либо есть общее истинное время, либо этих истин много, но каждая истина представляет собой изолированную социокультурную территорию. Это, вне сомнения, множественность (множество), но состоящая из совокупности или суммы сингулярностей, – культур – как своеобразных отдельных планет или островов, где время организовано и течет по-разному.
3 Далее кажется, что глобальная современность – с ее часами, гаджетами и часовыми поясами – как раз и представляет собой темпоральную сингулярность. Но парадоксально, что чем больше антропологи исследуют интеграции отдельных культурных единиц в разного рода глобальные системы – в империи нового времени, мировой социализм или капитализм, – тем больше они приходят к пониманию, что это как раз не так. Как я продемонстрирую ниже, во-первых, время этой глобальной современности не сингулярно; во-вторых, осознание этого в антропологии наступает примерно тогда же, когда формируется вывод о том, что время вообще не сводимо к сингулярной системе координат (Munn 1992) даже на отдельно взятом “острове времени”. Итак, дело не в том, что в эпоху глобализации культурное разнообразие представлений о времени унифицируется. Вектор этой трансформации совсем не направлен от множественности к сингулярности с точки зрения того, как этот вектор рассматривают антропологи. Скорее наоборот: мы можем наблюдать в антропологии замену того, что я называю “аналитикой темпоральной сингулярности” или множественности как суммы сингулярностей, рассматривающей время или как универсальное, или как специфичное для каждой конкретной культуры, “аналитикой темпоральной множественности”, где каждая система временных координат работает не в изоляции от других, а во взаимоотношениях с ними. В данной статье я рассмотрю этот вектор смены аналитики. Меня также будет интересовать то, как можно помыслить эти взаимоотношения внутри множественности темпоральностей – т.е. отношения между темпоральностями. В частности, я рассмотрю современную литературу в свете двух модальностей этих отношений: модальности изменения (change) и модальности обмена (exchange), которые я более детально исследую в другой работе (Ssorin-Chaikov 2017).

