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Time arid.,tÍieOther
HOWANTHROPOLOGY
MAKESITS OBJECT
' .. l
~1 o\)

Johannes Fabian

COLUMBIAUNIVERSITY
PRESS NEWYORK
-
)

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Fabian , Johannes.
Time and the other.
Bibliograph y: p.
Includes index.
l. Anthropology-Philosophy. 2. Tim e. l. Title.
GN345.F32 1983 306' .01 82-19751
ISB:N 0-231-05590-0
ISBN 0-231-·05591-0 (pbk.)
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

.
Columbia Univers ity Press
New York Guildford, Surrey

Copyright © 1983 ·columbia Un iversity Press

Ali rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
F or my parents
And for !lona

\
Contents

Pref ace and A.cknowledgments IX

Cbapter 1: Time and tbe Emerging Otber I

From Sacred to Secular Tim e: The Philosophical
Traveler 2
. From History to E volution: ThP.N aturalizaJ,ionof Time 11 ·
Some Uses of Time in A.nthropol,ogi,calDiscourse 21
Taking Stock: A thropological Discourse and the
Denial efCoevalness 25

Chapter 2: Our T ime, Their T ime, No Time:

Coevalness Denied 37
Circumventing Coevalness: Cultural Relativity 38
Preempting Coevalness: Cultural Taxonomy 52
Chapter 3: Time and Writing About the O ther 71
Contradiction: R eal or Appm·ent 72
· Temporaliz.ation: l\-feans or End? 74
Time and Tense: The Ethnographic Present 80
In A1yTime: Ethnography and the Autobiographic
Past 87
Poli~cs <?fTime: Th e Temporal Wolf in Taxonomic Sheep's
Clothing 97

Chapter 4 : Th e Other and the Eye: Time

and the Rhetoric of Vision 105
v1u Contents

.~ethod and Vision 106

Space and l\,femory:Topoi of Discourse 109
Logic as Arra.ngement: Knowledge Visible 114
Vide et Impera: The Other as Object 118
"The Symbol Belongs to the Orient": Symbolic Anthropology
in Hegel's Aesthetic 123
The Other as [con: The Case of "Synúx)lic
Anthropology" 131 ,/

Chapter 5: Conclusions 143

Retrospect and Summary 144
/ssues for Debate 152
Coevalness: Points of Departure 156
Notes 167
Ref erences Cited 183
Inde x · 199
Preface and Acknowledgments
"Yoli see,myfri.end," lvlr. Bounderbyput in, "we a.,·e the
kind of peo-plewho know the value of time, and you are the
kind of peopk who don't know the value of time." "I have
not," reto.rted i\1.r.Childers,·ajter surve~ying
himfrom head
tofoot, "the honour of knowingyou-but if you mean that
you can make moremoneyof your time than l can of mine,
I shouldjudge from your appearame thatyou are abcut
right."
Charles Dickens Hard Times

WHEN THEY APPROACH the probJem of Time, certain

philosophers feel the need to fortify them selves with a ritual
incantation. The y quote Augustine: "What is time? If no
one asks me about it, I know; if I want to explain it to the
one who asks, I don 't know" (Confessions,book XI ). In fact,
1 have just joined that chorus.
It is difficult to speak about Time and we may leave it
to philosophers to ponder the reasons . It ·is not difficult to
show that we speak, fluentl y and profusely, through Time.
Time, much like language or money , is a carrier of signifi-
cance, a form through which we define the content of re]a-
tions between the Self and the Other. Moreover-as the
conversation between Mr. Bounderby , the factory owner,
and ~1r. Childers, the acrobat, reminds us-Time may give
form to relation s of power and inequality .under the condi-
tions of capita]ist industrial production.
It occurred to me that this could be the perspective for
a critique of cultural anthropology. These essays, then, a:re
offered as studies of "anthropology through Time. " The
 X Preface and Acknowledgments
reader who expects a book on the anthropology of Time-
perhaps an ethnography of "time-reckoning among the
primitives"-will be disappointed. Aside from occasional
ref erences to anthropological studies of cultural concep-
tions of Time, he will find nothing to satisfy his cur iositv
' about the Time of the Other. I want to examine past and
, present uses of Time as ways of construing the object of our
,discip line. If it is true that Time belongs to the political
· economy of relations between individuals, classes, and na-
~tions, then the construction of anthropology's object through
,temporal concepts and devices is a political act; there is a
· "Politics of Time."
I took an historical approach in order to demonstrate
the emergence, transformation, and differentiation of use s
of Time. This runs counter to a kind of critica! philosophy
which condemns recourse to history as a misuse of Time.
According to a famous remark by Karl Popper , "The his-
toricist does not recognize that it is we who select and order
the facts of history " ( 1966 2:269). Popper and other theo-
rists of science inspired by him do not seem to realize that
the problematic element in this assertion is not the consti-
tution of history (who doubts that it is made, not given?)
but the nature of the we. From the point of view of anthro-
pology, that ~e, t~~ subject of history, cannot be presup -
posed or lefc 1mphc1t. :,.J'orshould we let anthropology sim-
ply be used as the provider of a convenient Other to the we
(as exemplified by Popper on the first page of the Open So-
ciety where "our civilization " is opposed to the "tribal" or
"closed society," 1966 1: 1).
Critica! philosophy must inquire into the dialectical
constitution of the Other. To consider that relation dialec-
tically means to recognize its concrete temporal, historical ,
and political conditions. Existentially and politically, critique
of anthropology starts with the scandal of domination and
exploitation of one part of mankind by another. Trying to
make sense of what happens-in order to overcome a state
of affairs we have long recognized as scanda lous-we can in
the end not be satisfied with explanations which ascribe
Western imperialism in abstract terms to the mechanics of
power or aggressíon, or in moral terms to greed and
Preface and Acknowledgments X1
wickedness. Aggression, one suspects, is the alienated bour-
geois' perception of his own sense of alienation as an inevi-
table, quasi-natural force; wickedness projects the same
inevitability inside the person. ln both cases, schemes of ex-
pJanation are easily bent into ideologies of self-justification.
1 will be searching-and here I feel close to the Enlighten-
ment philoso-pheswhom I shall criticize later on-for an
"error ," an intellectua l misconception, a defect of reason
which, even if it <loes not offer the explanation, may free
our self-questioning from the doub le bind of fate and evil.
That error causes our societies to maimain their anthropo-
logical knowledge of other societies in bad faith. We con-
stantly need to cover up tor a fundamental contradiction:
On the one hand we dogmatically insist that anthropology
rests on ethnographic research involving personal, pro-
longed interaction with the Other. But then we pronounce
upon the knowledge gained from such research a discourse
which construes the Other in terms of distance, spatial and
temporal. The Other's empirical presence turns into his
theoretical absence, a conjuring trick which is worked with
the help of an array of devices that have the common intent
and function to keep the Other outside the Time of anthro-
pology. An account of the many ways in which this has been
done needs to be given even if it is impossible to propose,
in the end, more than hints and fragments of an alternative.
The radicaLcontempo~e~{ of ~nkind is a.-2.rolect. The-
oretical reflection can identl y obstacles; only changes in the
praxis and politics of anthropological research and writing
can contribute solutions to the problems that will be raised.
Such are the outlines of the argument 1 want to pursue.
lt lies in the nature of chis undertaking that a great mass of
material had to be covered, making it impossible always to
do justice to an author or an issue. Readers who are less
familiar with anthropology and its history might first want
to look at the summary provided in chapter 5.
I don 't want to give che impression that this project was
conceived principally by way of theoretic al reasoning . On
the contrary, it grew out of my ordinary occupations as a
teacher working mainly in institutions involved in the re-
production of Western society, and as an ethnographer
Xll Preface and Acknowledgments
trying to understand cultural processes in urban-industrial
Africa (see Fabian 1971, 1979). In the actofproducingeth-
nographic knowledge, the problem of Time arises con-
cretely and practically, and many anthropologists have been
aware of the temporal aspects of ethnography. But ,.,,e have
rarely considered the ideological nature of temporal con-
cepts which inform our theories and our rhetoric. Nor have
we paid much attention to intersubjective Time, which <loes
not measure but constitutes those practices of communica-
tion we customarily call fieldwork. Perhaps we need to pro-
tect ourselves by such lack of reflection in arder to keep our
knowledge of the Other at bay, as it were. After a1l, we only
seem to be doing what other sciences exercise: keeping ob-
ject and subject apart.
Throughout, I have tried to relate my arguments to ex-
isting work and to provide bibliographic references to fur-
ther sources. VV. Lepenies ' essay the "End of Natural His-
tory" ( 1976) is dosel y related to my views on the uses of
Time in earlier phases of anthropology (although we seem
to differ on what brought about the phenomenon of "tem-
porali zation "); P. Bourdieu has forrnulated a theory of Time
and cultural practice (1977) in which I found much agree-
ment with my own thought. H. G. Reíd has been, to my
knowledge, one of the few social scientists to employ the
notion of "politics of time" (see 1972 ). My indebtedness to
the work of Gusdorf, Moravia, Benveniste, Weinrich, Yates,
Ong, and others is obvious and, I hope, _properly acknowl-
edged. I made an attempt, within the lim1tations of libraries
at my disposal, to read up on the copie of Time in general.
The literatur"e I consulted ranged from early monographs
on primitive time reckoning (Nilsson 1920 ) to recent studies
of time-conceptions in other cultures (Ricoeur 1975); from
philosophical (\Vhitrow 1963) to psychological (Doob 1971)
standard works. I looked at interdisciplinary projects from
the "Time and its Mysteries " series (1936-1949) to the work
inspired by J. T. Fraser and the International Society for
the Studv of Time he founded (see Fraser 1966, Fraser et
al., eds., '1972 ff). Specia1 issues of journals devoted to Time
have come to my attention from History and Theo1y (Beiheft
6: 1966) to Cahiers Internatúmawc t.k Socwlogie (1979). [ should
Preface and Acknowledgments Xlll
mention several highly original treatments of the tapie, ex-
emplified by G. Kubler's The Shape of Time (1?6~) and the
work of M. Foucault (e.g., 1973). The one b1bhography I
found (Zelkind and Sprug 1974) lists more than 1,100 titles
of time research but is badly in need of completing and up-
dating.
As could be expected, many of the questions I raise oc-
cupied other writers at about the same time. This w«;>rkcarne
to my attention after these essays were completed (m 1978),
too late to be commented on at length. Most important
among these writings is undoubtedly Edward Said's Orien-
talism (1979 [ 1978]). Similaritíes in intent, method , and oc-
casionallv in formulations between his study and mine con-
firmed ~e in my ideas. I hope that my ~rguments ~'Íll
complement and, in so~e cases, elabor~te h1s theses. qmte
possibly, M . Foucault's mfluence explains why there 1s so
much convergence bet,-veen our views. There may also be
deeper analogies in our intellectual biographies , as we found
out in later conversations. I believe we both struggle to re-
store past experiences, which were buried under layers_ of
"enculturation " in other societies and languages, to a kind
of presence that makes them critically fruitful.
A remarkable study by Ton Lemaire (1976) provides
background and much detail to ~~apters l ~nd 2_. Le-
maire's is one of the best recent cnt1cal evaluauons of cul-
tural anthropology; unfortunately it is as yet not available
in English. . . .
Justin Stagl achieved m rny v1e~ a b:eakth:ough m the
historiography of anthropology w1th h1s stud1es on early
manuals for travelers and on the origins of certain social-
scientific techniques, such as the questionna~re-sur~•ey ( 1979,
1980) . His findings demonstrate a connecuon_ wh1ch I on~y
suspected, namely a direct influence of Ram1st thought m
giving "method" to our knowledge of the Other. M~ch _of
what I discuss in chapters 3 and 4 takes on added s1gmfi-
cance in the light of Stagl's writings. .
Stagl drew on the seminal work of W. Ong,_ as d1d J.
Goody in his book The Dmnesticationof the Savage Mznd ( 1977)
which provides valuable illustrations to issues treated in
chapter 4, especially regarding the role of the visual in the
XlV Preface and Acknowledgments Prefac e and Acknowledgments XV

presentation of knowledge. The section on Hegel's cheory To Wesleyan University I am grateful for a sabbatica l
of symbols in that chapcer is complemented by F. Kramer's leave giving me time to wrice, and to studems at ,vesleyan
essay "Mythology and Ethocentrism" (1977: 15-64 ). University and the University of Bonn for letting me try out
Sorne of che points I make in chapters 3 and 4 receive my thoughts in courses on the History of Anthropological
~upport from a recent study by Arens (1979) on cannibal- Though t.
~sm, one of the most persistent topics in anthropology, wruch llana Szombati-Fabian helped generously with sugges-
1s sho~n to_have been primariI}: an _"oppressive mental _con- tion s and critical response. Fredric Jameson, Martín Silver-
struct denved from cosmological ideas about other times man, Bob Scholte, and WaJter Ong read the manuscript and
and places. encouraged me. Although this may come as a surprise to
Finally, I found mucb confirmation, albeit of a negative him, I think that che time of close collaboration with Hav-
sort (from the position taken in this book) in the \.vork of G. den Vvnite at che Center for the Humanities at ,iVeslev~n
Durand (1979; see also Maffesoli , ed., 1980). He seems to University was important in giving shape to this projecr.'
erner~e as the major proponent of a neohermetic move - I want to thank Valborg Proudman and Hanneke Kos-
~ent ~n Fr~.nch ~nthropol<;>gyw~~s~ strategy it is to play che sen for help and competent assistance of which typing ver-
1mag~nary agamsc pro~1c pos1t1,1sm and pseudoscientific sions of the manuscript was but a small part .
evoluttomsm. The effect 1s to revitalize "orientalism" and to
reinstate the visualist rhetoric whose history has been criti- Amsterdam
cally studied by Yates and Ong (see chapter 4). November 1982
With few exceptions I shall not refer to these and other
recent publications in the text or in the notes. I mention
sorne of them now because they confirm my conviction that
we are on the threshold of sorne major change in our con-
ceptions of the history and present role of anthropology.
Elements of ª.ne,;,~understanding are being formulated here
and there; mme 1s one attempt to show how they might be
put together .
Mue~ as I ~m ind~bted to readings , I owe mosc to my
conversat1ons w1t~ Afncan workers and intellectuals. I hope
that V. Y. ~ud1mbe, P. Laleye , "Vamba-dia-Wamba , M.
Owusu, and many others will recognize in these essays sorne
of the exchanges we had through the years. A version of
chapter 1 (including the plan for the book) was first read at
the Department of _Anthropology at Har\'ard University and
I _want to thank M1chae) F1sher for giving me the opportu-
rucy to formulate my thoug~ts. Perhaps even more impor-
!4nt was to ~e an<;>ther?Ccas1onw~en I presented these ideas
m a panel _d1scuss10!1w1~hthe Afncan philosopher M. Towa
at the Nat1onal Um\'ers1ty of Zaire in Kinshasa. I discussed
chapter 3 with J. Habermas and his' collaborators at the Max-
Planck-Institute in Starnberg. ·
Time and the Other
Chapter One / Time
and the Emerging Other
A.partfrom time there is one other means to bring abcut im-
portant change-force . If one works too slowly,the other
wíll do itf aster.
GeorgChristophLichtenberg1
Of course the hiswry and prae-histm) of man take their
prope,· placesin the general scheme of k:now!Ldg e. Of course
the doctrine ~fthe worul-umg evolution of civílisaticn is
one which philosophic minds will take up with eager imer-
est, as a themeof abstra.ct science. But beycnd this, such re-
searchhas íts practicalside, as a source of power destlned to
infiuence the rourseof modern ideas <ind actions.
Edwa.rdBurnett Tylor 2

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER : That commonplace applies to

anthropology as much as to any other field of knowledge.
But commonpl aces usually cover up for not-so-common
truths. In this first chapter I want to set down sorne of the
terms for an argument to be pursued throughout these es-
says: Anthrop p logy's claim to power originated at its roots.
a
lt belongs ~to its essencé and is not matter0 facc iaeñtal
misuse. Nowte re is this more clearly xisible,_c!t.le~t ~onc~_w.e
look for i( -·than in the uses of Time anthropology _1~1akes
when it strives to· c9nstitute its own object-the sayage~ the
primitive, the Other. It is by diagnosing anthropology 's
tempo ra l discourse that one rediscovers the obvious, namely
that there is no knowledge of the Other which is not also a
temporal, historic al, a political act.
2 Time and the Emerging Other
Perhap s this covers too much ground; fxJliticalcan mean
anything from systernatic oppression to anarchic mutual
recognition. Toe epigrams chosen for this chapter are to
ind icare that our attent ion will mostly be directed to che op-
pressive uses of Time. Anthropology's alliance with the
forces of oppression is neither a simple or recent one, as
sorne moralizing critics would have it, nor is it unequivocal.
The brief sketches of sorne of the historicaJ contexts in which
anthropological uses of Time developed have the main pur-
pose of recounting a story whose conclusion is open-ended
and contradictory. Anthropology may, during the period
covered here, have succeeded in establishing itself as an ac-
ademic discipline; it failed to come to a rest vis-a-vis a dearly
defined Other .
Fram Sacred to Secular Time: The Philowphical Traveler
In the Judeo-Christian tradition Time has been conceived
as the medium of a sacred history. Time was thought, but
more often celebrated, as a sequence of specific events that
befall a chosen people. Mucb has been said about the linear
character of that conception as op¡x>sed to pagan, cyclical
views of Time as an éternel retour. 3 Yet such spatial meta-
phors of temporal thought tend to obscure something that
is of more immediate significance in an attempt to sketch
the ancestry of Time 's anthropologicaJ uses: Faith in a cov-
enant between Divinity and one people, trust in divine
providence as it unfolds in a history of salvation centered
on one Savior, make for sacred conceptions of Time. They
stress the specificity of Time, its realization in a given cul-
tural ecology-the Eastern Mediterranean, first, and che
circum-Mediterranean with Romeas its hub , later.
Decisive steps towards modernity, those that permitted
the emergence of anthro¡x>logical discourse , must be sought,
not in the invention of a linear conception, but in a succes-
sion of attempts to secularize Judeo-Christian Time by gen-
eralizing and universalizing it.
Different degrees of universalizing Time had of course
been achieved in an abstract form by earlier philosophical
Time and the Emerging Other 3
thought. In fact, "universal Time " was probably established
concretely and ¡x>liticallyin the Renaissance in res¡x>nse to
both classical philosophy and to the cognitive challenges
pre sented by the age of discoveries opening up in the wake
of the earth 's circumnavigation. Nevertheless, there are good
reason s to look for decisive developments, not in the mo-
ments of intellectual rupture achieved by Copernicus and
Galileo nor, for that matter, by Newton and Locke, but in
the century that elaborated the devices of discourse we now
recognize as the foundations of modern anthropology-the
Age of Enlightenment. 4
If we follow G. Gusdorf we may locate the starting ¡x>int
of chese developments, a sort of barrier that had to be bro-
ken through , in one of the last attempts during the seven-
teenth century to write a universal history from che Chris-
tian viewpoint , Bossuet's Discourssur l'histozreuniverselle (first
published in 1681).:. Perhaps it is too simplistic to put Bos-
suet at the other side of a premodern/modern watershed ,
for in many ways he anticipated the Enlightenment genre
of "philosophical history." His opposition to modernitv is
not so 'much in the detail of his methodological prescrip-
tions as it is in the position that integrates his views: faith m
the evange lical specificity of all of history as historv of sal-
vation. A brief reading of the introductfon to the Discours,
entitled "The General Plan of this Work, " will illuminate
the importance of Bossuet's treatise.
Bossuet' s professed aim is to alleviate confusion caused
by the multitude of historical fact. This is to be accom-
plished by teaching the reader to "distinguish different times
(temp\)" with the help of "universal history ," a device which
"is to the histories of every country and of everv peop le
w~at a general map is to particular maps " (1845:'I, 2). In
t~1s analogy the universal is aligned with the genera l, which
s1~als ª .certain ambiguity (one which, incidentally , is still
w1th us m anthropology's quest for univers als). Universals
a~pears tO ha_ve two co~notations. One is that of totality ; in
thIS sense, uruversal designares the whole world at ali times.
The other is one of generality: that which is applicable to a
large nurnber of instances. 6 The important point, borne out
by the body of the Discours, is that Bossuet <loes not thema-
4 Time and the Emerging Other
tize the first connotation. His account <loes not cover the
world, it never leaves the circum-Mediterranean. Writing
within the horizon of the history of. Christian religion, h~
<loes not see his perspective, nor does he look beyond h 1s
horizon. The former is self-evident as an article of faith, the
latter is bounded by his ¡x>liticalposition at the French court
of Louis XIV, whose succession to the Christian Roman
Emp ire he takes for granted. Perspective an<:fho.rizon ?f the
Discours are tied together by the all-pervadmg mtent1on to
vaJidate (albeit not uncritically) the political realities of his
<lay by a history that is universal because it expresses the
omnipresent signs of divine p~ovidenc<:· . osoph ical history" wh1ch Vo]taire opposed to mindless
In contrast, Bossuet is quite consc1ous of problems 1m-
plicit in the sec~nd connotation of univer~al. ~ow: can one
present history m terms of generally val1?. pnnc1ples? ~e
argues that such a project rests on the ab1hty to d1sc~rn m
the "sequence of thin.gs" (suitedeschose~~ the "o!d~r ~f tunes."
Methodologically th1s calls for an abbrev1at10!1 or, se-
quences in such a way that order can be perce1ved at a
glance" (commed'un coup d'oeil, 1845:2). A long h~story of the
"art of memorv" is behind this remark, and a h1story of the
visual reductioii of tem¡x>ral sequence--its "synchronic" un-
derstanding - lies ahead of it.7
A methodological device that opens the view over Time
is the epoch, conceived : not i':1 its curren .tly most .common
understanding of a penod or mterval of time, but ~n a lf<!n-
sitive sense derived from its Greek root. An epoch 1sa pomt
ploring the past; every step he makes is the passage of an age"
as from a place of rest, all that happened before or after, so
that one ·may avoid anachronisms, that is, a kind of error
which results in confusing the times." In exposing universal
history one proceeds ~y. treati?g a "sma ll number of ~p-
ochs." in secular and rehg10us hIStory, the outcome of wh1ch
will be-and here Bossuet's methodology rejoins his faith-
to make visible the "PERPETUAL DURATrON OF REUGJ01', AND
... THE CAUSES OF THE GREAT CHANGES IN THE EMPIRES"
(1845:3, 4). Thus both, the external, spatial boundaries of
histor y and its inner continui~y are of r~l~giº':· Wher.e me~e
sequence might cause confus10n, the d1stmct1on of umes m
Time and the Emerging Other 5
the light of divine p rovidence creates order. lt demon-
strates the omnipresent -...·ork of salvation.
O. Ranum, the editor of a recent English version, re-
mind s us that Bossuet used the term discoursein the title of
bis work deliberately. H e wanted to break with convention s
according to wh ich highly stylized secular and religious his-
torie s were produced during the seventeenth century (see
Ranum 1976:xviii). Bossuet asserted his freedom to abbre-
viate, condense, and emphasize without being bound by the
then finnly established canon of historical facts each histo -
rian was expected to re~rt. In this he anticipated the "phil-
chronicling and out of which the first projects of modern
anthropology were to grow. Less obvious, but equally im-
portant, is the model set by Bossuet for what one might call
sermonizing history, which is another possible connotation
of discourse.Bossuet wrote his work for the enlightenment
and education of che Dauphin (and his father, the Sun King).
It was meant as a refutation of attacks on the literal under -
standing of the Bible and as a defense of a Gallican, French-
centered, reformed Catholicism. In short, his "distinction of
times" is embedded in concrete political-moral concerns. He
expressed himself through discursive devices that were rhe-
torical in the classical sense: aimed to move and convince
the reader. His political intent and its rhetorical form \\'ere
to influence the writin~ of the philosophesand to become part
of anthropology's hentage as, in Tylor's words, a "reform-
er's science."
We set out to show in Boussuet's Discours an example
for a premodern treatise on universal history ; now we seem
to end up with more similarities than dissimilarities if we
compare his method and devices to those of the Englighten-
ment philosophical histories. We are confronting here a weU-
known problem in the interpretation of eighteenth-century
~ou ght. On the whole, the philosophes,whom we recognize
m many respects as our immediate ancestors, achieved only
a sort of negative modernity. In the words of Carl Becker:
"Thei r negations rather than their affirmations enable us to
treat them as kindred spirits" (1963:30). Or , as Gusdorf puts
6 Time and the Emerging Other
it, these thinkers replaced Bossuet 's Christian myth .with the
"myth-history of reason" whi~h, by and ~arge, c~mtmued to
use the conventions and devices of earher pertods. If one
wants to show how Time became secularized in the eigh-
teenth century and onward he must concentrate on the
transformation of the messageof "universal hist?ry " rather
than on the elements of its code. Toe latter display a re-
markable continuity with preceding periods down to tJ:ie
Greco-Roman canons of the arts of memory and rhetonc.
The transformation of the message had to be operated on
what we identified as the specificity of Christian "universal-
ity." Change also had to occur on the leve} of p~litical intent
or ')udgment." lt was on that level that the philos<>phes had
to overcome Bossuet who "was never reluctant to Judge all
of the past in the light of the single most important event
of all time: the brief passage of the rnan-god Jesus through
a life on earth" (Ranum 1976:xxvi ).
In fact, among the many expr~ssions of chang~ one
could cite is the very transformat1on of one man s all-
significant passage on earth into the topos of travel. In the
Christian tradition, the Savior's and the saints' passages on
earth had been perceived as constituent events of a sacred
history. To be sure, this had occasioned much travel ~o
foreign parts in the form of pilgrimag~s.' crusades,_ and m1s-
sions. But for the established bourgeolSle of the e1ghteenth
century, travel was to become (at least potentially) ev~ry
man's source of "philosop hical ," secular knowledge. Rehg1-
ous travel had been to the centers of religion, or to the souls
to be saved; now, secular travel was from the centers of
leaming and power to places where man w~s t~ fin? _no-
thing but himself. As S. ~oravia had sho~n m h1s brilba~t
studies, the idea and practice of travel as science,pr~J:>ared m
Diderot's encyclopedia (1973: 125-132), was defimt1vely es-
tablished toward the end of the eighteenth century, espe-
cially among the thinker s known as "ideologues" (see
Moravia 1976). Two names, those of J. M. Degérando and
C. F. Volney, are of special interest in this connection of
travel and the secularization of Time.
It was Degérando who expre~sed _the te~poralizing
} ethos of an emerging anthropology m th1s conc1se and pro-
Time and the Emerging Other 7
grammatic formula: "The philosophi~ t~ve~ler, saili~g to
the ends of the earth, is in fact trave llmg m time; he 1s ex-
ploring the past; every step he makes is the passage of an
/age" (Degérando 1969 [1800]_:?3).In this st~tement, the attrib-
utephilosophicalechoes the mil1tant enthus1as~ of the preced-
ing century for a science of man to be conce1ved_by man and
for man, one in which religious and metaphrs 1cal searches
for mankind's origin and destiny ~ere to giv~ place t~ a
radi cally immanent vision of humamty at home m the entire
world and at all times. Now man is, in Moravia's words ,
"p laced, without residue, insi~e of _a wor ld-horizon which is
his own . . . to travel means, m th1s framework, not only to
quench the thirst for knowledge; _it ~lso ~ignifies man's ~ost
intim ate vocation " (1967 :942). It lS m th1s sense of a veh1cle
for the self-realization of man that the topos of travel sig-
nals achieved secularization of Time. A new discourse is built
on an enormous liter ature of travelogues, collections and
syntheses of travel accounts. 8 • • • • •
The manifest preoccupation m th1s bterature,. m 1ts
popular forms as well as in its scient.i!ic u~s , was ~~h the
descr iption of movements and relauons u~ space ( ge?g-
raphy") based primarily on visual º?servauon of _fore1gn
places. However, this does not contra~1ct the c<?ntention ~at
elaborating a secular conception of ~une was_1ts underlym~
concern. Precisely because secular Time was 1ts presuppos1-
tion , logically speaking, or its signifie~, in semiotic par!ance,
the new discourse had (with exceptions to be ment1oned
later) no need to thematize Time: (Ph~losophical H_ist?ry ,_as
is well known, was strange ly ah1stoncaJ). Such d_1StI_nct1on
between intent and expression is an important pn~caple of
interpretation which will be more fully elaborated m chap-
ter 3. It also invites consideration of the reverse case: A d1s-
course in which Time is thematized may be about an atem-
poral referent. 9 As we shall see, nineteenth-century
evolutionism is a case in point. At any rate, "e_~ilosophical
travel, " that is, the conception of travel as science, could leaye
the problem of Time the~reticaJ!y implicit b~al_lse _travel 1t-
self, .as witnessed by Degerando s statement, 1s mstituted as
a temporalizing practice. . . .
Why this should be so IS explamed by the subsumptton
8 Time and the Emerging Other
of travel under the reigning paradigm of natural history.
Moravia has shown that the project of scientific travel was
consciously conceived to replace an earlier, enormously
popular, genre of mostly sentimental and aesthetisizing tales
of travel. The new traveler "criticized the philosophes:the
reality of lived experience and of things seen was now op-
posed to a reality distorted by preconceived ideas"
(1967:963). On e also begins to reject the linkup, unques-
tioned by earlier voyagers, between travel in foreign parts
and military conquest. According to La Pérouse , one of the
most famous figures in this story, "the modern navigators
only have one objective when they describe the customs of
new peoples : to complete the history of man" (cited in Mo-
ravia 1967:964 f).
There is a significant double entendre in the verb to
wmp/.ete.As used by La Pérouse , it signifies belief in the ful-
fillment of human destinv: travel is the self-realization of
man. lt also has a more litéraJ, methodologicaJ meaning and
might then be trans lated asfilling out (as in "to complete a
questionnaire"). In the episteme of natural history 10 the ex-
ercise of knowledge was projected as the filling of spaces or
slots in a table, or the marking of points in a system of co-
ordinares in which ali possible knowledge could be placed.
I t is therefore not surprising that with the rise of an ethos
of scientific travel we also see the emergence of a genre of
scientific preparation for travel quite different from the in-
structionesEuropean potentates used to give to the early nav-
igators and conquistadors. We know its modern offspring,
the Notes. and Queries on Anthropology which accompanied
generations of anthropologists to the field. 11 Only recently
have we rediscovered and come to appreciate such prede-
cessors as Degérando's The ObseroationoJSavage Peoples, is-
sued from the short-lived activities of the Société des Obser-
vateurs de l'Homme. It is most revealing to find that a mod.el
of the genre was conceived by that natural historian par ex-
cellence, Linnaeus (lnstitutÚJPerigrinatmis, Uppsala, 1759). 12
This confirms, if confirmation is needed, beyond any doubt
the roots of the new science of travel in natural-historical
projects of observation, collection and classification, and de-
scription.
The new travelers did not mindlessly subscribe to em-
Time and the Emerging Other 9
piricism and pure, positive description. Volney, one of the
rnosl eminent representatives of the genre, is also the one
who advocated a critical stance based (and in this he is closer
to the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenmem) on ex-
plicitly historical, i.e., temporal considerations. During his
voyages in Egypt and Sy:ia he const~ntly had to face ~he
dilapid ated monuments of a once glonous past. Contrastmg
past and pre~nt became. an int~llectu~I.concern as well as. a
literar y dev1ce pervadmg h1s wntmgs (see Morav1a
I 967: 1008 f). It was elevated to a poetic-philosophical vi-
sion in his Les Ruines ou Méditationsur les Révolutionsdes Em-
pires. Bet_te~than any comn:ientary, the openi~g page fro~
Ruines w11l1llustrate the po1gnancy of contrad1ctory expen-
ences of past and present and the politicaJ nature of Vol-
ney's concern with Time:
In the eleventh year of the reign of Abd-ul-Hamid,
son of Ahmed, emperor of the Turks, at a time when
the victorious Russians took the Crimea and planted
their banners on the coast that leads to Constanti-
nopl e, I was travelling in the empire of the Otw-
mans, and I traversed the provinces which once had
been the kingdoms of Egypt and Syria.
Carrying with me my attentiveness to every-
thing that concems the well-being of man in society,
I entered the cities and studied the customs of their
inhabit ants; I ventured into the palaces and o'b-
scrved the conduct of those who govern; I lost my-
self in the countryside and examined the conditions
of those who work the land. Seeing everywhere
nothing but pillage and devastation, nothing but
tyranny and misery, my heart was he avy with sad-
ness and indignation. Everyday I found on my road
abandoned fields, deserted villages, and cities in
ruins; often I encountered ancient monuments and
temple s reduced to debris; palaces and fortresses,
columns, aqueducts, tombs. This spectacle turned
my spirit to medidating about times past, and it
caused in my heart thoughts that were grave and
profound . (Volney 1830:21 f)
When he later draws the "lessons from times past for
times present " (thus the title of chapter 12) he finds conso-
10 Time and the Emerging Other
lation in a thought that rings with the optimism of the phil-
osophes:
It is a ma n's folly that makes him lose himself ; it is
up to man's wisdom to save him. The peoples are
ignorant, may chey instruct themselves; their rulers
are perverted, let them correct and better them-
selves. Because that is the dictare of nature: Since the
euil.sof societüs comefrom cupidityand ignorance, man-
kind will not cease to be tormmted untü it becomes enlight-
ended and wise, until they practice the art of justu:e,
based on the knowledge of their relations and of the
laws of their organisation. (!bid . 90)
The difference between this new faith in reason and
Bossuet's old faith in salvation could not be expressed more
clearly. Bossuet preached understanding of a past that con-
tained a histOT)' of salvation and divine providence. Volney
preac~es, too, but has no recourse from the history of man.
To h1m, knowledge of the past is a sort of Archimedian
point from 1'."hic~to change an otherwise hopeless present.
There ~:ta 1~l)' 1s ª1:element of_ romantic pessimism and
nostal~1a m_h1s reven~s on the Onent's glorious past. At the
~~e um_e, 1f we cons1der the context and message of Ruines
m tts entirety, we find, beneath the image of a dream which
the ~ri~er _conveys to his readers, the pragrnatic assertion
that 1t 1s his, the educated French traveler's, knowledge of
the past that cour_its.It is a superior knowledge , for it is not
shared by the Onentals caught in the present of their cities,
ei~her deserted and dilapidating , or overpopulated and pu-
t~d. Boss.uet.ha~ evok~d the same topos at the end of his
Di.fcours,albe1t w1th a d1fferent C?nclusion: "Egypt, once so
wise, stumbles along drunken, d12zy, because the Lord has
spread giddiness in its designs; she no longer knows what
she is doing, she is lost. But peoples should not fool them-
selves: When it pleases Him, God will straighten out those
who err" (1845:427).
Prefigure? in che Christia~ tradition, but crucially
1 particul ar importance to further deve lopments in the nine -
transformed m the A.ge of Enhghtenment, the idea of a
Jknowledg~ of Time which is a superior knowledge has be-
come an mtegral _par~?f anthropology's intellectual equip-
\ment. We recogmze 1t m an outlook that has been charac-
Time and the Emerging Other 11
ceristic of our discipline through most of its active periods:
The posited authenticity of a past (savage, tribal, peasant)
serves to denounce an inauthentic present (the uprooted,
évolués, acculturated). "Urban anthropo logy," inasmuch as it
exposes counterimages to the pristine wholeness of primi-
tive Jife, was in an obvious sense the byproduct of an ad -
vanced stage of colonization abroad and an advanced stage
of urban decay at home. On a deeper leve!, as Volney's ex-
amp le reminds us, it was the point of departure for our
discipline in that it expressed the consciousness and con-
cerns of its urban, bourgeois founders.
FromHistoryto Evolution: The Naturaliz.atíonof Time
Thanks to srudies such as those by Burrow, Stocking, and
Peel, our understanding of evolutionism, the paradigm un-
der which, at least in England, anthropology gained its sta-
tus as an academic discipline, is much improved. Neverthe-
less, there rernains much confusion, sorne of it revived and
perpetuated in various forms of neoevolutionary anthropo l-
ogy whose histori cal awareness <loes not seem to go beyond
l..eslieWbite .13 A failure to distinguish between Danvin 's and
Spencer's views of evolution is responsible for a great deal
of equivoca! back-and-forth tracking between biologicaJ and
sociocultural applications. On the other hand , an admixture
of the two cannot simply be dismissed as an error. It sterns
from a tradition of equivocation fostered by Spencer him-
self (see Peel 1971:ch. 6) and perhaps by Darwin in his later
stages. One way to get a grip on this slippery issue is to
examine it in the light of a critique of anthropology's uses
of Time.
If our conclusions in the preceding section are correct,
the starting point for any attempt to understand evolution-
l
ary temporalizing \.\i.llbe the achieved secularization of Time.
It resulted in a conception which contains two elements of
teenth century: 1) Time is irnmanent to, hence coextensive
with, the world (or nature , or the universe, depending on
the argument); 2) relationships between partS of the world
12 Time and the Emerging Other
(in the widest sense of both natural and sociocultural enti -
ties) can be understood as temporal relat ions. Dispersa! in
space re flects d irectly, which is not to say simply or in ob-
vious ways, sequence in Time. Given the sociopolitical con-
text of these axiomatic truths in the industriali zing and col-
onizing Vlest, it seems almo st inevitable that social theorists
would begin to look for scientific frames in which to place
ideas of progress, improvement, and development they had
inherited from che philosaphes.This is the straightforward
story as it is most often told. In real ity, the history o~ early
evolut ion ism is replete ,,vith puzzles, paradoxes, and mcon-
sequentia l reasoning.
Theories of social evolution and vague ideas of biologi-
cal evolution were around before Darwin proposed his spe-
cific theories of the origin of species. Once his theory gained
popular acceptance it, or elements of it, were incorporated
in views of social evolution even by those who, like Spencer,
had formed their ha.sic convictions independently of Dar-
win. "Vhat they did was to redistill from Darwin's theory of
biological evolution those doctrines that were social to begin
with (Malthusianism, utilitarianism). Paradoxically, the uti-
lization of Darwin became possible only on the condition
that a revolutionary insight that had been absolutel y crucial
to his views, namely a new conception of Time, had to be,
if not eliminated, then altered and emasculated. Only then
cou ld it be app lied to various pseudoscientific projects sup-
posed to demonstrate the operation of evolutionary laws in
the history of mankind.
Numerous developmental and protoevolutionary
schemes had been tried before; and there was Vico, a dis-
turbing figure when it comes to periodizations of modern-
ity.14But the qualitative step from medieval to modern time
conceptions could not have been made without a break-
through based essentially on a quantitative change. This was
the demise of Bishop l!ssher 's bíblica) chronology, prepared
by ear lier skeptics by fully estab lished only when Charles
Lyell published his Principles efGeology (1830). 15 Its impor-
tance is stated by Darn•in in a passage "On the lapse of Time"
in The Origi,nof Species:"He who can read Sir Charles Lyell's
grand work on the Principles of Geology, which the future
Time and the Emerging Other 13
historian will recognize as having produced a revolution in
the natur al sciences, yet <loes not admit how incomprehen-
siblv vast have been the past periods of time, may at once
do;e this volume" (1861 [Third Edition]: 111). Lyell's con-
cern was \v:ith unif onnitarianism, a theor y which was to ac-
count far the present shape of the world ""1.thoutrecours~
to unique , simultaneous creation or to repeated acts of di-
vine intervention ("catastrophes"). As summarized by him,
it posited that "ali former e han ges of. the organic and p~ys-
ical creation are referable to one urunterrupted success10n
of phy sical events, governed by laws now in operation"
(quoted in Peel 1971:293n9 ).
That was the basis for nineteench-century attempts to
formulale sp~cific cheories o~ _evolucion. Geologic_al Tm:e
endowed them with a plausib1hty and a scope wh1ch their
eighteen th century predecessors could not have had. Fur-
thermore , while it is true that the new conception provided
first of all a vast quantitative expañsfon of Time, its r~al
significance was _Qfa q_ualitative nature. The problem w1?1
calculations based on che Bible was not only that they d1d
not contain enough time far natural history. That sórc of
problem could have been dealc with ~and is dealt .wich, I
imagine, by present-day fundamentahsts) by redomg the
calculations and extending the chronology. The true r~as~n
why biblical chronology had to be abandoned was that tt d1d
not contain the right kind of Time. Being calculated as the
Time after creation as it was revealed in the Scriptures, this
was Bossuet's Time of salvation. It was Time relaying sig-
nificant events, mythical and historical, and as such it was
chronicle as well as chronology. As a sequence of events it
was linear rather than tabular, i.e., it <lid not allow for Time
. to be a variable independent of the events it marks. Hence
: it could not become part of a Cartesian system of time-space
1
coordinates allowing the scientist to plot a multitude of un-
eveniful data over neutral time, unless it was first natural-
ized, i.e., separated from events meaningf ul to mankind. 16
Let us far a moment return to Darwin in order to clar-
ify two further issues. One is Darwin 's own keen awareness
that Time, once it was naturalized, could and shou ld not be
rehistorized (which was precisely what the social evolution-
14 Time and che Emerging Other
ists would try to do). He could not have been clearer than
f
in the following assage in which he rejects tendencies to
read sorne sort o inner necessity or meaning into the tem-
poral dimension of evolution:
The mere lapse of time by itself does nothing either
for or against natural selection. l state this because
it has been erroneously asserted that the element of
time is assumed by me to play an all-important part
in natural selection, as if all species were necessarily
undergoing slow modification from sorne innate
law. (1861: 110 f)
Second, Darwin had more than a first inkling of the
epistemological status of scient~c chronologies as a so_rt?f
language or code (an idea we will encounter later on m 1ts
Lévi-Straussian version):
For my part, following Lyell's metaphor, I look at
the natural geological record, as a history of the
world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing
dialect; of this history we possess the last volume
alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of
this volume, only here and there a short chapter
has been preserved; and of each page, only here
and there a few lines. Each word of the slowly-
changing language, in which the history is written ,
being more or less different in the successive chap-
ters, may represent the apparently abruptly
changed forms of life, entombed in our consecutive,
but widely separated formations. ( 1861 :336 f)
UnJike old sacred Time, or even its secularized form in the
"myth-history of reason," che new nacuralized Time was no
longer the vehicle of a continuous, meaningful story; it was
a way to order an essentially discontinuous and fragrnentary
geological and paleontological record. The social evolu~<;m-
ists, as I mentioned before , had to emasculate the new v1s1on
on all the three accounts in which it differed from earl ier
conceptions. They could not use its vastness because th~ his-
tory of mankind, recorded or reconstructed, occup1ed a
negligible span on the scale of natural evolution (and I am
not sure whether this has changed now that we count hu-
Time and the Emerging Other 15
man time in millions rather than thousands of years). Nor
could the social evolutionists accept the stark meaningless-
ness of mere physical duration. They were too full of_the
conviction that Time "accomplished" or brought about chmgs
in the course of evoiution. And finally, they had, as yet, no
use for a purely abstract methodological chronology; theirs
was a preoccupation with stages leading to civilization, each
of chem as meaningful as a sentence leading toward the
conclusion of a scory.
Because they had no use for the positive implications
of naturalized Time, the social evolutionists accepted it in
the end as a mere presupposicion of natural history. In fact ,
sorne took the consequences and discarded Time altogether
from their speculations about human social evolution. For
instan ce, Morgan stated: "It does not affect the main result
that different cribes and nations on the same continent, and
even of the same linguistic family, are in different condi-
tions ac che same time, the condi,li,onof each is the material
fact, the time being immacerial" (1877: 13). From Morgan's
timeless "condition" to the later topos of cultural "config-
uration s" was but a small logical step. In postulating the
radical irreducibility of "superorganic " history, militant an-
tievolutionists such as A. Kroeber in his "Eighteen Profes-
sions"became executors of the legacy of naturalized Time. 17
After ali chese observations on what evolutionist ·an-
t
thropologist s did rwt do with Time we can now state what
they <lid do to ic: they spati.aüzedTime. We may illustrate
this by going back to Spencer. J. D. Y. Peel notes that Spen-
cer visualized evolution, notas a chain of being, but as a tree:
"That chis image holds true for societies as well as or~an-
isms, and for between them as well as for social groupmgs
within them, is clear from the opening to the final volume
of ilie Sociology where he says 'social progress is not linear
but divergent and redivergent' and speaks of species and
genera of societies" (1971:157). What this describes (a point
not developed by Peel who in this context ~ets bogged clown
in the spurious issue of unilinear vs. multihnear evolution) is
a taxonomic approach to socio-cultural reality. The tree has
always been one of the simp lest forms of constructing clas-
sificatory schemes based on subsumption and hierarchy. We
16 Time and the Emerging Other
are back to Linnaeus and eighteenth-century natural his-
tory. In other words, the socio-cultural evo_lutioni sts ~ccom-
plished a major feat of scientific conservat1sm..by s_avmg_an
older paradigm from what \1. Fouc~ult <:ªll~d the ir~pti~e
violence of time" ( 1973: 132). The 1mplicat1.onsof th1s \•v11l
be spelled out at length in the chapters _that follow. Let us
retain at this point that the temporal d1scourse of anthro-
pology as it was formed decisively under _the paradig~
evolutionism rested on a conception of Trme that was not
only secularized and naturalized but also thoroughly spa-
tialized. Ever -since; I shall argue, anthropology's efforts to
é"onstruct relations with its Other by means of temporal
devices implied affinnation of ~if~erence as ~is«:,nc e. . pretended to rest on strictly scientific hence universally valid
The ingredients of evolut.J..orustnaturahzatton of T1me
were Ne\.vton's physicalism as well as Lyell's (and t~ a lesser
extent Darwin's) uniformitarianism. In the histonography
of anthropologv things are usually left at that. Tylor or
Margan are fo¡ many anthropologists still the un<:ontest~d
founders of their discipline and, while most of their "artifi-
cial constructs " may now be rejected , the naturalization of
Time which was evolutionism's crucial epistemo logical stance
remains by and large unquestioned. That, I subm it, ~trays
a good measure of naiveté. The use of Time in evolut1onary
anthropo logy, modeled on that of natural hi_story,und_oubt-
edly was a step bevond premodern conceptions. But 1t can
now be argued thit wholesale adoption of models (and of
their rhetorical expressions in anthropological discourse)
from physics and geology was, _for a s<:ienceof ~~n, sadly
regressive. intellectually, and qmte reacuonary poht1cally.
Let me explain. I consider regressive the fact that an-
thropolo~y achieved i_tsscien~fic _respec~ability_ by adopting
an essentrally Newtoman physicahsm (Time bemg a umver-
sal variable in equations describing nature in motion) at a
moment near the end of the níneteenth century when the
outlines of post-Newtonian _p_ hysics (a1_1dpost-"na_tu~l his-
tory" history) were clearly v1S1ble.Radical natural1zat10n of
Time (í.e., its radical dehistorization) was of course central
to the most celebrated scientific achievement of that period,
the comparative method, that omnivorous intellectual ma-
chine pennitting the "equal" treatment of human culture at
Time and the Emerging Other 17
ali times and in ali places. The enthusiasm and euphoria
generated by th is toy made it easy to over look that, while
the data fed into the machine might have been selected with
positivist neutrality and detachm ent , its products-the evo-
lutiona ry sequences-were anything but historically or politi-
cally neutral. By claimins- to make sense of contemporary
society in tenns of evolut.J..onarystages, the natural histories
of evolutionism re introdu ced a kind of specificity of time
and place-in fact a history of retro active salvation-that has
its closest counterpart in the Christian-medieval vision con-
tested by the Enlightenment.
This was politically ali the more reactionary because it
prin cipies. In fact little more had been done than to replace
faith in salvation by faith in progress and industry, and the
Mediterranean as the hub of history by Victorian England.
The cultural evolutionists became the Bossuets of Western
impe rialisrn.
For better or worse, these were the epistemological con-
dition s under which ethnography and ethnology took shape;
and they were also the condit ions under which an emerging
anthropological praxis (research, writing, teaching) carne to
be linked to colonialism and imperialism. One cannot insist
too much that these links were epistemological, not j:ust
moral or eth ical. AnthroJX>logycontributed above all to the
intellectual justification of the colonial enterpr ise. It gave to
politics and econom ics--both concerned with human Time-
a firm belief in "natural ," i.e., evolutionary Time. It pro-
mot ed a scheme in terms of which not only past cultures,
but all Jiving societies were irrevocably placed on a temporal
slope, a strearn of Time-sorne upstream, others down-
stream. Civilization, evolution, development, acculturation,
moderni zation (and their cousins, industrialization, urbani-
zation) are ali terms whose conceptual content derives, in
ways that can be specified, from evolutionary Time. They
all have an epistemological dimension apart from whatever
ethical, or unethical, inten tions they may express. A dis-
cour se emplo;ing terms such as _primitive L.sa.)'._age .(bUÍalso
tribal, tradit ional, Third World, or whatever eupbemism .is
current) <loes not think, or observe, or critically study, the
18 Time and the Emerging Other
"_erimitive"; it thinks, observes, studies in terms of the prim-
!!!E ..!.
frf!niti__ve
being essent ially' a temporal conéept ; is a cat-
e~)'d!0t an object, of Vlestern thought.
One last point needs to be made before we consider
Time in the context of modern anthropology. Evolutionism,
the very paradigm that made of anthropology a science
worthy of academic recognition, was soon violently rejected
on both sides of the Atlantic. One might be tempted to as-
sume that this rejection included its use of Time. This , how-
ever, was not the case. Little needs to be said in this regard
about the diffusioni st opponents of evolutionism. Superfi-
cially at least, their basic assumptions were so much like those
of evolutionism that their disputes could not have resulted
in any major reorientation. The categorical frame of natu-
ralized Time had become so powerful by the end of the
nineteenth century that it easily absorbed ideas which the
Kulturkreis people had inherited from the romantics.
This app lies, for instance, to Graebner's textbook dif-
fusionism. Throughout his Methode der Etlmowgie (1911)
"culture history" is predominantly construed from spatial
distribution. That he accepted the evolutionist equation of
time and change is implied in the following example of his
reasoning: "If I can demonstrate that the total culture, in a
given span of rime, did not change at all, or only in rninor
aspects, then I am entitled to interpret dates which fall into
this period more or less as if they were contemporaneous"
( 1911:62). In other words, in the study of "unchanginf
primitive culture, temporal relations can be disregarded m
favor of spatial relations. When Graebner frequently talks
about temporal sequence (Zeiifolge),or tempora l depth (Zeit-
tieje) this expresses an Aristotelian notion of effective cau-
sality; temporal sequence was indispensible for arguments
conceming cultural causation. Still, diÍÍUfilQ..11Ís!Ilamounted
to .ª project of writing a history without Time of peoples
"w1thouthistorv." 18 -
On the other hand , Graebner and other theoreticians
of diffusionism should be read against the background of
earlier culture-historical and culture-geographical writing,
whose intellectual substance had not yet been diluted by
postivist methodologization. A document for that period is
Time and the Emerging Other 19
an extraordinary essay by Friedrich Ratzel, "History , Eth-
nology and Historical Perspective " ( 1904). Half of the paper
is ad~resse_d to questions ?f T_ime_and temporal sequences
and, m th1s case, romanuc h1stonsm and natural history
pro~iuce _arguments that seem to run side by side. Ratzel
begms_w1_thremarks on the theory of science, rejecting the
evolu~1omst~etapho~ of a developmental tree. Such a tax-
onom1c and h1erarch1cal view obscures the radical common-
ality and equality of all sciences. Because ali discipline s ulti-
mately study phenomena that are on and of the earth they
all are earth sciences (see 1904:488). With acknowledge-
!'llents to Herder , Ratzel makes it clear that this geograph-
1sma~surnes a cotemporal community of mankind. Priority
was g1ven to the study of specific cultural identities under-
stoodas the outcome of processes of interaction between a
population and its environme_nt. Emphasis on real space
(~ology) precl!lded concern w1th temporal grading of soci-
eties on evoluttonary scales according to postulated general
laws.
Nevertheless, in the century between Herder and Ratzel
the episteme of natural history had established a hold on
ethnology. When Ratzel turns to the question of "facts and
temporal sequence" he advocates a "genetic" interpretation
of cultural facts but affirms that the foundation of such an
approac~ mu~t be (natural-historical) collection , description,
~d class1ficatton_of cultur~ traits (see 1904:507 ). lmper cep-
tibly, real ecolog1~al_spa~e1s ~mg replaced by classificatory,
tabular_ space: d1str1?ut1on wms over growth and process.
~tzel _,s awar~ of th1s ª!1d describes contemporary infatua-
t10n w1th conJectural historv, somewhat ironicaUv as fol-
lows: "lt sounds very simplé: Since ali historical ~;ents oc-
cur m space, we must be ª?le to measure the time they
need~d to spread by the d1stances that were covered: a
readu~g of ti!Ile on the dock of the globe" (1904:521). Al-
11:ost 1mmed1ately he doubts that in the realm of human
h1story su~h ~imple translation of distribution in space into
~uence m tlme will ever be "scientifically" possible. Espe-
c1ally, th~ detem1ination of origins in c:ievelopmental se-
qu~nces 1s a m~tter of "practical" rather than scientific so-
lut1ons (l hear m practual at least a connotation of political).
20 Time and the Emerging Other
Within the human community (Ókumene) it is impossible to
decree a specific period or area of cultural origins. Being
situated on one and same earth, "no country is privileged
over another" (1904:523).
The reason and excuse for this digre ssion is to register
at least one instance of anthropological uses of Time which
hesitated to follow the main line of naturalization and tem-
poral distancing. lts failure to influence mainstream anthro-
pology in the twentieth century certain ly was in part self-
inflicted. lt is hard to recognize Herder in Graebner's
pedantry. The deeper reason, however, might be thp.t the
dominant trends in anthropology could not accommodate the
anti-Enlightenment heritage that was at the roots of the cul-
ture-historical orientation.
Several discernible paradigms succeeded the evolution-
ist and diffusionist Grürulerz.eit.For the sake of brevity Jet us
refer to them as (British) functionalism, (American) cultur-
alism, and (French) strucLuralism. The early functionalists ,
notably :\falinowski, simply rejected evolutionism on the
grounds that it was armchair historical specu lation. Notice
however that he objected, not to its being too naturalist or
rationa list in dealing with human society, but rather to its
not being naturalist enough. Functionalism, in its fervor to
exp lore the mechanisms of living societies, simply put on ice
the problem of Time. Synchronic analysis, afler all, presup-
poses a freezing of the time frame. Similar postulates were
formulated by de Saussure and French sociologists such as
Mauss and Durkheim. Eventually this made possible the rise
of hyphenated functiona1ism-structuralism whose powerful
hold on social anthropology, and, indeed, on sociology tes-
tifies to the unbroken reign of evolutionist epistemology. Its
open, explicit revivaJ in the later ·writings of Talcott Par-
sons, in debates on the history of science (Kuhn , Toulmin,
Campbell, and others), and even in the latest twist of critical
theory (Habermas and his opponent Luhmann), shows that
it has not lost it5 attraction among Western intellectuals. 19
Ironicall y, the supposedly radical break with evolution-
ism propagated by Boasian and Kroeberian cultural anthro-
pology had little or no effect on these epistemological pre-
su ppositions. True, cultural ism proclaimed "history" a
Time and the Emerging Other 21
domain irreducible to natural historv. It relativized human
cultural time and left universal time' to biological evolution'.
With that the Enlightenm ent project was in fact ignored and
relegated to the natural sciences. Practically, concentration
on cultural configurations and patterns resulted in such
overwhelming concem with the description of states (albeit
"dynamic" states) that the eighteenth-century élan in che
search for a theory of universal human progress was all bu t
abandoned. 20 In sum, functionalism, culturalism, and struc-
turalism did not solve the problem of universal human Time;
they ignored it at best, and denied its significance at worst.
Some U.\esrf Time in AnthropologicalDiscoune
One might be tempted to conclude from ali this that not
much has changed since anthropology first emer~ed. Yet in
at least one respect contemporary anthropology d1ffers from
its eighteenth and nineteenth century predécessors. Irre-
spective of theoretical orientation, field research has been
established as the practical basis of theoretical discourse.
That fact alone makes the problem of Time in modern an-
thropology comp lex and interesting.
. 1r one compai:es uses of Time in anthropological writ-
ing w1th the ones m ethnographic researchhe discovers re-
markable divergence. I will refer to this as the schizogenic
u~ ?f Time. I beli~ve it can be shown that the anthropolo-
g~st m the field often employs conceptions of !ime guite
different from those that mform reports on h1s findmgs.
Furtherm ore, I will argue that a critical analvsis of the role
Time is allowed to play as a condition for producing eth-
nographi c knowledge in the practice of fieldwork mav serve
as a starting point for a critique of anthropologiéal dis-
course in general. But before that argument can be devel-
oped we should be more specific about the notions of Time
whose use in anthropological .discourse ,..,,ewant to criticize.
We must ~riefly survey uses of Time as they appear in an-
~hropolog1_caldiscourse, i.e., in the writing of monographs;
in syn_thet1cand a~alytical works covering different ethno-
graph1c areas, or d1fferent aspects of culture and society over