Number of purchasers: 4, views: 1033

Readers community rating: votes 0 

1. Abu-Shams, L., and A. González-Vázquez. 2014. Juxtaposing Time: An Anthropology of Multiple Temporalities in Morocco. Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 136: 33–48. https://journals.openedition.org/remmm/8817 
2. Adam, B. 1988. Social Versus Natural Time, a Traditional Distinction Re-Examined. In The Rhythms of Society, edited by M. Young and T. Schuller, 198–226. London: Routledge.
3. Adam, B. 1995. Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time. Cambridge: Polity Press.
4. Adam, B. 1998. Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards. London: Routledge.
5. Agamben, G. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
6. Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities. L.: Verso.
7. Appadurai, A. 1991. Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology. In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by R.G. Fox, 191–210. Santa Fe: The School of American Research.
8. Appadurai, A. 2013. The Future As Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London: Verso Books.
9. Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the Secular. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
10. Aveni, A. 1989. Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks and Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
11. Bear, L. 2014. Doubt, Conflict, Mediation: The Anthropology of Modern Time. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20 (S1): 3–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12091 
12. Bear, L. 2014. 3 For Labour: Ajeet’s Accident and the Ethics of Technological Fixes in Time. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20 (S1): 71–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12094 
13. Bear, L. 2016. Time as Technique. Annual Review of Anthropology 45: 487–502. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102313-030159 
14. Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage Publications.
15. Benjamin, W. 1969. Illuminations. New York: Schocken.
16. Bergson, H. 1965. Duration and Simultaneity, with Reference to Einstein’s Theory. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
17. Bestor, T.C. 2008. Supply-Side Sushi: Commodity, Market, and the Global City. American Anthropologist 103 (1): 76–95. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2001.103.1.76 
18. Birth, K.K. 1996. Trinidadian Times: Temporal Dependency and Temporal Flexibility on the Margins of Industrial Capitalism. Anthropological Quarterly 69 (2): 79–89. https://doi.org/10.2307/3318035 
19. Birth, K.K. 2012. Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
20. Bloch, M. 1968. Tombs and Conservatism among the Merina of Madagascar. Man N.S. 3 (1): 94–104. https://doi.org/10.2307/2799414 
21. Bloch, M. 1977. The Past and Present in the Present. Man, N.S. 12 (2): 278–292. https://doi.org/10.2307/2800799 
22. Bloch, M. 1986. From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
23. Boas, F. 1974. The Principles of Ethnological Classification. In A Franz Boas Reader, edited by G.W. Stocking, 61–67. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
24. Bogoraz, V.G. Einshtein i religiia: primenenie printsipa otnositel’nosti k issledovaniiu religioznykh yavlenii [Einstein and Religion: Application of Relativity Principle to the Study of Religious Phenomena]. Petrograd: L.D. Frenkel’, 1923.
25. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
26. Bourne, C. 2006. A Future for Presentism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
27. Chelcea, L. 2015. Post-Socialist Acceleration: Fantasy Time in a Multinational Bank. Time and Society 24 (3): 348–366. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X14563018 
28. Colson, F. 1926. The Week: An Essay on the Origin and Development of the Seven Day Cycle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
29. Cooper F. 1992. Colonizing Time: Work Rhythms and Labor Conflict in Colonial Mombasa. In Colonialism and Culture, edited by N. Dirks, 209–245. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
30. Dalsgaard, S., and M. Nielsen. 2013. Introduction: Time and the Field. Social Analysis 57 (1): 1–19.
31. Davis, R. 1976. The Northem Thai Calendar and Its Uses. Anthropos 1: 3–32. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40458880 
32. Derrida, J. 1992. Given Time: 1, Counterfeit Money. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
33. Dick, H.P. 2010. Imagined Lives and Modernist Chronotopes in Mexican Nonmigrant Discourse. American Ethnologist 37 (2): 275–290. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01255.x 
34. Duncan, D.E. 1998. The Calendar. London: Fourth Estate.
35. Durkheim, E. 1915. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen & Unwin.
36. Engels, F. 2010. The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State: In the Light of the Researches by Lewis H. Morgan. In Marx&Engels:Collected Works. Vol. 26, Engels 1882–89: 129–276. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
37. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1940. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
38. Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
39. Flynn, A.U. 2021. Once Upon a Time in Utopia: Bergson, Temporality and the Remaking of Social Movement Futures. Social Anthropology 29 (1): 156–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12991 
40. Galison, P. 2004. Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time. New York: W.W. Norton.
41. Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
42. Gell, A. 1992. The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Construction of Temporal Images and Maps. Oxford: Berg.
43. Giddens, A. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
44. Giddens, A. 1981. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press.
45. Glennie, P., and N. Thrift. 2009. Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
46. Greenhouse, C.J. 1996. A Moment’s Notice: Time Politics Across Cultures. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
47. Gupta, A. 1992. The Reincarnation of Souls and the Rebirth of Commodities: Representations of Time in “East” and “West”. Cultural Critique 22: 187–211. https://doi.org/10.2307/1354088 
48. Gupta, A., and J. Ferguson, eds. 1997. Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham: Duke University Press.
49. Gupta, A., and J. Ferguson, eds. 1997. Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley: University of California Press.
50. Gurevitch, A.Ya. 1984. Kategorii srednevekovoi kul’tury [Categories of Mediaeval Culture]. Moscow: Iskusstvo.
51. Guyer, J.I. 2007. Prophecy and the near future: thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time. American Ethnologist 34 (3): 409-421. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.3.409 
52. Halbwachs, M. 2020. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
53. Hanson, S.E. 1997. Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
54. Harvey, D. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell.
55. Herzfeld, M. 1991. A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
56. Ho, K. 2009. Liquidated, an Ethnology of Wall Street. Durham: Duke University Press.
57. Hobsbawm, E. 2010. Age of Empire: 1875–1914. London: Orion.
58. Hodges, M. 2008. Rethinking Time’s Arrow: Bergson, Deleuze and the Anthropology of Time. Anthropological Theory 8 (4): 399–429. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499608096646 
59. Howe, L.E.A. 1981. The Social Determination of Knowledge: Maurice Bloch and Balinese Time. Man, N.S. 16 (2): 220–234. https://doi.org/10.2307/2801396 