22 Time and the Emerging Other
several areas; and, finally, in textbooks presenting the sum
of o~r. pre~ent knowle~ge. To shorten that task I propose
to d1stmgmsh three m~or uses of Time, each characteristic
o[ª . ge~re of discourse , keeping in mind, however, that these
d1stmct1ons are not mutually exclusive.
Let us call the first one· PhysicalTime. lt serves as a sort
of paramet_er or ve~tor in desc~ibin~ sociocultural process.
It appears m evoluuonary, prehistoncaJ reconstruction over
vast spans but also in "objective" or "neutral" time scales
used to measure ?ernogr~phic or ecological changes or the
recurrence of vanous social evems (economic , ritual, and so
forth). The assumption is (and this is why we mav call it
physical) that thi~ ½ind of Time., while it is a parameter of
c_ultural process, 1s1tself not subJect to cultural variation. At
llmes, t~e nature of our evidence forces us to acknowledge
that ~ given chronology might be "relative"; but that means:
relat~ve to chosen points within a sequence, not culturallv
relauve . Relativity of this kind is considered a flaw, which is
~hy carbon 14 and a host of other physical methods of dat-
mg caused so much enthusiasm when they first appeared. 21
Not only were these thought to provide better, more correct
placement of human developments in Time· as far as hu-
~an evolution is concerned they lead to a t~mporal exp lo-
smn compara~le to the one that did away with biblical chro-
nology. Most 1mportantly, though, these methods of dating
appeared to anchor human evolution and a vast amount of
cultural mater~al once and forever in objective, natural, i.e.,
!1oncultural Time. To a great <leal of anthropological writ-
mg they conveyed an aura of scientific rigor and trustwor-
thrness that previously was reserved to well-documented
histories of the recent past.
Of course, neither evolutionary theory, nor prehistory,
nor archa~ology are confin~ t? p1otting data on temporal
scales. This leads us to cons1denng a second use of Time in
anthropo1ogical discours~ which makes its appearance in two
turu.lane Time, the other Ty-
relat~d fo~ms. One I \.Vill call 1\<
pologicalTtme. iHundane connotes to me a kind of wor]d-wise
:elation to T_ime w_hich,.while resting assured of the work-
mgs of Phys1cal Tune m natural laws governing the uni-
Time and the Emerging Other 23
verse, ~as no taste for petty chronolog izing. Instead, it in-
dulges m grand-scale periodizing. lt likes to devise ages and
stage~. But unlike belief in the Millennium or the Golden
A_ge, 1t keeps a cool distance to a1l times. The rhetoric of its
d1~ours~ can. t~erefore serve equally well the construction
of unposmg v1s1ons of the "human career" and the mainte-
nance of cocktail talk about primitive memality.
In another, more serious form this stance manifests it-
self as TypologicalTime. It signals a u se of Time which is
mea su~ed, notas time .elapsed, nor by reference to points
on a (!mear) scale, but u:iterrr_is of socioculturally meaning-
ful events or, more prec1selv, mtervals between such events
Typolo~cal Time ~~derlie ~ such quaJifications as preliter~
ate vs. hterate, trad1t1onal vs. modern, peasant vs. industrial
and a host of permutations ·which include pairs such as tribaÍ
vs. fe~dal, _rura1 vs. l;lrban. 1~ this u~ , Time may almost
totally be d~vested of 1ts vectonal, physteal connotauons. In -
stea~ of bemg a measur_e of movement it may appear as a
q~ahty of states; a quahty, however, that is unequa1ly dis-
tnbu ted among human populations of this world. Earlier
talk about peoples without history belongs here as do more
sophisticated distinctions such as 'the one betwe;n "hot" and
"cold" societies.
In fact, constructs which appear (and often are pro-
cl~iTed ?Y their authors and users) to be purely "system-
auc . do m f~c~ gen~rate _discourse on Time and tempora l
~elattons: Th1s 1sobv1ous m the case of c/ass (see, e.g., its use
m the nmeteenth century; Pee! 1971:60 f) ; it is central in
Max Weber's typology of authority. Systematizers such as
T~lcott . Pars~ns_ did not ~ucc~e~-and, God knows, they
tned-1? punfymg Webers brilhantly condensed analytical
categones and type-constructs from their historical, tem-
poral substance. After ali, Weber cannot be read as if his
cen~ral c~mc_ern,the process of rationalization, did not exist.
Rat101?ahzat1on~learly _isa close relative of the Enlighten-
t?ent idea of p~ilo~ophtcal history. At any rate, not even th e
ughtest for~ahzations of the "social system" were able to
stop r;ie lo,gical leak k_ept open by the concept of charisma.
In Webers own wnungs about it temporal references
 24 Time and che Emerging Other
abound: The notion of Alltag is used to define, by contrast,
the nature of char ismatic author ity. As a process, charisma
undergoes "routinization" (Veralltiiglichung).Dur ation (Dauer,
dauerhaft, 1964: 182), emergence (entstehen, in stalu nascendi
182, 184), flow (münden, 186), succession (passim), are ali
temporal, directional qualifications which signa! fundamen-
tal links between typologizing and temporalizing. These
connections were quite apparent to Weber's contemporar-
ies. Han s Freyer noted in 1931: "Sociology grew out of the
philosoph y of history. Almost ali of its founders regarded
sociology as the legitimate heir to historical-philosophical
speculations .... Not only historically, but with logical ne-
. cessity, sociology includes problems of types and stages of
culture; at least, it always leads up to that problem"
(1959:294 f).
Inasmuch as some kind of typologizing is part of aJmost
any anthropological discourse I can think of, notions of Ty-
pological Time are all-pervasive.
Finally, time has informed anthropo logical discourse in
a third sense. For lack of a better label, I shall speak of it as
lntersubjectiveTime. The term points back to one of its phil-
osophical sources in phenomenological thought, as exempli-
fied in Alfred Schutz's analyses of intersubjective time and
in a few applications to anthrowlogy, such as in Geertz's
Person, Time and Conductin Bali. 2 More importantly, the at-
tribute intersubjectivesignals a current emphasis on the com-
municative nature of human action and interaction. As soon
as culture is no longer primarily conceived as a set of rules
to be enacted by individual members of distinct groups, but
as the specifit way in which actors create and produce be-
liefs, values, and other means of social life, it has to be rec-
ognized that Time is a constitutive dimension of social real-
ity. No matter whether one chooses to stress "d iachronic " or
"synchronic, " historical or systematic approaches, they all are
chrcmic,unthink able without reference to Time. Once Time
is recognized as a dimension, not ju st a measure, of human
activity, any attempt to eliminate it from interpretive dis-
course can only result in distorted and largely meaningless
repre semations. The iron y is that formal models, which are
Time and the Emerging Other 25
often presented as the most "scientific" form of anthr<;>po-
Jogical discourse, try in fact to ignore the one problem, T1me,
which has been recognized as the greatest challenge by
mode r n natural science.
Taking Stock: AnthropologicalDiscourse
and the Denial of Coevalness
This sketch of major ways in which conceptualizations of
Time inform anthropological thought and discourse shows
how enormously complicated our topic could get, especially
if we would now go into further differentiations and into the
many combinations in which Physical, Typologica~, ~nd In-
tersubjective Time may be used. However, even 1f 1t were
possible to write some~ing. like a ~mplete "grammar of
Time" for anthropological discourse, 1t would on~y show _us
how anchropologists use Time in constructing their theones
and composing their writings. Findings from such aJ?alyses
would ultim ately pertain to questions of style and hterary
form ; the y are of great interese but do not as such raise the
epistemological question which muse ask whether and how
a body of knowledge is validated or invalidated by the use
of temporal cacegorizations.
We must ask what it is that anthropologists try to catch
with their manifold and muddled uses of Time. (Or, which
is the same, what they are trying to escape from by employ-
ing a given temporal device). _Let me indica~e the d~ectio?
of my ar~TUmentby formulatmg the followmg thes1s: It 1s
not the dispersa! of human cultures in space that leadsañ'=
thropoTogy to "témporalize" (something that _is_!!l,ai_ntained
in the image of the "philosophical traveier" whose roaming
in space leads to che discovery of "ages"); it is natu_,ralized-
spatialized Time which gives meaning (in fact a variety oJ
specific meanings) to the distribution of humanity in spac~.
The histor y of our discipline reveals that such use of Time
almost invariably is made for the purpose of distancing those
'i. who are observed from the Time of the observer. I will il-
lustrate this first by taking another look at the historical
26 Time and the Emerging Other Time and the Emerging Other 27

break we attributed to Enlightenment thought. Then I will

give a more detailed account of how distancing works in Pagan World
current anthropological discourse.
Enlightenmem thought marks a break with an essen-
tially medieval , Christian (or Judeo-Christian) vision of Time.
That break was from a conception of time/space in terms of
a history of salvat ion to one that ultimately resulted in the
secularization of Time as natural history . For the present
argument it is important to re alize that this not only en-
tailed a change in the quality of Time (sacred vs. secular)
but also an important transformation as regards the nature
of temporal relations. In the medieval paradigm, the Time
of Salvation was conceived as inclusive or incorporative: 23
The Others, pagans and infidels (rather than savages and
primitives), were viewed as candidates for salvation. Even
the conquista, certainly a form of spatial expansion , needed
to be propped up by an ideology of conversion. One of its
persistent ID}ths, the search for Prester John, suggests that Orbis IThe World]
the explorers were expected to round up, so to speak, the Figure l.l. Premodern time/space: incorporaúon
pagan world between the center of Christianity and its lost
periphery in order to bring it back into the confines of the There
Civilization Now
flock guarded by the Divine Shepherd. 24
England Here
The naturalization of Time whích succeeded to that view
defines temporal relations as exclusive and expansive. The
pagan was always already marked for salvation, the savage is
not yet ready for civilization. Graphically (see figure s 1.1 and
1.2) the difference between these views can be illustrated bv Savage
Then ············································ ·· ······· Society
contrasting two models. One consists of concentric circles o'f
proximity to a center in real space and mythical Time, sym-
bolized by che cities of Jeru salem and Rome. The other is Figure 1.2. Modern timefspace: distancing
constructed as a system of coordinates (emanating of course
also from a real center-the Western metropolis) in which raison d'étre for the comparative mechod if it was not the
given societies of all times and places may be plotted in terms classification of entities or traics which first have to be sepa-
of relative distance from che present. rate and distinct before their similaritie s can be used to es-
To anticípate an objection: evolutionary sequences and tablish taxonomies and developmental sequences. To put this
their concomitant political practice of colonialism and im- more concretely: What makes the savage significant to_the
perialism may look incorporative; after ali, chey create a uni- evolutionist's Time is that he lives in anoiher Time. Little
versal frame of reference able to accommodate all societies. ~eed s to-be-said ~i assume, abou~eparatioo. and distancing
But being based on che episterne of natural history, they are m colonialist praxis which drew its ideological justification
founded on distancing and separacion. There would be no from Enlightenment thought and later evolutionism.
28 Time and che Emerging Other
We can now examine how Time is used to create dis-
tance in contemporary anthropology. But before we get to
distancing itself we should note that anthropology, Jike all
scientific discourse, inevitably involves temporalization(an in-
sight which \\.i.ll be developed in chapter 3). We must nec-
essarily express whatever knowledge we have of an object
in terms of temporal categorization. This is emphatically not
only the case when we give "historica l" accoums; Time is
involved in any possible relationship between anthropologi-
cal discourse and its referents . The ref erent shared by var-
ious subdisciplines of anthropology is strict ly speakirÍg not
an object, or a class of objects, but a relationship. This is a
cautious, insufficient term (I would prefer contradiction). In
any gi,venpiece of anthropological writing the referent usu-
ally is a particular aspect of the relationship between ele-
ments or aspects of a cu lture or society; but ali particular
ethnography is ultimately about general relationships be-
tween cultures and societies. In fact, if we remember the
hislory of our discipline, it is in the end about the relation-
ship between the West and the Rest. 25
By now it is generally admitted that ap I?ªIticu lar egi.-
nographic knowledge we may have acquired is affected l2y_
historically established relatioris of powef aoo dommation
between the anthropologist's sodety and the one ~~ -s~dies.
In Jhat sense, ali anthropological knmvledg e is political in
ruiture. However , it seems possible to me to carry om=seTf-
que stioning further by focusing on Time as a key category
with which we conceptualize relationships between us (or
our theoreticaI.constructs) and our objects (the Other ). How
exactly temporal categorizations contribute to defining and,
in fact, constituting our object depends on the kind of time-
use in a given anthropological discourse.
Physical Time may define seemingly objective discance
between the researcher's culture and, say, che findings from
an archaeological excavation or a record recon structed from
oral tradition. If an object can be located in 2000 B.c ., oran
event in 1865, they are definitely, inevocably past. Such de-
finitive anchoring in the pa st gives Iogical and psychological
firmness to che standpoint of the researcher; this is why
chronological dating, in itself purely mechanical an d quan-
titative, can bestow scientific significance on a vast array of
Time and the Emerging Other 29
particul ar data. To be sure, chrono~ogy i~ on~y ~ means t?
an ulterior end. The temporal d1Stancmg 1t mvolve s 1s
needed to show that natural laws or law_-like regularities op-
erate in the development of human soc1ety and culture.
It may seem that the use of Physical Time is politically
innocuous. If anything is "value-free" in science it should be
the measurement of physical duration. On the other hand,
one is tempted to llU'Oke relativity theory as evidenc~ for
the inescap~bly p9,sitional relativity (Standpu:nktbewgenhez~)J;ú..
the experienc.e.oLJ:ime. Physicists commenting on the w1der
iriipÍication s of relativity theory have done this; occa_sionally,
social philosophers have attempted to relate th~1~ argu-
ment s for a multiplicity of cultural times to relat1v1ty the-
ory. 26 I doubt that these connections can amount _e~much
more than ana logies or metaphors. After ali, rel~uv1ty th~-
ory is_called f9r only _in the realm of extremely Fi~gh_yeloc1-
ties. It is hard to see how it could be directly relevant on the
level of culturally shared experiences. It mighc even be ~aid
that relativity theory is aiming too low in that it theo~1zes
from the reference point of individual observers. Soc1ally
mediated "relativity" of Physical Time would have to be
identified , rather, in historical processes of mechanization
(the technology of clocks) _and sta_!ldardization. (the acceI?-
tance of universally recogmzed umts of measunng). In th1s
latter sense of vVestern dock time, anthropologists have used
Physical Time as a distancing device. In most ethnographic
studies of other time conceptions the difference betw~en
standardized dock time and other methods of measunng
provid es the puzzle to be resolved.
Furthermore , the idea of Physical Time is part of a sys-
tem of ideas which include space, oodies, and motion. In
the hands of ideologues such a time concept is easily trans-
formed imo a kind of political physics. After ali, it is not
difficult to transpose from physics to politics one of the most
ancient rules which states that it is impossible for two bodies
to OCCUP.Y che sarne space_at the same time. Wh~t:: in the
course of colonial expans1on a Western body pohttc carne
to occupy, literall y, the space of an autochthonous body,
severa! alternatives were conceived to deal with that viola-
tion of the rule. The simplest one, if we think of North
America and Australia, was of course to move or remove
 Time and th e Emerging Oth er
30
~e.other body. Another one is to pret~nd that space is being
d1v1dedand allocated to separate bod1es. South Africa's rul-
ers ding to_ that solution ..Most often the preferred strategy
has been s1mply to marupuJate the other variable-Time.
:With the he~p of various devices of sequencing and dist anc-
m_g one ass1gns to the conqu~red popul ations a different
Time. A $ºod <leal of such Ansto _tel~an political physics is
reflec_ted ~n t_heschemes of evolut1onists and their cousins,
the d1ffus1omsts.27
Physical Time is seldom used in its naked, chrono logi-
cal form. More often than not , chronologies sh ade into
A!urt4,aneor Typolo¡ticalTime. As distancing devices, catego-
nzat10ns of this kmd are used, for instance, when we are
told t~at certain elements in our cultu re are "neoJithic" or
"_arc~aic";or when ce~~;i living societies are said to prac-
nce .ston~ age economics ; or when certain styles of thought
are 1dent1fied as "savage" or "p rimitive." Labels that con-
note temporal dístanc~g need no_t_have e~pli~itly temporal
~efer~nces (such as <-¿ ·clical_or repetitzve). AdJectu!.e!i Ws~myth-
zcal, ritual, or even tribal, ~vil)~rve the same function. They,
to~, connote temporal d1stancmg_~ a ~~f crea ting ~e
obJects or referem s of anthropological d1scourse. To use an
ex.treme formulation:_ ~emporal d_istanceis obje ctivity in the
~.mds of many pr act.J.tioners. Th1s,_by the way, is reflected
w1th gre~t accuracy and exasperatmg predi ctability in the
popular rma_g e of our discipli~e. I ~m surely not the only
~thr~polog1st who, when he 1dent1fies himself as such to
h!s ne1ghbor, barber , or physician, conju res up visions of a
di~tant past. "Vhtn popular opinion identifies all anthropol-
ogists as handlers of bones and stones it is not in error· it
grasps the _essential role of anthropology as a prov ider' of
temporal dIStance.
To recognize ~ntersu?jective Time would seem to pre-
elude any sort _ofd1s_tancmgalmost by definition . After all,
phenom ~n~logists ~ned to demonsn:ate with their analyses
~hat soc1_al _mtera c~on pre ~uppo ses mter subjectivity, ..,vhich
m tur~ i_smconce1vable w~thout assuming that the partici -
pants mvolved ~e coeval, 1.e. share the same Time. In fact,
furthe r c~mclus1ons.e~ be drawn from this basic postulate
to the pomt of reahzmg that for hum an communica tion to
Time and the Emerging Other 31
occur , coevalness has to be creat~d. Communic~tior_i is, ulti-
mately, about creating shared T!me. Such a v1e":'1s not all
that outlandish to anthropolog1sts_ w~o, followu~g Durk -
heim's lead, have probed into the s1gmficance o_f ntual ~d
the creation of sacred Time. One could aJso pomt to an_u~-
creased re cognition of inter subjectivity in such new d1sc1-
plines as ethnomethodology and the ethnography_ of speak-
ing. But , on t~e wh?le, th~ d~~ina_nt c?m1:1umcauon model
remain s one m wlúch obJect1v1ty1s still ued to (te_mpor~)
distan cing between the particip a~ts: A~ least, I beheve th is
is implied in the "videly accepted disunctlons between sender ,
message, and receiver. Leaving aside the pr?blem of the
message (and the code), these 1:1-odelsproJect, between
sender and receiver, a temporal d 1stance (or sl~pe). Other-
wise communication could not be conceptualtzed as the
transfer of information. In sum, even in communication-
centered approaches that seem to recogni 7e sh~red Time
we can expect to find de vices of temporal d1stancmg.
These examples all lead ~p t<;> the c~ucial poi~t of <?ur
argument : Ben~_ªj.h t~eu:.1:>ewildermg _vanety, the d1stano~g
devices that we can 1dent:1f y produce a global result. I will
call it denGl efcoevalness.By that I mean g__'/lf,rsist!JJJ:
GJYÍ,
_SJS-
tematict~ to pl,acethe reJerent(s)ofanthmpow_g:y m_a J'ime
other thañ thepresent of the producer ofanthrop_olog!_cal
dJ§COU:se.
- what I am aiming at is covered by the German term s
gleichz.eitigand Gleichzeitigkeit.The unusual coeval, and espe-
cially the noun coevalness, express a need 1?steer between
such dosely re lated notion s as synchranous!smiultaneous~nd
wnternpurary.I take SJT!chronous to refere to events occurrmg
at the same physical ume; contempora1yasserts co~currence
in what I called typological time. Coeval, accordmg to my
pocket Oxford diction ary, cover_s1:>oth("of same age, dura-
tion, or epoch"). Beyond th_at, 1t 1s ~o connote a c_ommon,
active "occup ation ," or sharmg, of time. But that 1s_only a
startin g point; it will be elaborated as I proceed w1th my
argument.
That coevalness may be denied with the figure s of
Physical and Typological Time n~ds, in 1!1Ymind, no fur-
ther elaboration. But there remams che d1fficulty we noted
in regard to Inter subjective Time. lt might be argued that
 32 Time and the Emerging Other
~is tell?poral category precludes the kind of ideological ma-
~1pulat1on,,sugg~sted by the notion ~hat anthropolog ists
. make use . <?fT1m~. lf coevaJ:ies~, sharmg of present Time,
IS a cond1t1on of comm um cat1on, and anthropo logical
knowled~e ~as its sources in ethnography, clearly a kind of
~omm~mcauo~, Lhe~ th~. anth~opologist qua ethnograp her
1s not f_reeto grant . or deny coevalness to his interlocu-
tors. Either he subm1ts to che cond ition of coevalness and
produces ethno_graphic know_ledge, or he deludes himself
meo te[I_lP?rald1stance _and misses the object of bis search.
. Th is .1~the reasonmg that underlies sorne of the most
radical critiques of anthr?pology. It is implied when we are
~ol_dth~t all anthropolog1cal knowledge is dubious because
~t 1s _gamed und~r th~ conditions of colonialism, imperial-
1sm, and oppress1on (v1ews that were forcefully expressed in
Dell H}mes' Reinv_enlingAnthro-pology,1974, and more thor-
ou~hly explored m a volume edited by Huizer and Mann-
heun, 1979). · Some needed breaks in that struggle--see Mahnowsk1s d1-
Maxwell Owusu, in _an ess~y "Ethnography in Africa"
(197~) argues, on the bas1sof ev1dence contained in writings
considere~ exemplary, that almost ali the "classical" ethnog-
raphers fatled to meet one basic condition: command of the
language of the peoples they studied. As far as I can see
Owu~u ?oes not _dra~· an explicit connection between com~
mumcatlve defic1enc1es and the denial of coevalness. He
doe; , however, denounce the "essential anachronism"
(19,8_:321, 3~2, 3_26~of e!-11.nographicdata collection aimed
at sava&"~soc1ety m Its ongmal state, but carried out under
t~e po~1llca}ecoJ1omy of ~olon~alism. Our analysis of time
~hstancmg m an thropological d1scourse will reveal that this
1s perhaps not going far enou&h. Anac~ronism signifies a
f~ct, or statement of fact, that 1s out of tune with a aiven
tune frame; it is a mis~ke, perhaps an accident. I am try-ing
t? show th~t we ~~ facmg, not m1stakes, but devices(existen-
ttal, rhetor~c, poht1cal). To signal that difference I will refex
to the demal of coevalness as the allochronismof anthropol-
ogy.
- The critique of anthropo logy is too easily mistaken for
mo~al co?~emnation. But at least the more dearheaded
radical cnt 1cs know that bad intentions alone do not invali-
Time and the Emerging Other 33
date knowledge. For that ~~ happen it tak~s bad epistemol-
ogy which a~vances cogrn~":e mterests w1thout reg~r~ for
their ideolog1cal p_res~ppos1uons. ~t any r~te, what 1s m~r-
esting (and hope-msp1rmg) about 1deological uses of Tune
is that th ev h ave not, or not yet, led our discipline into total
self-delusion. To insist on field research as the fundamental
source of anthropological knowledge has ser:7e~ as a P?W-
erful practical corrective, in fact a contradictton, which,
philosoph _icallyspe~king, makes am hrop ology on the whole
an apore ttc enterpnse .
Let me exp lain. On the one hand, ~th~ographers, es-
pecially those who have taken commumcauve approaches
(and that includes most ethnographers of value) have al-
ways acknowledged coevalness as a condition without which
hardly anything could ever be learned ª?out another ~l-
rure . Sorne have struggled consciously w1th the categ~nes
our discourse uses to remove other peoples fro~ our r1m~-
ary; 28 sorne gave poetic expression to what is es~entially.an
epistemological act:-see the type of anthropolog1~ wntmg
exemplified by Turnbull's For~stPeople and the ~ev1-Strauss
of Tristes Tropiques.But ·when 1t comes t~ P:oducmg ª?thro-
pological discourse in the forms of descnptton , anal):'s1s,and
theoretica l conclusions, the same ethnographers w~ often
forget or disavow their experience~ of coev~ness w1~h·the
people they studied._Worse? they ~.tll t~k. their expene':1ce~
away with ritualistic mvocanons of part1c1pant observ~t1on
and the "ethnographic present." In the e':1d, they w_illor-
ganize their writing in terms of the categon~ of Phys1ca_lor
Typological Time, if only for fear that_ their repo_r~sm1ght
otherwise be disqualified as poetry, fictton, o~ pohucal pr~-
paganda. These disjunctions becween expenence and ~•-
ence, research and writing, will continue to be_a festermg
epistemologica l sore in a discipline who~e self-unage--~nd
that is another heritage from the Enhg~te1:1ment philo-
sophes-is one of aggressive_health and opt1m~sm.
Having <lia.&n;c;>sedthe dlne~s _a~ tJ:i~ dem~ ..Qf coeval-
n~s, or allocnromsm, we can begm askmg ourselves what
might be done about it . This will not be eas}'.-An <;.!!.:.
trenched vocabulary and obsti.9ate literary convenuons alone
34 Time and the Emerging Other
are formidable obstacles. Moreover, coevalness is a mode of
temporal relations. It cannot be defined as a thing or state
with certain properties. It is not "there" and cannot be put
there ; it must be created or at least approached. As an
epistemological condition it can only be inferred from re-
sults, i.e., from the different ways in which recognition or
denial of coevalness inform anthropological theory and
\\-TÍting.A Kantian category of thought, or even a Durkhei-
mian collective representation, are by definition "necessary"
(otherwise they could not be categorical). As such, it would
seem that the categor y of shared Time cannot be ques-
tioned ; it is not subject to choice between recognition and
denial, at least not within the frame which produces and
uses it. Here is a dilemma with which we must struggle and
I see no other way out of it but to focus on ideological me-
diations of scientific discourse such as the uses of Time we
have examined hete .
First of ali, that it seemspossible to refuse coevalness to
another person or another people suggests that. coeva~n_ess
is neither a transcultural fact nor a transcendental condmon
of knowledge. The term_foevalness was chosen t<?mark a
central assumption, namely_that all temR_oi_::ª1 relat1ons1..ana
therefore also contemporaneity, are embedded in culturafü 1
organized praxis. Anthropologists have little di_fficultyad-
mitting this as long as it is predicated on a specific culture,
usually one that is not their own. To cite but two examrles,
relationships between the living 3:Udthe <lea~, or rela~1on-
ships between the agent and obJect of mag1c operanons,
presuppose cultural conceptions of contemporaneity. To a
large extent, Western rational disbelief in the presence of
ancestors and the efficacy of magic rest on the rejection of
ideas of temporal coexistence implied in these ideas and
practices. So much is obvious. It is less clear that in order to
srudy and understand ancestor cult and magic we need to
establish relations of coevalness with the cultures that are
studied. In that fonn , coevalness becomes the ultimate as-
sault on the protective walls of cultural relativism . To put it
bluntly, there is an interna! connection (one of logical equiv-
alence and of practica! necessity) between ancestor _cul~ or
magic and anthropological research qua _conceptuahzat1<;>ns
of shared Time or coevalness. Paraphrasmg an observat1on
Time and the Emerging Other 35
by Owusu, I am tempted to say th~t ~e ..Wes~~n anthro-
palogist must be haunted by the Af ncan s. c~p;.1oous an.~es-
tors" as much as the .African anthropo logist •~ daunted by
"Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Fortes, MaJT, Gluc~man,
Forde, Kabbery [sic), Turner, Schapera, and the W1lsons,
among others " (1978:326). . . . .
Obviously, we are now gettmg mto d~ep :ph1losoph1cal
waters . Our examination of the ~~s of T1_me m anthropo-
logical discourse has led us to stace their g~neral effect or
thru st as the denial of coevalness to the cultures tha~
stÜdled. The most interesting fi.nding, however! "'.ªs.one th~t
precludes a simple, overall indic~ent_ of our d1saphne . ! .h1s
was the di55oyer1 of an aporellc ~pht between reco~!!.!_On
o[.coe:tal.n.~~sin sorne ethnogra1:h1c rese~~h and den~~ of
c~\'alness in most anthropolog1c~ fheonzmg_ ~nd \.HJU~g.
T here is a split between a recogruzab_lecogn1u:e necess1ty
and a murk y, ultimatel y political pracll~e. That 1s, however,
not an accident or simply a theoretical w~aknes_s. Such
schizogen ic use ofTime can be traced to certam ch01ces th~t
were made at a time when anthropology emerge~ ~ a sc1-
ence. There is nowadays much talk about the pol ~ucal and
moral complicity of our discipline with the_~oloma l e~t~r-
prise. Much remains to be said about cogmnve comph~~ty.
To be sure, the logical connections between ,. ~ay, Bnt1_sh
evolutionism and the establishment of the Bnnsh Emprre
are obvious. But our critique of these connections is bound
to miss its mark as long as it <loes not unearth sorne of the
deeper links. The distance betwee~ che \\! es~ and the Rest
on which ali classical anthropolog1Cal theones have been
predicated is by now being disputed ~n ~egard to alm~st
every conceivable aspect (moral, aesthenc, mtellectual, _poht-
ical). Little more than technology and sheer econ,?m 1c ~x-
ploitation seem to ~ lef t over for the purposes of exp lam-
ing" ·western supenonty. It has become foreseeable that
even those prerogatives may either disappear or _no long~r
be claimed. There remains "only" the all-pervadmg dem~
of coevalness which ultimately is expressive of a cosmolog 1-
cal myth of frightening magni~ude and persistency. 1t takes
imagination and courage to p1cture what would happen to
the '\\Test(and to anthropology) if its temporal fortress were
suddenly invaded by the Time of its Other .
Chapter Two / Our Time,
Their Time, No Time:
Coevalness Denied
At any raU, the primacyof space over t:imeis an inf ailible
.~gnof reactianarylanguage.
Ernst Bloch 1
J.Sthm that I learnt, perhapsfor t1ufirst time, lu>w
// u1<
thormghly the notion of travel hasbecomecorrupted by tlu
notion of power.
-Strau.ss2
Clatuk Lé-..tí

COEVALKE SS IS ANTHROPOLOGY 'S problem with Tim e.