60. Hubert, H. 1999. Essay on Time: A Brief Study of the Representation of Time in Religion and Magic. Oxford: Berghahn.
61. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.
62. Irvine, R. 2018. An Anthropology of Deep Time: Geological Temporality and Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
63. Janeja, M.K., and A. Bandak, eds. 2018. Ethnographies of Waiting: Doubt, Hope and Uncertainty. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
64. Karaseva, A.I., and M.P. Momzikova. 2019. Chasovye poiasa i sinkhronnye telekommunikatsii: nezametnaia rabota po temporal’noi koordinatsii u gorozhan Dal’nego Vostoka Rossii [Time Zones and Synchronous Telecommunications: An Invisible Work of Temporal Coordination in Urban Far Eastern Russia]. Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 3: 42–61.
65. Kern, S. 1983. The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
66. Khosravi, S. 2014. Waiting. In Migration: A COMPAS Anthology, edited by B. Anderson and M. Keith, 74–75. Oxford: COMPAS.
67. Landes, D. 1983. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
68. Lansing, S. 1991. Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
69. Leon-Portilla, M. 1973. Time and Reality in the Thought of the Maya. Boston: Beacon.
70. Lounela, A. 2020. Contested Values and Climate Change Mitigation in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. Social Anthropology 28 (4): 862–880. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12790 
71. Lyotard, J.-F. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
72. Mandel, E. 1975. Late Capitalism. London: Humanities Press.
73. Marcus, G. 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.000523 
74. Marx, K. 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis.
75. Mauss, M. 2013. Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: A Study in Social Morphology. London: Routledge.
76. May, J., and N. Thrift. 2003. Timespace: geographies of temporality. London: Routledge.
77. McTaggart, J.M.E. 1908. The Unreality of Time. Mind 17 (68): 457–474.
78. Mintz, S. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking.
79. Miyazaki, H. 2003. The Temporalities of the Market. American Anthropologist 105 (2): 255–265. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2003.105.2.255 
80. Mumford, L. 1964. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt.
81. Munn, N. 1983. Gawan Kula: Spatiotemporal Control and the Symbolism of Influence. In The Kula: New Perspectives on Massim Exchange, edited by J.W. Leach and E. Leach, 277–308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
82. Munn, N. 1992. The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 93–123. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.21.100192.000521 
83. Ogle, V. 2015. The Global Transformation of Time: 1870–1950. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
84. Palmié, S., and Ch. Stewart. 2016. Introduction: For an anthropology of History. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 207–236. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau6.1.014 
85. Pandian, A. 2017. Waiting. Anthropology and Humanism 42 (1): 10–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12156 
86. Pedersen, M.A., and M. Nielsen. 2013. Trans-Temporal Hinges: Reflections on an Ethnographic Study of Chinese Infrastructural Projects in Mozambique and Mongolia. Social Analysis 57 (1): 122–142. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2013.570109 
87. Pelkmans, M., ed. 2013. Ethnographies of Doubt: Faith and Uncertainty in Contemporary Societies. London: IB Tauris.
88. Ringel, F. 2018. Back to the Postindustrial Future: An Ethnography of Germany’s Fastest-Shrinking City. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
89. Rosenberg, D., and A. Grafton. 2010. Cartographies of Time. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
90. Rowlands, M. 1995. Inconsistent Temporalities in a Nation State. In Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local, edited by D. Miller, 23–42. London: Routledge.
91. Sahlins, M. 1976. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
92. Shove, E., F. Trentmann, and R. Wilk, eds. 2009. Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture. Oxford: Berg.
93. Simmel, G. 1950. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press.
94. Sorokin, P.A., and R.K. Merton. 1937. Social Time: A Methodological and Functional Analysis. American Journal of Sociology 42 (5): 615–629. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/217540 
95. Sorokin, P.A. 1943. Sociocultural Causality, Space, Time; A Study of Referential Principles of Sociology and Social Science. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
96. Ssorin-Chaikov, N. 2000. Bear Skins and Macaroni: The Social Life of Things at the Margins of a Siberian State Collective. In The Vanishing Rouble: Barter Networks and Non-Monetary Transactions in Post-Soviet Societies, edited by P. Seabright, 345–361. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511720628.015 
97. Ssorin-Chaikov, N. 2006. On Heterochrony: Birthday Gifts to Stalin, 1949. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 12 (2): 355–375. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2006.00295.x. 
98. Ssorin-Chaikov, N. 2017. Two Lenins: A Brief Anthropology of Time. Chicago: HAU Books.
99. Ssorin-Chaikov, N. 2019. Reassembling History and Anthropology in Russian Anthropology. Pt. I. Social Anthropology 27 (2): 320–335. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12628 
100. Ssorin-Chaikov, N. 2019. Reassembling History and Anthropology in Russian Anthropology. Pt. II. Social Anthropology 27 (2): 336–351. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12627 
101. Stein, F. 2017. Work, Sleep, Repeat: The Abstract Labour of German Management Consultants. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
102. Stein, F. 2018. Selling Speed: Management Consultants, Acceleration, and Temporal Angst // PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 41 (S1): 103–117. https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12256 
103. Stein, J. 2003. Reflections on Time, Time-Space Compression and Technology in the Nineteenth Century. In Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, edited by J. May and N. Thrift, 106–119. London: Routledge.
104. Strathern, M. 2013. Learning to See in Melanesia: Lectures Given in the Department of Social Anthropology Cambridge University, 1993–2008. Chicago: HAU Books.
105. Thompson, E.P. 1967. Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism. Past and Present 1: 56–97.
106. Urton, G. 1981. At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky. Austin: University Texas Press.
107. Verdery, K. 1996. What Was Socialism, And What Comes Next? Princeton: Princeton University Press.
108. Wengrow, D. 2005. Kingship, Revolution and Time: Perspectives on Materiality and Modernity. In The Qualities of Time: Anthropological Approaches, edited by W. James and D. Mills, 137–151. Oxford: Berg.
109. Whipp, R. “A Time to Every Purpose”: An Essay on Time and Work. In The Historical Meanings of Work, edited by P. Joyce, 210–236. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
110. White, H.V. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
111. Wolf, E.R. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
112. Yanagisako, S., and C. Delaney, eds. 1995. Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis. London: Routledge.
113. Zaloom, C. 2006. Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
114. Zerubavel, E. 1981. Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life. Chicago: University Chicago Press.

Система Orphus

Loading...
Up