Trying to bring that idea into focus, I have pushed the ar-
gurnent to a point where the next step would be to form-
ulate a theor y of coevalness. This will be a difficult task be-
cause the problem is not ju st "there "; it is continuou sly
generated at the inter section of contradiction s in ant hropo -
logical praxis. As a project , a the ory of coevalness mu st
therefore be conceived in constan t confrontation with an -
thropolo gical discourse and its daim s. Above ali, we must
seek to dar ify the term s and purpose of the proj ect by ex-
amining more closely "uses of Time " in the contex ts of fully
de veloped anthropology. For the past history of allochronic
discour se is not the only obstacle on the ro ad toward a the-
ory of coevalness.
Wh at was asserted about the allochronic, or schizo-
chronic tendencie s of emerging anthropology wi1l now be
extended to an analysis of two major strategies that have
 38 Our Time, Their Time, No Time
been emp loyed by the established discipline. One is to cir-
cumvent the question of coevalness through the uses of cul-
tural relativíty; the other preemptsthat question with the help
of a radically taxonomic approach. Each strategy will be
documented from the writings of anthropologists (especially
M. Mead, E. T. Hall, and C. Lévi-Strnuss) whose claims to
speak for established anthropology are widely accepted. The
mode of presentation will be polemical, that is, one whose
primary objective is to advance or expound an argument.
Such a mode must respect historical accuracy in the cho ice
and interpretation of sources but it doe s not seek historio-
graphic completeness. In no way is this chapter to be mis-
. taken asan historical account of the schools it touches u pon.
The evidence for allochronism I am going to assemble
should, cherefore, be read as reasons Jora thesis and not so
much (at least not yet) as evidence against an adversary.
At any rate, the polemic will become accentuated as I
move on in later chapters . In the end, I cannot accept what
I appear to be grantmg now: that anthropology could ever
leg1umately or even just factually circumvent or preempt the
challenges of coevalness.
To oppose relativity to taxonomy may cause a logical
brow to rise. In what sense are che two opposed? Here the
terms are taken merely as convenient labels evoking distinc-
tive orientations toward culture and knowledge. Toe trends
they designate correspond rougWy to the Anglo-American
and French "ep istemic paradigms" analyzed by B. Scholte
(1966). These paradigms are undoubtedly in practica( op-
position (an~ competition) even though, o~ perhaps be-
cause, they share a common ancestry. But 1t 1s of cour-se
possible to combine a relativist outlook on culture with a
taxonomic approach to it. This is the case with various eth-
noscientific or echnosemantic schools to which, for practica!
reasons, we will not pay much attention in these essays. 3
Circumventi.ngCoevalness:Cultural Re/.ativity
In Thought and Change, a book which treats explicitly of the
uses of Time in anthropologica l theory, Ernest Gellner
Our Time, Their Time, No Time 39
mments on the critique of evolutionism. As a ~heory, in-
'?dentallv he considers it "quite dead in academic philoso-
cihy whiéh is now superb ly timeless ... [and) virtually dead
P s~iology ... [while) in formal thought only defended
:: . very occasional biologists and histor:ians" (1964: ~ 1). ~ot-
. 'g that the conflict between evoluuonary-genet.lc (ume-
1~ntered) and strucmra l (timeless) theories of exp lanation
~as fought out most dramatically in British social an-
thropology, he observes:
Systematic study of ''primitive" tribes beg u':1 first
¡0 the hope of uti lizing them as a kind of time~
machine, as a peep imo our own historie P.asl, ~s
pro\·iding closer evidence about the ea~ly hnks m the
great Series. But real pr~gress was ach1~ved when
this supposed time-machme was used w1th redou-
bledvigour but willwut any concem for reconstruct-
ing the past: when the triba l grou.ping~ were stud-
ied for their own sakes and explamed m terms of
themselves, and not as 'survivals' from a past sup-
posedl y even further back. (Gellner 1964:18 f)
If structuralism-functionalism showed disregard for
Time (i.e., for Time as past) this <loes not mean that anchro-
pology ceased to serve as a time-machine. Just be~u~e one
condemns the tirne-distancing discourse of evolut.1omsm he
doe s not abandon the allochronic understandin~ of such
term s as primiJ.ive.On the contra.ry, ~e time-machme, freed
of che wheels and gears of che h1stoncal method, now works
with "redoubled vigour.'' The deniaJ of coevaln~~ becomes
inten sifi.ed as time-distancing turns from an exphc1t concern
into an implicit theoretical assumption.
\Vhat happened , and how did it happen? The cele-
brated progress of anthro~logy from f:nl~gh~~nmer:itcul-
tural chauvinism roward treatmg other soc1et1es m their ~wn
terms" (notice: not on their own terrns) was made poss1~le
theoretically by logical and sociological positivism and 1ts
radi cal rejection of "historicism." As regar~s an~hropology,
this meant above ali chat the task of our disc1plme was de-
creed to be the "explanation" of systems or •:structures~• (in
Radcliffe-Brm.rn's use of che term). Explanauon was sa1d to
be possible only within the frame of a present, synchronic
40 Ou r Time, Their Time, No Time
set of relationships. It matters little whether that frame is
metaphorized as a logical arrangement of structures, a me-
~hanical or biological coordination of elements in an organ-
1sm, or, somewhat later , as Popper's "logic of the situa-
cion." " We know no-w that extreme antihistorism has been
difficult to mainta in. ~{alinowski himself was led to concede
that the functional method must adm ic the "time elemem" 5
and Evans-Pritchard was eventual)y moved to formulate a
ful] rehab ilication in his essay "Anthro pology and History "
(1962_[19?1]). _Britishfunctionalist anthropo logy is quite in-
tere stmg m chis respect because it shows that to get rid of
T~e as "past" (theoretical ly) is not equal to conquering
Time altogether. Even if these thinkers could convince
themselves that temporal relacions between a givcn socio-
cultural order or svstem and its antecedent forms have no
e~planatory value they could not ignore che problem of
Time and temporal relations within a given order.
Talcott Parsons was aware of tha c in The Soaal System:
Social action and interaction crucially im·olve "time rela-
tions" in such forms as time of action, "location in time" of
actors, and "interpersonal time" (1963 ( 1951):91 f). Con-
cer~ed . a~ he wa~ to sh?w the social system as equilibrium
mamtammg, he lmks Tune to the problem of deviance. He
speaks of "time allocation" in che form of time schedul es for
certain kinds of action (251 ), "time off" for others (see
2?4n2, 302). Time is internally connected to de"iance by
vITtue of the facc that Time is a "possession" (120), i.e., an
inheremly Iimited resource for an actor or a society. Time
bei_ngan e~s~n~al condition for "goal attainmem," misallo-
cauon of ume 1s at the bottom of most deviant behavior.
~roperly allocated, Time is a means to keep out conflict and
mterference. But then Parsons notes, cranking up the time
machine, while time allocation is a task for ali societies (rel-
~tive to_each society). it is more crucial in our own comp lex
mdustnal world (wh1ch makes Time more relative to our
society). After ali, "we know that in many societies the mo-
tivacional prerequisites for fitting into such a time orienta-
tion do not exist." 6
. P~rsons illustrates the effect which the logic of func-
uonalISm had on thought about cu lture and Time: Time
Our Time, Their Time, No Time 41
as encapsulated in given social systems. This made possi-
:1eor, at any rate, reAected an _ethnow-apic_p~axis ,vhich
asserted~e irnportan~e of _studymg Time w1thm c~ltures,
•hile it virtually exorczsedTime from the study of relatwns be-
~ni cultures. "Theories of Time" held by various cu ltures
could now be studied wi~ "time le~s" theory and m~thod.
This is what 1 mean by etrcumventmg coevalness: Tune as
a dimension of imercultural study (and praxis) was "brack-
eted out" of the anthropological discourse.
To be exact, func tionalist encapsulation of Time had
two effects, and critical analysis muse focus on the relation-
ship between the two. . .
First, in che view of its adherents, the funcuonalist-
scructurali1't approach actually favored ethnographi~ s~dy
of Time . To be sure, culturally different conceptual1zauons
of Time , recognizable in language, symbols, ~nd norms of
behavior and in material cultur e had been stud1ed for a long
time (not only by anthropologists but also by classicists, his-
torians of reli~ion, and psychologists). Yet to the extent that
their perspect1ve was "comparat ive," these studi~s were _out
to establish "contrast"-between, say, Western lmear Time
and primitive cyclical Time, or between modern Time-
centeredness and archaic timelessness. Functionalism made it
possible to avoid these stereotype s of comparative discourse
and to examine instead the specific, often contradictory uses
of Time by a given society or culture. Even when the notion
of Time is not explicitly discussed it clearly is touched u pon
in such classics as Malinmvski's Dynamics of Culture Change,
Leach's Political Systenzsof Highland Bunna, Gluckman·s Order
and Rebellivn in Tribal Africa, as well as in much of the work
of Evans-Pritchard, M. Forces, Lhe W'ilsons, Mary Douglas ,
and especially in \lictor Turner's analyses of ritual process. 7
Liberating and productive as it may have been et~o-
graphically, functíonalist emphasis on system-internal Time
stood on questionable theoretical ground. This brings us to
the second effect of "enca psulating " Time. As it turns out,
the richness of relativistic ethnography of Time has its price.
It must apparently be paid for \\.·ith epistemological nai'veté
and logical inconsistency on a higher theoretica l level. Na-
'iveté often characterizes talk about the "cultur al construc-
42 Our Time , Their Time, No Time
tion" of Time. The very notion of cultural construction (un-
less it is backed up by a theory of symbolization, which it
was not in classical functionalism) implies that cultural en-
coding works on sorne precultural, i.e., "natura l'' or "real"
experience of Time. By relegating that problem to philosophy
or to the psychology of perception , cultural relativism not
only does not solve the question of human time experi-
ence; it <loes not even raise it. Much of the study of "cul-
tural transformation " of human experience remains steri le
because it is not capable (or unwilling) to relate cu ltu ral var-
iation to fundamental processes that must be presumed to
be constitutiveof human Time experience.
In that respect the problem with Time resembles, and
bears on, the problem with language and communication.
This ·was observed recently by Maurice Bloch in an essay
critica) of structura list-functionalist presuppositions about the
relativity of Time experience. Taking note of debates in-
volving British anthropologists and philosophers, Bloch re-
jects the arguments for relativity, ali of which ultimately
break clown in the face of two facts: 1) "Anthropo logy itself
bears witness to the fact that it is possible, within certain
limits, to comrnunicate with all other human beings, how-
ever different their culture" and 2) " If other people really
had different concepts of Time we cou ld not do what we
patently do, that is to communicate with them" (1977:283).
The first observation is the weaker one. It either rests
on an equivocal use of communication(one that would have
to accommodate such instances of patent noncommunica-
tion as the denial of coevalness in anthropological dis-
course); or ii is naively positivistic in that it tries to convince
us that the success of a project legitimizes the means or even
exp]ains how it works. But I do believe that Bloch touches
the heart of the matter in his second observation. Time, in
the sense of shared, intersubjective Time, is a necessary
condition of communication. 8 As such it is the inescapable
counterpole to any investigation into culturally different no-
tions of time, not only logically but also practically.
Bloch carne to his position by way of analyzing the log-
ical difficulties structuralist-functionalist theory had with ex-
plaining cha.nge.Radical functionalism in the line of Durk-
Our Time, Their Time , No Time 43
• and Radcliffe -Brown asserts the essentiallv social, that
~el~ •stem-relative nature of categories of th~Úght. If fol-
15' 'd through to its ultimate consequences, th1s means that
)ow~ theor y can account neither for new rule~ nor for new
SOC ts·, because "if all concefrts and categones are
conce . . . deter-
•
min:J by the social system a resh look 1s rrnposs1ble su~c~
11cognition is already n_ioulded t? fit what_ 1s ~o be cnt.J.-
ª. ed " Or "if ·we be lieve m the sooal determmauon of con-
ce ts · . . .• this leaves the actors _w·1t~ no 1anguage to t a lk.
ciz
aiJut their society and so change 1t, smce they can talk only
within it" (Bloch 1977:281 ). Paraphrasing that last sta!e-
ment , one might cóntinue to re~son that _the anthropolog1s~,
· smuch as he succeeds m entenng another . soc1-
m~/culture and comprehending it from within (:which 1s the
~~owed ideal of cultural relativists), would be mcapable of
saying anything abou.t it. Such reduc_tio .ª~ absurd~~i ~as ~f
course always been countered by ms1stmg º1?- universa~
translatabilit y." But unless one ~ª1:- c?me up ~•th a theory
of transl atabi lity, all talk about tt 1s JUSt beggmg the ques-
tion.
Bloch's mvn way out of the dil~mma <loes not offer a
viable solution either. His attempt 1s unsuccessful. because
he formula tes a critique that accepts t~e teri:ns of h1s adver -
saries. ~ot surprisingly, thi~ leads .h1m ul~1mat~ly back. to
the same empiricism and na1ve reahsm we_1~en ufied earher
as the hidden assumption of cultural relauv1sm. If I _under-
stand him correctlv, his argument can be summanze1 as
follows: If concepdons and cat~g<:>rieso( Time are socrally
determined we must ask how lt 1s poss1ble to study them
criticallv. We can avoid the logical impasse if we i:1-sist,first
of all, t.Íiat the problem with Time is a problem w1t? percep-
twnof Time. , Bloch then postulates two types of t.lme per -
ception (using, it seems to me, perceptwn al~ost syn~ny-
mouslv for conceptualization)There are percepuons of Tune
that a~e close to nature and others that are removed from
it. He then asserts (criticizing - but in fact rea~firming D~rk-
heim's distinction of profane and sacred reality) that T1me-
close-to -nature is found in one kind of cu ltura~ know~e?_ge,
that which serves in "the organization of pracucal actrv1ues,
especially, productive activities." Time-removed -from-
 44 Our Time , Their Time, No Time
nature is involved in "rítu .al communica~ion." Jt is in practica]
c~::mlexts that we find universal categones of Time, while in
r.Itual contexts we can expect to encounter the kind of rela-
m:e c~mcept~lizations studied by the structura list-function-
ahst ~see 197 t :285, 287). That, I fear, will not do. Bloch's
solut1on <loes accommodate universalitv and relativitv but
only at th~ _price _of .compar~enLaliz'in$" _human p~axis.
~ranted , h1s m~ent1~n 1s to contnbute a cnt1que of ideolog-
1cal _uses (that 1s, m1suses) of Time , something, as he ob-
s_e1ve~ co~rectly, that was precluded by structuralist-
f~nct101:~.1i_st theory. But_by alignin~ rational use with prac-
tica) actt\ 1t!esand nonrauonal use w1th ritu al he in fact seem s
to rel~pse mt o a C_o mte~n seq~ence of ?evelopmental stages ,
a device who se T1me-d1stancmg fun ct1on is obvious . The se
consequence s _cannot be avoided by insisting that praxis is
here mvoked m ~e. Mar xist_sense . _Marx was keenly aware
th a t l? oppose _rehg1ous ?~ 1deological appearance (Schein)
to soc10_e conom1c and poht:1cal reality ('tVirklichkeil)is in itself
a pra ct1cal act. <;>frevolu~?nary emancipation. Hence , the
~,e1':po_ral .~ond1t1on_ s of cnttc~ll y understan?ing "ritual" and
_pract1c~l- _concepuon s of Tme are essenually the same. It
~s a po~1t1V1St .stra~gy to m~ke of rel~gion and ideology ob-
Ject~ sui genens, ep1stemo logica1ly, while at the same t ime re-
ducmg them to the_ir socjal funétions, ontologically.
. Appeals to bas1c, umversal human needs not withstand-
~ng, st ru cturalism-fun ction alism promotes a kind of relativ-
ISt_TI whose negle~~ for_ the epistemological significance of
Tim~ becomes v1S1blem un surmountable logical inconsis-
teno~s- The_se have been demonstrated over and over. 9 In
fact little could be added to a much earli er incisive critique
by another Bl~h, Ernst, of another relativi sm, Spengler's.
He re we find m one condensed passage all the major ele-
men~ that should_ make us anthropologists constantly re-
cons1der º':1r allegiance to a doctrine which we know to be
ur:uenable m our h~ad_s even if we continue to cling to it
w1th our he~r~s. Th1s 1s how E. Bloch summarizes the ef-
fects of relat1v1sm:
The very process of history is broken up into Gar-
dens of Culture or "Culture Souls." These are as
unrelated to each other as they are without connec-
Our Time, Their Time, No Time 45
oonto Man and human labor (which is th e pervad-
. matter of history) or to nature. . . . Quite art-
.criv,historical relativism is here turned into
mething static; it is being caught in cu ltural mo-
50
nads that is, culture soul s without windows, wich no
links'among each other , yet full of mirrors facing
inside. ( 1962 ( 1932):326 )
Bloch'scritique is aimed at Spengler, but it does hit much
doser to home. There is now an anthropology which is fas-
dnated with "symbo lic" mirrors (signs , signi fiers, symbols )
lining the inside walls of "cultures" and reflecting ali in-
terpr etive di scourse inside the confines of the chosen object.
These reflections give to an anthropological obsen er the il-
1
lusionof objectivity , coherence, and densit y (perhap s echoed
in Geertz ' "thick description ''); in short , the y accoun t for
much of the pride anthropology take s in its "dassical" eth-
nogr aphies. One is tempted to continue Bloch's metaphori-
cal reverie and to muse over the fact that such mirrors, if
placed at propitiou s angles, also have the miraculous power
to make real objects disappear - the analyst of strange cul-
tures as magician or sideshmv operator, a role that is not
entirely foreign to many a practitioner of anthropo logy and
one that is most easilv assumed under the cover of cultural
relativism. '
A critique of relativism could of course easily take up
most of this book, especially if we were to pay closer atten-
tion to its crucial role in the development of American an-
thropology. Such is riot the purpose of these essays. But be-
fore we turn co another form of denying coevalnes s the point
needs to be made that relativisti c circumvention of the
problem on a theoretical leve! did by no means lead its pro-
ponents to ignore Time and temporal relations as they af-
fect practica/ relations becween cultures.
So far we have cornmented on forros of cu ltu ral relativ-
ism whose roots must be sought in theories of sociocu ltur al
integration stres sing the social origins of cognitive catego-
ries (the Durkheimían approach in French and British an-
thropology ). E. Bloch 's critique of Speng ler points to other
sources in romanticism and Nietzschean ideas, and numer-
ous influences from Gestalt psychology to linguistics. This
46 Our Time, Their Time, No Time
second trend, exemplified and popularized by Ruth Bene-
dict's Pauerns of Culture ( l 934) proposed to study culture
with the help of aesthetic concepts such as pattern, style,
and configuration. Both movements, however, converged in
their intense concern for the unifying ethos, the common
morality that accounts for regularities in the behavior of the
members of a culture. In the United States, these research
efforts found their conceptual focus in such notions as "na-
tional character" and in the debates about "values." Insti-
tutes and programs (for instance at Columbia and Harvard)
brought anthropologists together with psychologists, sociol-
ogists, and political scientists and spa·wned unprecedented
interdisciplinary efforts.
To assess their bearing on the problem of coevalness,
we must recall for a moment the political comext of these
studies, situated as they were during and soon after World
War II. Because intellectual-scientific and political preoccu-
pations were so intimately connected in the minds and daily
activities of these researchers, much of the work of that pe-
riod now seems dated and destined for oblivion. Yet, many
of the senior anthropologists who continue to influence and
shape the discipline today (and who are by no means to be
found in the same theoretical or political corners) spent their
formative years with culture-and-personality, national-char-
acter, and vaJue studies. Taking imo account the usual de-
lay of one generation it takes for scientific insights and con-
cerns to percolate to the level of popular consciousness, one
realizes that a particular brand of wartime cultural relativ-
ism continues to inform the outlook of a good <leal of an-
thropology.10 Ic certainly cannot be overlooked in this criti-
caJ examination of anthropo logical uses of Time.
Of special interest in chis context is the clash between
extre1!1e value-rel_ativismin anthroJ><?logicalth~ry an~ ~e
perce1ved necess1ty to pass value JUÓgpients m po lmcal
practice. Perhaps there was never a stronger methodologi-
caJ emphasis on explaining entire nations in terms of their
basic values and patterns of socialization and institutionali-
zatiorr than during that period of war against Cermany and
Japan and in che cold war against the Soviet block which
folfowed victory over the enemy of mankind. With historical
Our Time , Their Time, No Time 47
h.10dsight we note che paradoxical nature of an enterprise
r
• which relativistic studies of values were to produce
owledge that would help to bring the enemy clown and,
~n after, estab lish effective control and assure transfor-
mation of . these values toward the model of the anthropol-
ogist's soCiety. . ..
Such an alliance between cheoreucal relat1.v1smand fight
for a cause perceived a~just an? n~essary was_neither new
(it resembles fo_rmally, 1f not_h1st<;>ncally, the lmks between
colonial expans1on and funct1onahst anthropology), nor was
it much of a logical problern. To see chis we need ox:ilybe
aware of an obvious implication of ali cultural relauv1sT?:
Once other cultures are fenced off as culture gardens or,. m
che terminology of sociological jargon , as boundary-mau~-
caining systems based on shared values; once each cu~ture 1s
perceived as living its Time, it becomes possible and mdeed
necessarv to elevate the interstices between cultures to a
methcxi~logical status. At that_mo_mentthe study <?f ~ltu!es
"from a distance," clearly a vice m terms of che mJunct1on
demandin g empi;ical researc~ thr~ugh par~icip~nt obser-
vation, may turn mto a theoreucaJ v1_rtue.. A s1tua!1onof P<?·
litical antagonism may then be rationahzed ep 1scemolog1-
cally as che kind. of objecúve discru:ice_that. allmvs the
anthropologist to v1ew another culture m 1ts entlrety. A -~u!-
tural holism is born which, in spite of termin<?logical s1~1-
larities, has little in common with the emphas1s on totahty
that originales in dialecti~ thought (whose con~tituting _acts
are negationsof cultural d1stance and of concom1tant no?<;ms
of scientistic objectivity). It is therefore not at all surp~smg
to find relativistic and holistic orientations in the service of
methodological projects which spurn time-consu~ing de-
scriptive and comparative study in favor of proJects de-
signed to get at the ju guiar of other cultures, that is, at their
central values and vital characteristics. 11 The spirit of the
times is aptly expressed in "Assignmenc: Japan,'' the intro-
ductory chapter in Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemumand
the Sword. "T ough-minded" acceptance of radical culu~ral
difference is there opposed to sof t sentiments about One
World and Universal Brotherhood (see 1967 [1946]:14f).
Benedicc fully realizes that pursuit of nacional identity rnay
48 Our Time, Their Time, No Time
be intimately connected with the exercise of power over
others, but that <loes not cause her to question the legiti-
macy of "being American to the hilt" (see 1967: 12, 15), lel
alone consider the epistemological implications of a nation-
centered theorv of culture.
National character was one of the unifying concepts in
these endeavors. The scholars who under the earlv leader-
ship of Ruth Benedict participated in studies of 'national
character eventually produced a manual significantly titled
The Study of Culture ata Distance (Mead and Métreaux 1953).
The book is a document for an important period in the his-
tory of anthropology. Its purpose is stated in the first para-
graph of Margaret Mead's introduction:
This Manual is concerned with methods that have
been developed during the last decade for analyz-
ing the cultural regularities in the characters of in-
dividuals wbo are members of societies which are
ínaccessible LO dírect observations. This inaccessibil-
ity may be spatial because a state of active waTfare
exists-as was the case with Japan and Germany in
the early l 940s; or it may be-as is now the case
with the Soviet Union and Communist China--due
to barriers to travel and research. Or the inaccessi-
bility may be temporal, since the society we wish to
study may no longer exist. (1953:3)
In another contribution to the volume, M. Mead speaks
of the political applications of stud ies of culture at a dis-
tance:
The approach described in this Manual has been
used for a variety of political purposes: to imple-
ment particular govemmental programs within a
country, LO facilitate relationships v.,ith allies, to
guide relationships ,vith partisan group s in coun-
tries under enemy control, to assist in estimating
enemy strengths and weaknesses, and to provide a
rationale for the preparacion of documents at the
international level. All these uses involve diagnosing
the cultural regularities in the behavior of a partic-
ular group or groups of people that are relevant to
the proposed action-whether this be the dissemi-
Our Time, Their Time, No Time 49
nacion of a propaganda statement, issuing an order
a inst fraternization, a threat of a certain type of
~risal, an introduction of a new international reg-
ulation, or a like matter. The diagnosis is made for
the purpose of facilitating sorne specific plan or pol-
ic,• and at least implicitJy, includes predictions of
expectedbehavior that may make such a plan or
palicysuccessful or unsuccessful. (/bid. 397)
It would be fascinating to subject this and similar pas-
sages to closer conceptual analysis. They illustrate the con-
tention that anthropo logical approaches based on cultural
relativismare easily put to work for such nonrelativist pur-
poses as nacional defense, political propaganda, and out-
right manipulation and control of other societies. Having
made that much clear, we must now ask a more pointed
question: How <loes chis particular amalgam of science and
¡x,liticsilluminate conditions and motives responsible for that
affiiction of anthropology we called allochronic discourse?
The mechanisms that translate relativistic studies of
or.hercultures in therr terms (and, incidentally, the ease with
which theories and methods developed for the study of
"primiti ve" culture are transferred to investigations of ''de-
veloped" nations and to groups and classes within our own
society) are subtle and not always obvious. Reading, for in-
stance, through Mead's introduction one cannot help but be
impre ssed by the intelligence and differentiated views she
bring s to her task, especially when she comments on con-
crete problems encountered in the practice of anthropo-
logical research. In this she is representative of her genera-
~n of eminent ethnographers. One gets the distinct
~pression of a decline toward crudeness and simplification
m much of what is currently written about ethnographic
method, even, and sometimes especially, by those who rightly
criticize the ethical, political, and intellectual presupposi-
tions of their predecessors.
Awareness of problems with Time could be a case in
point. To begin with, M. Mead makes it clear that cultural
distance is a problem of T ime as well as space. In the brief
statement on political applications she notes the importance
of Time and timing in relations between cultures, cognitive
50 Our Time, Their Time, No Time
or political. The passages where she makes recommenda-
tions for fieldworkers contain numerous observat ions on the
impo rtanc e of native attitudes toward T ime which must be
matched by the researchers's temporal awareness. Afler all,
if the aim of such research is to observe "regularities" of
behavior exhibited by individual members of a culture, sorne
notion of Time and temporal sequence and, consequently,
sorne methodological consideration of these temporal as-
pects must be an integral pare of the approach. The pi-
oneering work of Mead and Bateson (the latter also con-
tributed to the manual) on che use of ethnographic fihn
certainly gives evidence for a keen awareness of the tem-
poral flow of human action.
In sum, the sort of cultural relativism which guided
American anthropologists involved in the studv of culture
at a distance seems to put to a test our gl.9baÍ thesis tbat
anthr~gx_ has~t:i co.nsn:..u~tiggits_object _ the Oth.e.r-
?Y ~mp.!Qy!_ngvar!ous dev1ces_QÍ temporal distancing, .llfgat-
--
tl!g the 1Z""
coeval
-
ex1stence of the obiect
J
and subiect
J
of its dis-
course. At the very least, we would have to credit numer-
. with awareness of the role of Time in
ous cultural relativists
shaping cultural behavior and, consequently, interaction be-
tween cultures (including field research).
This is the moment when a brief look at E. T. Hall's
The Silent Language will show that echnographic sensitivitv to
Time alone <loes not at all guarantee awareness of the prob-
lem of coevalness. The opening paragraph of chapter 1,
(''T ~e V<?i~esof Time") exemplifies che rhetorical appeal of
Hall s wnting. It also manages to pack numerous theoretical
assumptions imo a few lapidary sentences: "Time talks. It
speaks more plainly than words. The message it conveys
comes through loud and clear. Because it is manipulated
less consciously, it is subject to less distortion than the spo-
ken language. It can shout the trulh where words lie"
(1959: 15). Read in the light of elaborations in the later
chapters, ~his ?pening statement describes Hall's position as
follows: Time 1snota mere measure, or vector, of culture; it
is one of its constituents. Time contributes to the makeup of
a culture because it is one of the most important means of
communication. Conceptualizations of Time belong to the
Our Time , Theír Time, No Time 51
core of beliefs and values which accoum for the identity of a
culture.
T aken at face value, such could indeed be the starting
paint fo~ a th.eo~y of culture that would assign crucial epis-
remolog1cal s1gmficance Lo temporal relations. But closer
analysis soon reveals th~t Hall is not concerned with episte-
mology. He does not ra1se the prob lem of kn-ow/,edge in terms
oJTime; nor does he ask how temporal relations and condi-
tions a.ff~t the validit y of anthropo logicaJ findings. His in-
terest 1s m methodology and leads him to examine cu ltura l
"use"of Time. T he book is replete with examples and com-
parisons between how we use time and how they use time.
Hall's opening statement also contains a theoretica l as-
sumption about cul!ure in general, nai:nely that it shapes
andregulates behav1or through unconsc1ous mechanisms or
rules. That implies in turn the mechodological axiom that
anthropology 's major task is to revea! the unconscious forces
~y cutting throug h the layers of deceptive conscious behav-
10r. In short , the study of Time in culture is valuable be-
cause it reveals what is ~idden beneath the "líes" of spoken
words. Truth and consc1ous awareness are here aligned ·with
~e knower, th~ anthropologist; dissimulation and submis-
s1on to unconsc1ous powers are on the side of the Other . No
wonder that the theoretical notion of an unconscious cul-
tur~ and th~ methodological prescriptions that go with it
eas1ly turn mto schemes to influence , control, and direct
ot!1ers; che anthropo logy of Time becomes the politics of
Time. As one reads thr~:>UghThe Sil~nt Language one realizes
tha~ the many percepttve observanons and examples illus-
tratmg how they use Time turn into so many recipes for how
~o use t~at knowledge so that their behavior can be tricked
mto ~ervmg mtr s-oals. Hall's frequent criticism of Amer ican
boonshness and mtransigence in dealing wich other cultures
cannot hide the fact that his book, too, is a "manual" for
people who want to g~t things done (diplomats, expatriate
managers and superv1sors, salesmen and economic advi-
sors).13 Nowhere <loes his awareness of the role of Time in
communic.a~ion Jead him to question che premises of cul-
tural relatrvism. Because Hall holds an instrumental view of
communicatíon , The Silent Language is about tempora J strat-
52 Our Time, Their Time, No Time
egies, not about the role of Time in processes of cultural
creation. Nor can it be said chat Hall's persuasive and influ-
ential treatment of the subject is merely a political exten-
sion, or perhaps perversion, of amhropological insights. The
política} act is built into the very cheory. The axiomatic as-
sumption that much of culture is inaccessible to the con-
sciousness of the "average member" 14 is already expressive
of a political praxis where true knowledge about the work-
ings of society is the privilege of an elite. The point of that
observation is not to denv che existence of unconscious mo-
tives but to question the strategy of a discourse which, with
the help of distancing devices, places che threat of the un-
conscious somewhere outside its own present.
Preempting Coevatness:Cultural Taxonomy
As Ernst Bloch observed, cultural gardens lie behind the
wal1sof relativism. The anthropologist may watch them grow
and change but whatever happens behind the walls occurs
in a Time other than his. ·whecher he moves, temporarily,
inside the walls, or whether he considers a culture garden
from afar, the very notion of containing walls and bounda-
ries creares order and sense based on discontinuity and dis-
tance. But chis sort of relativism which circumvents the
l problem of common Time by postulating a rnultiplicity of
times and spatial coexistence is not the only way of avoiding
the question of coevalness and temporal coexistence. \V e ,,vill
1now consi9er a trend or paradigm which goes much far-
'.ther. Rather than walling-in the Time of others so that it
cannot spill over int.o ours, this school simply preempts the
quesrion of coevalness. Its strategy is to eliminate Time as a
significant dimension of eicher cultural integration or eth-
nography. To chis trend we usually affix the label of struc-
,turalism and we see it exemp lified in che work of Lévi-Strauss.
For the sake of simplicity I will follow that practice , fully
realizing, however, that structuralism is at best a crude in-
dex of a highly complex intellectual tradition whose world-
wide success became paradoxically linked to the idiosyncra-
Our Time, Their Time, Ko Time 53
sies of the intelligentsia of one country and, for ali that
013 uers , of one city.
By now numerous critica) readings and appraisals of
l.,évi-Strauss's work are available. 15 The on ly excuse for
addingmy own observations to this literature is that no cri-
tique of the uses of T ime in anthropo logy can ignore a
movement whose proponents like to point out that they have
no use for Time. ·
To begin with, I do not think that musings about che
notion of structure are helpful in approaching structur al-
ism. The term simply has too wide a currency in anthropol-
ogy, especially in the kind of relativi st discourse we dis-
cussed m the preceding section. Lévi-Strauss has taken great
pains to set himself apart from these approaches on the
grounds that they are guilty of too much empiricism, i.e.
naive trust in that which is immediately observable. Follow-
ing Durkheim 's and de Saussure's leads he disdains search
for connections between cultural isolates and a reality out-
side. As a science of culture, anthropology is for him the
study of relations between cultural isolates and of che rules
or !áws governing these relations. In such an enterprise it is
fut~le to_expect explanations either from history (asking how
a gt~·en 1~olatecarne about) or from psychology (asking what
a gtven 1solate means to members of a culture, or how it
motivates their behavior).
The fundamental assumptions of structuralism are best
under stood as a radically taxonomic approach to culture. 16
An analysis of the temporal aspects of structuralist dis-
course must therefore concentrate on the problem of Time
and t~on_ºt?Y· Am~ng ~e many possible points of depar-
ture m Lev1-Strauss wntmgs I have chosen the following
~emarks, which are part of his famous attack on Sartre's
In
idea of hi~tory The Savage_L'vtind.Nothing illustrates better
the peculiar mixture of luc1dity and duplicity characteristic
of structuralist t.alk abou t Time. 17
. In style ~vit~his fundame _ntal convi~t~onsregarding the
bmary orgamzat.Jon of ali knowledge, Lév1-Strauss begins by
Jl?Siti':g a "symmetry" between the preoccupations of the
historian and those of the anthropologist: "The anthropol-
54 Our Time , Their Time, No Time
ogist respects history , but he <loes not accord it a special
value. He conceives itas a study complementary to his own:
one of the them unfurls the range of human societies in
time, the other in space." He asserts that "distrjbution in
space and succession in time afford equivalent perspectives·'
and rejects the claims of those who posit that history consti-
tutes an irreducib le and indeed privileged approach "as if
diachrony were to establish a kind of incelligibilitynot merely
superior to that provided by synchrony, but above all more
specifically human " (see 1966:256).
An unattentive reader may be lulled into taking this for
a conciliatory view, emphasizing complementariness, sym-
metry, and even equivalence (Which? None of these terms
simply implies the others). Such is not at ali Lévi-Strauss'
intention . His structuralist duplicity rests on a not-so-subtle
trick he operates in these passages. Ostensibly he sets up an
argument with an opponent holding a view different from
his own. In reality he has already reduced the opponent's
position to his and from then on his argument is nothing
but an elaboration of his own views. His ruse is to substitute
diachrony for history. That sleight of hand is supported,
much like the diversions ali illusionists tn' to create while
operating their magic, by directing the reader 's attention to
something else, in this case to the "opposition" of Space and
Time.
Lévi-Strauss leads us to believe that space here could
mean real space, perhaps the space of the human geogra-
phers who became the ancestors of anthropo logical schools
that defir:ie themselves as historical. He perm,ts the sous-
eniendu that his concern with space is expressive of attempts
to understand human distribution in space as a reflex of
ecological variation, of the emergence of differem modes of
production, or of geopo litical arrangements. 1n fact, he has
little interese in under standing the ro le of real space in the
genesis of human differences and conflict. Space for Lévi-
Strauss is what ~- Foucault likes to call "tabular" space, i.e.,
the kind of taxonomic space chat must be postulated if cul-
tural differences are to be conceived as a system of semio-
logical constructs, organized by a logic of oppositions. Lévi-
Strauss' thought does not inhabit a world ; ic Jives in a matrix
Our Time, Their Time, Ko Time 55
chat al]ows him, not just to place, but to plot any and all
cultural isolates in a logical grid.
At this point, those who are familiar •.vith Lévi-Strau ss'
writinSS might object that he constantly sets his structural
analys1s of mych against the background of the spatia l dis-
tribution s of variants. But the point is chat he perceived his
\\'Orkas a rad ical break with "historical" reconstruction based
on the geographic distribution of culture traits. Even when
he ostensibly uses hard data on the ecology of the honeybee
or of the porcupine, his ultimate goal remains to show that
structural analysis of bee and porcupine tales can establish
conn_ections of which historical-geografhic research knows
nothmg. Ofte~ one cannot help but fee that he deliberately
cre~tes confus1on between structu ral and ecological and his-
toncal arguments because that confusion works in his favor.
lt makes him , at first, appear to take ethnographic accounts
on the location of variants in space seriously so that, later,
he can sho"".the irrelevan ce of such information to a deeper
under standmg. Ali along, he knows chac the discribution
maps on which culture historians and folklorists locate var-
iants in the hope of translating spatial relations into histor-
ical sequences are just that:-maps . Maps are devices to clas-
sify data . Llke tables and diagrams they are taxonomic ways
of ordering cultural isolates with the help of categories of
c~mtrast and opposition: source vs. variant, center vs. pe-
rtph~r y, pure form vs. mixed variant, displaying cr iteria of
qual1ty vs. those of quantity , or whatever else diffusionists
use to map che traits of cultures. Ali of them are as taxo-
nomic as tJ:teoppositions used in structur~l analysis, che dif-
ference bemg m whether or not one attr1butes the location
of an isolate to conscious activities and historical events (such
as borrowing, migration, and diffusion) or whether one ac-
counts for it in terms of the operation of unconscious rules
or laws.
, . Diachr~ny serves a similar strategy. In the context of
Lév1-Strauss attacks on Sartre one is led to believe that
diach rony could mean the same as history. This is mani-
festly not the case. Ever since de Saussure canon ized the
opposi_ti~nb_ecweensynchrony and diachrony it served, not
as a d1stmct.1onof temporal relations (as one rnight expect
56 Our Time, Their Time , No Time
from the rr~sen_ce of ~e co~ponent chrony i~ .~oth terms),
but as a disunct10n agamst Trme. 18 The poss1b1hty of iden-
ti~ying and ana lyzing semiological S}'Stemsis unequivocally
sa1d to rest _on the elimination of Time and, by implication,
of such nouons as process, genesis, emergence, production ,
and other concepts bound up ,,vith"history." Diachrony does
not refer to a temporal mode of existence but to the mere
succession of semiological systems one upon another.
Succession, strictly speaking, pre supposes Time only in the
sense of an extraneous condition affecting neither their syn-
chroni c nor their diachronic constitution. Thus struc tural-
ism, while accusing its opponents of reifying 'TÍÍneasa ·sort
of rñythical power, is guilty of ultimate reification. Time is
re~ov~ from the realms of cultural praxis ang ffeen its
place in that of _pure logical _forrns. Of course, he who -ex-
orc1ses the devil must somehow believe in him, which is whv
structura list exorcism of Time deserves serious attention. 19'
. For_a radical structur~ _anthropology, Time (as Physical
Time?~ 1s a mere prereqms1te of s1gn systems; its real exis-
tence, 1f any, must be sought where Lévi-Strauss Jikes to lo-
cate the "rea l:" in the neural organization of the human
brain being part of nature. Structuralism thu s illuso:ates one
of t_heideological uses of Time 1 identified in mapter.J..:. iL
na_turalius Time by removing it from the sphere oL .co~
sc10us cultural production. Lévi-Strauss, quoting Engels in
support of his position, maintains that forms of thought re-
Aect natural laws. Consequently, it is futile to use our (cul-
tural)_c~mceptio?s of_temporal relation for the purpose of
explammg relauonsh1ps between things (see 1969:451). To
expect m~aning from Time would be Hegelian idealism; at
an}'.rate, 1t would run against the Saussurean principies on
wh1ch structural anthropo logy is based. In L 'Origi.nedes man-
ieresde table Lévi-Strauss gives a succinct summary of the
differe~ces betw_!:en _!he historical and hi~ o~ ª-P--PCQ_ac h.
\,Vhere fue former seeks "to make out continge nt links and
the traces of a diachronic evolution," the structuralist dis-
covers "a system that is synchronically intelligible":
ln doing this we have merely put into practice a les-
son by Ferdinand de Saussure . . . : As one con-
siders the subject matter of linguistics more deep l}'
Our Time, Their Time, K o Time 57
one gets more and more convinced . . . of a truth
which gives us much to think, namely that the link
one establishe s between things pre-exists . . . the
things themselves and serves to determine them .
()968:216 )
This is clea~ enough. lf the proper subject matter of an-
thro pology 1s the study of relalionships between cultural
isolates, ªº? if t~ese rela_tio~shi:ps rest on principies or laws
~t pr_e-ex1st~err actualizauon m "contingent " history, then
Tun_e 1s eff~<:t1velyr~mo~•ed from anth_ro~logical consid-
eration .20 Lév1-Strauss atutude toward Tlffie 1s firmlv rooted
in nineteei:ith-century notions of natural history, a faét which
~ts cons1de:able doubt on his claim to be the legitimate
h~ir of the e1g~teenth ce?tury. Admittedly, Enlightenment
thmke rs were mterested m ~1story for "phi losophical" rea-
90~s .. Above .all they saw h1story as the theater of moral
pnn c1ples ulumatel)'. traceable to "constant laws of nature."
But nat~r e '7ªs dec1ded]y human nature and the challenge
of .th~ h1stonan was_to s~o':"' t~e temporal unfolding of its
pnnoi:,les . The radical disunct:Jon between contingent hu-
~n h1story and necessary natural history was drawn in the
nmeteenth century. To maintain, as Lévi-Strauss <loes, that
anthrorology tout court belongs to natural history is to deny
the Enli~h_tenment origin of our discipline.
. As 1f 1t we_renot d~ e~ough that the equivocation of
h1~tory ~º? d1achrony 1mphes che rejection of historical
Tune , Lév1-Strauss seems to feel the need to rub this in, so
to speak. He _sef:Sout to ~emonstrate that even chronology-
ª.conc~ptuahzauon of Trme one might accept as the objec-
llve res1due after all the mystifications of the historical school
have ~en <:Iear, 7d _away-Ís nothing but a dassificatory, tax-
onom1c dev1ce. H1story," we are told, "does not ... escape
the commo!1 obli_gationof aH knowledge, to employ acode
to a_nalrse 1ts_obJect, even (and especially) if a continuous
reali~y 1s.attnbuted to that object." For history, '·the corle
cons1sts m a chro~ol<?g}'" (19~6:258). Predicta.bly, chis vie,v
of the conceptuahzauon of T 1me leads straight back to its
reduction to taxonomic space:
Given that the general code consists not in dates
which can be ordered as a linear series bul in
58 Our Time, Their Time, No Time
classes of dates each furnishing an autonomous sys-
tem of reference, the discontinuous an d classifica-
tory nature of historical knowledge emerges clear ly.
lt operates by meaos of a rectangu lar matrix . . .
where each line represents classes of dates, which
may be called hourlv , daily, annual, secular, millen-
ial for the purposes' of sdÍematization and which to-
gether make up a d iscontinuous set. In a system of
th is type, alleged historical continuity is secured
only by dint of fraudulent outlines. ( 1966:260 f)
One ca nnot help but be astounded by the temerity of chis
argument. A banal fact, that classification is one of the tools
of knowledge, perhaps even a tool of all know1edge at sorne
point of its production, is made into a transcendental rule.
Structuralism 's 0\\/Il creature, the code, is promulgated as a
standard, in fact a "common obligation" of all knowledge (a
formula ~at rings with Durkheimian assumpt ions). This is
metaphys1cs of the worst sort, the one which is mixed with
moral~sm. So paralyzing is this self-righteousness of the tax-
onom1st that one almost forgets to question the insinuation
tha~ hi~tory_of any kind could ever amount to chronology-
as 1f h1stonans of ali persuasions, at least since the eigh-
teemh century, had not always in~isted that chronology is
but a scaffold or tool for ordermg what remains to be
understood. The same goes for histor y's alleged fixation on
continuity. Where is the historian after He~el and ~farx who
would dare to think continuity without d1scontinuity? Cer-
tainly Lévi-Strauss cannot find him in Sartre, against whom
he argues in this context.
. But l~t us for a moment grant Lévi-Sg:au~s_his peculiar
v1ew of h1story and admit that historians are indeed.-con-
c_e{n_e?witb establi~hin_g_ chroñólogies -and -determining con-
tmy1_pes. Such contmuICles, we are gi.ven to understand , are
fabricated by a decepúve use of Time. The remedy Lévi-
Strauss prescribes is tO concentrate on space and discontin-
uous distribution. If the historian's use of Time rnay be a
deception--and it is the argument of this book that such is
the case in much of anthropology-then Lévi-Strauss' use
of space i~ a deception upon a deception. As we have just
seen, he himse lf has no difficult}' packing chrono logical Time
Our Time, Their Time, No Time 59
jnt o a spatial ~a~rix. But as one need not accept the claim
that a temporah zmg usage, such as talk about the primitive,
is innocent of spatialization (in the form of distancing ) so it
would be nai"ve to believe that when setti ng up a spat ial tax-
onomic matrix of human culture one does not temporalize.
At any ra_te, sti:uc~uralism, to my know ledge, <loes not pro-
vide us w1th entena to choose between a deception that im-
'poses co?tinuit~ on t~e di~ontinu<:ms and one that cuts up
·the contmuous mto d 1scontmuous 1solates. Worse , by virtue
1
0 f its self-assurance and faith that, with its own advent, such
crit.eria are no Jonger needed, structuralism has in effect
functioned to freeze an d thereby preserve earlier historical
and temporal izing ethnology. It is in such ethnologv, after
ali, where Lévi-Strauss mines the building blocks 'ror his
monumental edifices. Behind the structural ramparts of his
mythol-Ogiques he peruses and digests enormous amounts of
ethnograph y without show ing signs of being disturbed bv
chepossibility th~t. mo~t of it :nig~t be corrupted to the cor~
by the temporahzmg 1deological mterests for which he has
so much contempt. Why is he so impatient with Sartre when
he ~as so. much toler ance for the h istories told by his an-
thropolog1 cal forerunners and colleagues? He assures us
that it "is not a bad thing . . . to borrow a quotation from a
\\TÍter [W. J. Perry] whose work is generally denounced as
an extravagant abuse of this historical method" (1969: º122
f). He is, as I said, safe and does not need a true critique of
bourgeou s historism because "luckily, structura l analysis
makes up for the dubiousnes s of historical reconstructions"
( 1969: 169).
. In the end, one comes to suspect that Lévi-Strauss' flail-
mg _at~ on history might really be instigatecl byms diffi-
culties w1th another problem. He is troubled bv_ the role of
sub·ectivit · in the_production oÍboth _culture.' _aru:L_ko,Qwl-
~e~bou_t...Q!lt,!!_re. In The Sa-uageA1ind, from which I have
~~n quotmg, th1s shows up repeatedly. Sartre, the existen-
ll~h~t, obviously irri tates him more than Sartre, the Marxist.
Lév1-Strauss' JX)SÍtionon historv and subjectivity I believe
~an be ~ead in two wa ys: either 'as a rejection of historv qu~
!de~logical prop f?r. a misconceived subjectivity; or as' a re-
Jecuon of subJect.tv1ty for fear that history-and with it
60 Our Time, Their Time, ~o Time
Time- might pierce the armor of scientific anthropology.
Be that as it may, it is important for our larger argument
that stmc~lism'~ prob lem wi!h _Ji~~is in v~rio_us ,~ys
linked up _with a reluctance to -admit conscioüs, mtentional,
aná ·th~i:,_
dore subjeclive activity as a source of knowle9ge,
native <?L.anthroP9Jogical. Perhaps one needs to be re-
1Iill1ded constantly that this position grew out of a critiq~e
of a rival camp on the French intellecrual scene; otherw 1se
one fails to appreciate the urgency with which it is ad-
vanced. But it is truly intriguing in the internationa l context
of anthropology that rejection of subjectivity did not lead to
contempt for ethnographic "obsen·ation," to use Lévi-
Strauss' favorite term for fieldwork. The structura lists, at
least those who practice anthropology, do not escape the
aporía arising from the c~Qfljcting_de_mª!!ds of coeval re-
s~l~hronic discourse any more than their histor -
ical and relativist predecessors and contemporaries.
Having outlined ways in which structuralism con-
tributes to the Time-distancing conventions of anthropo-
logical theorizing and writing, we must now brieíly examine
its struggle with the other horn of the dilemma, the tem-
poral demands on personal, participant research. Once
again, Lévi-Strnuss likes to confuse us. He may ridicule dog-
matic fixation on fieldwork in situ as when he declares futile
the hope of the ethnographer in the Malinowskian tradition
"to grasp eternal truths on the nature and function of social
institutions through an abstract dialogue with his little tribe"
(1967: 12). But he never discards ethnography as a basis of
ali anthr<;>pologicalknowledge, neither explicitly (as we ,,,.il)
see presently from a number of statements regarding the
role and importance of fieldwork) nor implicitly (as is clear
from his untiring use of ethnography, his own and that of
other anthropologists). Furthermore, he is aware of inti-
mate links between the praxis of fieldwork and what we
called anthropology's problem with Time.
On at least one occasion, Lévi-Strauss invokes fieldwork
precisely in the problematic sense I try to explore in this
book. A chapter in The ElementaryStructures efKinship is ti-
tled "The Archaic Illusion." In it he criticizes the wide-
spread tendency, especially among psycho logists, to draw
parallels between the minds of children and lunatics and
Our Time , Their Time, No Time 61
the "primitive mind." This old evolutionist strat~ 1
...Q.Lar-
~ing fr_2.!!l_2n~og ~ny t~ ¡hylogegy (and oack)_is ot co 111 :se
cíassical example for 'methodological" abuses o( Tune:
Primitive thought illuminates the thought of Western chil-
~ ren because the two are equidistant from Western adult
ought. Both represent ear ly stages in a developmental se-
t uence. Lévi-Strauss is quick to denounce this as an insult
both, our children and primitive adults, and he calls on
'tbe ethnographer as a witness. He especially rejects onto-
~netic-phylogenetic arguments which wou]d make primi-
uve children even more infantile than our own: "Every
fieldworker who has had concrete experience of primitive
children will undoubtedly agree that the opposite is more
likely to be true and that in many regards the primitive child
appears far more mature and positive than a child in our
own society, and is to be compared more with a ávilized
adult." (1969:92)
Even more important than the specific context of this
remark is the strategy of invoking the fieldworker and his
"concrete experience" as an instance from which to judge
the claims of a temporalizing discourse. 'Cnfortunately, it
soon turns out that a critique of temporal distancing is by
no means central to his argument. Foremost in Lévi-Strauss'
mind is the role of fieldwork in distinguishing the anthro-
pologist from the fostonan (if being understood that for him
the latter is always the "culture historian" fascinated by cul-
ture traits and their spatial distribution ). He must, there-
fore, find a _Efilionª1
_e for fieldwork which not only ~se.rts
the ethnographer's subjective experience as the ulti[!late in-
S!_~ of anthropolggy but al ó _ciaims superi_or objectivity
for ..su.Q1..know1edge.Somehow there must be a way of show-
ing that one person's immersion in the concrete world of
another culture accomplishes the scientific feat of reducing
that concrete world to its most general and universal prin-
cipies. Living in the Time of the primitives, the ethnogra-
pher will be an ethnographer only if he outlives them, i.e.,
if he moves through the Time he may have shared with them
onto a level on which he finds anthropology:
Indeed, such is the way the ethnographer proceeds
when he goes into the field, for however scrupulous
62 Our Time, Their Time, No Time
and objective he may want to be, it is never himself,
nor is it the other person, whom he encounter s at
~e end of his investigation. By su perimposin g
h1mself on the other, he can at most claim ro extri-
cate what :\fau ss called facts of general functioning,
which he showed to be more universal and to have
more reality. (1976:8 f)
Such feats of transcendence as Lévi-Strauss expects from
the ethnographer turn out to be variously linked to the
achievement of "distance" conceived, notas a mere fact, but
as a methodologica J tool in a manner that reminds us of its
uses in relativist discourse. Much like American culturalism,
French structuralism manages to turn de nial of coevalne ss
into a positive too! of scientific knowledge. A few examp les
will show this.
Let us return, first, to Lévi-Strauss' critique of the "ar-
~haic illusion" in The Elementary Structures oJKinship. Draw-
mg parallels between \\ 7ester n children and prim1tives, he
argues, is an insult to ali involved except, as it turns out, to
the \Vestem adult mind (which is re sponsible for drawing
those paralJels in the first place). To our surprise, Western
th_ough~is in_the e~d acquitted ~f the crime of ideological
Tune d1stancmg which ontogenetJc-phylogenetic arguments
seem to perpetrate on the primitive. The reasoning is as
follows: We do have a valid point after all when we observe
that the primitives appear to think like (our ) children. Call-
in_gthe primitive childlike is to "generalize " him as someone
w1th whom we share a common transcultural basis. Analo-
gies betwe~n socialization into a culture and learnin g a lan-
guage supposedly demonstrate this.
Lévi-Strauss assumes (much like the American cultural
~elativists) that a culture takes shape and identity by select-
mg a few among a practically infinite number of possibilities
(as a language selects its significant sounds from an infinite
number of possible sounds). Such a view is not just meth-
odo logica1-proposing that culture is best descrihed taxo-
nomically-it is also onto logicaJ when it maintains that cul-
ture is created by selection and classification. It is a concept
of culture devoid of a theory of creativity or production,
because in a rad ically taxonomic frame it makes no sense to
raise the question of production. By extension, we never
Our T ime, Their Time, )llo Time 63
appreciate the primitive as a producer ; or, which is the same,
in comparing ourselves to the primitive we do not pro-
nounce judgment on what he thinks and does, we merely
classify ways how he thinks and acts. 21 \o\'hen Western man
calls the primitive childlike, this is fq_rthe structuralist not a
statement on the nature of primitive man. That particul ar
conceptualization of a re lationshiP-between ,...us and the
OTherJ !'1e are assured, is merel y taxonomic. Ali we do in
calling primitives infanti le is class perceived similarities: The
choices primitive societies have not yet made are anaJogous
to the choices children in our societies have not yet made
(see 1969:92 f ). ·
Lévi-Strauss' demonstration of taxonomic innocen ce
Jeaves us with questions that must be asked. Are we to ac-
cept his contention that in our own society relations be-
tween adults and children merely reflect different degr ees
of "extension" of knowledge? Are we to overlook that adult-
child r:elations are also, and sometimes primarily, fraught
with barely disguised actitudes of power and practices of
repres sion and abuse? Even worse, are we to forget that talk
about the childlike nature of the primitive has never been
jus t a neutral classificatory act, but a powerful rheto rical fig-
ure and motive, informing colonial pr actice in every aspect
from religious indoctrination to labor laws and the granting
of basic political rights? Is apartheid, one might ask, ten -
dentiou sly bue not without justific ation, only a classificatory
scheme? Aside from the evolutionist figure of the savage
there has been no conce ption more obviously implicated m
political and cultural oppression than that of the childlike
native . Moreover, what could be clearer evidence of tem-
poral distancing th an placing the Now of the primitive in
the Then of the Western adult?
My comment on these passages from The Elementary
Structures of Kinship was occasioned by Lévi-Strauss ' invoking
the fie1dworker as a witness against Time -distancing. What
became of that testimony in the course of a few pages of
structuraJist argument? With remarkable ease, fieldwork ex-
perience was neutralized by an overriding taxonomic con-
cern to just ify one of the more despicable devices of anthro-
pological and ·western political discourse.
So that it may not appear as if the only objection to
64 Our Time, Their Time, No Time
taxonomic subterfuge was a political one (although in the
end all objections are political, even those that are made on
"logical" $"rounds) let us take a look at another example.
Once agam the issue appears to be the role of fieldwork.
-:1\~icein his essay "History and Anthropology" Lévi-Strauss
1s unpelled to note the paradoxi ca l nature of their relation-
ship. Comrnenting on Boas' valuation of fieldwork he states:
Knowledge of social facts must be based on induc-
tion from individua li.zed and concrete knowledge of
social groups localized in time and space. Such spe-
cific knowledge, in turn, can be acquired only from
the history of each group. Yet such is the nature of
the subject-mauer of ethnographic studies that in
the vast majority of cases history líes beyond reach.
(1967:9)
Later on he sums up the struggle of anthropology with his-
tory in this paradoxical formula:
The criticism of evolutionist and difTusionist inter-
pretations showed us chac when the anthropologist
believes he is doing historicaJ research, he is doing
the opposice; it is when he chinks that he is not
doing historical research that he operates like a
good historian, who could be limited by the same
lack of documents. ( 1967: 16 f)
~o so~ve,,that paraaox one must first realize that t~e
h!SlQI.@n and the anthropologist a~ ~a lly conc~
dg~
one and the same problem: otherness (see 1967: 17). It is a
•secondary. matter ~at f~r the historian otherness normally
means rerno~eness m Trrne, whereas the anthropologist is
lconcerned w1th cultural difference as it appears in spatial
distance and distribution. The historian finds his sources of
knowledge in documents which he uses as best he can to
understand the actual, specific genesis of an institution or
society. The anthropologist relies on fieldwork instead of
h.ist?rical docu~ents which a~e lacking for mosc of the so-
oeues he stud1es. But there 1s more to fieldwork than its
bein~ a substitute for lacking documents. Nor is it adeq uate
to thmk of fieldwork as piecemeal induction: "forms of so-
cial existence cannot be apprehended simply from the out-
Our Time, Their Time, No Time 65
side-the investigator must be able to make a personal re-
construction of the synthesis characterizing them, he muse
not mere!y analyze their elernents, but app_rehend ~hem a~
a -whole m the form of a personal expenence--h1s own-
(1967:370 f).
So we are back to personal experience, and one begins
to wonder how the same scholar who shows such relentless
contempt for subjecti~1 it:}'.in his attacks on Sartre col!ld ~s-
sign epistemological s1gmficance to fieldwork as a su~Jecuve
activity. Our doubts are soon put to rest when we d1scover
that, once again, in affirming fieldwork, Lévi-Strauss gets
around the problem with Time. As expected, he posits that
the fieldworker 's personal, concrete encounter with another
culture is of a taxonomic nature. This is how the argument
runs: The researcher's task is to make the otherness of the
societies he studied available to his own as experience.He
achieves chis by enlarging "a specific experience to the di-
mension s of a more general one" ( 1967: 17). Most impor-
tant, a "transition from the conscious to unconscious is as-
sociated with progression from the specific to the general"
(ibid. 21). The fieldworker's experience, while personal and
concrete , is not subjective but objective, inasrnuch as he rea-
sons
on the basis of concepts which are vaJid not merely
for an honest and objective observer, but for ali
possible observers. Thus the anthropologist does
not simply set aside his own feelings; he creates new
mental categories and helps to introduce notions of
space and time, opposition and contradiction, which
are as foreign to traditional thought as the concepts
met with coday in certain branches of the natural
sciences. (1967:361)
The key to understanding this view of empirical objec-
tivity is its glorification of distance based on a denial o~ the
conditions of shared Time. The structuralist can conunue
to insist on the importance of concrete experience without
much of a problem because personal experience is in this
view nothing but the vehicle or medium for the epiphany
of che "general" and "unconscious." 22 Like rays focused by
66 Our Time, Their Time, No Time
a lens, like the spirit's voice speaking through the medíum,
~ective knowledge of the unconscious appears through the
f hnographer's (conscious) activicy, but ít is not a result of
Anthropological knowledge, like myth, thinks th~ anthro-
logist, not the ?tI:ier way round. He tak_es<;>nh1s.rol~ as
the priest and m1ss10nary of the transsubJecuve, sc1ent1fic,
speak taxonomic, structures that govern the universe.
The most disconcerting fact about such a view of field
research is that it leaves no instance for appeal or cr itique .
There may be bad anthropologists (as there are bad príests)
but , structural ism seems to hold, that does not affect the
role and validity of the discipline they celebrate. Being the
apprehension of the general and unconscious, anthropol-
ogy is once and forever removed from the lowly regions of
political struggle, from intellectual contestatio n, and from
outright abuse, in short, from the dialectic of repression and
revolt that makes up che real context in which it appeared
as an academi c discipline .
Still, as if unable to find acquiescence in the exorcism
of the subjective, concrete, and conscious, Lévi-Strauss ap-
pears to strugg le with a recalcitrant residue in his theory of
ethnographic objectivity. He is, after ali, not only a theore -
tician but also a practiúoner of anthropology as an ethnog -
rapher and teacher. He recognizes that fieldwork experi-
ence involves in many cases a conversion, an "inner
revolution that will really make [the ethnographer] into a
new man" (1967:371). But apparently he has no difficulty
at all in separating the effects of field experience from their
significance. The fact of personal conversion does not cause
him to· reconsider his epistemological stance. He takes the
easy way out, which is to insist on the social function of the
personal experience. With disarming frankness he qualifies
it as a kind of initiation whose function it is to admit adepts
to the discipline and to provide a selected few with legiti-
macy and a license to practice. In fact, he compares the eth-
nographers' field experience to training analysis among psy-
choanalysts and goes on to recommend "personal"
supervis ion in the training of the novice, suggesting that
close contact with someone who has had the experience be-
fore might expedite conversion in the apprentice.
Our Time, Their Time, No Time 67
The observation that notions such as conversion and
initiation smack of religio-mystical thought ~~ easily _m~de
but perhaps not quite so easily un~erstood.. ~n. ~omung
out these resemblances I have no ~nt~rest m JOmmg the
chorus of criúcs who claim to recogn1ze m that monu1!1en_tal
inkblot which is Lévi-~tra1:1 ss' oeuv_real~ost everr maJOTm-
tellectual movement m history (mcludmg gnos1s, the _Ka-
bala and similar esoteric pursuits). But there are senous
reas~ns for dwelling on his way of turning apparent ~mp~a-
sis on the personal into affirmations of the trans-subJecuve ,
the ritual and institutional: The researcherj_e<:,r~~nal _en-
counter , we ai::e told, is the obiective wor mg o_fsc1ence 1?e-
cáuse it is,E_Ositedas a sort of pure channel through which
ethnogra_phy_passes into ethnology and an~~pology. Closer
examination of the many statements Lév1-Strauss ma~es
about the nature of fieldwork reveals that the one nouon
which for him characterizes chis activity more than any other
is observation. He <loes not seem to have much use for the
qualifier partú:i,pant,customarily _att~che? to th~ term. ~ven
less does he consider commumcauve mteract1on , an idea
currently much discussed in theories of fieldwork: For Lévi-
Strauss the ethnographer is first and foremost a v1ewer (and
perhaps voyeur ). Observa~on conceived as the essence of
fieldwork implies, on ~he s1de of ~e ethn~~.apher, .ª con-
templative stance. lt mvokes th~ nat~rahst watchmg_ an
experiment. It also calls for a nauve ~oc,ety that ~ould, 1de-
ally at least, hold still like a tableau vrvant. Both unages are
ultimat ely linked up wit~ a vis~~ root metapho: ?~know!-
edge. In this, structurahsm reJoms the aesthettc1zmg at~-
tudes of the cultural relativists. In both movements , the 11-
lu sion o~ltaneity (as between the e~ements _of a picture
that - ís contemplated, or between che visua l_obJect and the
act of its contemplation) m_~}'.Je_adto u ter ~1sr~ga~d for -~e
active, productive nature of field-work and 1~_me.v1table~-
plia tiq_nin _his1orica]situations and real, polmcal c~mrad1c-
tions .
- Another strategy of escape from Time and history
common to both movements has been to declare the uncon-
scious the true object of anthropo logical researc~. But 1:0-
where are these convergences clearer and more dtrectly s1g-
68 Our Time, Their Time, No Time Our Time, Their Time, No Time 69

ni_ficamfor the pr~blem of Ti~e-distancing and the deniaJ tions of scientific r ationality. ~olitically, _Léví-Strauss' rise to
o~ coevalness than m the valuauon of cultural difference as rominence and the quanutauve exp los1on of anth ropo logy
4ista.nce.In the l'vlead-Métreaux volume this rema ined rather P
in the United States coincide with the period of "deco loni-
1mrlicit and vague; it is spelled out clearly by Lévi-Strauss : zaúon" i.e., the demise of direct colonization demandin g
~ocial anthropology "apprehends" its objects, i.e., semiolog- personal and d irect involvement in the oeuvre ciuílisatrice.
1cal facts as defined by de Saussure, "either in their most American ant.hropology and French structural ism, each
remo te manif estat ions or from t.he angle of the ir most gen- having developed ways to circumvent or preempt coeval-
eral expression" (1976:10). The point is, as could be shown ness, are potential and actual contributors to ideologies apt
from ?ther contexts? !hat the two are interchangeable. Dis- ro sustain the new, vast, anonymous, but terrib ly effective
~nce 1s ~e p_rereqms1te for generality as the study of prim- regimen of absentee colonialism. 24
mve sooety 1s the road toward uncovering the universal
structures of the human mind.
I~ is insofar as so-called primitive societies are far
d1stant from our own that we can grasp in them
those "facts of general functioning" of which Mauss
spoke, and which stand a chance of being "more
unive~sal" a~d having "more rea lity." ... This ob-
servauon ~h1c~ has the privilege of being distant,
no doubt 1mphes sorne differences of nature be-
tween these societies and our own. Ascronomy not
onJy demands that celestial bodies be far away but
also that the pas.sage of time have a different
rh ythm there , othenvise the earth would have
ceased to exist long before astronomy was born.
(1976:28)
. State~ents like this leave little room for specu lation.
D1stance m space and time and, in fact, a different Time
are made the prerequi~ites not o~ly for cert~ ways of doing
anthropology but for 1ts verv ex1stence. With that the tem-
por~ is finally and totally removed to the level' of meta-
ph ys1cal presuppositions; it no longer can be a problem in
the exerase_ of anthropology as a "science."
The pams taken by structuralísm to remove Time and
~e problem of coevaJness from anthropological praxis and
discou~e shou ld _of course be ev~luated histor ically; its al-
lochromc escape 1s a response to 1ts own social and political
contex_t. ~ª:
from expressing the coming-to-rest of a trou-
ble? d1sciplme on a solid scientific basis andan unassailab le
log¡c, s~ructu~alism indi~ates (by virtue of opposition) that
somet hmg m1ght be bas1cally wrong with , vestern concep-
Chapter Three / Time
and Writing About the Other
Evenif [an observer] is in cammunicationwith other ob-
servers, he can only hear what theyhave seen in their <ib-
sohltepasts , at timeswhich are a/so his absolutepast. So
whelher/mQWledgeoriginates in the experieme ofa group
<!fpeople or ofa societ:y,it must always be basedon what is
pa.stand gone, at the mcment when it is under considera-
titm.
David Boltm 1
La raison du plus f Mt est toujours fa meiUet,re:Nous l'al-
km.smont,·erwut a l'heure.
La F rmtaine 2

SO FAR, EXAMPLES of tempo ral distancing between tbe

subject and the object of antbropology were invoked to sup-
port the argument that the temporal conditions experi-
enced in fieldwork and tho se expre ssed in writin g (and
teaching) usually contradict each other. Produ ctive empiri-
cal research , we hold, is possible only when researche r and
researched share T ime. Only as communicative praxis does
ethno graph y carr y the prom ise of yielding new knowledge
about another culture. Yet the discourse that pret ends to
interpret, analyze, and communicate ethnographic knowl-
edge to the researcher' s society is pr onounced from a "dis-
tance," that is, from a position which denies coevalness to
the object of inquiry . Is this contrad iction real or only ap-
par ent? To make sure that we are not losing our time with
~ false problem we must name the cond itions under which,
1n our under standing of the term, a real contradiction arises.
72 Time and Writing About the Other
Contradict:ion:
Real or Appa.rent
First, the two activites under examination--field research
and the communication of findings in writing and teach-
in~-must in fact be part of a discipline claiming a unified
ex1stence. This was certainly not always the case. After all,
travelogues and armchair syntheses coexisted side by side
during most of the early history of anthropology without
being practically united in the same person or institution.: 1
Even today the degree to which empirical research is em-
phasized over theoretical and synthetic work varíes from
country to country and from practitioner to practitioner. But
wherever anthropology presently is recogn ized as an aca-
demic discipline (albelt often under differem names, or in
conjunction with qualifiers indicating specialization within
the field) its representatives insist on the necessity of both
empirical research and theoretical interpretation of sorne
sort. 4
Second, for a contradiction to arise between two activi-
ties there must be an issue, a problem with regard to which
comradictory attitudes or effects can be identified . We found
such an issue in the contradictory uses of Time. But there
remains a question that will need much further thought and
clarification. It could be argued that to accept shared Time
in personal fieldwork is a matter of convenience, something
that goes with the prevalent lore of our discipline. Denying
coevalness need not affect in principie the production of
ethnographic knowledge. Or one might posit that because
prose n3!1"ativeis the literary genre of most anthropological
writing, devices of temporal sequencing and distancing are
simp ly inevitable aspects of literary expression.
If the first objection holds, our contention that there is
a contradictory, indeed schizoid and often hypocritical prac-
tice in need of careful analysis and critique would be seri-
ously weakened. Many anthropologists insist that there is
nothing to the mystique of fieldwork. Ali it <loes,and it mat-
ters little how, is to produce data. Data may be used, se-
lected, and manipulated to verify the theories formulated in
anthropo logical discourse in any shape and rnanner the
theoretician sees fit. The conditions under which data were
Time and Writing About the Other 73
obtained, as long as certain basic rules were followed, nei-
ther validate nor invalidate theories. V alidity rests on logical
criteria of consistency, parsimony, elegan ce, and so forth.
In fact, to be at all admissible as evidence, data are required
by sorne canons of scientific inquiry (those that rule quanti -
cative approaches and certain structural methods) to come
in bits and pieces, pref erably selected at random and
deansed from possible contamination by lived experience
and the personal bias such experience might introduce. Such
a view of social scientifi.cinquiry could not possibly admit a
contradiction between the temporal conditions of research
andwriting . The only thing that could contradice the prop-
ositions formulated in writing would be contrary evidence.
Such coumerevidence, however, would not in principle be
differen t from evidence supporting the explanations that
would have to be dismissed. lt, too, results from the manip-
ulation of data, not from contradictions between insights
gained in lived experience and those reached by the opera-
tions of a method. lf coevalness were recognized by the pos-
itivist, he would presumably relegare the problem to psy-
chology or philosophy.
Communicative and dialogic alternatives to positivist and
empiricist ethnography have been widely discussed in re-
cent years. 5 Here I want to concentrate on the argument
rhat the idea of a contradiction between research and writ-
ing might raise a spurious problem. Could it be that tem-
poral distancin g and denial of coevalness are not faults, but
conditions of possibility of anthropological discourse? An-
rhropologi sts, like other scientists, are expected to produce
a discourse of facts and not of fiction. The factum is that
~hich was made or done, something that inevitably is "past"
~n relation to the acts of recording, interpreting, and writ-
mg. In view of its obligations to facticity, how could there be
any daims on anthropo logícal discourse to heed the de-
~and s of coevalness qua copresence of talk and of that which
1s talked about?
Because these questions bear on the theory of liter ary
production in general they may lead us into an area too vast
to be adequately covered in these essays. Yet if we continue
to identify (and denounce) denial of coevalness in anthro-
74 Time and Writing About the Other
pological di~ours_e we must at sorne P?int ask ~ow such de-
nial can be 1denafied on the level of texts. Vve should be
able to adduce semantic, syntactic, and stylistic examples of
allochronism. As will be seen presently, it is not difficult to
point out the work~ngs of such. devic~s here and there.
However, to do this m a systemattc fash1on one \~•ouldhave
to submit the oeuvre of a number of representat ave anthro-
pologists to linguistic and lit_erary an_alysis,°: _task of v~st
proportions and one for whach no smg le cnt1c can cla1m
adequate competence. We must set~e here for something
more modest and more general. I w1ll first ask to what e~-
tent anthropological discourse act~all~ re~ts º!1 temporah-
zation and whether such temparahzatmn _mev1tablyresult s
in temporal distancing. Followmg that, I will t~e upa ~or e
specific problem, namely, the inherently autob1ogra~h1c na-
ture of much anthropological writing. Finally, I wil! once
more confront the claims of "taxonomic" discourse w1th re-
spect to temporalization. . . . . .
T emporalization , being an obJect of m~mry m these es-
says, cannot be .defined axiomati~y at the outset. In_my
understanding, 1t connotes an acuv1ty, ~ co_mplex praxis of
encoding Time. Linguistically, temporahza!1on refe~s to the
various means a language has to express tnne relauons. ~e-
miotically, it designates the constitution of sig_nr~lations w1th
temporal referents. Ideologically, temporahzauon has ~he
effect of putting an object of discourse into a cosmolog1cal
frame such that the temporal relation becomes central and
topical (e.g., over and against spatial relations). Finally, t_en:i-
poralizing, like other instances of speech, may be a de1ct1C
functiori. In that case a temporal "reference" may not be
identifiable except in the intention and circumstances of a
speech-act.
Temporalizatian:iWeansor End?
A rapid review of the most common temporal operators in
anthropological prose could follow custo~ary (but some-
what questionable) distinctions between lex1cal, (morpho- )
syntactic, and stylistic levels of discourse. On the leve) of the
Time and Writing About the Other 75
· on anthropolooical language is of course crmvded v-:ith
Iex1c ' • .o-
ressions which m one way or an<;> th er signa
· 1 conceptua l-
~"~on of Time and temporal relat 1ons (such as sequence,
ruration , interval or period, origins, and development). '"Te
aJready commented on sorne of these .terms, ..as well ª~,~n
the fact that a term ~eed ~ot ~ mam~estly t~mpor~ in
order to serve as a T1me-dLstancmg dev1ce. In fac~, expres-
·ons that have a clear temporal referent (a date, a ume span,
!~ indication of past, present, or futurC?) ~re probably less
· portant, quantitatively as well as quahtattvely, than tho~e
:iose temporalizing function derives from t~e ~ontext !º
which they are used. Wi~h r_egard to our spec1al mterest m
thecritique of allochromc _d1scourse we would h~ve to con-
centrate, in semiological parlance, on connotauon ra~er
than denotation . The Time-di stancinf;{.effect may , _for m-
stance, be achieved by the moral-pohtical connotauons of
ostensibly pure temporal terms, or by the temporal conno-
tations of "strictly technical, " classificatory ~erms. .
Take a word like savagery. As a techmcal term m evo-
lutionarv discourse it denotes a stage in a developmental
sequencé. But no degree of nominalist tec~?icality can p~rge
the term of its mora l, aesthetic, and pol.1t1calco~notallon~.
Cumulatively , these result ir:1a semantl~ f\1nc~1onthat 1s
everything but purely tec_hmcal. As an 11:id1cauonof r~la-
tionship between the subJect and the obJect of ~nthr~po-
logical discourse, it clearly expresses t~mporal d1sta~cmtr
Savage-ryis a marker of the pa~t, and 1f ethnographK ev1-
dence compels the amhropolog1st to state that savagery ~x-
ists in contemporary societies th~n it wiJI?e loc~ted: by dmt
of sorne sort of horizontal strat1graphy, m the1r Time, not
ours.
Kinship, on the surface one o~ the most i_nnocent de-
scriptive terms one could imagine, IS fra~ght ,~r~th tem,ro~I
connot ations. From the early debates on class16catory km-
ship systems to current studies of its continued importance
in Western society, kinship connoted "primoridal" ties and
origins, hence the special strength, persistence, and me~-
ing attributed to this type of social relation. Views of km-
ship relations can easily serve to measure_ degrees of ~d-
vancement or modemization. By comparmg the relat1ve
 76 Time and Writing About the Other
importance of kinship bonds in different societies or group s
one can construct developmental, i.e., temporal scales. In
this context of connotaúve, symbolic funct ion one would also
have to examine Lhe use of metap hors and other tropes! ;
Lévi-Strauss' distinction between hot and cold societies be-
longs here (see 1966:232 f) as do observations such as the
one where he aligns the synchronic with the diurna! and the
diachronic with che nocturna l (see 1968: 156).
\.Ye need not go into furt her deta il to make che point
that counts: An examination of thc temporal lexicon inev-
itably leads critica! analysis beyond the lexicon, to higher
le,els of discourse and LO wider contexts. In the words of
Roland Barlhes: "As for the signified of connotation, its
character is al once general , global and diffuse; it is, if you
like, a fragment of ideology" (1970:91).
One would come to similar conclusions if one were to
examine the syntactic means by ·which anthropological dis-
course signifies temporal a~pects and relat ions. Verbal and
adverbial temporal markers abound in ethnographic ac-
counts and theoretical syntheses. As we shall see, studies of
the use of tense soon cÓnverge on such conventions as the
"ethnograph ic presem" which, althoug h achieved by syntac-
tic means, is evidently used to stylist:icends. In other words,
the "meaning'' of the ethnographic present cannot be ascer-
tained simply from the ways in which the present tense ex-
presses concept ions of Time and temporal relations through
the construction of sentences. Ralher, it must be derived
from the intent ions and funct iom of a total discourse of
which sentences are parts. In sum, a critique of allochroni c
discourse needs to be carried out from top to bottom, so to
speak, although it may involve constant checks and reAec-
cions in the other d irect:ion.
There is, for instance, one kind of anthropological dis-
course which understands itseJf as historical. Unless one re-
jects the legitimacy of such an understanding, it would seem
that, in ali fairness, one cannot hold the use of temporal
devices against it..T hat sorne or ali of Lhese devices not only
indicale , refer to, or measu re Time, bul also signify tem -
poral distance between the writer and the object, would then
\ be a problem interna! to che product ion of anthropo logical
Time and Wr iting About the Other 77
discourse and would have no bearing on relationships be-
tween anthropologists and their "informancs·• as mora l and
1
palitical agents.
· Such a view would have to be taken if one chooses to
approa0 a given social-sciemific discourse as a self-con-
taineds1gn system. In that case, tempo ralization would have
to be evaluated strictly with respec t to its semiotic function. 7
One assumes that temporal signs, like all signs , are consti-
tu~ as signifi~rs_and signifieds, keeping in mind that ac-
cordmg to sem10uc theory the referent (or obj ect) of a dis-
course is part of a sign rela tion; it is constituted, so to speak,
inside the discourse. Expressions and concent are but two
aspects of one and the same semiotic system (or sem iotic
process, depending on which aspect one wishes to stress).
Above ali, the semioticians tell us, one must avoid confusing
"<:<>n
tent" with the rea l world. According ly, anthropo logical
d1SC ours~ about the "primit ive" or "savage" is not about
peoples m a real world, at least not directly. First and im-
mediately, it is about the primitive as interna! referent of a
~ ourse or a~ a ~entificaJly constituted object of a disci-
pline. T he aruculaaon of such a semiotic system with the
real world (with its "externa! refere nt ") is a different matte r
altogether.
. W~ will ask later whether such a position is tenab le. At
!h•s püIT.lt I want to follow the semiotic view and purs ue its
unpltcat1ons for the problem of temporaliza tion. In his es-
say _about scientific d iscourse in the social sciences, A. J.
Greuna_s~on~rasts hi~~orical d iscour~ with an "ideo logical
humam sac d1scourse. The Jatter proJects its referem on an
"a-tempor al rnythical plane of eter nal prese nce" (1976:29).
Anthr ~pology, we may ex trapolate, differs from such an
achromc humanism in that its discourse r efers to, speaks
~bo~t , hu man cultu re an~ society as it exists and develops
~nTim e (and space). In th1s sense all anth ropo logy is histor-
IC~ (but not to be confused with the discourse of a disci-
pline called history). Greimas goes on to state:
Now, h_i~ tor ic~I disco_u rse introduces two new pre-
suppos~u_ons1_nthat 1t, first, replaces the concepl of
r~mat} w1th that of temporality . At the same
élf=h
time tt assumes that the sign ifier of the text which is
78 Time and Writing About the Other
in the present has a signified in the past. !hen it
re ifies its signified sema ntically and takes 1t for a re-
ferent external to the discourse. ( 1976:29) ·
In other words, temporalization is .not an. incidental
property of historical dis~o1;1rse_;te1~por:alityc~nsutu~es _such
a semiotic system by providmg 1ts s1gmfiers w1th a s1gn1~ed.
According to Greimas, this works "tJ:irough t~e mec~am sm
of temporaluncoupling, which mechan~sm ~ons1sts?f sttpulat-
ing present statements (énoncés)as bemg s1tuated 1_nth~ past,
thus creating a temporaliUusúm. In its turn, the re1f:katton of
the signified is recognized as a procedure producmg the re-
ferential illusion (ibid.)." . Taxonomy purifies historical discourse from its illusionary uses
In this sense, Time is used to create an obJect. The con-
seguence _of that "positivis! illusio~" is a na1ve realism ex-
p~ssing. the unfounded claim that the !~emes and p]lra ses
of historical texts really represent the obJects of ~he worl?
and thejr interrelationships." Furthermore, because of th1s
sortof realism the positivist illusion leads to relativism: "The
best historical discourse which has as its 'ref erent' a given
society can, through the lex icological interpretation of its
sources, only reproduce the 'categorizations of the ~orld '
proper to that society as they manifest themselves m the
way the society covers its universe with lexemes" (1976:30). 8
Once again, and in an unsuspected context, we find th_at
relativism in anthropological discourse and_ t~m_poral dt~-
tañcing are internally connected. Moreover, 1t 1s now poss1-
ble toread that connection in both directions: H!§..t.Q~-
course (of the positivist variety) is incapa?le. of giving_~ore
than relativistic reproductions of the soaet1es and sultures
that are its referents. Conversely, relativistic discourse (such
as structuralism-functionalism or American cu]turalism, or ,
for that matter, remote descendants such as "ethnoscience")
can always be expected to rest, epistemolo~cally, o~ ter:i-
poralizations, even if it professes a lack of mterest m h1s-
tory .How can temporal, pos1t1v1st
. . . I·11 . b e sh attere d;i. I n-
us1ons
terestingly enough, Greimas proposes that this can only _be
achieved by anthropology (see 1976:30). To understand h1m
Time and Writing About the Other 79
ne has to realize that his "anthropo logical discourse " is
~entical to French structuralist anthropology. He can
therefore postulate that
only a structural comparat ive method (cmnparatisme)
is capable of giving historical science a taxonomic
,nodelof human societies or, which comes to the
same of providing the methodo logical tools for a
taXO~omicenterprise ffaire taxinomique)which his-
wry could employ to const ruc t its semiotic objects,
after which it would be free Lore legate them to the
past.(1976:30)
A truly elegant solution (one that echoes Lévi-Strauss'):
of Time. But is the "ideolo~al machine" (Greimas 1976:31)
of histor ical discourse as srmple as that? What, ap~t fr?m
the taxonomic satisfaction of having classed away histoncal
discourse, is accomplished b) 1 showing that tempor~izing is
a form of signif ying? Gr~imas himself insists that s1~n rela-
tionships should be cons1dered as processes and actton, not
only as systems. Even a strictly "linguistic" approach to so-
cial scientific discourse cannot ignore its subject, the "p ro-
ducer of discourse," a notion which would seem to anchor
a discour se in the rea l world (even if its referent is merely
semiotic). I am not sure, however, that production means to
Greimas more than an "ensemble of mechanisms by which
language is made into discourse" (1976 : 11). In that case, his
"producer" would be but a concept strictly within the system
of sign relations, a mere auxiliary notion permitting to speak
of process even if the system "proceeds" nowhere in the real
world. Be itas it may, to me producti~n sign~ls the necessiry,·
to go beyond the confines of estabhshed s1gn systems; 1t
evokes the labor invo]ved in creating knowledge and the
elements of a discourse capable of conveying knowledge.
From that perspective, semiotic analysis of temporalization
~n do little more than prepare the ground for a critique of
1ts epistemological and political implications. 9
 Time and Writing About the Other
80
Time and Tense: The Ethnographic Present
In conversatio ns about the planning of this book, the "eth -
nographic present" ~as often broug~t up ~san examp le fo1:
the uses of Time m anthropological d1scourse. T? my
know ledge, there <loes _not exi~t a well-docume_nted h1story
of this literary conve nuon . If 1t were to be v..T1tten, such a
study would pro bably retrace the u se of the present t? the
very first instances of ethnography. He rodotus gave h1s ac-
counts of strange peop les in the present tense . In recent
times, however, anthropologists appear to have ~en trou-
bled by this venerable tradit:ion.10 The ethnograph1c presenl
certainly should be an issue of debate as soon as t~ ac~ of
writi.ng ethnography is perceived to h~ve temporal unphc a-
tions. Yet neither the exact problem w1th the use of the pre-
sent tense in ethnographic accounts nor its bearing on tem -
poralization are easy to de~e .. <?ne need~ to take .ª
considerable detour through lmguisucs and ep tstemology tf
one wants to get a grip on the proble:11· . by the time their ethnography is published; rather the charge
In simple terms, the ethnograph1c present ~s ~~Nª,C -
tice of_giying accounts of other cultures and s~oeues m_!he
Er~nt tense. A custom, a ritual, even an enure system of
exchange or a world view_are thus predicated on a group
or tribe, or whatever umt the ethnographer. happens _to
choose. Intradisc iplinary critique of that pracuce _may a1m
at two implications, one_log ic~,. the other onto l~gical, both
bearing on the referenua l vahd1ty of statements m the pre-
sent tense .
In che sentence 'The X are matrilineal,' the present tense
copu la are (especially if taken in conjunction wi~h the defi-
nite article the) may give rise to doubts concernmg the s~-
tistical valid ity of the assertion. To be sure, the present 1s
the proper tense in which to re~rt the res:ult_sof counts ~r
the value of correlations. But ·w1thout quahfymg or quant1-
fying modifiers ("most X," or "70_ percent o~ ali X ques-
tioned"), the present undu ly ma~rnfies the cla1m of ª.~~te-
ment to general vali~ity. _In pnnciple, the sam~ cnt1c1sm
could of course be ratsed 1f the statement were m the past
tense ("The X were matrilineal"). But in t_h3:tform ~t ap-
pears less offensive to empirically or statist1cally mmded
Time and Writing About the Other 81
readers because the stated fact would no longer be subject
to d~rect _verification or falsification. lt now P<?sesa problem
of htstoncal accuracy and would have to be Judged by cri-
teria which by their nature are indirect. Historica l accuracv
is a matter of the "critique of sources." Furthermore, h isto~-
ical accuracy no longer is a strictly referential criterion. It is
a quality of metastatements about statements and accounts.
Certa inly, these few remarks hard ly scratch the surface of
the logical problems of historica l inquiry; but they may he lp
us understand why the present tense in ethnographic ac-
(X)Unts is troubling in ways in which the past tense is not.
Another t}pe of objection to the use of the ethno-
graphic present may identify itself as historicalbut in fact it
reprimands the ethnogr<1pher for ontological reasons. In that
case, the statement "the X are matrilineal" is taken to imply
a static view of society, one that is unattentive to the fact
that all cultures are constantly changing. What is objected
to is not so much that the X may no Jonger be matrilineal
is one of projecting a categorical view on their society. At
the very least, say these critics, the present tense "freezes" a
society at the time of observation; at worst, it contains as-
sumptions about the repetitiveness, predictability, and con-
servatism of primitives. .
. Both obJe~tio~s, logicaJ-stat:istical and ontological, are
eastly met by d1sclaimers. The ethnographic present may be
declared a mere literary device, used to avoid the awkward-
ness of the past tense and of constant doubling up in the
form of numeric or temporal qualifiers; that sort of prob-
lem can be dealt \\ith once and for ali in a methodological
appendix. In this way, intradiscip linary critique of the eth-
nographic present quickly comp letes a full circle: something
bothers us about a literary practice and we alleviate our
doubts by finding out that it is •~ust" a literary practice.
T~at will not do for the critique of one of the most
pervas1ve characteristics of anthropological discourse. As we
turn to linguistics for illumination we find that matters are
much i:nore c~mplicated and also more interesting. In the
precedmg sections on temporalization in social-scientific dis-
course we carne to an important conclusion: Relations be-
82 Time and Writing About the Other
tween a given type of temporal discourse and its referen t as
well as relations between specific temporal operators and
their signifieds are seldom, if ever, plainly referential. Wha t
temporalizing ctiscourse and temporal devices have to say
about Time and temporal relations must almost always be
ascertained in a context that is v.ider, and on a level that is
higher than the one in which uses of Time can first be iden-
tified. The term primiti.ve,for instance, is not (only) tempor -
alizing qua lexical ítem. It is the key term of a tempora lizing
discourse. 11
If the devices of temporaJizing discourse have little ref-
erencial value-i.e., say littJe or nothing about real Time or
real temporal relations--this may appear to weaken the case
against allochronism in anthropology. Allochronic expres-
sions might "for ali practica) purposes" be neglected; pra~ti-
cal being what anthropology "really'' <loes by way of mamp-
ulating concepts of Time in setting up relations between Us
and Them. The contrary is the case. If any, there is an in-
verse relationship between referential function and practi -
ca) importance. Toe power of language to guide practical-
political action seems to increase as its referential function
decreases.
Does this also hold true for che use of tense? Following
a ground-breaking essay by E. Benveniste (1971 [1956]:205-
222) anda thorough study by H. \ \leinrich (1973[ 1964]) we
1
may retain the se cruc ial findings before we focu s again on
the problem of the ethnographic present: Ne ither semanti-
cally (regarding their conceptual "coment") nor syntactically
(regard ing their function in scructur íng utterances) can
temporal verb forms be adequately understood . Linguisti c
anaJysis must concentrare on their role in constituting com-
municative situations whose objectified [>roducts are tex ts,
not words or sentences (see Wein r ich 1913:25 f). Temporal
forros are one of the ways in which a speaker (writer) com-
municates with a hearer (reader); they are signals ex-
changed between the participants in comp lex sítuations and
"it would be wrong to reduce [temporal forms] to simple in-
formations about Time" ("\leinrich 1973:60).
If we examine occurrence of temporal forms in given
texts we discover that certain among them are infrequent
Time and Writing About the Other 83
(e.g., dates, adverbial expre sions) while others occur at a
rate of about one per line of written text. The latter are the
verb forms. Exactly what kind of verb form is used varíes to
sorne extent from language to language but in the texts of
any langu age one may expect that the distribution of tem-
roraJ verb forms--tense-is not random. Ben veniste writ-
ing only, and Weinri ch maínly, about the French verb found
rhat certain tenses tend to be associated with each other,
forming "groups," and these gro ups appear to correspond
to two fundamental categories of spea king/writing: dis-
course vs. history (Benveniste), or commenta r y vs. story
(Weinrich). Dominance of a certain tense in a text signals
directl y the "locucionary attitude" (or the rhetori cal intent)
of the speaker/author.Tense only ha s índirect reference to
Time in the "re al world" ou~ide the communicative sítua-
cion of the text. Hence, to -wTiteethno~raphy in the present
tense despite the fact that it is descnptive of experiences
and observations that líe in the author 's past, would be in-
different because tense does not locace the content of an
account in Time. Ali the same, the present tense <loes signaJ
the ~Hiter·~ intent (al least in French and related languages )
to g1ve a discourseor commentaryon the world. Ethnographic
~ccounts in the pase tense would prima facie situate a text
m the category of hi.storyor slory, indicating perhaps a hu-
m~nistic rather than scientific intent on the part of the
wnter: That, however, is not a satisfying solution. lt cou ld
be _eas1lyshown tha~ anthropologists of a scíentific bent may
Wnte ethnography m the past tense while others who pro-
fess a humanistic-hístorical orientation mav write in the
present. '
_ .There remains ambiguity even if one accepts the basic
dIStmctions of locutionary attitude discovered by Benvenist.e
and Weinrich because-as the se authors point out-tem-
poral verb forms are verb forms. Their temporal signifi-
c_ancemust not be separated from other tvpes of informa-
tion carr ied by, or associated with, verb forr~s. such as person.
The occurrence of pronouns and person markers is as obsti-
r:ate, a term ·weinrich bonows from music (ostinato)to des-
ignare both frequency and repetitiveness, as that of verb
forms. Person and pronouns may have important temporal
84 Time and \'\'riting About the Other
functions. Ideally and typically, the first person singular J
should co-occur with tenses marking the genre dis-
course /commentary, e.g., the present. This would reflect the
locut ionary attitude or communicative situation where a
speaker cÓnveys directly and purposefully to a listener what
he believes to be the case or what h e can reportas a fact. In
contrast to this, history /story would be
the mode of un era nce that excludes every "autobio-
graphical" linguistic form . The histor ian will never
say je or tu or maintenant, beca use he will never
ma ke use of the formal apparatu s of discourse [or
"comme ntar y,"] which resides prim arily in the rela-
tionship of the persons je:tu. Hence we shaJl find
only the forms of the "third person" in a historical
narra ti ve strictly followed. (Benveniste 1971: 206 f)
Xow if this is so, a good <leal of anthro pological discours e
confronts us ""ith a para dox in the forrn of an anomalou s
association of the pre sent tense and the third person: "the y
are (do , h ave, etc.)" is the obstinate form of ethnograph ic
accounts.
There are at least tw-o ways to explain such co-occur-
ren ce. One is to probe more deeply into the significance of
verb person and pronouns ; the other is to trace the locu-
tion ary function of the present tense in ethnographic ac-
coun ts beyond the confines of its immediate communicativ e
situa tion, reveal ing its roots in cert ain fundamental assump -
tions regarding the nature of k.nowledge.
For the first argument we draw again on Benvenist e's
observations contained in his essays on relations of person
in the verb and on subjectivity in language. Philosophicall y,
his findings are not new but they are of special imerest be-
cause they are derived from lingui stic ana lyses of the ways
of speaking (and writing) rathe r than frorn abstrnct specu -
lation . Keep in mind that our problem is to understand the
obstínate use of the third person in a genr e which, by the
dom inanc e of the present tense, is clearly mar ked as dis-
course /commentary pronounced by an / , first person sin-
gular. As it turns out , the problem may not be one of con-
tradiction but of confusion . Toe fundamental communicative
Time and Writing About the Other 85
sit~º Jl - which - ~c?ID-p~sses the genres of dis-
co~se /comme nta,ry 1s dtalogical:_An / addres ses (re ports to)
I~ Bu t onl y the ?rst and second persons are aistin-
pIShed along the axis of personness. The grammarian 's
"third pe~s<?n" is _oppose~ to the first and second person as
\ nonp aruc~p~nt m the dialogue. The "'third person ' is not
a
a 'person '; 1t 1s rea lly the verbal form whose function is to
expres s the non-person"(Benveniste 1971: 198). The connec-
tion _between the fu~t ~vo _and the third persons is a "cor-
relauon of personahty. First and second person are in a
"correlation of subjectivity'' ( 1971:201 f):
What díffe rentia tes "I" from "you" is first of ali the
factof beíng, in the case of "I ; · interna! to the state-
ment and externa ! to "you"; but external in a man-
ner that does not supp ress the human real ity of
dialogue. ... One could thus define "vou" as the
1t0n-subjective person, in contrast to the '.subjective
person tha t 'T ' represents; and these two "perso ns"
are toge ther opposed Lo the "non-pe rson" form
(=he). (1971:201)
Then ';;'~at <loes the o~stinate use of the nonperson "third
person m et hnograJ?hlC ~ccounts whose present tense sig-
nals that the y ar~ d1alog1cal t~ll us about the relationship
between the subJect and obJect of anthropological dis-
course ? If we go along with Benveni ste we must conclude
that th~ use of the third person marks anthropological dis-
course m terrn s of the "correlation of personality" (person
vs. nonperson) . The ethnographer doe s not addres s a you
except , presumab lv, in the situation of fieldwork when he
as~ question s or 'othernise participates in the life of his
subJects. H e need not expli~itly address his ethnographic ac-
count _to a you becau_se, as 11sco:1rs~/co~mentary it is alread y
suffic1ently placed m a d1alog1c s1tuat1on; ethnography ad-
dresse s a reader . !he dialo~ic ~ther (second person, the
other anthropolog 1st, the sc1enufic community) is marked
by the present tense; prorwu~ and verbforms in the third per-
son mark an Other m:,tsulethe d~gu e. He (or she or it) is not
s~oken to but pos1ted (pred1cated ) as that which contrasts
wuh the personne ss of the participants in the dialogue.
86 Time and Writing AbouL che Other
"Removal from che dialogic situation" is, in ID} ' view,
another ·way to describe denial of coevalness, a conclusion
which, however, cou ld not be drawn if we were to follow
Benveniste's linguistic theory of subjectivity to the end. T o
declare, as he <loes, that the dialogic situation is a mere
pragmatic consequence of certain fundamental linguistic
oppositions (see 1971:224, 225) amounts to making both the
participants and the events of communication epiphenom-
enal to language; personal consciousness and social prax is
are reduced to linguistic phenomena. I agree with Benve -
niste when he rejects t.he notion that language is only an
instrument (see 1971 :223 f) but I cannot go along with his
blatant idealism, which would have us conclude that the op-
position of Self and Other and the preference for a certain
tense in anthropological discourse are but general facts of
1 language. On the contrary, these facts of language are bul
1 special instances in which self-assertion, imposition, subju -
gation and other forrns of human alienation manifest them -
1 selves. Because Benveni ste (with de Saussure) is convinced
of che "immaterial nature" of langu age (I 971 :224) he is in-
capable of relating a certain discursive practice to political
1praxis. His (and Weinri ch's) det.ailed and ingenious analyses
of the workings of tense and person const.antly rebound
from the inner walls of language qua system (or of speakin g
qua locutionary situation).
Much as we can learn from linguistics about the intri-
cate workings of tense, in the end we must leave the con-
fines of linguistic analysis, especially if we cake language se-
riously .· The ethnographic present represents a choice of
expression which is determined by an epistemological posi-
tion and cannot be derived from, or explained by, linguistic
rules alone. Anticipating an argument to be developed in
the next chapter, the following hypothesis may be ad-
vanced: The use of che present tense in anthropological dis-
course not only marks a literary genre (ethrUJgraphy) through
the locutionary attitude of discourse /commentary; it also re-
veals a specific cognitive stance toward its object, the monde
commenté(Weinrich). It presupposes the givenness of the ob-
ject of anthropology as something to be obserued.The present
tense is a signa! identifyinga discaurseasan observer'slangu.age.
Time and Writing About the Other 87
Such a language provides glosses on the world as seen. It
~epicts ~d ~e-_presents~other culture; it is its re-produc-
uon by lmgu1suc (s}'lllbohc) means. AU chis corresponds to a
theory of knowledge construed around a visual root met.a-
pho~.. Historicall)', anchropo logy has been linked up with t.he
trad1tLonof "natura l history," with its echos of deta ched ob-
servation and its fervor to make visible the hidden relations
between things. It is in that direction that we will have to
pro~ fur!-11er.To r~monstrate that the ethnographic pres-
ent 1s an mappr?pn~t~ temf><:>ral form is beside the point.
We accept the lmgu1st s verd1ct that tense in itself has no
temporal .ref~r~nce. \-Vhat muse be critically investigated is
the _pecuhar mc~dence of atemporal modes of expression in
a d1~cou_rse wh1ch, on the whole, is clearly temporalizing.
Puttmg _1t bluntly, we must attempt to discover the deeper
conn~uons b~t\,t,, ·een_ a certain type of political cosmology
(defir:nng relatJo~ w1th the Other in temporal terms ) and a
certam type of ep1stemology (conceiving of knowledge as the
reproduction of an observed world ).
In My Time: Ethnographyand the AutolnographicPast
Anthropo1ogical discourse often exhibits (or hides , which is
the ~ame) con_flictbetwe~n theoretical-methodological con-
vent1~:ms_and_h':'edexrenence. Anthropologica1 writing may,
~ ~ent1fic; 1t IS. ~so mheren~y autobiographic. This is not,
hm1ted to_the tnv1al obse:vauon that ethnographic reports
are somet~es cluttered_ w1th anecdotes, personal asides, and
oth~r dev1ces apt to enhven an otherwise dull prose. In fact,
U~td recently anthropologists were anxious to keep auto-
b1o~aphy separate from scientific ¼Titing. The strictures of
pos1uv~sm_acc~:mntfor this, although they may have been
oper~tmg •~d1r~tly. _Soi:nehow the discipline "remembers",
that ll acqu1red 1tssc1enufic and academic status by climbing ,
on the sh_oulders of a~venturers and using their travel- ,
ogues, wh1~h for_centunes had been che appropriate liter-,
ary genre m _wh1cht? report knowledge of the Other . In .
many ways th1s collecuve memory of a scientifically doubtful
past acts as a trauma , blocking serious reflection on the epis-
88 Time and Writing About the Other
temologic al significance of lived experien ce and its autobio -
graphi c expre ssions. How would such reAection have to
proceed?
Once more we begin ½'Íth the supposition that anthro -
pology is based on ethnography. Ali anthropologicaJ writin g
must draw on reports resulting from sorne sort of concrete
encounter between individual ethnographers and mernber s
of other cultures and societies. The anthropo logist who <loes
not draw on his own experience will use accounts by ot her s.
Directly or vicariously, anthropological discourse formulate s
knowledge that is rooted in an aut hor's autobiography. If
this is seen together with the convention that fieldwork
comes first and analr sis later, we begin to realize that the
Other as obj~ct or content of anthropo logica] knowledgeT s
necessarily part of the knowing subject's past. So we find
Time and temporal distance once aga in linked up with th e
constitution of the ref erent of our discourse. Only now tern-
poralization clearly is an aspect of a praxis , not just a mech-
anism in a system of signification. That praxis includes ali
the phases of the production of anthropo logical knowledge ;
Time is not just a device but a necessarr condition for th at
process to occur. In a general way, the sarne holds true, of
course, for any type of literary production. The '-\-Titerof a
novel uses his or her past experiences as "material" for the
literary project. However, the anthropo lo_gist makes the pe-
culiar claim that certain experien ces or events 1n füs ~t
con fitute facts1 not fictio.n. What else cou ld be the sense of
invoking ethnographic accounts as "data "?
Ou,r inevitably temporal relation to the Other as object
of knowledge is by no means a simple one. In a most basic
sense (one that is, I suspect, quite acceptable to the positiv-
ist) temporal distance might be a sort of minimal condition
for accepting any kind of observation as a fact. A frame for
such a view was sketched out in a note on "co-apperception
of time" by C. F. von Weizsacker. His reflection is all the
more interesting because it comes from a natural scienúst
and philosopher venturing to make a contribution to "his -
tori cal anthropo logy." Von Weizsacker states:
That which is past is store d in facts. Facts are the
possibilities of the appearance of that which is past.
Tim e and Writing About the OLher 89
rossibil ities are founded on facts. . . . One could
sal' that the pre sent is the one-ness [Einheil] of
úrÍte,But here che concept of the present does not
explain the one- ness of time, rather it is the other
way roun d. Similarly, the concept of past does not
explain facticity . . . rather , that which is past is th e
presently fact ual (1977:3 15).
Fact and past are not interchangeab le, nor is their rela-,
tionship primarily one that points from che writer 's present \
into the object's past. As I under sta nd him , von Weizsacker,
asserts the inverse: The object's present is founded in the
writer' s past . In th at sense, f~cticin,:_itself , that cornerston e
of scientific thought, is autobiogra phic. 12 This, incidentall y,
is why in ant hropol ogy objectivity can never be. defüied in
:sition to subjectivity, especially if one <loes not want to
don th e notion oí faces.
Again st the background of these abstract and difficult
though ts about Time and facticity we may now consider
tempor al distancing in a more concrete , hermeneuti c f rame.
Hmn eneutic signal s a self-under stan din~ of anthropology as
interpre tive (rather than naivel y inducti ve or rigorousl y de-
ductive ).13 No experience can simply be "used " as naked
data. Ali personal experience is produced under historical
condi tions, in historical cont exts; it must be used with criti-
cal awareness and with constant atte ntion to its authoritative
dairn s. Toe hermeneutic stance presupposes a degree of
distancin g, an objectification of our experiences. That the
anthropol ogist's experienced Other is necessariJy part of his
past may therefore not be an impediment, but a condition
of an interpretive approach .14 This is true on several levels.
Fieldwork , demanding personal presence and involving
several learning proce sses, has a certain time-economy . The
anthropologi cal rule of thumb-one full cycle of seasons-
ma y not be its exact measure but it recognizes at least that
a certain passage of time is a necessary prerequisite, not just
~ annoying expenditure. More time, often much more time,
1s nece ssary to analyze and in terpre t experience recorded in
text s. In sum, doing anthropo logy needs distance, temporal
and of ten also spatial.
At chis point, after all the critical rem ar ks we addressed
to positive valuat ion of "distance" in relativist and structur-
90 Time and Writing About the Other
alist anthropology, a warning signal should go off. Are we
not admitting no,, 1, by a detou r through hermeneutics , what
we found question able earlier? Xot at all. In the first place,
the distance ju st invoked is essentially temporal. It is, so to
speak, only supplemented by spat ial distance. Moving from
one living context to another in the course of anthropolog-
ical work merely underscores the necessity of objectifyin g
our experiem;:es. However, it is imaginable that an ethnog-
rapher constantly"on the move" may lose his ability to make
worthwhile ethnograp hic exper iences altogether, for the
simp le reason that the Other would never have the time to
become part of the ethnographer's past. Time is also needed
far the ethnographer to become part of his interlocutor" s
past. Many anthropologists have noted and reported dra-
matic changes in the altitudes of their "informams" on sec-
ond or subsequent visits to the field. Of ten these are inter-
preted in psychological or moral terms of increased tru st,
deepened friendship, or plain getting used to each other. If
it is true that ethnography, in order to be productive, must
be dialogical and therefore to a certain degree reciproca! ,
then we begin to appreciate the epistemological significance
of Time.
Secondly, hermeneutic distance is called for by the ideal
of reflexivity which is always also self-reflexivity. Affirma-
tion of distance is in this case but a way of underlining the
importance of subjectivity in the process of knowledge .
Hermeneutic distance is an act, not a fact. It has nothing in
common with the notion (such as Lévi-Strauss', see above,
chapter 2) that distance be somehow the source of more
general, hence more "real" knowledge. It may be useful to
introduce a convention which distinguishes between reflexwn
qua subj ective activity carr ied out by and revealing, the eth -
nographer, and rejlection, as a sort of objective reflex (like
che image in a mirror) which hides the observer by axio-
matically eliminating subjectivity.
I can think of at least two reasons for agyoca.ting_~-
flexive over a ~flect iv~ sta_gce.First, attempts to elimina~ or
hide the- subject in anthropological discourse too of ten re-
sult in epistemological hypocrisy. Consider, for instance , the
following innocuous looking statement in The Savage Mind.
Time and Wriling About the Oth er 91
'fhe context is Lévi-Strauss' assertion that primitives, much
}ike ourselves, rely on observation and interpretation of nat-
ural phenomena : "The procedu~e of the ~merican India_n
who follows a trail by means of 1mpercept1bl~ clue s . . . 1s
no different from our procedure when we dnve a car ... .
(1966:222) . _ .
Now, it seems to me, that the qual1fier nnpercept1ble here
has an intriguing function. Upon closer ex.amination it turns
out that it cannot possibly be used _jn a de~ota~ive, re~e~~n-
tial manner; an imperceptibleclue 1s a log1cal 1mp<;>ss1biht y.
But perhaps that is ~ing too rigorous. Irr_i1;> erce_puble may
be a manner of speakmO"anda reader fam1har w1th the lan-
guage can be expected° to correct nonpe-rceptibleas scarcely
perceptible.But that way out is to? easy. I wo~ld argu~ ~hal
imperceptibl e here functlons as an mdex revealmg (or h1dm$)
the fact that not one but two subjects inhabit the semantJ.c
space of the statement. One is the Indian who "follows a
procedur e," the _other is ~e ethnogra_pher to w_hom the In-
dian 's clues are rmpercept1b)e. Such hterary sle1ght-of-hand
camouflage s the second sul?ject in order to mark the obser-
vation as objective fact.
The "impercept ible clue" is only one example for the
many conventionalized figures and images that p~rvade eth-
nographic and popular reports on encounters w1th Others.
When it is said t.hat primitives are stolid this trans lates as "l
never got close en'ough to see them excited, en thu siastic, or
perturbed. " When we say that "the)' are born with rhythm"
we mean "we never saw them grow, practice , learn." And so
on and so forth. All statements aboul others are paired with
the observer's experience. But why v,·ould hiding the Self in
statements about the Other make ethnography more objec-
tive?
There is another reason for preferring reflexion over
reflection. Reflexivitv asks that we "look back" and thereby
let our experiCl,!lce_s ~come_back" to us. ReAexivity is based ,
on memory, i.e., on the fact that the location of experience -
in our past is not irreversible. We have the ability to present
(make present) our past experiences to ourselves. More than
that, this reflexive ability enables us to be in the presence of
others precisely inasmuch as the Other has become content
92 Time and \'\,1riting About the Other
of our exrer ience. This brings us to the cond itions of po s-
sibility of mtersubjective knowledge. Somehowwe must bf._able
to share each other'spost in arder to be knowingly in each ath._er 's
p_resent.If our experience of Time were nonreflexive , un i-
d irectiona l, we would not have anything bu t tangential
know ledge of each ot her , on the level of interpersonal com-
munication as well as on the collective level of social and
political interaction. \iV~n much or most of an~ropolo gy is
indeed .pe!:f_eived as tal'!gen tíal (besícle the point, ir relevant )
by those who have been its o~ects, th is points to a s~ere
breakdown of "collect ive reflex ivity"; it is yet another symp-
tom of the denial of roevaJness.
~eedless to say, these thoughts about reflexive distance
would not be univer sally accepted . Sorne social scienústs want
to measure the reactions of experimental subjects, or the
distribution and frequency of certa in kinds of quantifiabl e
behavior. They could in pr incipie work without temporal
distance, as soon as d ata are fed into the analyticaJ machine .
At any rate , the time which even the most operationally
minded social scientist mu st spend on devising bis "instru-
men~" (e.g. questionnaires), on co,llectin~, c~in~, and
countmg responses and then often on 'cleanmg up · h1s data ,
is to him a practical nuisance, not an epistemologica l neces-
sity. More sophisticated techniques and faster computers of-
fer the prospect of cutt ing down on time to the poinl wher e
we can conceive research setups (such as used to determin e
television rat ings) where large numbers of subjects are
hooked up directly to analytical rnach inery-the statisti-
cian's dteam, perhaps, but our nightmare.
In this context one should also examine the temporal
imp lications of data storage, a notion that tempts many an-
thropolog ists who seem lo be troubled by the burd en of ac-
cumulated ethnography. Are our data banks simply mor e
sophist icated archives of the kind societies have kept from
the beginning of historical times? Is the term bank real ly ju st
an innocent metaphor for a depos itory? Xot at ali. Data
banks are banks, not only because things of value are stored
in them , but because they are institutions which make pos-
sible the circulat ion of informat ion. 15
So far, anthropology has done little more than toy
Time and Writing About the Other 93
around with such crude data banks as the H uman Relations
Arta File and with low-pmver statisticaJ operations on doubt-
ful samp~es._There is no sign that operaúona lism will det er-
mine a ~1gm~cant part of the discipline in the near future.
Jf _machm e um_e were , a~ sorne point, to replace (not ju st
as&5t) human ttme, and 1f ou r observations on the role of
Time in constituti ng the object of ou r discourse are correct,
we would expect anthropology to disappe ar. For che time
bei~g, ethno~aphic º?je cti~ity remains bound up with re-
ftex1on, an acuv1ty wh1ch will call for T ime as long as it in-
volves human subjects.
. . T o ~ay that reflexive distance is necessary to achieve ob-
J«U fica~on <loes noc mean that the Other, by virtue of being
located m our past, becomes thinglike, or abstract and gen-
eral. 0!1 _the contrary, an ethnographic past can become the
most vrv1d part of our present existence. Persons , events,
puz zlem~nts, and discoveries encountered during fieldwork
may conu~~e to occupy our_thoughts and fantasies for many
years. Th1s 1s probably nol JUSL because our work in eth nog-
raph y constantl}'. turns us ~oward the past; rather il is be-
cause our past 1s presenc m us as a praject, hence as our
future . In fact, we would not have a pre sent to look back
from at o~r past if it was not for that constant passage of
our expenence from p~t to f1:1ture.Pa~t ethn ogra ph y is the
pre sent of anthro polog1cal discourse masmuch as ic is on
the way to become its future.
SÚch are the general outlines of the processes in which
anlhro pological_consciousness emerges. In any concrete case,
however, consc 1o~sness of the ethnograp hic past may be as
deform ed and ahenated as other types of consciousness.
1:'ake, for ~xample, on~ of the most irritati ng of our profes-
s~~al hab,ts wh1ch I wdl call the possessive pase. There is a
tnv1al and probably har mless form of that affliction. Those
who suffe r from it show _the symptoms of an irrepr essible
~rg ~ to r~call,~refer ~o, cite, and recount experiences with
lheir nauves. Somenmes they are just conversat ional bores;
the y ofte~ resemb le _form er sold iers who are unable to sep-
ar are their present hves from memories of "their war." For
rna~y an~ropologists, ~eldwork obviously has this effect of
an mtens,fied, traumatic period which remains an intellec-
94 Time and Writing About the Other
tual and emotional reference point throughout their lives.
Whenever experience becomes so much part of an individ-
ual's psychological history that a reflexive distance can no
longer be generated, neither the person involved nor those
to whom he reports his experiences can be sure of the na-
ture and validity of his accounts and insights. To sorne ex-
Lent, such psychological ingestion and appropriation (Lévi-
Strauss would call itcannihalism) of the Other may be a nor -
mal and inevitable condit ion for the production of ethno-
graphic knowledge , but it may verge on the pathologi cal (as
there are indeed links between psychopat.hology and an ex-
aggerated exoticism).
Such 'allophagy ' is seldom critically analyzed or even
noted because of an institutionalized fear of being accused
of unscientific autobiographic divagation. Intellectual dis-
honesty may then take its revenge in the form of utter con-
fus ion when it comes to taking a stand on such disturbing
cases as Pere Trilles or Carlos Castaneda. I doubt that the
experts on American Indian religion ·who have ali but dis-
mantled Castaneda 's credibility as an ethnographer realize
that he probably parodied and exaggerated (with enviable
commercial success) the little disputed privilege of the pos-
sessive pase which the conventions of anthropological dis-
course grant to ali practitioners. 16 How many are the an-
thropologists for whom the aura of "empirical research" has
served to legitimize as fieldwork varying periods spent on
getting over culture shock, fighting loneliness and sorne hu-
rniliating tropical illness, coping with the claims of the local
expatriate community, and learning about corruption in the
]ocal bureaucracy-all this before finally getting together
sorne meager, secondhand information? Or what about those
who quite simply invented or faked their ethnographies,
perhaps because that was the onlJ way in which they cou]d
live up to the expectations of degree-granting departments
and funding agencies to "deliver" within the time allotted
for research in the field? One shudders at the thought of
what time pressure may have done to the vast body of eth-
nography produced in the most expansive period of our
discipline.
The point of these questions is not to cast vague suspi-
Time and Writing About the Other 95
don on moral integrity. More insidious than individual
moral failure is a collective failure to consider the intellec-
wal effects of scientific conventions which, by censoring re-
flexions on the autobiographic cond itions of anthropologi-
cal knowledge , remove an important pare of the knowledge
process from the arena of criticism.
To make it clear that moral indignation at the sins of
ethnographers is not enough, one only needs to consider
another aspect of what \.Vecalled the possessive past. Figures
of speech-the use of possessive pronouns, first person sin-
gularor plural, in reports on informants, groups, or cribes--
are the signs in anthro{>ological discourse of relations that
ultimately belong to pohtical economy, not to psychology or
ethics. After all, dogmatic insistence on fieldwork , personal
and participative, coincides with the virulent period of col-
onization. Participant observation, however, was not canon-
ized to promote participation but to improve observation.
Personal presence was required for the collecting and re-
cording of data prior to their being deposited and pro-
cessed in Western institutions of learning. In structure and
intent these conventions of our discipline have been analo-
gous to the exploitation of natural resources found in colo-
nized countries. Talk of "geopolitics" and the predomi-
nance of spatial images such as Western "expansion'' cloud
the fact that our exploitative relations also had temporal as-
pects. Resources have been transported from the past of
their "backward" locations to the present of an indu strial,
capitalist economy. A temporal conception of movement has
always served to legitimize the colonial enterpríse on ali lev-
ek Temporalizations expressed as passage from savagery to
civilization, from peasant to industrial society, have long
served an ideology whose ultimate purpose has been to jus-
tify the procurement of commodities for our markets. A.f-
rican copper becomes a commodity only ·when it is taken
possession of by removing it from its geological context,
placing it into the history of Western comme rce and indus-
~r_ialproduction. Something analogous happens with "prim-
1t1veart." 17
The idea of a cornmodification of knowledge owes much
of its conceptual clarity to Marx. Bue the basic insight on
96 T ime and Writing About the Other
which it rests is by no means a recent one. When Geor g
Forster, one of the founders of modern anthropology, once
contemplated the hustle and bustle or Amsterdam harbor
he was moved to the following meditation:
The eagerness of greed was the origin of mathe-
matics, mechanics; phy sics, astronomy and geog-
raphy. Reaso n paid back with intere st the effort in-
vested in its formation. It linked faraway continencs,
brought nations together , accumulated the produces
of ali the different regions-and ali the while its
wealth of concepts increased. They circu lated faster
and faster and became more and more refined.
New ideas which could not be processed locally
went as raw material to neighboring countrie s.
There they were woven into che mass of alread y ex-
istent and applied knowledge, and sooner or later
the new product of reason returns to the shore s of
the Amstel. (1968: [1791) :386)
If analogies (or homologies) between the colon ial enter-
prise and anthropology hold, one would have to admit that
ethnography, too, may become a commodity. Its commodi -
fication would require a similar temporal passa~e of data
(the goods) from their historical context in soaeties con-
sidered primitive to the present of Western science. In the
idiom of our econom ic phi losophies, anthropology is an "in-
dustry " with the peculiar trait that anthropologists are both
workers who produce commodities, and entrepreneurs who
market them, albeit in most cases at the modest profit of
academic salaries. 18
This is a disquieting conclusion indeed, one that could
hardly be expected from a review of sorne of the literary
conventions of anthropological discourse. If it is correct it
would mean that precisely the autobiographic origins of the
ethnographer's possessive past link his praxis to the political
economy of Western domination and exploitation. That link
is by no means just one of moral complicity, easily dis-
avowed by repentin g on the ways of our colonialist prede -
cessors. The connect ion is ideological and even ep istemo-
logical; it regards conceptions of the nature of
anthro¡::xJlogicalknowledge, not just of its use. Most impor-
Time and Writing About the Other 97
tantlY it confirms that temporal manipulations are involved
in working out our relationship to the Other.
politicsof Time: The Temporal Wolf
in Ta,"<
orwmicSheep'sClothing
We have examined temporaliz ing in anthropological dis-
course as it manifests itself in the ethnographic pre sent and
the autobiographic past. ~ow we must face once more the
daim s of "tirneless" structuralism. After all, in his semiotic
analysis of social sciemific discourse, Greimas promised sal-
vation from the evils of temporalizing in the fonn of a/air e
,a:xinomiquewhich is (Lévi-Straussian) anthropology . Any in-
vocationof anthropology as a savior or deus ex machina should
make us suspicious. I t only makes more urgent the task of
examin g how Time is used in defining relations. with the
referent of our discourse.
In an attempt to understand what exactly taxonomy
does we may begin by considering the following proposi-
tion: \iVhether taxonomy is carried out in the structuralist
vein or in more modest varieties (such as in ethnoscience
and various structural approaches to folklore) taxonomic
description always consists of rewriting our ethnographic
notes or texts. At the very least (and leaving aside its tech-
nical understanding propagated by N. Chomsky) the proj-
ect of rewriting rests on u-vo presuppositions, one being a
presumption of fact, the other amounting to a kind of judg-
ment. The presumption of fact holds that there is a text to
be rewriuen.This is ultimately an ontological statement, one
that anchors the taxonomic enterprise in a real v,,rorldof
texts and writers. Even the most abstract logico-mathemati-
cal reduction of an ethnographic text is still writing. It re-
mains within the confines of discourse qua activity carried
out by a subject. Being produced by a subject (and granting
that "production" often is nothing but reproduction of cog-
nitive templates and literary conventions) taxonomic dis-
course stays linked with other forros of discursive expres-
sion. Taxonomic description is therefore not a revolutionary
alternative to other forms of anthropological discourse. It is
98 Time and Writing About the Other
but a taxon, a class of writings in a taxonomy, a view we
encountered earlier as Lévi-Strauss' way of "reconciling" an-
thropology and history.
However there is, secondly, a suggestion of judgment
in the idea of rewriting-as if taxonomic description were
to make up for deficiencies in the original text, it being per -
haps too confused, too cryptic, too exotic or simply too long
to surrender its meaning upon simple inspection. In this
respect, "scientific" str uctural ism is undoubtedly akin to
hermeneutic and historical philology which it wishes to sur -
pass and replace. Both are pervaded by an urge to restore,
to provide a better reading of, the original text. It rnakes
little difference whether the airn is the philologi st's Urform,
or the structuralist's forrn tout court, both traditions are
shaped by an ethos developed in the course of searching for
the "authentic" meaning of the sao·ed texts of our tradi-
tion.19 Lévi-Strauss obviously sensed this. Because he wanted
to dissociate himself at ali cost from the enterprise of a his-
torical hermeneutic he took his famous escape when he pro-
nounced that anthropo logical discourse is but a myth upon
a myth (1969b:6). He can feel free of che burden of having
to justify his own rewriting of myth as a Uudgmental) act of
liberating the original from its existence in obscurity. Of
course, he also leaves unanswered che question why anthro-
pology needs to write over its ethnographic texts at ali. If
the herrneneutic stance is to extract meaning from a text,
structura list construction of a rnyth u pon a myth appears to
work by imposition.Models that map basic and derived rela -
tionsh_ips are laid upon the native text. Where the herme -
neutic approach envisages its task as work, structuralism sees
itas play, as a game whose rules are the elegan ce and par-
simony displayed in "matching" text and model.
Bue chis is only part of che story. Taxonomic rewritin g
never is just a purel y contempl ative, aesthetic game of re-
ducing rnessy data to elegant models. It is a dra'.'m-out, se-
rious game in the course of which pieces of ethnography ,
isolated and displaced from their historicaJ context, are used
in a series of moves and countermoves, following certain
basic rules (those of binary opposition, for example) until a
point is reached where the pieces fall into place. The game
Time and Writing About the Other 99
is over when the so]itar y player, the anthropologist, has ex-
bausted the moves permitted b)' the rules. Now one mav
invoke (following Lévi-Strauss' example) the analogy of thé
game in arder to characterize the playf ulness of taxonomic
aescription. But one should not forget that behind the mask
of the modest, candid, and tentative bricoleurhide s a player
w/UJis out to win.
\Vinning the taxonomic game consists of demonstrating
synchronic relations of order beneath the flux and confu-
sion of historical events and the expressions of personal ex-
perience. The temporally contingent is made to reveal un-
aerlying logical necessity. The Now and Then is absorbed
by the Always of the rules of the game. And one mu se never
forget t.hat structuralist discourse accomplishing these feats
is not just a discourse which has taxonomies as its referent.
lt defines itself as a taxonomic Jaire. Far from merely re -
flecting relations of order, it creates them. The founding
classificatory act, the first binary opposition (or in Bateson's
famous terms, the difference that makes che difference) is
the one between the native text and the taxonomic dis-
course about that text. Two steps follow: one is to declare
the native text itself taxonomic (by opposing its const ituent
classificatory relationships to reaJ relations, culture vs. na-
ture); the other is to posit the taxonomic, speak scientific,
nature of anthropological discourse as being opposed to the
humani stic, speak hermeneutic-historical, approach.
The outcome of ali this is not at all a structural ar-
!'3':1-gementof oppositions suspended in an equilibrium, nor
1s 1t just a classificatory schema innocently construed in a
~me _of imposing arbitrary models on reality. What we get
1s a hierarchy made up of relationships of order which are
sequen tia! and irre versible; hence the ser iousness of the tax-
onomic game. If we take Lévi-Strauss (and for that matter,
the cognitive anthropologists) seriously we find that their
theory o~ sc~ence is out to integrate anthropology itself at
s?me pomt m che sequence of "transformauons" to be de-
nved from certain basic oppositions such as nature and cul-
ture , forrn and content, sign and reality, and so forth. A
way to visualize chis in a taxonomic idiom would be figure
3.1.
100 Time and Wriling About Lhe Other Time and Wriüng About the Other 101
Occidental DlscourH JSeeaUSethe arrangement is hierarchica l, movement within
rbeparalle l/opposed str ings is always either ascent or de-
scie~it,es (Gl scent. This w~uld seeming ly not affect relations of opposi-
oon
.
------------
Bu t that 1s not real ly the case as soon as one takes into
science of nature (FI science of culture (El account the onto logical assumptions of taxonomic ap-
J>"->3ch es in ant hropology . The "op positions" AB, CD, EF (and
anthropology
HG, for that matter) are expressive of evolutionary devel-
opment; they are direccional, in fact one-way relations: Na-

l------------
ture precedes Culture (at least in the minimal sense that it
elhnology ethnography
was there before _people existed); ethnography precedes
i
taxonomic models nalive telCIS
ethn?logy (accordmg ~~ the canons of anthropo logical
praxis); and the human.aes precede the sciences (in the h is-
IOI (CI
aory of \Veste1:1 thou_ght). Again, it matters little that any of

------------ signilier
taxonomic (classificatoryl
relations
dilcontJnuous,spatial
signlfled
real relations

con1inuous,temporal
ahoseassumpuons m1ght be debated as soon as a context is
specified. The point is that a taxonomic conception of them
cannot but present them in chains and, in the words of M.
Serres, none of thes~ chains "can be thought "'ithout time"
culture
(Bl
nature
(Al
(197~:91).2_0 The logtc of these relationships of opposition
~ mc!us1o_n generates the r':'les of the game which is a
Figure 3. 1: The place of anthropology in a ta.xonomy of relaúons
/aJT~ taxinomu¡ue.If that game 1s, according to Greimas and
Undoubtedly this is not the only way to draw the dia - ~v1-S trauss, the "constitution of the semiotic objecf' then it
gram; another form could includ e different kinds of science 1sclear that such constitution is arr ived at in a sequen ce of
or humanities, kinds of native texts, and even diff erent wavs tempo rally ordered steps. Viewed from that ang le, taxo-
to set up the oppositions on the lowest level. But even in i'u; º?mi_c anthropology is indistinguishable from approaches it
fragmentary form it illustTates the crucial point; because thc d1Sm1 sses as histonca l and subjective.
nodes are arranged hierarchica lly, the relationships that . Following Serres (who in turn follows mathematical no-
constitute taxonomic discourse are sequentia l and can also t10ns regarding "relations ·or order") we can now more ac-
be presented as a slring of points (steps, stages) on a line or curat ely characterize the nature of relations which taxo-
arrow: · nomic discour se attempts to establish between the subject
and object of its discourse.
The relationships whose concate nacion amounts to a
X X X X X X X X X ~onomy of anthropological knowledge are n@rejl.exi.ve.
A B C D E F G H I None of the members in the chain that makes up the struc-
~re r~p:esented in our diagram can precede or succeed
oras two strings emanating from an op position: •tself; 1t 1s always preclecessor or successor of another mem -
H/G
ber in the c:hain. For example, a discourse having posited
tha~ the lex 1con for a certam cogn itive domain consists of
E F arbnr~ry_ labels for things, and that the object of taxonomic
C D analys~s is the ordered system of relationsh ips between la-
A B beis,will not go back on itself and reexamine the assumption
102 Time and Writing About the Other
that the imposition _of lab~ls is ind eed arbitrary. Similar ly,
th~ structural analysIS of p1eces of ethnography (myths, kin.
sh 1p sy_ste~s) ~1 proceed by reducing them to model s.
There 1t w1Ue1ther come to rest, or it will seek further re-
finements, or more encompassing models, until it comes to
rest. But it will not, at the same time, question the method
it employs. Science, as T. S. Kuhn and many others seem to
tell us , cannot be done critically, that is, reflexively when and
whüe _it_ is being d~ne. Critiqu_e needs ~he extraordinary time
of cnst~xtraordinary meanmg outs1de the established re-
lationships of order.
. I~plied in che chainlike arrangement is also that rela-
uonsh1ps between any two members cannot be symmetrical.lf
A precedes B, B cannot pre cede A. One might object that thi s
neglects the poss:ibility that, within the two parallel chains,
movement may ~e either ascending or descending. For in-
stance, ethnological theory may, depending on circum-
~tances, precede as well ~ succeed ethnography. Or even ts
m nature such as ecologICal and demograph1c changes m ay
precede as well as succeed cultural change. :\Tevertheless, the
rule demands that no two mernbers of the chain can pr e-
cede an d succeed each other at the same time. Therefore it
is ruled out that taxonomic discourse could ascend and de-
scend the relations of order in the same act. This <loes not
mean that in taxonomic anthropology ethnography should
n~t ~ "mixed''. with ethnology, or autobiograp h y not with
SC:1ent1~c analys1s, or structural analysis not with history. Any
giv<:~ •~stance of taxonomic discour se may contain juxta -
pos1uons of ali of those "opposed" elernents. But the rule of
n~msy1!1metryd~ carry an injun ction against reciproca! and
d1alecucal concepaons, both of which would presuppose that
two members of the chain coexist in Time.
Finally, the chain of relationships of order implies that
if A precedes B and B precedes C then A precedes C. In
other words, the entire structure is tmnsitive. If culture mas-
te~s nature, and if the anthropologists master culture, then
saence, through antbropology, masters nature. Perhaps it is
the other way round; but never both at the same time or ,
in analogy to the game, never in the same move.
To object that such an interpretation of relations of or -
Time and Writing About the Other 103
(!er confu ses logical sequences v..ith t_emporal s~quences is
atuitous unless one deludes oi:1esel_f mto acc_eptmg_the un-
grnableposition that taxonom ,c d1scourse is outs1de t.1:e
te aimof human actio n. The demonstrable fact that d1s-
:u
re rse qua spat iotemporal action can be described in purel_y
~ts
ical-taXonomic terms in no wa )' justifies the be!ie~ tha~ lt
of logical relations. A theory that holds th1s 1s guilty
of the same confusion of method and substance, me~ns ~nd
ends, which Greimas found to be the fallacy of histoncal
djscourse unredeem_ecl by tax~momy (1~76:30). Marx , ';hom
trUcturalists now hke to claim as theIT ancestor, sa"' and
~voided the fa11acy when he criticized Hegel and Feuer-
bach:To be able to distill from history the "logic" of t~e
rocess or to find the "law·· that the dominating class will
tevit.ably be overthrown by the oppressed class <loes not
al:,solvethe analyst (as spokesma n for ~'history"') ~rom the
necessity to trans late logic into revoluuonary proJects: _To
takea position on "logical relations" is always also a pohucal
act.
Which finally brings us to che moment when the ~olf
enters the story. In La Fontaine's fable ~e comes to a nver
to drink and accuses che lamb of tro ublmg the water. But
the lamb is positioned downstream. In M.. Serres' _inte:rpr~-
tation of the "game º\ the wolf," the. wolf 1s the sc1ent1st, m
our case the taxonom1c anthropologtst. In the story! much
as in our diagram , he is placed in a chain of relauons of
arder in such a way that he is upstream , up th~ temporal
slope. Yet his posture is _to_a~cu se the larnl;>,that 1s, to_ques-
tion the "lamb"-the pnrn1uve or the nauve text _wh1chhe
takesas his "problem"-as if the two were enga~d m a game
allowing moves in both directions. He acts as 1f there were
a give and take; as if what is valid in the time of the lamb
(there and then ) could be made visible in the time of ~e
wolf (here and now). As it is the avowed aim of taxonom1c
discour se to establish relations that are always and every-
where valid, che story must end with the wolf abso~bing hi~-
torkal time into his time--he will eat the lamb. Th1s fable ts
an "operational definition of hypocris y" (Serres 1977:~4)
because the wolf appears placed in the rniddle of the 0am.
The anthropologist proclaims himself to be in the serv1ce of
104 Time and \,Vriting About the Other

science, to be nothing but an executor of the laivs of na ture

or reason. He uses the taxonomic cover to hide his relent-
less appetite for the Time of the Other, a Time to be in.
gested and tr ansformed into his own : "He has taken the
place of the wolf, his true place ; \,Vestern man is the wolf of
science' (Serres 1977: 104).
\Vhat ,ve take the fable to illustrate is an ideologyof re-
lations, a game that defines its own rules. A crucial strate gy
in this game is to place the players on a tempora l slope .
Tha t the time of the lamb is not the time of the wolf is
postulated, not demonstrated. /A.n evolutionary view of re-
lation s between Us and the Other is the point of departur e,
not the result of anthro pology. A taxonomic approach in-
serts itself effortlessly into that perspective. Its ostensibl y
achronic stance turns out to be a flagrant example of allo-
1chro n ic discourse.
 hapter Four / The Other
d the Eye: Time
d the Rhetoric of Vision
[the tlwught.soJman] are e-very<m~a represe nta-
or appear ance of somequality, or other accidentof a
· withrmtus, which is cc,mn()nlycalledan object.
Thomas Hobbesi
~ major deject of rnaterialism up to thi5day . . . has
to cunceive the object,realit)', sensuousness,only in the
J,,- oJan objectof contemp!,atim,not as sensuous-human
•vitJ, praxis, not subjectively.
Karl A1arx2

GENERATIONS OF Ai~THRO POLO GY students setting

out to do their first fieldwork have received, and followed,
.tvice to lear n the language , if possible before beginning
with research, and to start their inquirie s on the spot by
mapping settlements , counriI1~ hou seholds , and dr awing up
genealogies of the inhabitants. T his is sensible advice. i{uch
time is saved if one comes to the field prepar ed linguisti-
cally. Maps, censuses, and kinship charts are the quickest
way to get a grip on the shape and compo siúon of a small
communi ty. If the society studied keep s records which can
be used for these projects, all.the better. No orie expects this
sort of work to be without snags and difficulúe s; but neither
have most anthropo logists considered the possibility that
such simple and sensible method s or techniques might be
hiased toward a certain theor y of knowledge whose claims
to validity are not beyond quest ioning .
 106 The Other and the Eye
1Wethodand Vision
These conve ntional prescriptions contain at least three un-
derlying assumptions deserving critica! attention:
First, they recommend the native language as a tool, as
a means to extract information. Somehow, what one seeks
is thought to exist separately from language and the activitv
of speaking. To be sure, anthropologists have , befare and
af ter \Vhorf, maintained that the language of a peo ple of-
fers clues , perhaps even the key, to its culture. In one re-
spect, however, the vie,\'S of those who saw in the native
language a mere vehicle of research, and others, who pro-
claimed it the depository of culture , converged: neithe r
considered serious ly that the "usefulness " of the native lan-
guage might rest Ón the fact that it draws the researche r
into a communicative praxis as a resu lt of which metaphor s
such as too!, vehicle, or receptaclemight be difficult to main-
tain. All the se images encourage a manipulative use of lan-
guage derived from visual and spatial conceptualizat ions
whose lon g history will occupy us throughout this chapter.
Second, the recommendations to use maps, charts, and
tables signals convictions deeply ingrained in an empirical,
scientifi.c tradition. Ultimately they rest on a corpuscular ,
atomic theory of knowledge and infonnat ion.4 Such a the -
ory in turn encourages quantification and diagrammatic
repre sentation so that the ability to "visualize" a culture or
society alm~st becomes synonymous for under stand ing it. l
shall cal) th1s tendency visualism and because visualism will
play a .role in our argument comparab le to that of denial of
coevalness or temporalization, sorne sort of descriptive
/ statement is in order. The term is to connote a cultural,
ideological bias toward vision as the "noblest sense" and to-
ward geometry qua graphic-spatial conceptualization as the
1most "exact" way of communicating knowledge. t:'ndoubt-
edly, the social sciences inherited that bias from rationalist
though t (based on Descar tes' distinction of res cogiJansand
res extensa) and from the empiricists (see Hobbes' fascination
with geometry). However, deeper and more remote source s
will be considered in the sections that follow, as well as the
The Other and the Eye 107
radoxical possibility that visualism may be a symptom of
I:edenaturation of visual e:::-perience.. .
Visualism may take d1fferent dir ~cllo1?-s-towar1
5 the
athematical-geometTic or toward the pictonal -aesthet1c. In
%e1atter case, its idolatrous tendency is oft~n mi.!:!gatedl?Y
the ~ec~t to approac. h culture noL':'-s_a pictm:e but as a
céxf. Certainly there has been progress m anth~opology from
tñere counting and ~apping of c~ltural tratts toward ac-
counts of culture which are attenttve to co~text, symbols,
and semantics. Still, sooner or later on~ ~1ll come upon
syntheses of knm•,ledge whose orpanmng me~aphor~,
models, and schemes are thoroughly visual and spaual. ~hts
¡5 obvious in such terms as trait , pattern, configu~auon,
structure , model, cognitive map; it is _pre_supposed.m no-
tions such as system, integration, orgamzanon, funcnon, re-
lation, network, exchange , transaction, and ~any others
which cannol be purified from refere_nce ~o bod1es, _parts of
bociies, ensembles, machines, and pomts m space; m sh~rt,
to objects of knowledge whose primary II.lO?eof percert!on
is visual, spatial, or tangible. Therefore 1t 1s not su~pnsmg
that anthropologists of ali pe~suasions have_ been m over-
whelming agreement that therr knowledge 1s based upon,
and validated by, observation.
Third even the most simp le and seemingly common-
sensical r~ommendations of the kind which served as a
point of departure for these remarks carry notions of speed,
or expeditiou sness of procedure. In other words, ~e} ' are
aimed at instituting a time-economy for anthropo1ogical_ re-
search. Not only is the total time for field~vork conventton-
ally fixed, it is also thought (and often said) that the field-
worker "saves time" by 1earning the languag ~ beforehand;
that he "gains time" through the us_eof techmques and d~-
vices. Advice mav take a moral twist, when the student 1s
told to make good use of time by never letting the sun set
on untyped field notes. In all this i~ is the researcher'stím_e
which is thought to affect the producuon of kno~led ge. Th1s
observation is not invalidated by recommendat1ons to take
note of native ideas of Time, ei~er_ as exrli~itly formulate~,
or as inferred from the orgamzatmn o ntual and practt-
108 The Other and the Eye
cal _activiti_es.As an object of knowledge, the Time of the
nauves ,~ill be processed by the visual-spatial tools anct
methods mvoked earlier.
A~thropologists who have gone through the exp eri.
~~ce of field research, and others who are capable of imag-
~mng ~hat happe~s to a stra~ger entering a society with the
mtentton _of learmng some_thmg about it, are likely to be p ut
off ~y this a~count. \.\~}' d1d extrapolations from simple and
sensible adv1ce regardmg method result in a caricatu re of
ethnography? ~ecause these recommendations not only ex-
aggerate_ ~the visual), they omit dimensions of experien ce.
No ~rovIS!on seem~ to be made for the beat of drum s or che
blanng of bar mu sic that keep you awake at night; non e for
the strang e taste and tex ture of food, or the smells and the
stench . ~ow <loes method:<leal with the hours of waiting, with
maladro1tnes_sand gaff es due . to confusion or bad timingr
\.\There <loes 1t put the frustrauon s caused by diffidence and
intr a~~ig~nce, where the joys of purposele ss chatter and
conv1v1ahty? Often aH this is written off as the "human side''
~f our scientific activity: Method is e::cpe~tedto yield objec-
t1v~ kn_mvledgeby tilte~mg out expenent1al "noise" thou ght
to 1mpmge on the qual1ty of information. But what makes a
(reported ) sight more objective than a (reported) sound .
smell , or _taste? Our bi~s for one and against the other is a
ma~ter of cultural choice rather than universal validitv. l t
derive s from a scientific tradition which was firmlv estab-
lished by the ti?'le J..Lock~,formulated the empiricist cano ns
of ~o~ern s<?C1~l sc1ence. The perception of the mind, " he
mam_ta1_n~d , 1s most aptly explained by words relating to
t~~ s1ght_ (1964 [1689):227 ). Among a11the tenets of emp i-
nosm th1s one seems to have been the most tenacious.
Even ~ detached observation is regarded positively as a
~eans to hft oneself ~hove the ÍI!1mediacyof fleeting sound s,
mef~able odors , confused emot.lons, and the flow of Tim e
passmg , the anthropologist so inclined should give, at the
v~ry least, sorne thought to the cultural determinedness of
his quest for distance. Evidently, such critica! reflection ""-il
l a manu script, to recall the points and arguments of a speech.
have_a bearing on arguments regarding anthropology's use s
of Time and what I termed its denial of coevalness. For it
remains to be shown what sort of theory of knowledg e
The Other and the Eye 109
bfOught about , or facilitated, a discour se whose visual-spa-
Ójli conce_pts, models: and type-construc~s ~lways seem _to
warkagamst the grarn of temporal contmu1ty and coex1s-
1e11ce between the Knower and the Knov.rn.
space
and Memory:Topoi of Discourse
In the Art of Memory, Frances Yates gives an ~ccou~t o~ the
depthand complexity of \ Vestern preoccupat1on ,~1th visual
1
anclspatial root-metaphors of knowledge. Her findmgs seem
to be supported by histor.ians of ~ience who concu~ with
tbe thesis that \,\Testern sc1ence den ves from an earher art
of rhetoric, chronologically (i.e., with regard to the sequence
of developments in our tradition), as well as systematically
(regarding the nature of scienti:ficactivity). Paul Feyerabend
goes as far as declaring that propaganda belongs to the es-
~nce of science, a view also held , but less outrageously for-
mulated, by T. S. Kuhn in his theory of scientific I?ara-
digms.6 Far frorn dismissing science as mere rhetonc-. a
hopele ss attempt in view of its practica! and technologic~l
triumph s--this position states the obvious fact t~at all _sc!-
ences, including the most abstract and mathemat1zed d1sc1-
plines, are social endeavors which must be carried out
tbrough the channels and means , and according to the rules,
of communication available to a community of practitioners
and to the wider society of which they are a pan.
As such, the observation that all science rests on rheto -
ric is a very genera l one and would not add much to o~r
!1nderstanding unless i_tis possible to show that the rhe~nc
mvoked here is a spec1fic product of our Western_ trad1t1on
as well as the principal channel through which sc1ences ar_e
"~eeding back" into \,Vestern culture. Yates finds that tra?1-
llon in the "art of memory." It began as a set of prescnp-
tions, rules, and techniques developed by Greek and Roman
rhetoricians to enab le the ancient orator, who spoke without
She describes in detail several sources in the Latin tradition
~1966:ch. 1) whose common element was a rnethod of join-
tng the principal parts of a speech to objects in various places
 110 The Other and the Eye
i~ a real or imagined building. While he delivers his 0
tlon, the spea ker 's mind is supposed lO walk through ;h-
rooms or parts of the building, stopping to consider the
things omo which he previousl y (and habituall y) conferr ~
th~ status of "places" of memory (hence the Greek term ~o..
poi).
Such are, in the briefest possible terms, the outlines of
a con~eption of rhet~ric which was to have consequences
reach_mg far beyond 1ts apparently simple, mnemote chnic
funct1on. For the theory of "places" did not merely aid
memory and recall; as it was developed in more and more
complex ways during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
it served to de.fine the nature of memory, and, through it:
the nature of any kind of knowledge which is communi-
cated with an intent to convince, to win over an audien ce.
Most teachers of rhetoric also prescribed technique s
b~s~d on sound ~nd he~ing (such as rote learning by rep-
etltlon and phomc associa.tion). Nevertheless, there seems to
have developed very early a consensus that the higher and
more exclusive art of memory was tied, by natural gift and
training, to an ability to visuaJize the points of a speech, a
poem, or any other text destined for rhetorical use . In the
forms il'!-which t~ey are reported, these theories were by no
means JU_strud1menta ry prephilosophical epistemologies .
The class1calrules of the art of memorv as summarized bv
Yates are based on numerous philosophical assumptions ,
none of them simple.
First, l?e _visualized objects (such as statues or parts of
~em, ~urrushmgs, and eleme nts of architecture) were not
srmple unages of the points to be memorized. They were
assumed to work best when they were somehow "striking' '
and. when che co~nection between image and point of an
orauon was an arbitrary one, decreed by the orator. "Places"
were ~ought of as products of the art of memory, not as
actual 1mages of the content of a speech. What set the skill-
ful ~rato! apa~t from other mortals was precisely his ability
to_v1suahze w1thout actually picturing the contents of his
mmd ;_the use of illustrative pictures and i:mages belonged
to dehvery, not to the foundation of rhetoric. This is prob-
ably where we have to seek the roots of increasingly suc-
The Other and the Eye 111
--ful attempts to represent the parts of speeches,. ~d later
..,.parts of speech and the structures oí propos1uons and
abements through "signs."
,rguFurtherm ore , che rules of the art of memory did not
aol prescribe visualization. I nasmuch as they spoke of
!ements between "places" of mem~ry they ca~led f~r sp~-
::luation of consciOUS1ie~s.
The rhetor s art cons1s~ed m htS
c:apacity to present to hunself the temporal flux of live speech
l.v~
15 a spatiaJ topography of poin_ts
JIOÓOil
.ªº? argu~ents. This! I
tbinkentitles us to trace the spanaltzat:Ion of Time, of wh1ch
sorne examples in earlier chapters, to the rules of an
aocient art of memory. In Bossuet's historical method, the
of epochs ("places to stop and loo~ aro~nd") is ~n-
éloubtedlyidentifiable as a theory of topo1 dev1~ed to g1~·e
firmfoundations to bis discourse, i.e., his <?ration_on h!s-
tol'Y·The same holds for Enlightenment philosoph1cal h1s-
tory, which prided itself in being topica] and not merely
chronological. Which leads us to the doorstep of modern
anthropolo gy: Culture traits and cydes, 1;>atternsand con-
fiBurations, nacional character and evolut1onary stages, but
also"classical monographs, " compel us to attach our argu-
ments to the Kwakiutl, Trobriands, Nuer, or Jdembu. They
areso many topoi , anchorings in real or mental space, of
anthropolo gical discourse. 7
Fina11y, the art of memory not only employed "p laces,"
i.e., a topograph y, bue a]so an architecture of memory. The
orator's Lopoi were to be found i': a hous~, pref~rably a
large,public building. In the Renaissance th1s arch1tectural
oonception led to actual construction of "theaters" of mem-
ory/knowledge (see Yates 1966:chs. 6 and 7). Vast proj~cts
to systematize knowledge were also base~ on astr<;>log1ca l
symbolsand charts. The space of rhetonc w~s u!ttmately
cosmo-w gicaland chis may poin! to ~orne of the h1stonca! roots
of those uses of Space and Tune m anthropology wh1ch we
qualified earlier as a "political cosmology." As images, places,
and spaces turn from mnemotechnic aids into topoi they
become that which a discourse is about. When modern an-
~ropolo gy began to construct its Other_ ~n te~m~ of topoi
unplying dist.ance, difference, and oppos1uon, ns mtent was
above all, but at least also, to construct ordered Space and
 112 The Other and the Eye
Time--a cosmos-for Vt/estern society to inhabit, rather than
"und erstand ing other cultures ," its ostens ible vocation.
Among the most suggestive lessons to be learned frorn
Y_ates' The Arl of i\1.emory is the evidence that Jinks the pre.
hist<;>
ry o.f \,Vestern science to an arúully cultivated cendencv
to v1sualize the conte nts of consciousness. Of equal impor-
tance are sorne of the eff ects which an image-theo rv of
~nm~ledge may have on social pracúce. Stressing visuáliza.
t1on m tenns of arbitrarily chosen "rem inders" makes mem.
ory an '.'art" ar:id remove s the foundations of rhetoric frorn
the . philosoph1cal problema tic of an accurate account of
reahty. The ma in concern is with rhetorical effectiveness and
success in convincing an audience, not \\-ith abstraer dem-
?nstration of "truth." This prepares the nominalist traditi on
m \Vestern thought out of which empiricism was to grow.
. ~o recognize this may help us to get away from at-
tnbutmg che deve lopment of the Western scientific mind
main ly l? Literacy or, at any rate, to our kind of literacv.
The arb1trarine~ of c_h e memory-images was not the same
as that of phoneuc scnpt. The symbols used in writin$"were,
o~ce _theyhad been agreed upon , constra ined in the1r com-
bmauons and_ sequ.ence by the sounds of the spoken lan-
guag:e. The v1sua] 1mages and topoi of the art of mem ory
~rov1ded much fr~edom of comb inat ion and invention , pre-
c1s~lyh.ecause their tnani1;:mlation .was thoug-ht of as an art
qmte diff erent from the simple skill of readmg and writing.
Y~tes describes in her accoun t successful svstems of what
~•ght be called comb inatorial mnemonics, tÍp to the inven-
~on of calculus by Leibniz. Modern mathematics thus has
Jts roots, at least sorne of them, in the same tradition of
visual~zed, spat ialized, and_ultimate ly cosmological thought
to wh1ch we can tr~c~ Enhghten~ent philosophical histor y
and the modern ongms of the social sciences.'
FinaJJy, the view of memory/knowledge as an "art" fa-
vored prete n~ons to exclusiv~ and arcane knowledge. As
~e memory n?ages and topo1 proliferated and as variou s
kmds of gnosuc, magical, and astrological schemes carne to
be used for the purpose of systema tizing this wealth of im-
ages, the ar t of public orators turned into the secret posses-
The Othe r and the Eye 113
5ionof esoteric groups. Perhaps Yates' fascination with her-
,netic-magic origins of Western science gets too dose to a
conspiracy theory of intellectu al history; but her findin gs
int to the very deep common roots of social and religious
~rianism . Both claim to possess special and exclusive
tnowledge conceived as manipul ation of an ap parat us of
vi5Ual-spatialsymbols removed from ord inary langu age and
cation. 9
CXJllllllUni
Many other developments had to occur before anthro-
p_oloS}' and similar di sciplines sta ked out their exclusive ter-
ritones, devi sed technical languages, and gained profes-
sionalrecognition. These developments may be under stood
sociologically and we can generalize them as instances of
(unctional specialization and role differentiation within
~r institutions and social systems. On ly, such generali-
1.auonsare often too abstract and at the same time nai:ve. In
tbeirfixation on goal-oriented behavior and adaptive fu nc-
tionalitythey tend to overlook the expressive, playful origins
of social forms and institutions. Deep historical connections
such as those between che modern sciences and the ancient
art of memor y prov ide us with the means to correct and
a>unterbalance sociolog.:al utilitarianism or functionalism in
the history of science . I am convinced, and the following
section will offer further reasons, that sorne very important
aspectsof anthropological discourse must be understood as
the continuation of a long trad ition of r hetoric with a pe-
culiar cosmological bent. Conceiving outlandish images and
moving in strange space, mostly imaginary , was a preoccu-
pation of savants long before actual encou nter with exotic
people and travel to fore ign parts, and for reasons to which
actual encounter seems to have added very líttle. Th e de-
tour through past and curr ent concerns in anthropology
which we took in the first three chapte rs has shown th at the
hold of a visual-spatial "logic" on our discipline is as strong
as ever; che bodies or organi sms of fun ction alism, the cul-
ture gardens of the particularists, the tables of the quan ti-
fiers_,and the diagrams of the taxonomists all project con-
ce~uons of knowledge which are organized around objects,
or 1mages of obje cts, in spatial relation to each other.
114 The Other and the Eye
Logi,cas Arrangement:KnowledgeVisible
Pierre de la Rarnée, or Petrus Ramus (1515-1572), was a
s':1?olm_an, a lo~ician ~d dialectician who taught at the
l:mver~1ty of Pans. He is perhaps rigbtly forgotten as a mi-
nor pb_ilosopber. Yet, as the work of \V. J. Ong has sbown
S?me ttme ago (_1958),he was a major figure as a theoreti-
c1an _ofth~ wachmg of knowledge. His writings, which were
pubbshe~ m many Ianguages and countless editions, and the
pedagog1cal movement associated with bis name had an in-
calculable influence on Western intellectual bistorv. Tbe fact
that bis theories soon became anonymous (preciséJy because
they were thought t? be synonymous with pedagogical
method) only underlmes the importance of Ramisrn. In
many circles, especially among the Protestant educators of
Germany, England, and its colonies in Norch America the
precep~ of Ram~sm gained s~ch a <legre~ of acceptance' that
they vrrtually d1sappeared m the undisputed practice of
Normal Science, to use Kuhn 's term.
. The sources of Ramism were medieval "quantitative"
log.ic and contef!1porary forros of th~ art of memory as it
was expounded m the works of Rena1ssance and Huma nist
thinkers. They are far too numerous and complex even to
attempt a summary. Suffice it to state that for Ramus the
most pressmg . problem about knowledge--any ' kind' of
knowle~ge--becam~. its teachability. This concern placed him
finnly m the trad1t1on of rhetoric to which he addressed
most o~ his polen:u~aI disquisitions. He was to become a key
figure ~n. ~ansm1ttmg sorne of the deepest convictions of
that t:ad1t1on-those concerning visual images and spatial
or?ermg-to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centur y
thmkers whom we recogni;,e as immediate precursor s of
modern science. 10
The outlook of Ramism is best summarized in the fol-
lowing passage from Ong's work:
Ramist T~eto~ic . ._. is not a dialogue rhetmic at all,
and Ram1st d1alect1chas lost ali sense of Socratic
dialogue and even most sense of scholastic dispute.
The Ramist arts of discomse are monologue arts.
The Other and the Eye 115
pe •,rdevelop the didactic, schoolroom outlook
;,Jliéhdescends from scholasticism even more than
-lfJJ1?ºº-Ramist ve1·sionsof the same arts, and tend
¡oat ly even to lose the sense of monologue in pure
41apmmatics. This orientation is very profound
áadof a piece with the orientation of Ramism to-
rd an object world (associated with visual percep -
l n) rather than toward a person world (associated
ih voice and auditory perception), In rhetoric,
·&bviouslysomeone had to speak, but in the charac-
:ensuc outlook fostered by the Ramist rhetoric, the
:t,eaking is directed to a world where even perso ns
4hpond only as objects---that is, say nothing back.
f>ºg 1958:287)
Ramus was a transitional figure in another, even more
portant, respect. The beginning of his career coincided
l.ith the period immediately preceding the invention of the
,=trerpre ss. His systems reached their maturity and had their
~rmous popular success in the beginning of the Guten-
krg era. Ong goes as far as depicting Ramus as one of the
.ideologues whose thoroughly visualized, spatialized, and
c:ombinatory conception of knowledge prepared the break-
ij}rough (noting that all the technological requisites had been
;available for sorne time before typography was finaJly "in-
vented" ) . The connections are far reaching :
Spatial constructs and models were becoming in-
tteasingly critical in intellecrual development. The
changing attitude manifested itself in the develop-
ment of printing, in the new Copernican way of
thinking abouc space which would lead to Newton-
ian physics, in the evolution of the paimer's vision
climaxed by Jan van Eyck's use of the picture frame
as a diaph rag m, and in the topical logics of Ru-
do lph Agricola and Ramus. (1958:83; see also 89)
Letter printíng made possible mass reproduction with a
great degree of reliability; which in turn favored mass cir-
culation of what Ramus considered his major contribution
to "method": his ambitious renditions of teaching matter
(poem s, philosophical texts, biographies, and others) in the
form of diagrams based on a dichotomization of its con-
116 The Other and the Eye
tents. These figures (sorne of which are reproduced by On )
~ar an uncanny resemblance to generations of visual d~.
vices used by anthropologists, from earlier evolutionary tree
to contemporary ethnosemantic paradigms and structurali s~
arrangements of binaq 1 oppositions. If one reflects, for in.
s~nce, on the nature of kinship charts (of the genealogi ca]
gnd type ) one finds that, ultimately, they are limited onlv
by t~e s1zeof the paper on which they are drawn or printe d,
Havmg learned more about the connections between print.
ing and diagrammatic reduction of the contents of though t
one is tempted to consider the fX>Ssibilitythat anthropolog ~
ical kinship theories (at Jeast the ones that take off frorn
data collected _\~ith River's chart ) are actually determined by
~e pre sentah1!1tyof whatever knowledge they may contain
m terms of diagrams that fit onto a conventional print ed
page. In ~ther words, it is the mode of storing, reprod uc-
mg, and d1sseminating knowledge in print (in articles, mon-
ographs, and textbooks) which, in ways that mav have to be
1
~pecified in much more detail than it is possible here, 11 pre-
Judge the What and How of large ix>rtions of ethnograph y.
Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from
the study of Ramism and from similar critica! analvses of
forgotten or suppressed periods in ·western intellect~al his-
tory is that methods, channels, and means of presenting
knowledge are anything but secondary to its contents. 12 An-
thropologists show varying degrees of awareness of this when
they allow themselves to be drawn into debates abou t
whether or not their formal reductions of culture reflect ar-
rans-~ment of ideas in "the heads of the natives." Not many
reah ze that this question makes little sense, not so mu ch be-
cause we cannot actua1ly look into the heads of natives (psy-
chologists might disagree with this ) but rather because ou r
diag~ams are unquestionably artifacts of visual-spatial con-
ven~mn~ whose function ~t is to give "method" to the d is-
semmauon of knowledge m our society.
Ramism and its belated reincarnations (<lid not Chom -
sky's trees descend, via Port Royal, from that tradition ?')
equate the know able with that which can be visualized and
l~gic, the rules of kn?wledge, with orderly arrangeme~ts of
p1eces of knowledge m space. In that tradition, sc1entific ob -
The Other and the Eye 117
. ·\1ty \Vas ~o be guaranteed by the kil?,d o~ dispass~onate
~I inspecuon and measurement pracuced m the sCiences
~ natur e. Once the_sou~ce of any _knowledge ~orthy of _that
r,arne is thought pnmarily to be v1sual percepuon of obJects
in space, why should it be scandalous to treat the Other-
othersocieties, other cultures, other classes within the same
societv--commedes choses?To be sure, Durkheim did not coin
tbisfamous principle because he wanted persons or the
010ral and spirit~a l aspects of society treate~ as things; but
he did postulare m that context that the social and cultural
mustassume, through observation, quantification, and sys-
iematic generalization , the same facticity that is exhibited by
thechosesin our field of vision. Behind all this is what S.
Moravia called a méthodologie du regard, which Enlighten-
ment philosophes and their positivist successors inherited
from ancient sources and which , as in these sources, re-
mained tied to rhetoric. 13
Later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this
stancebecame more pedantic and more generally effective.
Rhetoric developed and hardened when the pursuit of
knowledge became inextricably part of its standardization,
schematization,and compartmentalization in the vastly ex-
panded rhetori c enterprise of academic teaching .
In the light of connections that are revealed by the
studies of Yates and Ong our present self-understanding as
anthroix>logists appears historically and theoretically shal-
low. It is all the more urgent to remedy that situation be-
cause, among the sciences that share common sources in the
rhetoric of images and toix>i and which employ pedagogical
methods of visualizing knowledge, anthropology occupies a
peculiar fX>Sition.It patrols, so to speak, the frontiers of
Western culture . In fact, it has always been a Grenzwissen-
schaft, concerned with boundaries: those of one race against
another, those between one culture and another, and finally
those between culture and nature. These liminal concerns
have prevented anthropology from settling dov/n in any one
of the accepted domains of knowledge other than in the
residual field of "social science ." There, many of us live in
hi~ing from biologists, paleontologists , geneticists, psychol-
og1sts, philosophers , literary critics , linguists , historians and,
118 The Other and the Eye
alas, sociologists on whose territories we are inevitablv led
,,,;ithout being able to offer any excuse except that the "stud v
of man" must embrace all these fields. That situation alon~
makes synopticism-the urge to visualize a great multitu de
of pieces of information as order ly arrangements, systems,
and tableaux-a constant temptation. There are reasons why
we should resise that lemptation. Sorne are political, other ·s
epistemological; both kinds will direce the discussion back to
the principa l theme of these essays-Time and the Other .
Vide et Impera: The Other as Object
Ong's principal intent is expressed in the subtitle of his work
on Ramus: "Method and the Decay of Dialogue. " Through -
out the book he deplores the antipersonalist orientation o{
visualism. In this respect he anticipaeed ehemes which were
taken uf in the debates of the sixties and seventies when
critics o ~iology and anthropology began to denounce the
dehuman1zing effeccs of overly scientistic methods. A com-
mon complaint was that social scientists treated their sub-
jects as objects, that is, as passive targets of various stru c-
tural, behaviorist, and often quantitative schemes of
explana~ion, and this to the detriment of "understandin g"
the moa.ves, values, and beliefs of their subjects as persons .
The study of Ramisrn reveals sorne deep hiseoricaJ re a-
sons for linking visual-spatial reduction of knowledge wieh
th_e ethos of scientific explanation. Undoubtedly, modern
sc1ence progressed as a result of this alliance but, accordin g
to Ong, such progress had ics price:
Ramism specialized in dichotomies, in "distribution"
and "collocation·• . . . , in "systems" . . . and in
other diagrammatic concepts. This hints that Ramist
dialectic represented a drive toward thinking not
only of the universe but of thought icself in terms
of spatial model s apprehended b)' sight. In this con-
text, the notion of knowledge as word, and the per-
sonalist orientations of cogn ition and of the uni-
verse which this notion implies, is due to atrophy.
Dialogue itself wilJ drop more than ever out of di-
The Other and the Eye 119
1.,)ectic.Persons, who alone speak (and in whom
.ione knowledge and science exist), w:illbe eclipsed
Jpsofar as che world is thought of as an assemblage
.,r the sort of things which vision apprehends-ob-
jectsand surfaces. (1958 :9)
:Asan alternative, Ong invokes the world of the "oral and
auditory" \.vhich is also "ultimately existencial" (19.58: 110).
1 have doubts about thís solution. Ong (and the critics
bf the social sciences who echo his views) rightly denounce
ifisualist reductions. One can only applaud his inspiring ef-
forts to think through the consequences which conceptions
of knowledge cou ld have that are based on auditory raeher
thanvisual root metaphor s.14 But to equate the aural with
'lbe personal and to identify both wieh the "existential" and
1humanecomes dangerousl y dose to a kind of antiscientism
which feeds on moral indignation and nostalgia for "d ia-
logue,"rather than on epistemological arguments.
To begin with, aural perception and oral expression
neither presuppose nor guarantee a more "personal" idea
or use of knowledge . That the spoken word is more fleet-
ing, and thae it lend s ieself less easily to apersona] forms of
fixation and transmission than images or print, can no longer
be held as a truism. New techniques available to record (and
process) spoken lan$'-1age and to eranslate it directly into
print via electron ic s1gnals rather than type and font make
the old divi.sions harder to maintain (even if one does not
care to go aJong wieh Derrida's reversal of relations between
speaking and writing as he expounds it in his Grammatol-
ogJ).15 \Ve may be approaching the point where the ex-
change of spoken words will be distinguishable frorn the cir-
c_ulationof printed messages and images mainly because the
time economy of the former muse respond, not so rnuch to
personal , bue to interpersonal conditions of communication.
Dialogueis perhaps too weak a term to cover the nature of
oral communication. Toe aural and oral muse be invoked
for episeemological reasons because they may provide a bet-
ter starting point for a dialecticalconcept of cornmunication.
Knowledge may be "depersonalized" orally as much as
through visual-spatial reduction. Why should mindless oral
repetition s of standardized forrnulae or, for that matter,
120 The Other and the Eye
skillful _manipu l~tion _of a s~o~eof tautological terms as they
occur m teachmg, m rehg1ous sermons, or in (X)liticaJ
sp~eches be any l_essdepersonalizing than the peddling of
pnnted words, dragrams, and images? If by personal,one
means somethi~g more specific than a vague ref erence to
humane ways; 1f one wants to designate with this term a
greater degree of personal awareness and of individual con-
trol , a sharpened sense for authorship and for knowled ge
as a possess1on or tool, then it seems obvious to me that
visualization and spa~alization of knowledge signa! a grea ter,
not a lesser, emphas1s on the knower as an individual.
In short , to invoke personaJism in this and similar de-
bates cre ates confu sion . Perhaps it can be avoided if one
reject s too simpl e an oppo sition between the visual and the
aura! . A st~p inLo that direction might be to consider Ti me
and especially those temporal relations that muse be in-
volved in interpersonal and, a Jortiori, in intercultural pro-
ductio _n ~,:id communication of knowledge.
_Lim1tmg ourse l~es Lo anthropolog)', we can link the
fi,i:idmgs of the rrev1ous chapters LOthe question at ha nd:
v 1suahsm alone 1s _n~:>t t.<;>blame for wbat 1 calJed a (X)liti
cal
cosmology. ~hat v1s1on 1s the noblest, most comprehensi ve.
and mosc rehable of the senses has been an artide of faith
since the_be&inn.ing of ou~ philo~<?phical tradicion. As 'ph e-
~O!flenal1sm,. ~h_,semph~sJS on v1s1on became part of ernpi -
nast and pos 1t1~ ·1~t theo~1eso~ knowledge. But before it could
ass~e the poh~caJ ~wtst wh1ch we ascribe to anthropolosi ·
cal discourse, v1sual1sm had to be expounded in spau al
schemes . Empiricist phe~omenalism <loes presuppose th at
Nature, at any rate expenenced Nature, is atomistic and tha t
know~edge i~ deriv_ed f rof!l myriads of sense impression s,
espec1al]y visual 1mpress1o~s. Because knowledge was
~oughc _to operate ~y collectmg , ~omparing, and classif )'ing
impress1ons, the not1on of the rnmd as a naturalisc's collec-
ti?n or cabinet encouraged further extension of the visual
bias tow~rd the spatial. ·oc only the sources of know ledg e.
but also 1ts contents were imagined to be visible. Add to this
the rhetoric_al intent of teaching such knowledge , and the
transformatmn from visible source to visible content is com -
The Other and the Eye 121
ted.Taught knowledge became arranged, ordered knowJ-
ge,easily rep resentab le in diagrammatic or tabular forrn .
To use an extreme formulation, in this tradition the
· t of anthropology could not have gained scientific sta-
until and unless it underwent a dou ble visual fixation, as
ep tual image and as illustration of a kind of knowledge.
th types of objectification depend on distance, spat ial and
poral. In the fundamental, phenomenalist sense this
s that the Other, as object of knowledge, must be sep-
e, discinct, and preferably distant from the knower. Ex-
. otherness may be not so much the result as the prereq-
ite of anthropological inquir y. ,.ve do not "find" the
ager y of the savage, or the primiti vity of the primitive ,
posit them , and we have seen in sorne detail how anthro-
logy has managed to maintain distance , mostly by manip-
ting tempor al coexisten ce through the denial of coeval-
Visualization and spatialization have not only been
ints of departure for a theory of knowledge, they become
program for the new discipline of anthropoJosr, There
a time when tbis rneant, above all, tbe exhibiuon of the
otic in illustrated travelogues, rnuseums , fairs, and expo-
'tions. These ear ly ethnofogicaJ practices established sel-
articu]ated but firm convictions tbat presentations of
owledge through visual and spatial images, maps, dia-
·grams, trees, and tab les are particularly well suited to the
description of primitive cultures which, as eveT)'One knows,
are supremely "synchronic" objects for visual-esthecíc per-
ception. Underlying this may be an even older association,
to which Ong directs our attention. The rise of topical logic
and the use of outlines and dichotomized tables, he points
out, was a natural outcome given the necessicies of teaching
philo sophy to teenagers (1958:136 f) . It is common ly be-
Iieved that the visual-spatial is more germane to the infan -
tile and adolescent mind than to mature intelligence.
Wheth er such is indeed the case may be for the psychologist
to decide. However it is easy to see how arguing from on-
to~en ecic to phylogenetic visualism may turn pedagogical
prmciples into po litical programs . Concrete ly speaking, we
 122 The Other and the Eye
must at least admit the possibility that striking images, sirn.
plified outlines, and ovenvrought tables were fed to stu.
dents in order to impress them with a degree of orderliness
and cohesiveness which the fields of knowledge taught by
these methods never possessed. Not the students' simplicitv
but the teacher's detennination to maintain his superior pÓ-
sition may have to be blamed. The same goes mutatis mut.an.
dis for the preponderance of visual-spatial presentation of
the Other in anthropoJogy. The hegemony of the visual as
a mode of knowing may chus directly be linked to the polit-
ical hegemony of an age group, a dass, or one society over
another. The ruler 's subject and the scientist's object have,
in the case of anthropology (but also of sociology and psy-
cho logy), an intertwined history.
If this is true, it would allow us to see the dogma of
empirical fieldwork in a new light. It was already noted that,
as a systematic pursuit, it emerged as a symptom of anthro -
pology's professionalization. 16 But we can ask now, wh at is
behind the professionalization of anthropology? In sorne way
or other it reflects the organization of a segment of bour-
geois society for the purpose of serving that society's inne r
1 continuity (through teaching and wTiting). Professionally re-
1quired field research also contributes to maintaining the po•
1
sition of that society vis-a-vis other societies. It is in this role
. that ethnography éame to be defined predominantly as ob-
1seroing and gathering, i.e., as a visual and spatial activity. lt
1
has been the enactment of po,ver relations between societies
that send out fieldworkers and societies that are the field.
Observ~ng reason (Beobachten.de Vernunft) seems to be impli-
cated in victimage, an insight which, long before Lévi-
Strauss, was candidly expressed by one of the great ethnol-
ogists of the nineteenth century: "For us, primitive societies
(Natumolker) are ephemeral, i.e., as regards our knowled ge
of, and our relations with, them, in fact, inasmuch as they
exist for us all. At the very instan t they become known to
us they are doomed" (Bastian 1881:63 f). This was said in a
political treatise pleading for the recognition of ethno logy
as a scientific discipline and proposing to create ethno-
graphic museums as its principal re search institutions.
At the risk of repeating myself, I must insist that I have
The Other and the Eye 123
n using "visualism" to desi~nate an ideowgicalcurrenr__in
estern thought. I am not trymg l? argue, by ~ay of na1ve
· cation , that vision, visual expenence, and v1sual expres-
l!>nsof experience should be removed from the _agend~ of
jhthropological thought and discours~. As ª°: 1deological
1/entespecially if it is true that there 1s collus1on between
h' a bent and allochronic tendencies , visualism functions
cognitive style that is likely to prejudice the study <?fal]
ds of cultural expression , including_those that per_tam to
al experience in general and to visual aestheti~s m par-
• ar. The visualist bias that is brought to che visual pro-
ctions of other cultures is no less in ~eed of critique than
,WWalistreductions of, say, Jangua ge, ~~tual, dance and mu-
ji:, social relations, or ecological cond1t1ons. . .
All this applies, of course, to the emerging ~eld _ofv1s-
'31anthropology. It s evaluation in t~r~s of ~he v1sual1stand
illochronic tendencies we are explonng m this chapter would
~uire more than a note in passing . My feel~g is_th~t, par-
;jdoxically, we may have a movement here wh1ch 1sdJrected
~st the lirniting effects of visualism on a theory of
kñowledge. At least sorne visual anthropologis~s affirm the
unportan ce of inter subjective exp~rience of Time and ex-
plore hermeneutic appr?aches to v_1sualdata (see Ruby 19~0
and further references m that arttcle). Needless to say, vis-
ual ethnography lend s itself to methodologizatio~ , in sorne
instances of the most excessive kind (see the hero1c attempts
at graphi c reduction and formal analysis in proxemics, ki-
nesics, and related fields).
'The Symbol B elongs to the Orient": Symbolic Anthropology
in Hegel's Aesthetic
When one criticizes epistemological and political implica-
tions of visualism and spatialism, allegations of abu.seshould,
of course, be weighed in a larger context of use. One must
ask what the convicrions and reasons are that make anthro-
pology accept visual-spatial reductions as legitimate modes
of knowledge. \\Te have done this for the periods when cul-
tural anthropology emerged under the ep isteme of natural
 124 The Other and the Eye
history and d~velope? its relativist and taxonomic discourse.
1t w~ml~ be 1mposs1ble.to conclude this account without
cons1de:mg how a trend m c':1rr:entanthropology which uses
the notion of symbol as a urnf ymg concept fits into our ar.
gument regarding allochronic discourse. Because "symbolic
anthr:opology" is of more r:ecen_torigin and an ongoing con.
cern 1t defies easy summauon; 1t also lacks a single towering
figure on whose oeuvre one could concentrare as being rep-
res~ntative of_t_heS}:11bolic approach. Compared to the his-
tonc~ and cnt1~ ltterat_ure on, say, evolutionism or struc-
turahsm, there 1sas yet httle to bui ld on.
The notion_of syi:nbol may have to be counted among
tho~e allochromc dev1ces whose use entails or encourage s
denta l of c~va Jn~ss between ~h~ subject and the object of
anthropolog1cal d1scourse. This 1s not a verdict but a point
for debate. At . any ra_te, it would be extremely difficul t to
demonstrate th1s fully if only because the sources from which
ant~ropologists have been borrowing their ideas are too
vaned. Between "symbolist" (X)etry and American "symbolic
interactionist" sociology, a critique of symbolic anthropol-
ogy would have to cover vast areas of intellectual histon ,
not to mention further complications that arise from dis-
senting views within symbolic anthropology.17
Th~ pragmatist heritaie of S}mbo]ic anthropolow h as
caused its _best representanves to presene a critica) d1strust
for the kmd of abstract formalizations to which French
structuralists are given (even though connections between
the two have by no means been severed, see Leach 1976). It
has, above al~, l~d ~em to. recognize concrete experience
and com!l1umcauve mteracuon as principal sources of eth-
nographic knowledge. Still, deciding on the symbol as a kev
notion h_as far-reaching consequences and there are reasons
for argun~~ that contemporary symbolic anthropo logy is part
/ of a trad1t1on of thought which constructs its objects with
the help of a visuaJ-spatial rhetoric. Svstem, order, model s,
bl~~prin~, and si~ ilar_terms which regularly occur in these
~-ltmgs s1gnal a v1sual1stepistemology. They are character-
1st1~of an anthropological discourse whose self-definition
oscillates between semiotics (French-Saussurian) and semiol-
ogy (American-Peircean). In either case, the symbolic an-
The Other and the Eye 125
pologist is inclined to "view" the Other as an object of
theúc contemplation. "In the country of the blind ," says
l. Geertz, "the one-eyed is not king bue spectator"
(J9'79:228). The exarnple of M. Sahlins will show that this
_.ay be carried to the (X)Ínt where the ardor to defend a
r:;ibolic approach even leads a bonafide materialist to af-
the aesthetic "autonomy" of culture. The detour
ifu,ough the symoo 1c stu y ofpr 1m1bve cMture leads one
,o discover a universal and transhistorical mode of existence
(OÍ all culture: religion, art, and even ideology will then be
declared "cultural systems" and nothing shou ld in princip ie
fl":vent science, politics, and economics from being re-
jorbed by such pancuJcuralism.
In surn, che S}mbolic carries a heavy load indeed. But
.itose load is it? Is the subject of anthropological discourse
Íurdened with it or is it carried by the object? When we ask
lbesequestions we note the arnbiguity of symbolicin symbolic
.-nthropology . Is it the primitive whose way of thinking, ex-
!!ssin , or being 1s symbohc, orís anthropology ~líe
iñifie sense that it projects onto íts Other symbofic rríean-
and understandings, much as the ancient artists of
memory populated their consciousness with esoteric images
and signs? Is the symbolic, as a mode of being, an object of
ioquirv or does it constitute a method? If it is a mode of
culturalexistence then it is a problem f or us; if it is a mode
of inquiry then it is a problem generated by us, a load with
which we burden those whom we analyze "symbolically."
These questions, to be sure, contain age-old philosophical
puzzles which have eluded definitive solutions and are likely
to elude them in the future. But they also touch on hiscory
and politics. It makes sense to ask them, for instance, in the
light of what we called allochronic discour se. In what sense
does talk of symbols and the symbolic foster a tendency in
anthropological discourse to place its Other in a Time dif -
ferem from our own?
At the risk of incurring the wrath of both symbolic an-
thropologists and historians of philosophy, I will illustrate
how symbol may be u sed as a temporalizing device by com-
rnenting briefly on sorne passages in the first and second
Parts of Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics.18 There are striking
 126 The Other and the Eye
res~T?blances between the se philosophical texts and ce rtain
pos1t1ons held by ~ontem))<?rarr analysts of cultural symbofs
(p~rhaps express1ve of h1stoncal connections via Royce
Peirce,_ and other American pragmatists). Moreover, as~
sumpt1ons that are usually hidden in anthropological dis-
course are expli~i~y state~ by Hegel, who was unhamper ed
by_cultural relat1v1sm and lts conventions of intercultural ci-
vihcy.
. . Hegel proposes his theory of the symbol in order lo
d1stmgmsh ~twee~ three major art forms: symbo lic, classic,
ai:id. ro~an~c. As 1s characteristic of him, he makes these
d1~tmct1ons m such a way that they not onl}' yield a system-
au~ typology bue also a developmental sequence. The sym-
~lic mod~ precedes the cl~sic ~d ro1:1antic forms by log-
1cal n~cess1ty, not bymere h1stoncal acc,dent . The histori cal
mear_ung of symbohsm and its logical position in a system of
relations are therefore interchangeable .
. To analyze ~e logic of symboJism is the purpose of an
mtroductory secuon to the second part of the Aesthetic with
the predictable title "On the symbol as such." 1t begins with
a statement whose temporalizing intent could not be ex-
pressed more clearly:
In the sense in which we are using the word, sym-
bo_l ~arks, conceptuaJI)' as well as historically, the
ongm of art; therefore it should be, as it were, re-
garded only as pre-are , belonging mainly to the Ori-
ent . Only after many transiúons , transfÓrmations
and mediations <loes it lead to the authentic realicy
of the id~a of a classical artfonn. (1:393)
Such is lhe real meaning of symbol as opposed to a secon-
dary, "externa!" use according to which certain mode s of
presentation that can occur in any of the three art forro ~
may also be called symbolic.
In ~ese few semences, Hegel summarized many of th e
f assumpttons that have been guiding inquiries into (tempü-
rally or spatially) remoce expressions of culture. Most im-
portantly, he sets ª. precedent for an extraordinary claim ,
namely th~t symbol!c could be ac once analytical ("logical ")
and hIStoncal: that 1t marks a type of relation between con -
The Other and the Eye 127
t and forro, reality and expressions, presumably charac-
. tic of all culture, as well as a specific form or a peculiar
e of expression ch aracteristic of certain cultures. These
nds at least in their authentic sta te, at the early stages
of civili;ation, outside of his own Western world, in the
-()rient. " That which is past is remate, that wh ich is r~rn~te
is pase: such is the tune to which figures of allochromc d1s-
c;ourseare dancing.
Neither Hegel nor later symbologisls cou ld confine
ahemselves lo affirmations of temporal distance. They had
:to elabo rate on the logic of distance lest placing the s_ym-
bolicin the pase rnight rern~ve _ic altogether fro~ senous
consideration. Our temporal d1sm1ssalof the Other 1s alwa}'S
such that he remains "integrated" in our spatial concepts of
]ogic (such as order, difference, opposition). Hegel, there-
fore, proceeds in his Aesthetic to shore up his position . Con-
c:eptually, it must be g_uard~d against confusior:i of the ~}'m-
bolicmode of express1on w,th other types of s1gn relat1ons;
historicall y, the symbolic must be shown to cause in the con-
tempora ry spectator reactions that are unlike those we ex-
pecefrom more fa~iliar art forn:is·. .
Hegel , accordmgly, first dISungmshe s symbols from
other signs , e.g., linguistic signs. Whereas the latter are ar-
bitr arily assigned to the sounds or meanings they represen~,
the relationship between symbols and what they express 1s
not "indifferent.'' The symbol suggests by its external ap-
pear ance that which it makes appear, not in its concrete and
uniqu e existence, however, but by expressing "a gener~l
qualit y of its me aning" (see 1:395). Furthermore, symbollc
expression and symbolized contentare not reducible to each
other. They lead, so to speak, an independent ex.istence :
one symbol can have many contents, one content is capable
of being expressed by different symbols. Hence symbols ~e
essentially ambiguous; they leave the viewer necessanl y
"doubtful " (1:397). If and when ambiguit}' is removed and
doub ts are assuaged, then a symbolic relationship in the strict
sense no longer obta ins. What remains of the symbo l is "a
mere image" whose relation to the content it depicts is that
of an analogy or simile (see 1:398; che terms are Vergleichung
and Gleichnis).
128 The Other and the Eye
Hegel insists that doubtfulness and insecurity vis-a-vis
the symbolic are not limited to certain cases. Rather, the>•
are the response
to very large areas of art; they app ly to an im-
mense material at hand : the content of almost all
oriental art. T herefore, when we first enter the
world of ancient Persian, Indian , or Egyptian fig-
ures (Gesta/ten)we feel uneasy. We sense that we are
walking among tasks; in themselves, these forms do
not strike us; their concemplation does not immedi-
atel~· picase or satisfy us. But they contain a chal-
len~e to go_beyon~ their exte rn a! appearance], to
the1r m~anmg , wh1ch must be something more and
something mor e profound than these images. (1:400)
In a ~anner reminiscent of relativist appeals to the unity of
mankmd, Hegel then n?tes that a symbolic interpretation is
called for because we s1mply cannot dismiss as childish the
productions of peoples who may be in their ch ildhood, but
who ask for "more essential content." Their true meaning
muse be "~ivined" beneath their "enigmatic" forms (ibid.).
Ali this sounds quite modern and is in fact ritually as-
~rted by contemporary anthropologists, especially the no-
~1onthat, the non-\,V~stern poses a "problem" (eineAufgabe,
m Hegel s words). Bemg alerted by the fable of the wolf and
~e l~b to a certain ki~d of hypocrisy whenever the Oth er
1s sa1d to be problemau c, one suspects Hegel of dupli citv.
He seems to be driven b)' an effort to give us a theory of the
symbolic as a special type of sign reíation. Ambiguity and
do~btfulness ~ppear to be a "logical" property of the sym-
bohc. I_n re3:11ty,they are caused by actual historical con-
fron~t14:m w1th non-Western forms of cultural expression .
Amb1gu1tyand doubtfulness are the primary datum; they are
the ~k or problem, not ~e symbohc images by which they
are tnggered . The S}'mbolicapproach is that part of a gen-
eral theory of signs which functions most directly as an anx-
iety-reducing method .
One might argue that it is mere pedantry to hold Hegel
(and perhaps ~ymbolic an~ropology ) to the actua l sequence
o_fsteps by ,-.•hich they arnve at a theory of symbolic expres-
s1on. Not at ali, because sequence may make a considerable
The Other and the Eye 129
di{ference when one wishes f:Oexamine ideolo~ca l and po-
liric.alimplications of symbollc app roaches. As is often ~e
case(and Hegel would be the first _to say so),. the logical
scructure of an argu ment may conta m assumpuons, or d~-
crees, of developmental, evolutionar y sequence .. In fact, m
Hegel's case it is quite clear that he prop<>sesh1s theorr ~f
the symbolic as a (pare of a) theory of h1s~º11; As s1:1c h 1t 1s
a cheory about Time , one that "temporahzes r~lat1ons Le-
tween Western and ~01,1-Wes~ern cultures by placmg the lat-
ter in the time of ongms. G1ven the resemblanc~s between
Hegel's views and those of present-day symbologists (not to
speak of convergences between He gel and Comte an~
Durkh eim) one cannot help but s~spec~ that. the s~bohc
continue s to serve essentially as ~ ume-d1stancmg dev1ce.
Hegel and modern symbohc anthropology par~ com-
pany as far as the extensi?n o~ their symboí-theon~s are
concerned. Hegel, whose d1alecuc thought _alwars m~nes to-
ward the concrete and who, in the Af!Sthetic_ as 1_n h1s o~er
works, roposes to account for ~pecific, histoncal real12a-
tions o( the spiri t, rejects the nouon that a~l art , and ~en~e
a1lculture should be approached as symbolic..He adm1ts (1~
50
me comments on symbolic theories fash1ona~le. at his
time) 19 that such a view might be construed , but h1s mterest
goes in the opposite d_irectio~. H~_wants to show that the
symbolic was, I}ecessartly., a h1stoncaJ. ~ode ?L~!._Produc-
~- -As sücfi it is part of a typology w1th_m whteh 1tco~tras1s
w1th two other major forms, callea class1cand romanuc (see
1:405). h.
In Later sections of his Aesthetic,Hegel elaborates on t 1s
typology and names the grounds on whi~h !he !hree types
are to be distinguished. The common cnter10n m ~ll three
fonns is the relation of form and content, express1on an~
mean ing. The symbolic, "the stage _of_the origi·n of art:• 1s
characterized by an inherent amb1gu1ty of that rel~tion .
Meanin g and express_i~n_are,. so to _speak, merely JUXta-
posed; the human spmt 1s still gropmg fo~ umty of sub-
stance and expression .. Qassic . ar_t, exe~plified ~y.Greek
sculpture, achieved umty, albe1t m an e~ternal, imper-
sonal form (see 11: 13 ff) . Such external umt y was, to u se a
Hegelian term not invoked by Hegel in this context, mere
 130 The Other and the Eye
anlit~esis to symbol~cjuxtaposition and ambiguity. Only Ro-
ma?llc art a~comphshes th~ s;:nthesis _of form and coiite, 1t
as mn_er ui:11ty, as the subJectlve realtzation of the Spirit
From Jt spnngs a new and "modern" creativity; in its
pan_t~eon ali gods are dethroned, the flame of sub-
Jecnv1ty_ha s ?estroyed _them, and instead of plastic
polythe1sm [1.e. a mulatude of symbolic figures] art
now knows only <>neGod, 012eSpirit, ane absolute
autonomy. Art is constituted in free unity as its own
~bsolute ~nowl~dge and will, it no Ionger is divided
1~to speofic tratts and functions whose only connec-
tton was the force of sorne dark necessity. (u : 130)
Similar schemes of fin~. identity are ex¡xmnded in Hegel' s
Phenomeno_logy efthe Spmt and in his writings on the philo s-
~phy of h1sto~y ~d l~w. ~ut nowhere are his argume nts as
anthropolog 1c~l as 1!1~1sAesthetic. For one thing, he soon
overcomes earher hes1tat10n and e_x.tendshis typo logy of are
forms to ali culture (see rr:232). H1s theory of art is a theor y
of culture:
These ways ?f .,.¡~""'.ingthe world constitute rehgion,
the substa nttal spmt of peoples and times . Thev
permeate art as mucha s aJI ~re~s ?fa given living
present. As_~very h1;1~an bemg 1s m ali his activities,
be they pohncal, rebgious artistic or scientific a
child of his time and has die task 'to work out tlie
~ssential c~mtent and necessary form of his time, so
1s ~rt destmed t.o.find the artistic expression appro-
pnate to the spmt of a people. (u:232)
The ·symboilc, however, dearly is the Other. Classic art
appe~s as. a transitory stage, a pále "logical" projection in
~1s tnpart1t~ typology. It_is. admirable bue does not inspire
unea~1~ess. The symbol_ic1s the prob lem. It is in practic a!
oppos1t1on.to _che romanuc, and the romantic clearly serves
as_ a descr1ptton of_ J:I_egel'sown nineteenth-century con-
sc1ousness and st?ns1b1ht1es.The sovereign individual, free
fro~ che ~onstramts of "natural" forms and aesthetic con-
ventions, 1s the ideal of contemporary , modern man. To
overcome the symbolic, historically and by conceptual anal-
The Other and the Eye 131
~• constitutes a "task" for modern man: his self-constitu-
,jion.
The symbolic-visual mode of expression is said to dom-
· .,.ate the early stages of culture; it is ambiguous and len -
uous, always in danger of turning into mere imagery or un-
p,ntrolled fancy. This is Hegel's counterimage to a culture
.tiich has achieved "inner unit)".' of fonn and coi:itent. By
ifie logic of contrast and oppos1t1on one expects h1m to ex-
ploreaudial-verbal modes as appropriate expressions of ro-
xnantic art. Such is indeed the case : "If we want to summa-
rize in one word the relationshir of co':1tent a~d form in ~e
Romantic . . . we may say that 1ts baste tone 1s . . . musical
-and . . . lyrical" (II: 141). He develops this insight system-
atically and in great detail in the third part of A.esthetic(m ,
chapter s on romantic music and poetry). There he speaks
of Time as that which is "dom inan t in music" (m: 163) , a
thou ght which links his theory of art to an idea pervading
bis entire philosophical system. It has been said that Hegel's 20
philosophy of the human spirit is a philosophy of Time.
· lndeed, among the most beguiling of his insights are those
that comrast Time with Space, as Sound with Sight, Histor y
with Natu re. In the Encycl.opediaHegel formulates: "The au-
dible and temporal, and the visible and spatial each have
their own basis. They are , at first, equally valid." But-and
in this context he opposes writing and speaking-"visible
langu age relates to sounding (tonend) language only a~ a
sign." The catch is in the only: "true expression of the mmd
occurs in speech" (see 1969:374, par. 459). '"-'e can, and must
go beyond signs and symbols.
The Other as I con: The Case oJ"SymbolicAnthropol.ogy"
Contemporary symbolic anthropology can probably not be
hlamed for (nor credited with) a historizing theory of the
symbolic. On the whole, it seems to have accepted White -
head 's verdict that symbolism as a culturally specific style (as
in "oriental symbolism," or "medieval S}mbolic architec-
ture" ) is "on the fringe of life" ( 1959 [ 1927): 1). It opted for
 132 The Other and th e Eye
an alte:native that was rejected by Hegel, namely that the
l symbobc ought to be taken as a mode
• sofar as it is cultura l.
of all perception in-
, . It app~ars , h~wever , if we let ourse lves be gui ded by
\'\,h1tehead s class1cal text , that a transhistorica l theorv of
symboliz~t~on shares many of the assumptions \Ve ascribed
to a r~la~v1st, taxonom ic, and genera lly visualist outlook. The
const 1tut1ve _act of knowledge-"selfproduction" in Whi te-
~ead 's te1:111mology-consists of bringing toget her into one
~1gn-relat 1on what _wasapart ( 1959:9). The temJXlral coex-
1stence of_ perc_epttons and expressions is not cons idered
prob lematIC. _It 1s 3!; externa l, physical fact (see 1959: 16, 21);
w~at couz:its1s the scheme of spatia l relatedness of the per -
ce1ved thmgs ~ each other a_nd to_ the perceiving subject"
(1~59:22). Th1s echoes Ram1st ep1stemology and, as on e
m1~ht expect, has_strong affinities to a classificatory, taxon -
om1c stance. Spaual relations and sense data are both "ge-
neric abstactions" and
The main facts about pre sentational immediacy are :
(i) that the sense-data invo lved depend on the per-
cipient organism and its spat ial relations to the per-
ceived organisms; (ii) that che contemporary world
!s exhi~!ted as extended an d as a plenum of organ-
1sms; (m) that presentational immediacv is an im-
portant facU?r in the experience of only a few high-
grade orgamsms, and that for the others it is em-
bryonic or entirely neg ligible. Thus the disclos ure
of a contemporary wor ld by presentationa l immedi-
acy is bound up with the disclosure of the solida rit v
of actual things by reason of their participation in ·
an irnpartialsystemof spatiaiextension.(1959:23; my
emphasis)
These premise_s are ingeniou sly deve loped until they
lea~ to the concJus10n that "Ultima tely all observation, sci-
ent 1fic or popular, consists in che determination of rhe spa-
tial relation of the bodily organs of the observer to the lo-
cation of 'projected' sense data" (1959:56). Furthermore
there is only a small step from spatialism to what I will refe;
to. as the iconism of symbo lic approaches: "Our re lation-
sh1ps to these bodies are precisel y our reactions to them.
The Other and the Eye 133
'fhe projection of our s_ensatio~s is nothing els_ethan the
ilbJstr
ation of the_ world m par~1al accord ~nce w1th the _sys-
iematic sche me, m space and time , to wh1ch these reactions
eonform" ( 1959 :58; my emph~is). Finally! ~.Y ~ªt
of as-
sumptions concern ing the spat1al-geogra ph1c_ umty o~, so-
cieties and the ro le of language as the mo st 1mportant na-
tional S}mbolism" (see 1959:6:4_,66 f.) White~ead's argument
ends with statemems of a pohtical n~tu:e wh1ch today sour~d
much like the commo npl aces on e 1s hkely to encounter m
anthropolo gical and sociological texts:
When we examine how a society be nd s its ind ivid-
ual members to function in conform ity with its
needs, we discover that one important operative
agency is our vast system of inherited symbolism.
(1959:73).
The self-organisalion of soci~ty depends on . \
commonly diffused symbols evokmg commonly d1f-
fused ideas , and at the same time ind icating com-
monl y understood actions. ( 1959:76)
Whitehe ad is not the sole philosophical ancestor of
symbolic anthropo logy, perhaps not even its most im(X)rtant
one. And there is much more to his thought and the essay
from which I quoted than its being an example of_visual-
ism.21 Still, it is fair to say that Symbolism:_!tsMeaning arul
Effect contains sorne of the basic presuppos1t1ons of the sym-
bolic approach in current anthropology. It holds that s 1~-
bols are the mode of knowledge of the cultures we stu y, m
fact of culture taut court, and that symbolic analysis or inter-
pre tation provide anthropo logy w1th adequate metho_ds of
áescr ibing and understanding other cultures .•Symbohc an-
tñr opology- shires with structuralism its contempt for crude
empiri cism; it is less enthusiastic about its concerns for clas-
sification and taxonomi c description. I say "less" because the
taste for taxonomies is not entirely absent. For instance, V.
Tum er's p roJXlsal to chart a symbol system in terms of
domi nant and instrumental symbols (1967:30 f.) clearly pre-
supposes classificatory and hierarchical ordering which, as a
method of description, could easily be presei:ited as a. tax-
onomy of symbols. Incidentally, Turner prov1des us Wlth a

134 The Other and the Eye
striking example of an ethnographic translation from tern,
poral to spatial schemes. At one point he notes that each of
the symbols he identified as "dominant" is described by the
Ndembu as mukulumpi,, elder, senior (1967:31; see also 30).
Relations based on seniority (especially when they are con-
cretized as filiation or generation) and relations based on
subsumption and dominance are of different types entirelv.
Of course it is the juxtaposition of the Ndembu term and
its ethnogi:aphic gloss--a trace of field work carried out un-
der cond1tions of coevalness-wh ich permits this critique.
Symbolic anthropologists advocate hermeneutic ap-
! proaches and perfer "thick" ethnographic accounts over
\anemic diagrams and tables. Very likely, they come closer
than other schools to treating Others not just in but also on
1their own terms. Yet symbolic anthropology continue s to
lspeak not only of symbols but of symbol-systems; it strives
E 1ects a hieratic continu1ty ? !1to th~ir troubl~d h1st~ry.
'tf;\'idence of historical process m th~ p~on<;>Uncedsyncreu sm
1to lay bare the symbolic structures and props of a cultur e.
On the whole, it orients its discourse on root metaphors d e-
rived from vision. Consequently it exhibits more affinities to
, spatial order than to temporal process.
Rather than trying to confront symbolic anthropol ogy
in terms of its numerous philosophical and sociaJ-scientific
sources, I will discuss one example documenting the iconic
bent and then examine sorne further consequences in a re-
cent case of conversion to symbolic anthropology.
My first examp le is James Boon's The Anthropologi.calRo-
mance efBali, ( 1977), a thoughtful and (in a positive sense)
self-conscious work in the symbolic orientation. Boon's proj-
ect is carried out with elegance and persuasiveness. His cen-
tral concern might in fact be quite dose to the one pursu ed
in these essays: The ethnography of Bali must be under -
stood in the context of "temporal perspectives" (thus the
title of part 1) which, successively and cumulatively, have
contributed to constituting "Bali" as a topos, i.e., a strikin g
and significant place of return and reference in Western
anthropoloRical discourse. From the time of its discovery as
a "paradise' by the Dutch, to Mead and Bateson's de]ight at
finding its people superbly photogenic (1977:10 , 67), down
to the touristic packaging of the island in our days, there
runs a history of visualization whose explicitness and inten-
The Other and the Eye 135
, affords us an extreme example of stereotypical knm~l-
y of an exotic people. Bali's ecol?g ical co~pactness,. 1ts
tng relief , and the profusi?n of v1sual-spat1alsy~bohsm
eloped by its cu~ture contnbuted f1;1rthert? f!Iakmg the
liland eminently suited to e~lmo~aph 1c descnpuon ~eple~e
'th visual rhetoric. Boon IS cnt:Ically aware th~t h1s n °''
~nographic research inserts itsel[ into th3:t h1story. He
ws that he must work either w1th or _a~amst the trans-
t,°mation of Bali into an ernblem of ~xot1c1sm.. .
The image of Bali derives from \.1sual-spat1alreducuon
jtiich is at the same t~e too ~oncrete an? too abstract:. too
qoncrete, inasmuch as 1t depICts the Balmese d~thed m a
fusing plethora of symh?ls; too abstr_act when 1t w~ongly
spite report s on vir ulent ~ht1 cal str1fe, and d1sregard?1g
~ its religious belief~ and ~ial !nsutu~1ons, the , "~ester~
image of timeless Bah was m~ntamed w1th un~a~ enn~ te
nacity. It spawned a long senes of ever more danng visual
reductions, including atte~pts to re3:d the syste_m ?f
branching irrigation can als hterally as d1agrams of kmship
and social structure (see Boon 1977:40). In sum, anthroJ;X>l-
<>wcal discourse on Bali has ~een given to excesses or
ahsmwhich have the cumulal:lve effect of_temporal ~1stanc-
VlSU-
ing: Bali is paradisiaca!, hieratic, emblemauc-everythmg but
coeval with the Western observer.
\Vhen Boon sets out to undo these delusio~s, ho~ever ,
he chooses a strategy whose prospects for br<:a½,ing,-v~th the
traditi on he criticizes are not very go?<i. ~h1s 1s not 1mme-
diatel y apparent from_ ~ü_smeth~ of pla_ymg_concepts ~e-
rived from literary cnttasm agamst the 1c~msm of ear_her
ethnogr aphy; the verbal serves here as an mstance aga~st
the visual. He applies the conceptual apparatus us~ to d1s-
tinguish between the genres of romance and ep1c to Ba-
linese historv ancient and recent, and succeeds 1~ convey-
ing an impré;sion of a highly flexible and dynanuc cultur~.
Details of his account need not concern us h~re. ~t;tffice 1t
to say that Boon's sensitivity to th~ eff~ts of v1suahzmg and
spatializing devices in ant~ropolo~cal d1scourse comes to the
poim where he almost ra1ses the 1ssue of coevalness.
136 The Other and the Eye
. But, and there is a but, it is not likely that Boon wiU
ra1se that problem in a fundamental way as long as he re.
ma ins within the theoretical and methodological frame of
symbolic anthropology. True, he denounces facile visual.
spatial reduction. Yet his own approach is topical in the sense
of a place-logic that permits him to attach his account to a
few striking themes (those of romance and epic anda series
of features, styles, and recurrent motifs which are used to
define these genres). He thus constructs an architecture of
interpretations whose rhetoric appeal bears more than a su-
perficial resemblance to the "art of memory." 22 The result
is an account which rises above its crudely visualist anteced-
ents. If successful, such description moves the ethnogr a-
pher's audience to approval or rejection, as the case may be,
but it avoids calling the Knower and the Known into the
same temporal arena. Like other S} mbo lic anthropo logists,
1
Boon keeps his distance from the Other; in the end his cri-
tique amounts to posing one image of Bali against othe r
images. This is inevitable as long as anthropology remains
fixed on svmbolic mediations whose importance no one
denies but ~hich, after ali, should be the field of encounter
with the Other in dialectical terms of confrontation, chal-
lenge, and contradiction, not the protective shield which
cultures hold up against each other. So far, it seems, füra-
tion on the symbolic favored maintaining the stance of the
viewer, observer, perhaps the decipherer of cultural "texts";
The Other remains an object, albeit on a higher level than
that of empiricist or positivist reification . The following pas-
sage f ro~ Boon confirms this beyond any doubt:
A major interest in the art of ethnology is to convey
a sense of the whole society, to typif y it in sorne
vivid, compelling manner. Like any essentiall}' met-
aphorical procedure , ethnology thus resembles the
arts of visual illusion, if one realizes there is no such
thing as simple "realism" and no possible one -to-
one correspondence between that which is "illu-
sioned to" and the perceptual or conceptual appa-
ratus by which illusion is perpetrated. (1977: 18)
Having moved to a higher level of visual-spatial redu c-
tion, and hence of temporal distancíng, symbolic anthropol-
The Other and the Eye 137
mav in fact be quite immune to the problem of coeval-
. As an ideology it may widen and d_ee_penthe gap
•een the West and its Other. At least, th 1s 1s how I read
follovving statement from the introduction to a reader
jn symbolic anthropology:
undamental to the study of symbolic anthropology
the concern with how peop le formulate their
ality. We must, if we ar~ to unde~stand this and
late it to an understandmg of their (and our own)
ction examine their culture, not our theories (and if
e stu,dy our theories, we must study them as "their
lture" ); study their systems of symbols, not our ad
oc presumptions about what it might or should be.
Dolgin et al. 1977:34)
One can applaud the authors ' intent when, in the same
passage, they call for a study of culture as praxis rather than
form. All the same, to insist on keeping_ "their cul_ture'' and
"our theories " apart countermands úie call f~r "praxis."~
praxís that does not include the one who stud1es tt can only
be;wnfronted asan image of itself, as_a represe..!!!_atí~n,and
with that , anthropology is back to the interpret.atlon of
(symbolic) forros. . .
This is exemplified by Marshall Sahhns m the acco~mt
of his conversion to symbolic anthropology, Culture and
Practical Reasan (1976). The book is devoted to demonstrat-
ing the difference between symbolic culture and practica!
responses to life's necessities or the prospects for profit. It
is of special interest here because it not only opposes two
modes of knowledge and action (in this it is hardly unique)
but it aligns these modes, very much in th~ manner of He-
gel, with the differences between what Sahhns calls the ·west
and the Rest.
In his arguments Sahlins makes amrle use of the_term
primitive. It turns out, however, that he 1s not much mter-
ested in evolutionary distancing and perhaps even less in
romantic idealizing. He goes farther than both ~hes~ for~s.
Where the former projects developmental or h1stoncal d1s-
tance and the latter a utopian-critical distance from Western
society, Sahlins introduces an ontological difference: As
 138 The Other and the Eye
symbolic and practica] reason are two irreducible mod
t.!"1°ught~nd acti_on, so are being primitive and being e;¡}
hzed_two 1rreduc1ble mod~ of existence. Consciously orn o~-
Sahlms and o~er sym~hc anthropologists promote funda:
?'lenta! _oppos1uons wh1ch ~av:e ~eft traces in almost evei-.
ideologicaJ ~amp of our d1sc1plme. Certainlv the natu }
cu~ture d~hsm of the structuralists seems to be a legitim·re.
h~ir to nmeteent~ c~ntury disjunctions. lt creates dicho~~
mies, first by a~tnbu~mi. centra_l import ance to classification
and exc_han~e U:pnm1uve soc1ety in contrast to labor and
'°'
pr~;1ct1~n m ~sle~n so~ety; second, by opposing histori-
cal ( hot ) to ahistoncal ( cold") societies and claiming rh
latter as the proper domain of anthropology.
. Bu~ let us ta.ke a closer look at Sahlins' reasoning. To
begm with, he cannot be accused of nai'veté about the orioin
and eff ect of such dichotomizing: 0
One evident matter-for bourgeois society as much
as the so-called primitive-is that materiaí aspects
are not usefully sep arated from the social, as if rhe
first were_re~erable to the satisfaction of need s by
the explo1~t1on of nature, the second to problems
of the re~atJOns~tween men. Having made such a
fateful different1a_tion of cultural compo nent s . . .
we are forced to hve forever with the intellectual
consequences. . . .
~fuch of anthropolog}' can be cons idered as a
su~tamed _effo': at synthesizing an original segmen-
tat,on_of !tsObJect,_an anal>tic distinction of cultural
domams ,_tmade w1thout due reflection, if clearly
on the model pre sented by our own society
(1976:205) . ship between value and labor had been seen as one of rep-
So fa~, ~o good._ Bt-!t th~ hislory of anthropologv does not
contam 1t~~JwnJUsttficaoon. The energy allegedly spent on
resynthes~mg ~oes n~t guarantee the success of the se ef-
forts. _Sahlu1;sh1mself illustrates this by the way he catTies
out ~1s prOJeCt._T~ree-fourths of his book is devoted to
sh~Wing that_v~neties of practica] reason, in particular his-
jncal matenal1sm,_gener~te. t~eorie~ that are only applica -
b ~ to Western soc1ety. Pnmit1ve soc1eties, we are told are
gmded by, and must be understood in terms of, "cuÚural
The Othcr and the Eye 139
bolic) reason." If this were taken to its radical conclu-
1 s one v.ould have to assert that sense and meaning are
found in prirn iúve societies on ly, whereas Western civ-
úon is but the result of economic mechanisms and prag-
. adjustments. 23 • .
Sahlins does not pose the problem m such a radJCal
•14 The remainder of his book is devoted to uncovering
e semiotic dimensions of our economy" (1976: 165; my
hasis). In other words, he proposes to sho·w that even
mporary American society has "culture," i.e., is in sorne
governed by S}mbolic reason whose logic is not redu~-
to practical concerns. With that he takes back \.Vhalh1s
e tral thesis states .
This attempt at synthesizing cultural and practical rea-
was doomed from the beginning because Sahlins tries
carry it out in terms of the _disjunction it ~as supP<?Se?.to
rcome. Throughout, he clmgs to the nouon of pnmiuv_e
·ety. In fact it is quite dear that he cannot do w1thout tl
he is to take the first slep in his argument for cu lture
inst practicaJ reason. To identif y, as he does, in Western
ietv the continued existence of symbolic representations
:~racteristic of primitive society was a favorite strategy ~f
~~eteenth-centurv evolutionist comparative method: one 1s
~pted to state t.hat Sahlins resurrects the doctrine of sur-
fl\'als. Little if anything, is gained for our understanding ·of
thesymbolic if it is opposed to the practica!.
M. Foucault observed, in the Order of Things (1973), that
aince Ricardo and certain ly since Marx, economic theory
Went through a profound change. At one time, the relation-
resentation or signification. Value was concei'ved as asign of
human activitv (axiom: "A thing is representable in units of
work"). Ricardo and Marx redefined the relationship as one
of origin and result: "Value has ceased to be a sign, it has
become a product" (Foucault 1973:253 ). If this observaúon
is correct it throws further light on current anthropo logical
dichotomies. Cultµre, according to ¡>redominant opinion,
relates to human activititv in svmbohc or semiotic wavs; it
representspractica} activitiés but 'is nol studied as their prod-
Uj: t. Sahlin s and other S}mbolic anthropologists who sub-
 140 The Other and the Eye The Other and the Eye 141

scribe to chis view and who are out to assert the autono.. With these remarks, our critique of symbolic anthro-
mous, irreducible character of symbolic cultur~, _ cut ~ogy converges with P. Bourdiel! 's _objecti<?nsto what he
themseJves off from human praxis, which alone can accounc ~s objectivismin anthropology (a1mmg mamlX at ~rene~
foi:._the emergence and existence of cultural order s. Illu s. stfUCturalism). ~ost ?f the issues are su~m_anzed m th1s
trating ~larx 's First Thesis on Feuerbach, with which I pre. passagefrom h1s Outlme of a Theory of Practice.
faced th1s chapter, they advocate an anthropology for which
objectívism constirutes the social world as a s,pec!a-
culture remains an "object of contemplation." de present ed toan observer who takes up a pomt
To criticize such "symbolism" is not to deny all useful- of view" on the action! w~o stands b~ck so as t~º?-
ness to semiotic approac hes. \\lhat should be rej~ctefl ..!§the ,erve it and, transfernng mt? the obJe~l the p_nna-
ideological closure of serniotic and symbolic types of anthro- plesof bis relation to the .º~JeCt,conc~1ves <;>flt as a
pological analysis. That closure is usuall y achieved by as- u,talityíntended for cognmon alofl:e, m wh1ch ali
1serting the functional autonomy of symbolic relations and 111teractíons are reduced to symbohc excha~ges. .
This point of view is the one afforde? by h1gh J?OSI-
'1 systems, and by relegating all questions that regard their tions in the social structure, f rom wh1ch the social
producti.on,their being anchored in a nonrepresentatio nal
1 world of real space and time, to economics (as in Sahlins' world appears as a representation (i? the_se_nseof
"practica! reason") or to neurophysiology (as in Lévi-Strauss' idealist philosophy but also as used m pamtmg or
"human mind "). thetheatre ) and practices are no more than "execu-
tions," stage parts, performances of seores, or the
To insist on production besides, or against, repre sen- implementing of plans. ( 1977 :96)
tation is not to assert an onto logical difference between the
two. There is J].9 ontological necessily to regard culture as a
product rather than a sign. The _distinction mustbe main-
tained for epistemological reasons. Proclaiming the sym-
bolic autonomy of culture and practicing sorne sort of se-
miotic analysis on aspects of it really works only within one 's
own culture (as demonstrated brilliantly by R. Barthes and
J. Baudrillard ). \.\7hen the analyst participates in the praxi s
that produces the system he analyzes, he may bracket out
the question of production without doing too much harm
to his mfiterial. Semiotic analysis applied to other culture s
(especially when it is carried out without immerson into the
praxis of these cultures) can only be realized as a form of
arb itrary imposition-call it constructing the mytfi of a myth
(as Lévi-Strauss defines the task of the anthropologist) or
app lying Occam's razor (as it is often put by his empiricist
counterparts). Arbitrary imposition works-w itness the out -
put of various semiotic and symbolic schools in anthropol -
ogy-but only on the condition that the one who employs it
exercises a kind of epistemological dictatorship reflecting the
real political relations between the society that studies and
societies that are studied.
Chapter Five / Conclusions
11,tsepetrifiedrelationsmust beforced to <Úmce
bysinging
lo tltemtheir oum melody.
Karl lvfarx 1
All knowkdge, taken at the momentof ils constituli.on,is
fJolemi
calknowkdge.
GastonBachelard2

FOR.\1L'LATED AS A. QUESTIO N , the topic of these es-

says was: How has anthropology been defining or constru -
ing its object-the Other? Search for an answer has been
gtiided by a thesis: Anthropology emerged and established
1tselfas an allochronic discourse ; it is a science of other men
inaiioth er Time . It is a discourse whose referent has been
removed from the pres~ñt of il!_~ speak1ngT,vi-itingsubje ct.
Tñis' "petrifiecr relatton" is a scandal. Anthropology 'sü ther
is, ultimately, other people who are our contemporarie s. No
matter whether its intent is historical (ideographic) or gene r-
alizing, (nomotJiet ic), anthropology cannot do without an-
choring its knowledge, through research , in specific groups
or societies; otherwise it ·would no longer be anthropology
but metaphysical speculation disguised as an empirical sci-
ence. As relafionships between P-_eoplesand societies that
stud y and thóse that are studied , r_:elationshipsbetw§ en an -
thro_P-9logyand its object are inevitably política); production
o[ knowledge occurs in a public fonun of inter~roup, inter-
clas~, and international relations. Among die h1storicaI con-
ditions under which our discipline emerged and which af-
fected its growth and diff erentiation were the rise of
144 Conclusions
capitalism and it~ colonialist-imper ialist expansion into the
very societies which became the target of our inquiries. For
th is to occur, the expansive, aggressive, and oppressive so-
cieties which we collectively and inaccurately call the West
needed Space to occupy. More profoundly and problema ti-
callr, they required Time to accomodate the schemes of a
one-way history: progress, development, modernity (and
their negative mirror images: stagnation, underdevelop-
rnent, tradition). In short, gf!!)politicshas its ideological fou n-
dations in chronopolitf:_cs.
Retrospecl and Summary
N either political Space nor political Time are natural re-
source s. They are ideologically con strued instrument s of
power. Most critics of irnperialism are prepared to adm it
this with regard to Space. It has long been recognized that
irnperialist daims to the right of occup ying "empty," und er -
used, undeveloped space for the common good of rnanki nd
should be taken for what thev reallv are: a monstrou s lie
perpetuare<:! for the benefü of one part of humanity, for a
few societies of that part, and, in the end, for one part of
these societies, its dominant classes. But by and large , we
remain under the spell of an equally mendacious fiction :
that interpersonal, intergroup , indeed, internaciona l Tim e
is "pub lic Time"-there to be occupied, measured, and al-
lotted by the powers that be.
The;re is evidence-to rny knowledge not touched upan
by historians of anthropology-that such a política} idea of
public Time was developed m the years after World War II ,
with help from anthropology. Perhaps it was needed to fi l)
the interstices between relativist culture gardens when, aft er
cataclysrnic struggle between the great powers and just be-
fore accession to political independence of most former col-
onies, it became impossible to maintain temporal plurali srn
in a radical way. Theoreticians and apologists of a new in-
ternationa l order perceived the need to safeguard the posi-
tion of the West. The necessity arose to provide an objec-
tive, transcu ltur al temporal rnedium for theories of change
Conclusions 145
tpat were to domínate Western social science in the decades
\}hat followed. 3
E F. S. C. Northrop was an important figure during that
~riod . As a thinker who had ach ieved an astounding com-
111andand synthesis of Jogic, philosophy of science, political
dteory, and international law, he radiated the optimism of
Western science on the threshold of new discoveries. lt is
ppossible to do justice to his pro lific writings by quoting a
~ passages. Nevertheless, to recall sorne of Xort hrop 's
ideas will help to darify our argument about political uses
4>ÍTime and the role anthropology was to play in this. The
,cene may be set, as it were , by quoting from his progrnm-
,natic essay, "A New Approach to Politics":
The political problems of toda y's world, both do-
mestic and internaúonal, center in the mentali ties
and customs of people and only secondarily and
úterwards in the ir tools- whether those tools be
economic, military , technological or eschatological
in the sense of the Reverend Reinhold Niebuhr.
Sincecustoms are múhropologicaJ,and sociological, con-
lmporary politics must be also. ( 1960: 15; my emphasis)
Northrop expectoo much from anthropology and took
initiatives to prod anthropologists into formulating their
contri butions to a new theory of international relations. At
a time when he served as the moderator of a symposium on
"Cro ss-Cultural Understanding" 4 he professoo to be guided
by two premises. One was the anthropological doctrine of
cultural relativism which he accepted as an appropriate
philosophical and factual foundation of internacional plu-
:<1lism.The other -w-ashis interpretation of the epistemolog-
1Cal consequences of Einstein's space-time postulates. In a
formul a he also uses in olher writings Xorthrop describes
these consequences as "anyone's knowledge of the publicly
meanin gful simultane ity of spatially separated events"
(1964:1 0). While the premises of cultural relativism posed
the problem (the multiplicity of cultures as spatia lly sepa-
rated events), the Einsteinian conception of relativity sug-
gested to Northrop the solution. "Public" Time provided
meanin gful simultaneity, Le., a kind of sirnultaneity that is
146 Conclusions
~at~ ~al because ~t is neural ai:id independent of ideology or
1!1d1v1dualconsoousness .5 W"ith that solution (which, I be.
heve, is identical with Lévi-Strauss' recourse to neural struc.
ture) coevalness as the frroblematicsimultane ity of different
conflicting, and contradictory forms of consciousness wa~
removed from the agenda of international reJations . An.
~ropology, of whose accomplishments Northrop had the
h1ghest r~gard, was to continue its role as the provider of
cultural d 1fference as distance. Distance , in turn, is what the
forces of erogress need so that it may be overcome in time.
T hat 1s the frame for an autocrit ique of ant h ropologv
which might have a chance to amount to more than a globái
conf ession of guilt or to ad hoc adjustments in theory and
method designed to fit the neocolonial situation. Let me now
recapitulare my attempts to draw at least the outlines of the
task that lies before us.
1~ chapter 1 the terms of the argument were laid clown.
Toe nse of modern anthropology is inseparable from the
emergence of new conceptions of Time in the wake of a
thorough secularization of the Judeo-Christian idea of his•
tory. The transformation that occurred involved , first, a
generaliza~on of historical Time, its extension, as it were,
from che CJrcum-Mediterranean stage of events to the whole
world. Once chat was achieved , movement in space cou ld
become secularized, too. The notion of travel as science that
is, as the temporal/spatial "completion" of hum an hi~tory,
emerged and produced, by the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury, research projects and institutions which can be called
anthropQ}ogical in a stricl sense. Precursors of modern an-
thropology in the eighteenth century have been called "time
voyagers," 6_a ch~racterization \\ hich is acceptable as long as
1 signed their slots in evolutionary schemes, was the abstract,
one keeps m mmd that their fascination with Time \Vas a
prerequisite as much as a result of travels in space. It would
be nai"ve t? think that Enlightenment conceptions of Time
w~re the sunple r~sult of empirical induction. As che "myth-
h1story of reason, they were ideological constructs and pro-
jections: Secularized Time had become a means to occupy
space, a title conferring on its holders the right to "save"
the expanse of the world for history .
The secularization of Judeo-Chri stian Time was a mild
Conclusions 147
nge, however, compared to its eventua l naturalization
hich had been under way for several generations unti l it
e finalized in the first third of the nineteenth century.
aturali zation of Time involved a quantitative explosion of
~r lier chronologies so as to make available enough time to
,aou nt for processes of geolog ical history and biological
p olution without recourse to su pernatural intervemion.
~alitatively , it comp leted the process of genera lization by
tulating coextensiveness of Time and planetary (or
mic) Space. Natural history-a notion unthinkab le until
É
coextensiveness of Time and Space had been ac-
pted-was based on a thoroughly spatialized conception
f Time and provided che paradigm for anthropology as
e science of cultural evolution. lts manifest concerns were
rogres s and "history," but its theories and methods, in-
ired by geo1ogy, comparative anatomy, and related scien-
c disciplines , were taxonomic rather than genetic-proces-
al. Most importan tiy, by allowing Time to be re sorbed by
e tabular space of classification, nineteench-century an-
opology sanctioned an ideological proces s by which rela-
·ons between the vVest and its Other, between anthropol-
gy and its object, were conceived not on ly as difference ,
ut as distance in space and Time. Protoanthropologists of
the Renaissance and f.n lightenment philosophes often ac-
cepted the simultaneity or tempora l coexistence of savagery
and civilization because they were convinced of the cultural,
merel y convencional nature of the differences they per-
ceived ; 7 evolution ary anthropologists made difference "nat-
ur al," the inevitable outcome of the operation of natural
laws. What was left, after primitive societies had been as-
merel y physical simultaneity of natural law.
When, in the course of disciplinary growth and differ-
entiation, evolutionism was attacked and all but discarded
as the reigning paradigm of anth ropology, the temporal
conceptions it had helped to establish remained unc hanged.
The y had long become part of the common epistemological
ground and a common discursive idiom of competing
schools and approaches . As concept ions of Physical, Typo-
logical and Intersubjective Time informed anthropological
148 Conclusions
writing in turn, or in concert, each became a means towarct
the end of keeping anthropology's Other in another Tint e.
There was one historical development, though, which
prevented anthropo logy from finally dissolving into a "tern.
poral illusion,' ' from becoming a hallucinatory discourse
about an Other of its own making. That was the undisput ed
rule requiring field research carried out through direct,
personal encounter with the Other. Ever since, ethno gra-
phy as an activity, not just as a method or a type of infor-
mation, has been regarded as the legitimation of anthro pol-
ogical know ledge, no matter whether, in a given school,
rationalist-deductive or empiricist-inductive conceptions of
science prevailed. The integration of fieldv,:ork into ant hro-
pological praxis had severa! consequences. Sociologically,
field research became an institution which consolidated an-
thropology as a science and academic discipline ; it was to
sen;e as the principal mechanism of training and socializing
nev.· members. Epistemologically, however, the rule of :field-
work made anthropology an aporetic enterprise because it
resulted in a contradictory praxis. This remained by and
large unnoticed as long as ethnographic research was
thought to be governed by positivist canons of "scientific ob-
servation." As_soon as it .is realized that fiel.iliv..ortis._a__form
of communicative imeraction with an Other, one that must
be carried out coevally, on the basis of shared intersubjec-
tive Time and inter _societal contem12oraneity, a_i::ontradic-
tion_hag 1<2...-ªPPearbetween research and writing because
anthrgp _ol2gic-ª1\Hiting had become suffused with the _§t rat-
egíes, and_devices of an allochronic discourse.K That ethnog-
raphy involves communication through language is, of
course, not a recent insight (Degérando insisted on that
point; see 1969:68 ff). However , the importance of lan-
guage was almost always conceived methodologically.B~au se
linguistic method has been predominantly taxonom,c , the
"turn to language" actually reinforced allochronic tenden -
cies in anthropologicaJ discourse.
There are ways to sidestep the contradiction. One can
compartmentalize theoretical discourse and empírica] re-
search; or one defends the contradiction aggressively, insist-_
ing that fieldwork is a requisite of the professionalization of
Conclusions 149
thropology, a ritual of initiation, a social mechanism that
y has incidental connections with the substance of an-
ropological thought. Both strategies provide a cover-up,
ey do nothing to resolve the contradiction. Worse, they
truct critica! insight into the possibility that those ritually
petitive confrontations ¼ith the Other which we caJI fi.eld-
rk may be but. special instances of the general struggle
tween the West and its Other. A persistent myth shared
imperialists and many ('\'estern) critics of imperialism
"ke has been that of a single, decisive conquista, occupa-
n, or establishment of colonial power, a myth which has
complemem in similar notions of sudden decolonization
d accession to independence. Both have worked against
•ing proper theoretical importance to overwhelming evi-
nce for repeated acts of oppression, 9 campaigns of pacifi-
tion, and suppression of rebellions, no matter whether
ese were carried out by military means, by religious and
ucational indoctrination, by administrative measures, or,
is more common now, by intricate monetary and eco-
mic manipulations under the cover of foreign aid. The
eological function of schemes promoting progress, ad-
ncement , and development has been to hide the temporal
ntingency of imperiaJist expansion. We cannot exclude the
ssibility, to say the very least, that repe titive enactment of
Id research by thousands of aspiring and established
ractitioners of anthropology has been part of a sustained
ort to maintain a certain type of relation between the West
d its Other. To maintain and renew these relations has al-
ys req__uiredcoeval recognition of the Other as the object
~wer and/or knowledge; to rationalize and ideologically
~tify these relations has always needed schemes of allo-
lironic distancing. The praxis of field research, even in its
ost routinized and professionalized conception, never
eased to be an objective reflex of antagonistic political re-
tions and, by the same token, a point of departure for a
adical critique of anthropology. 10
There is a need to fonnulate these conclusions simp]y
and brutally . At the same time , one must avoid the mis-
~ke of concluding from the simplicity of effect to a simplic-
1ty of intellectual efforts that brought it about. In chapter 2

150 Conclusions
I analyzed two major strateg ies for_wnaLL c.alled the deni al
of coevalness :-Relativi$m , in its functionalist and culturalist
varieties, undoubtedly has its roots in romantic reaction s
against Enlightenment rational absolutism. But romanti c
ideas regarding the historical uniqueness of cultural crea-
tions were only too vulnerable to chauvinistic perversion .
What started perhaps as a movement of defiance , of an ap-
propriation of "our Time" by peoples (and intellectuals) re-
sisting French intellectual irnperialism, soon became a way
of encapsulating Time as "their Time" or, ~ the_ for~ of
taxonomic approaches to culture, a plea for 1gnormg Time
altogether. The purpose of that chapter was to illustrate ac-
complished forms of the denial of coevalness as these ex-
press dominant trends in modero anthropology. Continu ed
efforts to counteract these dominant trends were, therefore ,
not given adequate attention and this remains, of cour se, a
historical gap. I doubt that it wilJ be closed soon. As long as
the historiography of anthropology continues to be the story
of those schools and thinkers who can be credited with the
"success'' of our discipline we cannot expect to find much in
it that allows us to appreciate its failure.
H aving demonstrated allochronism as a pervasive strat-
egy of anthropological discourse, I tried in chapter 3 to ad-
dress the problem in a more pointed fashion. Above ali, my
questions were directed to one of the more powerful de-
fenses construed at about the same time that anthropology 's
aggressive allochronism became entrenc~ed: Can '_'Ve accept
the claim that anthropology's allochromc concepuon of 1ts
object may be carried out with impunity because that o~je~t
is, after ali, "only" semiotic? If the Other is but a sem1ouc
Other, goes the argument, then he remains internal to the
discourse; he is signified in sign relations and must not be
confused with the victim of "real" relations. We found that
a semiotic approach is useful, up to a point, when it comes
to analyzing the intricacies of temporalization. Yet when we
proceeded from general considerations to reflexions on two
specific discursive practices--the ethnographic present and
the autobiographic past-we found serious limitations. In
both cases, semiotic, i.e., self-contained linguistic explana-
tions proved to be afflicted by Iogical "leaks" causing critica!
Conclusions 151
analysis to consider _links between co1?-~unicative practic<:s
(or literar_y.~onve1:11ons)and the . poht:tcal econom}: of sc1-
entific act1v1nes: Time, the real Time of hun:ian acu~n and
interaction, does seep into the systems of s1gns wh1ch we
construct as representations of knowledge. We may even
1iave to consider, following a suggestion by M. Serres, that
setting up a semiotic relation, especially if it is p~rt of a tax-
onomy of relations, is itself a temJ><:>ral ~et. Wh1le preten~ -
ing to move in the .~at space of class1ficauon, the ~onoffilst
in fact takes a pos1t1on on a temporal slope-uph11l, or up -
stream, from the objec t of his scíentific desire. . .
The allegation that sign theories of cultur<: me vt~bly
rest on temporal distancing betv;een the decodmg subJect
and the encoded object can obviously not be ?emonstrat~d
"semiotically;" such a project would necessa~y get lo?t m
an infinite regress of sign-re lation~ upon s1gn-rela.ttons.
Ther e is a point at which sign-theones must be questioned
epistemologicall y. What sort of theory of knowledge do they
pre suppose, or: what sort of ~eory of .knowle1ge can be
mferred from the history of s1gn-theones beanng on an-
thropolo gy? Chapter 4 attempts to pro~ into such d~e~er
conne ctions by tracing the c~rrent pro.mm~nce of sem1?t1~s
and semiology to a long h1story of vJ.sua~1 st and ..5pat1ah~t
conceptions of knowledge. Specifically, I s1tuated symbohc
anthropology" in a tradition dominated by the "art of mem-
ory" and Ramist pedagogy. The gist ~f that argument .was
that sign-theories of culture are theones of representatlon,
not of production; of exchang~ or "traf~c ," 11 not of crea-
tion; of meaning, not of prax1s. Po.tenttally, and .perhaps
inevitably, they have a tendency to remforce the_bas1c pr~m-
i.sesof an allochronic discourse in that they cons1stently al1gn
the Here and Now of th e signifier (the form, the struct ure ,_
the meaning) with the Knower, and the There and Then of
the signified (the content, the func~on or ~vent, the sy_mbol
or icon) with the Known. It was th1s asserll~eness of v1su~-
spatial presentation, its authoritative role m the tran~m1s-
sion of knowledge, which I designated as. the :·rheto~1c of
vision." As long as anthropology presents tts obJect pnmar-
ily as seen, as long as ethnographic knowle~ge i~ conceived
primarily as observation and/or representatJOn (m terms of
152 Conclusions
models , symbol systems, and so forth) it is likely to per sist
in den}ing coevalness to its Other.
I ssuesfor Debate
I expect that the sweeping character of this account of tem.
poral distancing might be disturbing to many reader s. Mv
intent has not been to express a summary repudiation of
anthropology. Rather, I wanted to outline a program far
d ismant ling identifiable ideological devices and strategies
which have been functioning to protect our di~cipline from
radical epistemological critique. I do believe that allochron-
ism consists of more than occasional lapses. It is expre ssive
of a political cosmology, that is, a kind of myth. Like other
myths, allochronism has the tenden cy to establish a total grip
on our discourse. It must therefore be met by a "total" re-
ponse, which is not to sa, that the critica! work can be ac-
complished in one fell swoop.
Such a project must be carried out as a polemic. How-
ever, polemic is notjust a matter of style or taste-bad taste
by sorne canons of academ ic civility. Polemic belongs to the
substance of arguments if and when it expresses intent on
the part of the writer to address opponents or opposin g
views in an antagon istic fashion; it is a ¼.lYof arguing that
<loes not dress up what really amount.s to dismissal of the
other as "respect" for his position; nor does it reject the
other view as dépa.ssé.The ideal of coevalness must of course
also ~ide the critique of the many forms in which coeval-
ness 1s denied in anthropological discourse. This is perh aps
a utopian goal. l realize that certa in ways of summar ily des-
ignating trends and approaches as so many isms border on
allochronic dismissal. For instance, anthropologists have used
the term animi.sm(which they invented in order to separare
primitive menta lity from modern rationaJity) as a mean s to
mdicate that an opponent is no longer in the contempora ry
arena of debate. 1 That sort of arguing from upstre am of
historical progress is unproductive; it merely reproduces al-
lochronic discourse. In contrast, polemic irreverence is, or
Conclusions 153
ght to be, an acknowledgment of the coeval conditions of
produ ction of knowledge. .
Above all, polemic is future oriented. By con_quenng
diepast, it str ives to. imagine. the futu_re course of 1?eas. It
t, conceived ~ a proJectand 1t recogmzes that man) . of ~e
lsleasit needs to over~o~e have _been 1:><>th self-~rv1~g,. m-
9erestoriented and obJect1ve, proJeCt onented. Ev<;>lut1omsm
tpl>li shed anthropological discourse as ~loch~<?mc,1:>utwas
~ an attempl to overcome a paraly_zmg d1sJunct1on_be-
t,ween the scien~e of ~t~re and the ~1ence of man. ~_1ff~-
~nism ended 11:_postt1v1stped_antry; 1t al5? hoped_ to v~~ 1-
,ate the histonc1ty ~f mankind . by takmg s~r!ously 1t.s
~cidental " dispersal m ieographic space. ~elaU\:1stcultur-
alismencapsulated Time m culture ga:dens; 1tde~1ved m~ch
ofits élan from arguments f~>rthe um_tyof mank.ind a~st
racist determinisms, 13 a proJect that, _ma somew~at differ-
e1t fashion, is carried on by taxonom1c structural1sm.
All these endeavors and struggles are pres~nt and co-
presen t with this critique of a~thropology. To n?-corporate
them into an account of the h1story of allochromsm_ ma~es
them past, not pa.ssé.That which is past enters the dtalecucs
of the present-if it is granted coevalness.
· Another objection could be formu~ated as fol!o~s:
Aren 't you in fact compounding allochromsm ~y e~ammmg
anthro pology's uses of Time wh~e dis.regardmg ume-con-
ceptions in other cultures? There 1sno simple way to _counter
that objection. 1 am not ready to_accept the categonca~ ver-
dict that Western anthropo logy 1s so corrupt that any fur-
ther exercise of it, including its critique by insiders, will only
aggravate the situation. l also beli~ve that the substance ?f
a theor y of coevalness and certamly coevalness as _Erax1s,
wíll have to be the re;ult of actual confrontation witlL.the.
Time of the Other. I am not prepared to offer an op inion
on how much of this has been accomplished by extant eth-
nographie s of Time. If there is any m<:rit to myar~ments
one would expect that anthropo lo~, m studymg Tim~ as
much as in other areas, has been 1ts own obstacle agamst
coeval confrontation with its Other. This is putting it mild1y,
for d e nial of coevalness is a political act, not just a discurs ive
154 Conclusions
fact. The absence of the Other from our Time has been his
mode of presence in our discourse--as an object and victim.
T hat is what needs to be overcome; more ethnography of
Time will not change the situation.
Other questions are even more vexing. Is not the the-
ory of coevalness which is imp lied (but by no means fully
developed) in these arguments a program for ultimate tem-
poral absorption of the Other, just the kind of theory needed
to make sense of present history as a "world-syscem," totally
dominated by monopoly- and stace-capitalism? 14 When we
allege that the Other has been a political victim; when we,
therefore, assert, that the West has been victorious; when
we then go on to "explain" that situation with theorie s of
social change, modernization , and so forth, ali of which
identify the agents of history as che ones that hold eco-
nomic, military·, and technological power; in short, when we
accept domination as a fact, are we not actually playing into
che hands of those who domínate? Or, if we hold that che
political-cognitive intereses of Western anthropology have
been manipulation and control of knowledge about che
Other, and if it is true (as argued by critics of our discipline)
chat precisely the scientistic-positivistic orientation which
fostered domineering approaches has prevented anthropol-
ogy from ever really "getting through" to the Other, should
we then conclude that, as a by and large unsuccessful at-
ternpt to be a "science of mankind," Western anchropology
helped to save other cultures from total alienation?
Are there, finally, criteria by which to distinguish denial
of coevaJness as a condition of domination from refusal of
coevalness asan act of liberation?
Answers to these questions, if there are any at the pres-
ent time, would depend on what can be said, positively, about
coevalness. If it meant the oneness of Time as identity, coe-
valness would indeed amount to a theory of appropriation
(as, for instance, in the idea of one history of salvation or
one myth-history of reason). As it is understood in these es-
says, coevalness aims at recognizing cotemporality as the
condition for truly dialectical confrontation between per-
sons as ·wellas societies. lt militares against false conceptions
of dialectics-all those watered-down binary abstractions
Conclusions 155
which are passed off as oppositions: left vs. right, past vs.
present, primitive vs. modern. Tradition and modernity are
not. "opposed" (except semiotically), nor are they in "con-
flict." Ali this is (bad) metaphorica l talk. \Vhat are opposed,
in conflict, in fact, locked in antagonistic struggle, are not
the same societies at d ifferent stages of development, but
differem societies facing each other at the same Time. As J.
Duvignaud, and others, are reminding us, the "savage and
the proletarian" are in eq_uivalent positions VJ.S.-a.:v is domi-
nation (see 1973:ch. 1). Marx in the nineteenth century may
lieexcused for not giving enough theoretical recognition to
that equivalence ; certain contemporary "Marxist" anthro-
pologists have no excuse.
The question of Marxist anthropology is not resolved
in my mind. 15 In part this is so because we have (in che
West) as yet little Marxist praxis on the leve! of the produc-
twn of ethnographic knowledge. As long as such a practica!
basis is lacking or badly developed, most of what goes by
the name of Marxist anthropology amounts to little more
than theoretical exercises in the style of Marx and Engels.
These exercises have their merits: the best among them have
helped to confound earlier approaches and analyses. They
are bound to remain disconnected forays, however, as long
as their authors share with bourgeois positivist anthropol-
ogy certain fundamental assumptions concerning che na-
ture of ethnographic data and the use of "objective" meth-
ods.
An even more serious problem with Marxist anthropol-
ogy appears when we view 1t in the perspective of this book:
the construction of anthropology 's object. In what sense can
Marxist anthropology be said to offer a counterposition to
the deep-rooted allochronic tendencies that inform our dis-
course? Do allochronic per iodizations of human h istory wich
play such an important role in Marxist analyses belong to
the substance of ~farxist thought or are they just a matter
of style inherited from the nineteenth century? How is the
~ ther construed in the anthropological discourse generated
in societies which are not part of the \Vest-and-the-Rest
complex? Antagonism with che capitalist world notwith-
standing, these societies have built analogous spheres of co-
156 Con clusions
lonial expans ion and, more recently, of foreign a.id and de.
velopment. Does the routinized world revolution construe a
different Othe r t han the capitalist world market? 16
Coevalness:Points efDeparture
Those who have given the matter sorne thought devel oped
outlines of a theory of coevalness through critical confr on-
tation with Hegel. Here I can offer little more than a few
comments on what I consider significant steps in the d evel-
opment of H egel's insights. In do ing so I ,vant to jndicate
points of departure, not so]utions; appeals to the histor y of
philosophy as such will not save the history of anthropol-
ogy. There is no need for a "Hegelian'' anthropology. ,~h at
ffil;!St be_devcloped _ ar~ the elements of a pr_oces!i]1...fll
and_ma-
terialist theor y apt to counteract t he hegemony of taxono mic
and representationaJ approac hes which we identified as the
principal sources of anthropology 's al]ochronic orien ta-
tion. 17 Affirmations of coevalness will not "make good" for
the denial of coevalness. Crit ique proceeds as t he negati on
of a negation; it calls for deconstructive labor whose airn
cannot be simply to estab lish a Marxist "alternative " to
Western bougeois ant hropo logy, one that would ha ve to heg
for recognition as j ust another paradigm or scientific cul-
ture garden.
This being said, what are the point.s of departure for a
theor y of coevalness? A first step , I believe, must be to re-
cuper ate .the idea of totality. Almost all the approache s we
touched on in these essays affirm such a notion-up to a
point. This explain s why the (totalizing) concep t of cu lture
could have been shared by so rnany different schools. Prac-
tically everybody agrees that we can make sense of anqthe r
society only to the extent that we grasp it as a whole ~ an
o,rganism, a con figura tion, ~ sys~!_!l.Such holism, howev er,
usually misses its profe ssed aims on at least two accounts .
First, by insisting th at culture is a system (etho s, mod el.
blueprint, and so forth) which "info nns" or "regu lates" ac-
tion , holistic social science fai]s to provide a theory of praxis ;
it comm its anthropol ogy forever to imputing (if not out-
Conclusions 157
· t imposin g) motives, beliefs, mean .ing s, a~d functions to
societies it stud ies from a perspecuve outs 1de and above.
oral compliance, aesthetic conf?rmity, or syste~ic integra-
n are , as bad substitutes for ~1~ectIC conceptlons of pro-
' projected onto other soc1eues. As dem onstr~ted by
roeber , T. Parsons, and more recently by M . Sahlms, cul-
1,11re ""'Íllthen be ontologized, i.e., given an existence aeart.
ese so-called holistic approaches to culture result ~n a
alistic theory of society which, in turn , invites spunous
lution s of the kind rep resen ted by M. Harris' cultura] ma-
ialism.
Second failure to conceive a t heo ry of pr axis blocks the
ssibility, ~ven for those \vho are prep~ed to reject a pos-
. ·istic epistemological stance, to. perce.1ve a~thr~P?lºID'. as
activit:y which is pan of what 1t stud1es. Sc1ent1sucobJec-
·ism and hermeneutic textualism often converge. 18 The We
f anthropolo gy then remains an exclusive. ~Ve, one that
ves its Other outs ide on all levels of theonzmg except on
e plan e of ideological ob fuscation, where everyone pays
"pservice to the "unity of mankind."
Among the most scandal izing of Hegel 's pronounce-
men ts have been those that affirm the all-inclusiveness of
historical proce ss-- its totality-and, as a consequen~e, the
copr esence of the different "moments" through wh1~~ the
totality realizes itself. In the Phenmnenologyof the Spint he
stated : "Reason (Vernunjt) now has a general interest in the
World because it is assured to have presence in th e wor ]d ,
or, that the present is reasonable (vernünftig)" (1973
[ 1807]: 144).
To be sure, that sort of equ at ion of the reasonable and
the presen t can serve to justif y evo]utionist Realpolitik, which
would argue that a state of aff airs must be accepted because
it is a present reality. Marx cr iticized Heg el for ju st that. At
the same time he insisted, with Hegel, on the pre sent as the
frame for his tor ical analysis. Her e the present is conceived,
not as a point in time nor as a modality of language (i.e. a
tense ) but as the copresence of basic acts of production and
reprodu ction-eating, d rinki ng, providing shelter , cloth~s,
"and severa! other thing s." In the GermanIdeologyMarx nd-
icules German historians and their penchant for "prehis-
158 Concl usions
tory" as a field of speculation, an area outside of present his..
tory. Research into the principies of social organization mu se
not be re legated to a mythical time of or igins, nor can it be
reduced to the construction of stages. Forms of social dif-
ferentiation must be seen as "mome nts" which, "from the be-
ginning of history, and ever since human beings lived, have
existedsimulfaneouslyand stiJl determine hístory" (1953:355 f;
my emphas1s; see also 354 f.). Thi s is the "materiaJist con-
nection amo ng human beings which is conditioned by their
needs and the mode of production and is as old as mankind
itself" (ibid. 356). To be sure, there are problems with the
concept of needs¡ and :Marx did return to phases , period s,
and stages (even m the text frorn which we JUSt quoted ) but
the point is that a Hegelian view of the tota lity of histori cal
forces, including their cotemporality at any given time, pre-
pared Marx to conceive his theory of economy as a political
one. The same awareness underlies his critique of Proud -
hon:
The _relations of production of every society form a
totahty. Mr. Proudhon looks at economic relations
as so many social phases genera ting one another
such that one can be derived from che other. . . .
The only bad thing about this method is that Mr.
Proudhon, as soon as he wants to ana lyze one of
these phases separate ly, must take recourse to other
social relations. . . . Mr. Proudhon goes on to gen-
erare the other phases with the help of pure reason,
he pretends to be facing newborn babies and for-
gets that they are of lhe same age as the first one .
(1953:498; my emphasis)
. This is the passage--from The P(Jl)ertyof Philos<>fJhy-
which was to be a corners tone for L. Althusser's argument s
for a structu raJist interpretation of Marx. In Reading Capital
he concluded "that it is essentiaJ to reverse the order of re-
flection and think first the specific structure of totality in
order to understand both the form in which its limbs and
constitutive relations co-exist and the peculiar structure of
history (1970 (1966 ]:98). The valid point in Althusser·s
reading is to h ave demon strated that Marx cannot be dis-
missed as just another historicist. :Marx's comribution to
Conclusions 159
criticaJ social thought has been his radical presentism which,
in sp ite of all the revolutionary talk to which _Marx a~d. ~s-
pec1ally Enge ls resorted, conta ined the theorettcal poss1b1hty
for a negation of allochronic distancing. What else is coe-
valness but recogn izing that aJl human societies and ali ma-
j? r aspects of ~ ~um~ s~ iety are '_'of the same age" (a dis-
tmctly romant 1c idea, mc1dentally , if we remember He_rd~r
and Ratzel (see chapter l). Th is <loes not mean that, w1thin
the totality of human history, developments did n ot occur
which can be viewed in chronologica l succession. T. Adorno,
in a reflection on He gel, summarized the difference be-
tween aJlochronic historism and a dialectical conception of
coevalness in one of his inimitable aphorisms: "No universal
history leads from the savage to humanity, but there is one
that leads from the slingshot to the megabomb " ( 1966:312).
Hegel and sorne of his critical successors 19 opened up
a global perspective onto questions which we raised from
the particu lar vantage point of anthropo lo~y- If allochron-
ism is expressive of a vast, entrenched poliocaJ cosmology,
if it has deep historical roots, and if it re sts on sorne of the
fundam ental epistemo logical convictions of We stern cu l-
tu re, what can be done about it? If it is true that ultimat~
justifi cat ion is provided by a certain theory of know ledge, lt
would follow that critical work must be directed to episte-
molog y, notably to the u~nished project of a '?~terialist
conception of knowledge ' as sensuous-human act1v1ty[con-
ceived as] praxis, subjecúve ly." Concrete, practicaJ contra-
diction between coeval research and aJlochronic interpreta-
tion constitutes the crux of anthropo logy, the crossroads, as
it were, from which critique must take off and to which it
must return. We need to overcome the contemplative stance
(in Marx's sense) and dismantle the edifices of spatiotem-
poral distancing that characterize the contemp lative view.
lts fundamental assumption seems to be that the basic act
of knowledge consists of some how structuring (orderi ng,
classifying) ethnographic data (sense data, fundamentally, but
there are levels of infonnation beyond that). It matters little
whether or not one posits an objective reality beneath the
phenomenal wor ld that is accessible to expe rien ce. Wh at
counts is that sorne kind of primitive, or iginal separation
 160 Conclusions
between_ a thing ~nd its appearance, an origina l and its re-
rrod~ct1on, p1~ov1de the starting point. This fateful separa-
t!ºº 1s the ult1m~te reaso1~ for what Durkheim (following
Kant, up to .ªpomt) perce1ved as the "necessity" of cultur-
ally struct~nng .the material of primitive perception. It is
the necess1ty to 1mpose order an.d the neccssitv of whateve r
order a society imposes . From Durkheim's théory of the sa-
cre~ and the profane, to Kroeber's notion of the superor-
gamc and Malinowski's culture as "second nature " dmvn to
Lévi-Strauss' ultimate "oppos ition" of nature and culture-
anthroi:o Jogy has ~en asserting that mankind is bound ro-
gether m commumues of necessitv.
S? much is clear and readily 'admitted by most anthro-
polog1sts who care to be explicit about their theories of
k~owledge. But one issue is usually left in the dark of un-
disputable assumption~ .ª?d that is t_he Lockean phenom e-
nahsm shared by empmc1sts and rauonalists alike. No mat-
ter whether one professes belief in the inductive nature of
ethnography and ethno logy or whether one thinks of an-
thropol~gy as a deductive, constructive science (or whether
one pos1ts a se9.uence of ~n inductive ethnographic phas e
~nd a constmcuve theoreucal phase), the primitive assump-
uon, the root met:-iphor of knowledge remains that of a dif-
ference, and a 11stance, '?etween t_hing and image, realit y
and represemauon. Inev1tably, th1s establishes and rein-
forces models of cognition stressing difference and distance
between a beholder and an object.
Fr?m detaching_ con~~pts (abstrac~<m.)to overlaying in-
ter:preuve scher:ies (~mpositzm:,),from lmking together (corre-
l~twn) to ~atchmg: (1somorphism}-aplethora of visually-spa-
t1ally denved not1ons domínate a discourse founded on
contemplative t~eor ies of knowledge. As we have seen, he-
gemony of the v1sual-spatial had its price wh ich was, firsc, ro
detempo~al ize t~e process of knowledge and, second, to
promote 1deological remporalization of relations between the
Knower and the Known.
Spatialization is ~rried on and completed on the next
l~vel, that of arrangm~ data and tokens in systems of one
kmd or another. In this respect there is little that divides
otherw ise opposed schools of anthropology, be they com-
Conclusions 161
mitted to a superorganic concept of culture, to a Saussurean
mod el, or to Ma..x\iVeber's Eigengesetzl,ichk.eit.In fact, even
vulgar biological and economic determinism sh_?~d be a~ded
to the list. Nor does it really matter-and th1s 1s cer tam to
scandalize some--that severa! of these schools prof ess to fol-
low an historical, even processual approach to culture (as
oppo sed to those that stre~s systemic an~ synchronic ana ly-
sis). AII of them have stramed, at one ume or another, to
attain scientific status by protecting themselves against the
"irruption of Time ," that is, against the demands of coevaJ-
ness which would have to be met if anthropology really took
its relation to its Other to constitute a praxis. Anthropo logy's
allochronic discourse is, therefore, the product of an idealist
position (in Marxian terms) and that includes practically a!l
forms of "mater iaJism," from nineteenth-century bourgeo1s
evolutionism to current cultural materialism. A first and
fundamental assumption of a materialist theory of knowl-
edge, and this may sound paradoxical, is to ~ake c~nscious-
ness, individual and collectiveJ the startmg pomt. ~ot
disemboélied consciousness, however, but "consciousness w1th
a body ," inextricably bound up with language. A funda-
mental role for language must be P?stulated , not ~~~se
consciousness is conceived as a state mternal to an md1v1d-
ual organism which would then need to be "expressed" or
"represented " through language (taking that term in the
widest sense, including gestures, postures , attitudes, and so
forth ). Rather , the only way to think of consciousness with-
out separating it from the orF.ism or banning it to sorne
kind off orum intemum is to msist on its sensuous nature;
and one 1,,vayto conceive of that sensuous nature (above the
level of motor activities) is to tie consciousness as an activity
to the production of meaningful sound. Inasmuch as the
production of meaningf ul sound involves the labor of trans-
forming , shaping matter, it may still be possible to distin-
guish form and content, but the relationship between the
two will then be constitutive of consciousness. Only in a sec-
ondary, derived sense (one in which the conscious organism
is presupposed rather than accounted for) can that relation-
ship be called representational (significative, symbolic), or
informative in the sense of being a tool or carrier of infor-
162 Conclusions
mation. It may come as a surprise but on this account I find
myself in agreement with N. Chomsky when he Sta.tes:
it is wrong to think of the human use of language
as characteristically informative, in fact or in inten•
tion. Human language can be used Loinform or
mislead, to clarify one's own thoughts or to display
one's cleverness, or simply for play. If I speak with
no concern for modif ying your behavior or
thoughts, I am not using language any Iess than if I
say exactly Lhe same things with such intention. If
we hope to understand human language and the
psychological capacities on which it rests, we muse
first ask what it is, not how or for what purpose ic is
used. (1972:70)
Man does not "need" language; man, in the dialectical, tran-
sitive understa.nding of to be, is language (much like he <loes
not need food, shelter, and so on, but is his food and house).
Consciousness, realized by the [producing] meaningful
sound, is self-conscious. The Self, however , is constituted
fully as a speaking and hearing Self. Awareness, if we may
thus designate the first stirrings of knowledge beyond the
registering of ta.ctile impressions, is fundamentally based on
hearing meaningful sounds produced by self and others. If
there needs to be a contest for man 's noblest sense (and
there are reasons to doubt that) it should be hearing, no t
sight that wins. Not solitary perception but social commu-
nication is the starting point for a materialist anthropology,
provided that we keep in mind that man <loes not "need "
language as a means of communication, or by extension,
society as a· means of survival. Man is communication and
society.
What saves these assumptions from evaporating in the
clouds of speculative metaphysics is, I repeat, a dialectical
understanding of the verb t.obe in these propositions. Lan-
guage is not predicated on man (nor is the "human mind "
or "culture"). Language produces man as man produ ces
language. frod,_uctionis the pivotal concept of a materleli§.t
anthro9-olQgy. - --
- Marx was aware of the material nature of languag e as
well as of the material link between language and conscious-
Conclusions 163
ness. In the light of what has been argued so far, the follow-
ing two passages need no comment:
The element of thought itself-the element of
thought's living expression--language-is of a sen-
suous nature. The social reality of nature , and hu-
man natural science, or the natural scienceabout man,
are identical terms. (Marx 1953:245 f.) Translation
from The Ecowmuc and PhilosophicManuscripts of
1844 1964 :143).
Only now, after having considered four moments,
foui aspects of the fundamental historical relation-
ships, do we find that man also possesses "con-
sc:iousness"; but, even so, not inheren t , not "pure''
con sciousness. From the start the "spirit" is afflicted
with the curse of being "burdened'' with matter,
which here makes its appearance in the form of
agitated layers of air, soun~s-in short of lan~age.
Language is as old as consoousness; language 1s
practical consciousness, as it exists for other men,
and for that reason is really beginning to exist for
me personally as well (see Marx 1953:356 f. Trans-
lation quoted from lvlarx and Engels 1959:251)
A production theory of knowledge. and !~nguage_ (i~
spite of Engels and Lenm) cannot be bmlt on abst:3ct1on
or "reflection" (Widersfnegelung)or any other concepuon that
postulates fundamental acts of cognition to consist of the
detachment of sorne kind of image or token from perceived
objects. Concepts are products of sensuous interaction; they
themselves are of a sensuous nature inasmuch as their for-
mation and use is inextricably bound up with language. One
cannot insist enough on that point because it is the sensuous
nature of language, its being an activity of concrete orga-
nisms and the embodirnent of consciousness in a material
medium-sound-which makes language an eminently tem-
poral phenomenon. Clearly, langu age is not materi.alif that
were to mean possessing properties of, or in, space: volume,
shape, color (or even opposition, distribution, division, etc.).
Its materiality is based on articulation, on frequencies, pitch,
tempo, ali of which are realized in the dimension of time.
These essentially temporal properties can be translated , or

L64 Conclusions
transcri'?ed, as spatial relations. That is an undisputable
fact-t h1s sentence proves it. What remains highly disput -
able is that visualization-spati alization of consciousness, and
especial ly historically and culturally contingent spatia liza-
tions such as a certain rhetorical "art of memory," can be
made the measure of development of human consciousness .
The denial of coevalness which we diagnosed on sec-
ondary and tertiary levels of anthropological discourse can
be traced to a fundamental epistemological issue. Ultimatelv
it re~ts ~n the negation of che tempo ral materiality of com-
mum~auon through language. Fo1: the temporality of
speakmg (other than the temporahty of physical move-
ments, chemical processes , astronomic events, and organic
growth and decay) implies cotemporality of producer and
produce, speaker and listener , Self and ·other. vVhether a
detel"!1poralized, idealist theory of knowledge is the result of
certam cultural, ideological, and political positions , or
whet~er it works the_ other way _round is perhaps a moot
quesuon. That there 1s a connect1on between them which is
in need of critica! examination, is not.
Conclusions 165
~nce and that , as such_, it sef".es universal goals and human
mterests, should b~ difficult 1f che arguments advanced in
th_eseessays are val1d. In order to claim that primitive soci-
et1es (or whatever repla~es them now as the object of an-
thropolog y) are the reahty and our conceptualizations the
theor y, one muse keep anthropo logy standing on its head.
If w_ecan show that our theories of their societies are our
pr ax/S---the way in which we produce and reproduce know l-
edg e of the Other for our societies-we may (paraphrasing
Mar x ~d Hegel) put anthropology back on its feet. Re-
n~wed _mte~est.in the h!5tory of our discipline and disci-
plmed mqu1ry mto the h1story of confrontation between an-
thropülogy and its O~er are therefore not escapes from
ernp1ry; they are pracucal and realistic. They are ways to
meet the Other on the same ground, in the same Time.

. At one time I maintained that the project of disman-

tlmg an~hropologf s_i~tellectual !mperialism must begin with
alternatrves to pos1t1v1stconcepuons of ethnography (Fabian
1971). I advocated a turn to language and a conception of
ethnographic objectivity as communicative, intersubjective
objectivity. Perhaps I failed to make it clear that I wanted
la!}_gllageand communication _to be...un.f;ierstoodas_a kind of
2.raxis in which the Knower cannot claim ascendan~o yer
the Knm~n (nor, for that matter, one Knowe r over <ll-
otfier). As I see it now, the ant hropol ogist and his interlo-
cutors only "know" when they meet each other in one and
Ll:1:same cote_mporal_ity(see _F:=tbian_
1979a). If ascen~ancy-
r_mng _to a h1erarch1cal posmon-1s precluded, thetr rela-
t1onsh1ps must be on the same plane: they ""i.11be frontal.
Anthropology as the study of cultural difference can be
productive on ly if diff erence is drawn into the arena of di-
alectical contradiction. To go on proclaiming, and believing,
that anthropo logy is nothing but a more or less successful
effort to abstract general knowledge from concrete experi-
Notes
J. Time and the Em erging Other

l. ' Ausser der Zeit gibt es noch ein andere s Miue l, grosse Veranderu nge n
hervorzub ringen , und das ist die-- GewalL Wenn die eine zu lang sam geh t. so tut
die andere ofter s di e Sache vorber ' (Lich tenberg 1975: 142). Ali trans lations into
English are my own unless an English version is cited.
2. Ty lor 1958:529 .
3. The mosc inAuen tial modem statement of this idea was Mircea Eliade's
Mythe de l'lternel retqur ( 1949). How mu ch the linea r•C)'Clical opposition con tinues
to d omin ate inquir y into conceplions of time is sbown in a more recent collection
of essays edite d by P. rucoeur (1975). Similar in ou tJook and somewha t broade r in
scope was th e volume Ma.n ami Time ( 1957).
4 . Th e point that ph iloso phy and th e social sciences missed the Copernican
revolution or, ac a ny r ate, failed to produ ce thnr Cope rnican revol ution was made
by G. Gu sdorf: 'Ain si la Renaissance est vraimen t, pou r les sciences h umaine s, une
occasion manquée' (1968:1 781 , see also 1778).
5. For Gusdorf' s discussion of B<>&u et see 1973 :379 ff. See also an essay by
Kose!leck, o n "History, Scorie s, and Form al Structures ofT ime" in which he póints
to tbe Augustinia n origin s of B~ suet 's "orde r of times" (1973:21 1- 222) and a
stud y by Klempt (1960 ).
6 . These are conn otations, not strict defini tions of univtrSal . They indi cate two
major tende ncies or intentio ns behind anth ro pological search for universa ls of cu l-
ture . One follows a rationali st tradition and often takes reco urse to linguis tics. The
other ha s an emp iricist orie ntatio n and seeks staústical prdof for univ ersal occu r-
renc e of certa in traics, insticutions, or cusioms. The most obvious example for the
former is the work of Lévi-Strau~ (especially bis wriú ng on the elem entary struc-
tures of kinsh ip an d on totemism). For a statement of the problem frorn th e point
of view of an thr opologica l linguistics see the chap ters on "synch ronic univ e,·salsw
and "diac h ron ic gene raliza tion" in Creenberg 1968: 175 . A majo r repre sent.ative
of the "general izing" sear ch for un iversals has been G. P. Murdoc,k ( 1949).
7. T he concinu ed influen ce of both tr adiúons will be discu ssed in chapt er 4 .
On the r hetorical devices used by Bossuet see O. Ranum in bis inrrod ucúon to a
recent Engfish editi o n of the Discours( 1976:xxi-xxv üi).
8. Concise and infonnative overviews over the ope ning of " huma n space•· and
the processing of that information in a vast literatur e dur ing che eight eenth cen-
tur y may be found in the first two chapt ers of Michele Duchet 's wor k on anthro-
 168 1. Time and the Other
~logy and history during the Enlight.enmenL (1971:25-136). See also a dissena-
uon, •·1ne Geography of the Philosophesw by Broc ( 1972).
9. W. Lepenies does not seem to cake into account th is possibilitY in bis im.
ponant essay on tempornlization in che eighteenth cenrury ( J 976). As· he telb I he
~to!')::the breakthrou~h into che dime~ion of time responded to "empirical pre,.
sure_ (E,fahrun~Jdmck); the ma~s of availab le data could no longer be contained ¡11
spatial~ achromc schemes. 1 do not find this very convinc ing. especially not in the
case of anthr~po logy, wherc it is manifcst that temporal devices havc been ideo-
logically med1ated , never direct responses to experienced realit".
10. The term epi.stemewas incroduced by M. Foucault . Much of what l will
ha\ ·e to sayabout "spatí:11!zed" Time has been inspired by a reading of his J"he
Order ofThings ( 1973; ongmally published as Les Mots et les dioses 1966).
11. First pub lished in 1874 by che British Association for the Advancement
of Sciencc. The project goes back to the work of a committee of three phvsicians
(!) initiated in 1839 (see Voget 1975:105) . · Graebner'~ Methcde (in 1916).
12. On the Sociéti, see Stocking 1968: ch. 2, Moravia 1973:88 ff, Copans and
Jamin n.d. [ 1978]. 0n Degérando (also written de Gérando) see F. C. T. Moore's
t~anslator 's introduction to the Engfüh cdition (1969). On the Jnsti.tutio , see J\.fora-
via 1967:958. Lepenies also mention~ chis work and links it to later rreatises br
Blumenbac~ , Lamarck, and Cuvier (1976 :55). As recent work by J. Stagl sho\1-,,
however, Lmnaeus was by no means an "ancestor." He wrote in an cstablished
tradition whose roots must be sought in humanm educational treacises and Ramist
"method" (Stagl 1980). On Ramism see chaprer 4.
13. L. Whíte 's TJu:Evolunon of Culture ( 1959) has been h,tiled as "the modern
equi\·alent of Morgan's Ancient Soriet')"'by M, Harris who, in the same sentence
shows how little it matters to him that Morgan's historical context was quite dif fer~
em from Whitc's, We are told that che "only difference " between the two work, is
'·the updating of sorne of the ethnography and che greatcr consistence of the
c~lcural-materialist thread '.' (1968:~3). This is typical of Harris' historiograph y.
H1s tal~ of anth _ropology 1s confess 1onal, aggressive, and often entenaining, but
not cnttcal. Sahhns and Service's EvofuJionand Culture (1960) and Julian Stcward \
Theory ef Culture Change ( 1955) have been among the most influential statement s
of neocvolutionism in anthropology.
14. :."llumerous publications attest to a renewed interese in Vico; see for in-
sra_nce_the coll_~tions of essays assembled in two issues of the joumal SocialResearch
(Giorgio Tagl1acozzo, ed., 1976),
15. Perhaps thcre is a Lendency, foslered by Darwin , Lo givc Loo much cred 1t
to L}:ell. _The_"<:risiso ~· chronology" goes back 10 che sixteent h cemury and courage
'.ºthmk_m m1lhons of years was demonstrated b~- Kant and Buffon, amo ng ocher~,
m the e1gh1eemh century (see Lepenies 1976:9- 15, 42 ff). Nevertheless, it remains
tmportant thar evolutioni st thought ol'.ed its temporal liberation to geology a sci-
ence whic_h perhaps more than any other , astronomy excepted, constru~s• Time
from spaual rclation and distribution. On predecessors of Lyell, see Eiseley 1961.
. 16. Peel ~ses nat.uraliúng in a similar sense. Although he does not develop
th1s further, hL~statement is worth quotin g here: "In an obviou~ ,ense social evo-
!ution i~ easily the most time•oriented sc:,-leof sociolog)', and many writers, Coll-
mgwood and Toulmin among them, have seen the dom inance of evolutionarv
modes of thought as a sign of che conq ue st of science by history. L'p to a poin.L
1. Time and the Other 169
chisis doubtle ss so: but it must nol blind us to a profou ndl y anti-hist~rical bias in
,ocial evolution. For in one respect evoluúon was not so m~1ch_a victory of the
bistorical scyle of explanation as a denaturin g, or rather naturahz.auon, of the proper
stUdY of society and histor y'' (1971:158). . . .
·17. Kroeb er alt.acks those who invoke biological or mechanical causality '.n
<>rder to explain hístury ( his term far cultural anthropology). But wh~.n he sa_ys~n
Frofession 16) "Hiswry deals wiJh ccmditicmssine i[Ul1 non, not Wllh causes (1915.281),
he scems to concur wich Morgan. . .
18. A fair historical and historiographic appreciation of what IS customanly
lum ped togecher as "Gcrman diffu sion ism·• is another mau~r._ Remarks on that
school in recent textbooks usually betray a dismal ignorance of 1ts tntellectual sources
and background. Clase links between German Kulturkreis-~hought and early AmeT-
ican anthropology are all but forgotten, as is Edward S~pn-'s work, Time Pmp ective
;,. Abonginal Ammcan Culnm: A Stud) in .\1ethod, pubbshed only five years after
__ . .
19. Far Parson s see che book edited by J. Toby (Parsons 1911). Peel d 1scusses
the revival of evo lutionism in contcmporary sociology and anthropology ( 19!1 :ch.
10): Toulmin coauthored a major work on con~eptio~s oí .Time (see T_oulm~n_and
Goodfield 1961): Donald T. Campbell stated h1s posmon man essay utled l\atu-
ral Sclection as an Epistemological :\fodel" (1970)._Much of ~e Ha™:~Lu~
controversv and the litcratme it gcnerated remams ali bue macceSSible because 1t
is express¡d in .i forbidding jargon . For a statement of the importance ?f ev?lu-
tionary arguments see an essay by Klaus Eder (1973). Halfmann ( 1979) 1denufies
the opponents as Darwinists vs. critica! theorie_s of d~velop~ent. . .
20. However, when the necessity to cons1der Time anses ,_anthropolo~sls m
che culrura list tradition remember the eighteenth century . O. Bidney states 1~ The-
oretical Anthropology: "The problem still remains, however, ~s lO the relanon of
historical . evo lutionary cu lture to human nature. lf cu lture 1s a d1recl, necessary
expression of human nature, how is one to exp~ain the evoluuon of culture pat-
tern s in time? In my opinion che problem remams msoluble as_lo~g as one does
not admit that human nature. likc culture, evolves or unfolds m ume , ~h _1~may
be understood 011 the assumption that while the innate biological ?°tenualiues of
man remain more or less constant the actual, effective psychophys1_calpciwers and
capabili ties are subject lo de"elopment in time . Wh~t _I_am suggestmg 1scompa~-
ble 10 the eighteenlh-century notion of the perfecnb1hty of human n_ature, wh1c~
scems to have dropped out of the picture in contemporary ethnologteal lhought
(1953:76). · 949) · ·d
21. Radiocarbon dating was fully established by W. F. L1bb'. (1 ; 1ts W1 er
acceptance in anthropolog)' was aided by ~ymposia and publ ~uons sponso~ed by
che Wenner-Gren Foundation. By 1964 (the date of pubhcaoon of works b} Oak~
ley and Butzer) it had auained "normal scienti~c" sta~s (in T. S. Kuhn's te~s>
on the leve! of textbooks. \\'hile il was revoluuonary m the sen.se of providmg
hithcrto unattainable chronometric certainJ.y. it changed little as regards certam
long-e st.ablished convictions abo ut the rela tively "úmeless"' n~rure of carly human
evolution. Compare the following statement by 0dkley with the passage from
Graebner (191 1) quoted above: ''At the prcsent mne, m al~ost ali ~\~ of the
world, cultures of man)' kinds and vary ing lcvcls of compl~x1ty i_iccurw1thm short
distances of one another, but before the Neolithic Re"oluuon thJS was not so. The
 170 1. Time and th e Other
cultures of the early hunters and foodgatherers evolved slowly and their trad itions
spread widely long before there was any marked change. Where a paleo lith ic cul-
ture can be defined and identified on the basis of suf ficient ly l.arge assemb lages of
artifacts, it is legitima te to regard its "industrie s" as ap proxim ately concempora-
neous throu ghout their area of disoi bution. Until recently this view was based
wholly on theor y, bu e radiocarbon dating of early archeologica l horiron s in Afr ica
ac least supports the concl usion that in prc-Neo lith ic times cultura l e\·olut ion wa.,
proceeding contemporaneously over very large arcas. To that extent pale olithic
industries may be used as means oí approx imate synchro nic datin g of Pleistocene
d eposits" (1964:9). Of course, both Graebner and Oak ley base their statements on
th e little d ispu ted assump tion that material, technical products of culture (''indus-
tries")-thosc that result in a record of spmial distributíon-are key indicators of
the evolution of human culture tcut amrl.
22. Originally published in 1966 and rep r inted in Geertz 1973: ch. 14 . .'\n
analysis of time conceptions in Zulu myth and ritual, based on Schut z, was made
by l. Szombati-Fabian (1969). Among the writings of A. Schutz see especially 1967.
One of his more accessible essays, 'Ma king Music Together' (origi nally published
in 1951), was reprinted in the reade r S:,mbolicAnthropcl.cgy(J. L. Dolgin et al., eds. ,
1977: 106-119). ½'hereas Husserl and Heidegger were primarily concerned with
Time as it needs to be thought in the context of human perception and "interna!
consciousne ss," Schutz ana lyzed its role in communication. He states in the conclu-
sion of the essay j u st cited: "l t appears that aU possible communication pre sup-
poses a mutual tuning-in relations hip between the communicator and the add res-
see of the communication. Th is relationship is established by the rec iproca! sharing
oí the Other 's flux of experiences in inner time, by living through a vivid p resem
together, by experiencing th is togethemess as 'We'" (Schutz 1977: 118). It is in
this context of intersubjectivity and of the problem of shared Time that sorne of
the insights of phenomenological philosop hy continue to influence anthropo logy,
sociology, and also linguistics. F..xamples for this are R. Rommetvei t's incisive cri-
tique of generativ ist hegemony in linguistics ( 1974) and my own reapprai sal of
sociolinguistics (Fabian 1979a). Th is paper should be consulted by readers who
are interes ted in the praclical -ethnographic problematics of intersubjective Time .
23. In a thoughtful book on the intellectual hisr.ory of anthropologica l re -
search among Australi an "aborigi nes," K. Burridge develops chis po int at greater
length (1973:1.3 ff). However, where I see br eaks and discontinu ity, he regards
the Christian conception of othemess as the main continuous source of anthro-
pological curiosity . This leads him to ascribe a fundamenta l ro le to missionary
practic e as a mod el for anthropology (1973: 18, 83 f). I don't think that his view is
borne out by the history of our discipline . Throughou t, Burridge stresses mor al
commitment as the common element of religious and scien tific encounter with the
Other which, in my view, prevents him from properl y apprec iating the imellectual.
cognitive side of it.
24. K. G. Jayne notes that Prince Hen ry the l\aviga tor used che myth of Pres-
ter John to j ustify an enterprise designed to "outflank" Islam through Lhe circum-
navigation of Africa ( 1970 [ 191OJ: 13). For an historical and litera ry analysis of the
Prescer Joh n myth as a "spatial" dream and a u topía before Moore see ch. 5 in
F. M. Roger s ( 1961; with references to the volunúnous literature on the subject).
2. Ou r Time , Their Time , No Time l 71
Th e story carne to a conclusion of sor es with a Portuge~ mission to Ethiopia in
1~20. the accoun t of which was wriuen by Father Francisco Alvares , an ~xtraor-
dina ry documen t for the transition from myth to ethnography (see Beckmgh am
and Huntingford 1961). . .
25. ~far shall Sahlins uses chis formu la with disarmi ng fran kne ss m h1s recenc
attempt to set up a basic oppos ition becween "practica ! r:ason " (the West's) and
"culture" (the Rest's); see Sahlins 1976 and my comments m chap ter.4 . .
26. na~;d Bohm states in a textbook on rela tivity theory : "The nonon that
there is one unique universal orde r and measure of time is only a habit of thoug ht
built up in th e limiced domain of Newto nian mech anics" {1965: 175). Emsl ~loch ,
citing developments in phy sics and mathematics , pr opose d to extend ~h~ ?ot ion of
relativi t·, to human time. We must recognize its "elasticity" and mulup hc,ty. Th 1s,
he ar~es, will be the only way to subsume Africa and Así~ under a coi:nmon
human history witho ul stretc hing them over the Western hne ar concepu on of
progress (see 1963:17 6-203). . .
:t .
27. Appa.rently it is not dead in ph1losophy e1th:r , least to Judge from K.
Wagn 's What Time Does ( 1976). For an especially lucid outhne of the argument
from time to space" see Lucas 1973:99 ff. . .
28. ~falinowsk.i's candid reve lation about his obsess1on w1th sex, drug s, race
and politic:a.1chauvinism caught the prur ient int eres t when the diary was first pub-
lished . It s importance as an epistemological documem was over looke~ by rnost
(but not by C. Geertz, see 1979:225 f). Malinowski carefoUy_rec orded htS stru ggle
with "the un cre ative demon of escape from real ity" by readmg novels rather than
pu rsuing his research work (1967:86). At least twenty times he reports on situa•
tions where the present with its demands became Loo much _to bear. On ce _he notes:
"Profound intellectual laziness; I enjoyed things retrospec uvely, as expenences re-
corded in memor y, rather than immediat~ly, because of my ~ser-.ilile state"
(1967 :35). Ali th is, I believe, is not on ly evide nce o~ Malmo~s lu s psy~holog1cal
prob]ems with fieldwork, it documents h~ struggle with an epistemo logtcal ~rob-
lem--coevalness.
2. Our Time, Their Time, No Time: Coevalness Denied
l. 'Überhaup t ist der Primal des Raumes übcr die Zeit em unrrügli ches
Kennz eichen reaktoniirer Sprache' (E. Bloch 1962:322).
2. Lé\•i-Strau ss 1963:39.
3. In my own development, critica ] questioning of ethnoscientific proc~dures
as to their ability to deal with the "irru ptive force of time" has been crucia l. My
vicws are expressed in an essay ''Tax onomy and ldeolo gy" (1975), one reaso~ why
1 do not want to address this issue again . M. Durbin's paper "Models of S1mul-
taneity and Sequentiality in H uman Cogn ition" (_1975)_in _che sam e volum e m1g~t
be r ead asa n attempt to raise the problem .ofT1rne w1thm che confines of a tax-
onom ic approach . .
4. For a critica! appraisal of fu nctiona list inability to <leal wnh change and a
plea for the Popperian ap proach see Jarvi e (1964). In his part isan defense offünc-
tionalism ("Without any doubt , the single most sign ificant body of the ory m the
172 2. Our Time, Their Tim~, No Time
social sciences in che present cenmry") R. A. Nisbet ignores criliques ,uch as Ja r-
.,¡e·s and speaks of funclionalism under the heading of Neo-Evolutionism (see
1969:223 ff).
5. See Malinowski 1945:34. Ac thc same time he relegates thac element to the
study of change which, with the stra igbtforw ardness thac was character islic of hin1,
he identifies as anthropo logf s response to problems of maintaining political power
over colonized popul ations (,ee 1945:4 f).
6. Georges Gurvitch, one of the few sociologists comparable in scamre to T.
Parsons , summarized his views in a treatise on social time. His ''dialecúcal" orien -
tation produced insights of great depth and comprehensiveness. But he, too, stans
from an unques tioned assumption : Sorne societies are Kpromethean," i.e., history-
and time-centcred, while others, no rabiy tho,e that are studied by "eth nograph y."
are not (see 1964 (1962]:6}. In the end his t}pological approach to the problem
leads him to assen a relativist "temporal plurali sm." Similar in approach and imenr
is the excellent , iffragmencaiy, essay "On Social Time" by V. Gioocia (1971) . Gio-
scia, however , is aware of the political na.cure of social conceptions of Time a, well
as of the visualist bia~ resulting in theorccical suppression of Time (see chapler 4).
7. A valu able sum mary of different genres of anthropological stud ies of Tim e
(including a bibliography containing references to most of the important articles
and monographs} may be found in the essay "Primitive Time-Reckoning as a Sym-
bolic System" by D. N. Malu (1968). R. J. Maxwell's contribution to the Yaker
volume is less useful (1971). To che list of Frazerian compilations of cultural con-
ceptions of Time one could add the chree volumes of F. K. Ginzel's "Manual of
~1athematical and Technical Chrooology" (1906, 1911, 1914)-a misleading title
beca.use the work examines only early historical , ethnographic , and folkloric evi-
dence. A paper by W. Bogoras (1925) is remarkable mainly for an early attemp l
to show ,imilarities between relativity theory and primicivc Time concepts. Among
more recent work one could cite Bourdieu (1963), a ~·olume edited by Lacro1x
( 1972), an import.ant paper by Turton and Ruggles ( 1978), and an essay by Kra-
mer ( 1978). The list is by no mean s complete .
8. For a succinct summary of philosophica l arguments relating to time an d
communication see Lucas 1973:44 IT.
9. For instance by D. Bidney in his critique of Herskovi~ ( 1953:423 ff ) and
more recently in a dcvastating essay by ).iowell-Smith (1971). Relevant writings by
Herskovits wet;e republished, with a po~itive introduction, by D. T. Campbe ll
(Herskovits 1972). Book-length appraisals were given by Rudolph ( 1968) and Ten-
nekes ( 1971) and abo ve ali by Lemaire ( 1976). Serious counterargumen ts continue
to be formu lated with respect to the question of linguistic relativity; see che volu me
of essays edited by Pinxten (1976). See also Hanson's proposal for "contextualism"
as a mediation between relativism and objectivism (1979).
10. And, one might add, thc outlook of American politics: "We cannot hope
to discharge satisfactorily to ourselves or to other peoples the leadership that his-
Lory has forced u pon us at this time unless we a.etupon reasoned and clearly stated
standa rds of evaluation. Finally, ali talk of an eventual peaceful and orderly world
is but pious cantor sentimental fantasy unless there are, in fact, sorne simple bu1
powerful heliefs to which all men hold, sorne codes or canon s that have or can
obtain univer ~ I acceptance:· Thi s is notan American pre sident preaching hís doc·
2. Our Time, Their Time, No Time 173
trine of human rights in 1982, but Cl)•de Kluckhohn in, a cold war essay "Educa-
tion, Values, and Anthropological Relativity" ( 1962 [1952]:286 f).
11. It is intrigui ng to note that a coherent critica! account of che ''war efforL"
in American anthropology is conspicuously absent from M. Harris' history of an-
thropo logy, although he gives a cursor:,· review of some studies of that period
(1968 :4 13-418). The same hold s for Honigman, who mentions "national charac-
ter'· in conncc:tion with Vico, Montesquieu, Hume , and Herder (1976:99 f), and
for Voget who does, however, provide an informative section on Kluckhohn's
proje ct of wcovert" value studies in five culwrcs of the Southwest ( 1975:414-421 ).
lt is even more surprising that, as far as I can see, none of the cono-ibutors to
Hym es' Reinventing Anrl,,ropology( 1974) felt the need ro drag that particular skele-
ton out of the closet. Inciden tally, no reference is made in these books to the Mead
and Métreaux manual on which I will commem below. One important critica! ap-
pra isal, focusing on studies of Japane se national character by W. La Barr, was
recently made by P. T. Suzuki (1980).
12. But this is only a passing impression. Elsewhere M. Mead stated : "These
contemporar y national character sn1dies of culture ata dist.ance resemble attcmpts
to reconstruct the culmral character of societies of the past .. . in which the study
of documents and monuments has to be substituted for the direc;t study of individ-
uals interacting in observable social situations. However they differ from historical
reconstruction in that, whether they are done at a distancc or through field-work
in the given nation, they are based primarily on interviews with and observation
of living human beings" ( 1962:396). ~ote that the allochronic intcnt of the state-
mcnt is reinforced, no t mitigated by reference to living human beings.
13. This intent is expressed in the title of a paper by Hall and William Foote
Whyte (1966): "lntercultural Communication: A Guide to ~1en of Action." The
section on time pro., ides a catalog of how-to recommendations for American busi-
nessmen having to deal with Latin Americans, Greek.s, Japanese, and lndians and
concludes with thi$ anthropological malapropos: "If you haven't been needled by
an Arab, you just haven 't been needled" (1966:570). ·
14. Marga ret Mead formulated that presupposition as follows: "Cultural un-
derstanding of the sort discussed in this Manual can only be achieved wichin a
frame of reference that recognizes che interna! consistency of the premises of each
human culture and also recognizes that much of chis consístency is unconscious;
that is, is not available to the average member of the culture'' (Mead and Métreau x
1953:399 f).
15. Perhaps one should not even attempt a bibliographic note (a useful work-
ing bibliography on Lévi-Strauss and his critics-containing 1,384 titlesl-is now
available : Lapointe and Lapoime 1977). Nevertheless, here are sorne tilles, ali pri-
marily concerned with a sysrematic interpretation of Lévi-Strauss' work, which I
would recommend for consultation. In English: Leach ( 1970}-readable but to be
taken with caution; Scholte (1974a), the most concise and differentiated incroduc-
tion by an anthropologist; Rossi (1974); and TQOSt recently Jenkins ( 1979). In French :
Simonis (1968) and Marc-Lipianski (1973), the latter being mainly a study guide .
In German: Lepenies aod Ritter (1970), a collective volume especially Yaluable as
a study of Lévi-Strauss' incellectual sources and affinities. Generally, l have found
F. Jameson 's The Prisqn H~ efI.anguage (1972) to be a most convincing critique
174 2. Our Time, Their Time, No Time
of strUcturalism (including related movcmcnr.s such as Russian fonnalism and the
Prague school). He is cspecially insigh tful with regard to thc problcm of Time .
16. Sc:e Lévi-Strauss 1976: 12. It should be clcar that ta:iwnomicis herc being
used to designatc an cpistemc (see Foucault 1973 and Lepenies 1976) and not ¡11
a narrow technical scnse of one typc of dassification (see Durbin 1975).
17. See also the cxcellcnt cssay on Lévi-Strauss and Sartre by Rosen ( 1971).
18. One of Lé1,i-Strauss· most famous statemcnrs should be quoted hcr e.
Speaking of myth and music, he observes that both requirc "a tempor al dimen sion
in which to unfold. But this re lation to time is of a rather special naturc : it is as if
music and mythology nccded time only in ordcr ro deny it. 80th, indeed, are
instruments for che obliteration oí time" (1970 [1964):15 f). Incidentall)', when
Lévi-Scrauss later tries to correct misunderstandings with regard to the distincti on
oí synchrony and diachrony he reaffirms the anticemporal intent; see 1976: 16 f.
19. G. Bachclard argues similariy and concludes: "Subrcpticement, on a rem-
lacé la locution durer da,11 le t.tmpspar la locution ,k.,,uurtr dans L'~spoceet c'est
l'intuition grossierc du pJcin qui donnc l'impression vague de plénicude . Voila le
prix dont il faut payer la continuité établie entre la connaissance objcctive et la
connaissance subjective" (1950:27).
20. In this respect, Lévi-Strauss' position is idcntical to L H . Morgan 's (see
the quotation from Morgan, chaptcr l) . Appropriacely , The ElementaryStructurt1of
Kinshif,is dedicated to Morgan.
21. Abscncc of a Lheory of production is not a mere side effect of a radical!;
taxonomic approach . Structuralism is a theory of non-production:ostcnsibly, be-
cause it is a theory tailored to non- or preindustrial soc1eties which are based on
symbolic exchange ; in reality, bccausc it is a theory produccd by a socicty whosc
•industrial" phase has long been terminated by what Baudrillard calls the "end of
production. " As the "-TÍLingsof Baudrillard show (sce espccially 1976) scruccural-
ism as che thcory of the "simulation oí the code" can be put to use for a shanering
critique of late capitalist "culture" but only at the expense of primith•e society frorn
which it must continuously extract Íts insights. Lévi-Strauss expresses awareness of
this in his famous bon mot on anthropology as mtropo!.ogy(1963:397).
22. See abo a statemcnt from the introduction to The Raw (l7l(Í tite CoollLIJ.
"Throughout, my intention rema.in, unchang,ed. Starting frorn ethnographic cx-
perience, l have always aimcd at drawing up an inventory of menu.l patterns , to
reduce appai:;entl)' arbitrary data to sorne kind oí order. and to atcain a leve! at
which a kind of nccessity becomes apparcnt , underlying the illusion oí líberty"
(Lévi-Scrauss 1970:10).
23. Elscwhere I argue Lhat thc silence and sccrecy surrounding the ethn o-
graphic act are comparable to the removal oí fundamental rcligious acts from thc
evc,-yday sphcre. 1 thcn aslc "Could ít be that in anthropology. as in many relí-
gious movements, there is a censoring-out of its consticutive acts, expressing con-
scious or unconscious efforts to protcct the discipline from realizing thac, after ali,
it rests on a historically siruaced praxis, a modc of producing knowledge in whicb
personal mcdiation is essenúal and must be 'accounted for' inst.ead of being simply
prcsumed in such fuzzy axioms as 'anthropology should be bascd on fic!d work ' •·
(Fabian 1979b:25).
24. The colonial involvement of British anthropology has been well docu ·
3. Time and Writing About the Other 175
men ted, which is one reason why it will be little discussed in these essays. Sc:eAsad
1973, Leclerc 1971, Kuper 1973.
J. Time a11dWriting About the Other
l. Bohm 1965: 175 f.
2. La Fontaine 1962:Fable X.
3. Evans-Pritchard found it "surprising that, with the exception oí Morgan's
1tudy of the l roquois ( 1851) nota single anthropologisc conducted field studies till
the_end of the nineteenth century." He undoubtedly exaggerated, bue his obser-
vauon underscored the insight that the eventual incorporation of field researc h
into the ~raxis ~f anthropology was not so much due to a need fo r empirical
confirmauon as 1t was exprcssive of the professionalization of a discipline : " An-
thropo logy became more and more a whole-tune profe ssiona l study, and sorne
ficld experience carne to be regardcd as an esscntial par t of the craming of its
studems " (sce 1962:71 f, 73).
4. For a recent statcment of this see an otherwise disappointing essay b)'
F. A Salamone (1979, wilh useful bibliographic references to the literature on
ficldwork). l\"otice a remarkable shift in these debates from a scientific orientation
inspired by an MEinsteinian'' notion of epistemo logy in Northrop and Llvingston
(1964) toward the comrnunicative leginmation of anthropological knowledge .
5. ~iy own contributi on to this debate was an essay, "La nguage , Histor; and
Anthropolog}"' (1971), which occasioned an anide by Jame (19i5). Bob &holtc
contributeclbeveral importc1ntessays(see 1971, l974b)asdid K. Dwyer(l977, 1979),
J. P. Dumo_nt (1978), B.Jules-Rosette (1978), and D. Tedlock (1979), among other s.
. 6. This can_ be done in a critica! and fruitful fashion, as, e.g., by Hayden
White (19_73).H1s analyses of historical discourse in terms of metaphorical stra te-
g1csperrrut, at the very lcast, intere sting comparisons becween different historíans.
However, when all discourse on Time, histor}', and change ís denounced, rather
t~an ~na~)'~d, as metaphorical the resu lts can be stultifying ; see :-,jisbet (1969).
t.:sed_Judac1ously or not, I find metaplwr to be of li.mited use for the critica! project
oí thts book . No doubt many allochronic devices are metaphoric -b ut Lhat is, I am
tempted to say, no excuse.
7. !his has been a erted, incidentally, about "Time and Physical Language .~
~cco~mg tO Schumacher, who qualifies spociaJ relativity as a "rule of communica-
bon" m a frame separating subject and oi?joct, "the idea of thc progress of time is
an outgrowth of the linguislic forms for phvsical comrnu nications" (see 1967: I 96
203 ). , ,
8. What Greimas has in mind scerns LO be illustrated by Evans-Pritchard when
he Sta!es: ~Every kin~ o~ social _relationsh1p, every belief, every technological pro-
ccss-:m fact everythmg m the life of the natives-is expressed in words as well as
10 acuon, and when one has fu lly understood the meaning of all the words of cheir
lan~age and ali their situations of rcfercnc:e one has finished one's srudv of the
&oaety" (l962a :79 f). ·
9. For a radical cr itique of claims that historical discourse m.ight, or should be,
176 3. Time and Vhiting About the Other
viewed as self-contained see Mairet (1974). A similar concern, combined with a
critique of the "positiv ist illusion" akin to that expressed by anthropologists (see;:
note 5 above), characterizes the work of B. Verhaegen (see 1974). The man y fac-
ecs o f the problem of history qua discourse are discussed in a collective volume
edited by Koselleck and Stempel ( 1973: see also Greimas' essay "Sur l'histoire év-
énementielle et l'histoire fondamenrale" in that collection).
10. Two sentences from Herodorus ' His/(JTÚs , chosen at random, illustrate thi5.
Notice thal they could also occu r in modern eth no gr.tphies: "The on ly deities to
whom Egypcians consider it proper to sacrifice pigs are Dionysus and the. Moon "
(1972:148); " h is the custom [of the Lybian tribes], ata man's lirst marnage, to
give a party , at which the br ide is enjoyed by each of the guests in turn. . . ...
(l 972:329). On early ethnological theorizing, see Müller 1972. Examp les of recent
criticism in anthropo logical textbooks are Vansina (1970 , see p. 165 where he calh
the ethnographic presenta "zero-time fiction") and Anderson (1973:205 f).
11. This does not cancel earlier remarks on terminological allochronism ; it
makes them more precise. A furrher point of clarification: 'Nha t is gained o r
changed if primitive is used in quotation marks, or preceded by .so-calledand sim-
ilar disclaimers (see sorne random examples in Lévi-Strauss which are representa-
rive of a widespread usage: 1966:222, 243, 267; 1976 : 19 (in his In augural Lec-
ture))? Perhaps these mod ifiers signa! the label-character of the term, its
convencional , classificatory function in a tcchnical vocabu lary. But disclaimers may
be indexi cal rather than referential. In that case they poin t to the position of the
primiúve in anthropological discourse . Who calls the prim icive so-calledr Anthr~-
pologists. In that case the modifier may not dissoci~te its user from anthropol?g~ -
cal praxis; nor does it soften the blow of allochromsm. Because the use of pnrm-
tive is not just a matter of definition bue expressive of a historically established
praxis , the term may become a starting point for fruitful phi losophical analy ~is
(see Dupré 1975: l 6ff) and, indeed, for a general cr itique of Western societ)' (see
Diamond 1974), an intention that must also be granted to Lévi-Strauss. Yet there
remains the question to what extent the political conditions of estab lished anthro -
pologica l praxis legitimate the use epistemologically, even if ethical intenti~ns are
bevond doubt. Fo r the wider history of primiiivism see the standard work ed 1ted by
Lovejoy et al. (1935 ). . (Galtung 1967:296). See also the introduc tion to A. Wilden (1972, "Th e Scientific
12. I believe that this is iUustrated by a statement from one of anthropology >
ancestors: "I have studied men , and I think. l am a fairly good observer. But ali
the same Ido not know how to see 1•,hat is before my eyes; l can only see clearl,-
in retrospect it is onlv in mv memories that my mind can work. I have neithe r
feeling no r u~dersr.ancling fo~ anything that is said or done or that happens before
my eyes. Ali that strikes me is the externa! manifestation .. But afterwards it ali
comes back to me, I remember the place and the time, nothmg escapes me. Then
from whac a ma n has done or said I can read his thoughts, and I am rarely mis-
taken'' (J.J. Rousseau 1977 [178 1):114).
13. Hermeiuutics (much like p!unomerwlog)' ) retains a distinctl y European·
con tinental Aa~or. When it crosses the Adantic it seems to arrive as a fashion able
jargon rather than a style of thought with serious practica ! consequences . ~ever -
theless , there are now signs that it begins to ha,,e substancial inAuence on the sooal
sciences in the Eng lish-speaking world. G. Radnit sky's C<mtinentalSchoolsofMtta5 ·
cienu ( 1968, with later editions) , K. O. Apel's A.nalyticPhiios<Jf)hy ofLanguagt and
3. Time and Writing About the Other 177
;u GeisttsWissenschaftrn(1967), and Palmer's Hermentutics (1969) pr ovide dear and
com pact int rodu ctions in English. Two recent publications, an h istorica l study by
z. Bauman (1978) and a reader edited by Rabinow and Sullivan (1979), attcst to
the reception of henneneutics in the social sciences, including anthropology.
14. See also the reflec tions on fieldwork and time by J. P. Dumo nt (1978: 47 f )
but notice his tak ing recourse to visual-spatia l re p rcsentatio n when he reports on
"Social Time and Social Space as Context" (ibid., ch. 5). Dumont illustrates my
poin t regarding "concradictions" betwcen temporal sensibility in doing research
and visualist distancing in writing anth rop ology (see ch. 4).
15. The process by which money and langua ge, merchandise and informa-
tion , become less and less disringuishable had been observed by tbinkers at least
since the seventeenth centur y. Kant's cri tic, J. G . Hamann noted (with a re ferenc e
10 Leibniz): "Money and Ianguage are two things whose study is as profound and
abstract as their use is general. Both are more do sely related than one would
suspec t. The theory of one exp lains the theory of the other; it appears, the~fore,
th at they derive from common grounds" (1967 [ 1761):97). lnadentally, this was
"-Tillen almost a century and a half before de Saussure found in the economic
theory of value a model for bis structural linguistics (see, e.g. , 1975 [1916):114 f,
157). Data storage and computer use in anthropology are discussed in a volume
edited by Dell Hymes (1965).
16. On Trille's fraudulent ethnography of West-African P>·gmies see Pisk.aty
( 1957); for a useful survey of the muddled debates concern ing Castaneda see
Murray ( 1979) .
17. Fo r a theoretica l discussion of this last point see our essay "Folk Art from
an Anthropological Per spective" (Fabia n and Swmbati-Fabian 1980) .
18. Dell Hymes conside rs th is in his introducrion to &inventmg AnJhrOfJolcgy
(1974 :48 ff) and quotes J. Galtung on "scientific colonialism": "There are ma ny
ways in which this can happen. One is to claim the right of unlimited access to
data from other countries. Another is to export data about the country to on_e's
own home country for processing into 'manufactured goods,' such as ~ks and
article s.... This is essen tially similar to what happens when raw matenals are
exponed ata low price and reimpor ted as manufactured goods ata very high cost "
Discourse: Know ledge as a Commodity" ).
19. G. Gusdorf gives an accou nt of the rise of modern linguistics in a context
of struggle between old and new interpretations of the Western "tradition" (1973:
part 3). See also Gadamer on the connection between theological and philological
herrneneut ics ( 1965: 162 ff; based on an earlier study by Dilth ey). Gadame r notes that
the origins of the modern concept of "system" must be sought in auempts to ~ec•
oncile th e old and the new in theology and in a phasc that prepared the separat1on
of science from philosophy ( 1965:164n 2). ln other words, Ksystem" always has served
as a figure of thought related to Time. lts currency in taxono~~ a~thr?f? lo~y
(and other approaches stressing the scienüfic character of our d1sc1pline) 1s md.c -
ative of allochronic tendencies. (\lve will have more to say about these con nections
in the following chapter).
20. The following reflecrions were inspired by my reading of an essay by Michel
Serres, "Le Jeu d u Loup " (1977:89-104). l am gratefu l to Josué V. Harari who
brought the piece to my attention. He has since pub lished an English version of
178 4. The Other and the Eye
Serres' essay which includes the text of La Fontaine ' s fable ''The Wolf and the
Lamb" (see Ha rari 1979 :260-276).
4. The Other and tireEye: Time arul.the Rhetoricef Vision
l. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1962 (165 1):21).
2. Karl Marx, "First The sis on Feuerbach" ( 1953:339).
3. With ou t atcempting to d ocumen t here what is by now a considerable liter-
ature o n fieldwork and methods one may note a developmen t from the catalogue-
gen re of the eighteen th and nineteenth centu ries (see chapter 1, no te 12) towa rd
more an d more "graph ic" instructions. Thus Marce( Mau ss declared in h is Manuei
d'EIJmogrophie: " Le premie r point dans l'étude d'u ne société consiste a savoir de
qui l'on par le. Pour cela, on établira la cartographie comp lete de la société ob--
servée '' (1974: 13). Noúce the massing of visual-graphic and tabular material in tJ,e
sections on field methods in rhe ~aroll and Cohen (1970: part 2) and the Honig-
mann handbooks (1976 : ch. 6); also in tJle more recent manual by Cresswell and
Godelier (1976). Much less frequently does one come upon statemencs like "Un-
derstanding in field resea rch is very much like the aural learning of a language"
(Wax 197 1: 12). But Rosalie Wax does not develop her insight and her own ac-
count is dominated by the spatial image of inside/outs ide.
4. See Givne r's essay "Scienúfic Precon cep tion s in Locke's Philosophy o f Lan-
guage" ( 1962).
5. On "The Sense of Vision and Ule Origin s of Modern Science '' see Llndber g
and Steneck (1972); see also Lindberg 's book Theories of VisionJrom Al-Kindi to
Kepln (1976).
6. See Feyerabend 1975:157 (with a rcference to KO)Té's studies of Galileo);
Kuhn 1970 ( 1962) :47 f seems to restr ict rhe importance of "debates'' to pre para-
digm periods. Wilden analyses "binarism " fashio n able in anthropo logy an d elsc-
wbere under d1e heading "The Scien tific Discourse as Propaganda" (1972 : ch . 14).
7. Perha ps one should distinguish severa! ways in which topoi and topical
logic inform anthropological d iscourse: ( l) Throogh time, often with asconish ing
contin u ity down to the beginnings of reco rde d Western intellec tu al h istory, ph i-
losophers, philosophe3, and anUlropologists have returned to the sarne common places
(ofcen copying from each ocher)-savagery, barbarisrn, cannibalism (see the latest
fash ion in books on that topos) and certa in tenacious elements of ethnographic
lore (see Vajda 1964). (2) At any giu~n time, ant h ropologists have been visiting and
revisitlng familiar intellectu al places- matria rchy, couvad e, mana. incest, totem and
taboo, culture heroes, ku la, potlatch, Crow lin ship systems, and so on . (3) Finally,
there ba\•e been actemp ts to chart topoi-~fordock 's etJlnographic sample , pre-
ceded by Ty lor's classical srudy of marriage and descent, is an instrument for sta·
tistical calculations bu t also an atlas mapping topoi (see Tylo r 1889, Mu rd ock 1949:
ap p . A). The Hall and Trager in ventory may be read as a sort of periodic chan
o f culture e lemems ; its mnemonic character is obvious (Hall 1959: 174 f ). Even
Hymes' "SPEAKING"-the mnemonic summary of comPonents in a speech event--
may belong here (Hymes 1972 :65 ff).
8. 'For further refere nces to lhe an mnemo11ica , to the h istory of sciencific il-
lustration and re latcd currents in lhe eighteentJl century , see Lepenies 1976:32 ff.
4. The Other and the Eye 179
9. This had anciem p recedenrs in the Pytha gor ea n and (n eo- ) Platonic tra-
ditions. lamblích~ (who die d aro und 330 AD) reports in bis book on Pythagoras
that the master "called geometry 'histor y.' He also notes that his followers avoided
A
comm o n and popu lar expressions in Uleir publicaúons; rather , "following the
command of Pythago ras to be silent abouc divine myster ies, tbey chose figures of
speech whose meaning remained in comprehens ible to the non -initiated and they
protected their d iscussions and writings through the use of agreed- u po n symhols"
(see Iambl ichos 1963:97, 111; my emphasis).
10. No tice th at i!') chis chapter I concencrate on tracing a general histor y of
visualism. For an accou nt of Rena issan ce atte mpts to inco rpo rate che newly found
savage in to such visual-spatia l schemes as the "chai n of bein g" see Hod gen 1964:
ch. 10 (especially the cree- and ladde r-d iagram s of hierarchy, pp. 399, 401 , both
from works by Raymond Lull, one of Ramus' precursors).
11. See Goody (1977 ) o n tables, lists, form ulae, and other device s.
12. Thi s evokes , of course, che"medium-is-the-message~ slogan to which M.
Mcluhan's brilliant insighcs seem to have been red uced by now. Ong, by the way,
ackn owledges imellectual debts to Mcluhan who in turn bui lds on Ong's stud ies
in his The GutenbergGaia:..7(1962:144 ff., 159 f., 162 f.).
13. Becau se methodo logy remained tied to the business of disseminating and
tran smitting knowledge. Rhetor ic as pidagogie,incidentally, was the "narrow door "
(M . Halbwachs ) through which Dur kheim-and with h im sociology-gained ad-
mission to the Sorbonne. He was first hired to teach education . His lectures on the
history of h igher educatio n in France up to the Renaissance were later published
as a book (Durkheim 1938).
14. Especially in his The Presence of the Word (Ong 1970 [ 1967)) to which 1
have paid little atte n tion in these essays.
15. See Derrida 1976, especially part 2, ch . l. At this point, I am not p re-
pared co confront Derrida's undoubcedly important theses regarding writing and
violence. lna smuc h as h e seems to equate writing with taxo nomy (see l9i6 : 109 f.)
our arguments may conve rge. As regards his charge of "epistemolog ical phono l-
ogism" (against Lévi-Strauss) I would th ink tha l bis cr itique is aimed in the same
direc tion as my views on visualism.
16. On the ritual- initiatory characte r of fieldwork see chapter 2; on its rela-
tively late appearance as a required practice, see chap ter 3. t\otice that in both
the se contexts the poin t was to stres.s the ins titu tion of field research as a routine,
as someth ing that was almost incidental to thc rise of anthropology. This indicated
the tenuous practirol inte gration o f empiry a nd theory . Ideologically,it became ali
the more important to insist on a toug h , visualist ideal of scien tific observation .
Howev er, this was ideologization with a vengeance insofar as our clinging to field-
work also prod u ced the apo retic situation which allowed us to identif y de nial of
coevalness as the key to anthropology 'i. allocbronism (see cha pter 1).
17. T. Todo rov ( 1977) traces tbeories of symbols to the origins of our West-
ern tradition. J. Boon exp lores connections betwee n syrnbolism and French stru c-
tural ism (1972) . R. Firdl's srudy is the most comp reh ensive attemp t by an anthro-
pologist to provi de a systematic treatise on symbols (1973) . Wor ks by \lictor Turner
(e.g. 1967) and Mary Douglas (1966), as well as the writings of C. Geeru (e.g.,
1973), among others , h ave been in fluencia!. Geertz, especially, ackno wledge s the
influe nce of Susan ne K. Lange r (e.g., 1951 [ 1942 )). There exists a re ader on sym•
180 5. Conclusions
bolic ant hro po logy (Dolgin et al. 1977}, perha ps a syrnplO~ oí ics aspiring to nor-
mal scientific status. Several works docume nt th e many pomt s of contact and con-
trast between structuralism and symbolic approac hes, see Sperber (1975), and Basso
and Selbv (1976). The Jarrer, incidenraHy, evokes a related tr end , expressive of the
iníluen c~ of K. Burk e, which concen trates on the noúon of metaphor and on rhet -
oric models for cultura l analysis (see the semi nal arl.icle by Fern and ez, 1974, and
the collection of essays edited by Sapir and Crocker, l 97i). A concise overview of
"symbolic interacúonism," a movement closd y re lated to symbolic anthro polog}':
was given by Meltzer et al 1975. O n symhol,in wcial anthropolo gy see Skorupsk,
1976.
18. I am using the Lhree-volume stu dy ed ition, Hegel , Vorkrungen über di.!
At?Jlhelik (1970) referre d to in th e following as Aesthetic 1, 11, 111.
19. Hege l re fer s to Friedri ch von Schlegel and to Fr iedric h Creu zer. Kramer
traces Creuzer's in fluence in crearing the "myth of the Orient " ( 1977:20 ff .).
20. See che commenta ry by Kojeve ( 1969: 134 f.) especially the important ~e-
mark on Hegel's historical Time being conceivcd as a movement that starts w1ch
the future and moves through the past imo the present. Kojeve notes "'It may be
th at the Time in which the Present takes primacy is cosmic or physical Time .
whcreas biological Time would be characteri1.ed by the pr imacy of the Pa~f'
(1969: 1341121). . objects in it or a public self, ali of which he called 'falsificarions of fact' or the
21. In fairness to Whitehead and to contemporar y symboltc anthropologts L~
one must acknowledge a crilical intent directed against crude empiricism and pos-
itivism. As has been noted by others (e.g., Apel 1970, Habermas 1972: chs. 5
and 6) there are many poinl, of contact between pragmatic ph ilosophy, herme-
neutics, and critica! theory inspired by a Marxist cheory of pr axis. Ro_yWa~~r ·s
orig in.il and insightfu l ap proach to symbolization (e.g.. 1975) exemp b_fi~ cnucal
and autocrilical symbo lic anthropology. Sce also V. Turner 's essay re viewmg cur -
renc symbolic stud ies (1975).
22. Iro nically. in view of the critique expressed here, I muse express _m:,,grat-
itude to J. Boon for having bro ugh t to my attcnrion, wfrh much enthus1~s~, the
work of Frances Yates. 1 also know oí his interes t in the history and sem,oucs of
ethnographic illuscration and I look forward to the re sult ~ of his re search .
23. For a cr itique oí a ~imilar argumen t expounded in another accoum of
conversion to symbolic an thropology see my review of R. Rappaport's Erolcg)',
Meaning, a,ui R t ligúm {1979), Fabian 1982.
24. That is done in the wr itings of J. Baudrillard (whom Sa.hlins quo tes), es-
peóally in his L'Édiange symholiqut et la ,,wrt {1976). To realize thac _Baudrill~rd,
too , feeds on the primit ive-civilized dichot.omy is per haps the best anudote agamst
che spe ll cast by this brilliant new pro ponent of "p hilosop hy ~ith a harnmer' (sec
S. K. Levine's revie w of Baudril lard's M1rrorof Productúm, Levine 1976).
5. Conclusions
l. "Man rnuss diese versteinerten Verhaltnisse dadurch zurn Tan¿en zwingen,
dass man ihnen ihre eigene Melodie vorsingll" (Marx 1953:311). . the thesís of J aulin) was edited by Amselle (1979).
2. ''Toute con naissance prise au mornent de sa con stiturion est une conna!S·
sanee polémique" (Bachelard 1950: 14). . .
3. A document for the sph; t of th at time is an essay by Jult an H uxlcy t1tled
5. Conclusions 181
"U nesco: Jts Purpose and its Philosophy" (1949). He had been the execut ive sec-
ret arv of the Preparatory Comm ission to l;nesco in l 946. Although he insists that
he is· speaking on ly for himse lf he clearly was inílue ntial in shapi~g i:x>lici
es_and,
above ali, in providing them with a temporal perspective. T he ObJecuve basis for
internacional cultural poliúcs, he argues, must l:M!an "evoluúonary approach" based
on wscienLificmethod ," i.e., a transcultural theo ry of change. He undoubtedly had
anthr opo logy in mind when he stated that "the neces.sary bridge betwee~ the _realm
of fact and the realm of value . . . can be strengt.hened by th ose social sc1ences
which uúlize the scientific method but endeavor to apply it to values" ( 1949:315).
4. Korthrop pres um ably qua lified for th at role as the author of The Metting
efEast arul West (1946) and edito r of ldeclogical Differenus and l-'lorld Order (1949).
Th e lauer included contr ibutions by D. Bidney (''The Concept of Met.a-Anthro-
pology'') and C. KJuckho hn ("The Philosop hy of the Navaho lndian s'').
5. !\o rt hrop's view is expressed obliquely in this rernar k. abo ut_Ber~n : "~l
was because Bergson assumed that a publicly meaníngful neuro logtcal e~istem~
correlate of introspected memory is impossible to find that he relapsed mto h1s
purely intuitive ph ilosop hy which accounted for impression istic art an d the mtro-
spected privare f:lowof time which he oonfused with public time and called 'du-
rée," but which left no meaning for public space and time, the pubhc events and
'misuse of the mind' •· (1960:5 1). The quotation is frorn the essay "The Neurolog-
ical Epistemic Correlates of lnt rospected Ideas."
6. This is the heading of a chapter on De Maillet. Buffon, and others in Loren
Eiseley"sDarwin's Century (1961 ). . .
7. Remember that Montaigne ended his essay "Des Cannibal es" (based, mc1-
dentally, on conversations with one of th em) with th is ironic al re mark.: "All this
isn'c so bad but, imagine, they don't wear breec hes" r T out cela ne va pas tro p
mal: mais quoyl ils ne portem poin t de hault de chausses." See Montaigne 1925
[1595):248). Two centuries laier , Georg Forste r not.ed: "We never consider how
similar we are to the savages and we call, quite improperl y, everyone by Lhat name
who líves on a different con tinent and doe s not dre ss accordin g to Parisian Fash-
ion·• ("denn wir bedenken nie. wie lihnlich wir den Wilden sind und geben diesen
Namen sehr unei gentlic h allem, was in einem anderen Weltte ile nichc parisisch
gekleidet isL" See Forster 1968 (1791):398 f).
8. On "Linguistic ~fetho d in Edmography" see H ymes 1970; on "Ethno gra-
ph y of Communicarion" see Schmitz 1975. On epistemologica l problems wíth the
"ethn ography of spea k.ing" see my pape r "Rule and Process" (1979a).
9. Although th is was recognized b~ F. Fanon and others there is a need to
remind ourse lves of the fact that colonial regirnes "aim at the repeated defeat of
resistance" (see Wamba-dia•Wamba in an essay on phílosophy in Africa, 1979:225).
On th e general issue of sustained oppre ssion see S. Amin 1976.
JO. This was noted by man y critics of an th ropo logy, especially in France: see
the cr itica! account of African Studies by Leélerc ( 1971) and of ethnolOg}' in Latin
America by Jaulin (1970). In a similar vein are the essays by Duví gnaud (1973)
and Copans (19i4). More rocen tly, a collection of articles (many of th ern discussing
11. C. Geertz (with a reference to G. Ryle) posited th at thoug ht consists oí "a
traffic in significant symbols," a view which "make s of the stud y oí culture a posi-
tive science likc any other" (1973:362). l suspect that he would rather not be re-
182 5. Conclusions
minded of stateme nts such as the one just quoted since he has been advocating a
hermeneutic stance in recent writings. Whether one rea lly can hpld both , a rep-
resentational theory of culture anda hermeneutic approac h in the sense in which
it is intended, for instance, by Gadamer ( 1965) is in my view an open question.
12. A. Kroeber and L. White used animísm as an invective in their debat es
(see Bidney 1953: 110). Léví-Strauss says about Sartr e's notion of the practico-inert
that it "quite simply revives the Janguage of animism" (1966 :249), and in the same
conrext he dísmisses Sartre's Critiquede la raí.sondialectiqueas a myth and the refore
an "ethnographic docume n t" CWhatdoe s this make of Sartre-a "p rimitive"? See
also Scholte's comment.s on this, 1974a:648).
13. 1 am sure that the glaring absence of the issue of race from these essays
will be noted. It would be foolish to deny its importance in the rise of anthropol-
ogy (see Stocking 1968). Upon reflection, my failure to discuss race may have
someth ing to do with the fact that ít was not considered a problem in the trainin g
I received (and that may be indicative of the rift between academe and the wider
Ame rican society). Apart from offering the lame excuse that one cannot spea k
about everything, I would argue that a clear conception of allochronism is the
prerequisite and frame for a critique of racism. Refutacions of racist thought from
genetics and psychology are useful, bu t they will not as such do away with race as
an ideological and, indeed, cosmological concept.
14. Without any doubt, the politics of Time which provided a motor for the
development of anthropology is somehow connected with the phenomena ana-
lyzed by l. Wallerstei n ( 1974). But I see a major dif ficulty in the notion of system
itself. Can it ever accommodate coevalness, i.e., a dialectical concept of Time ?
N. Luhmann seems to think so but I find his arguments inconclusive co say the
least. See his important essay "T he Future -Cannot Begin: Temporal Structures in
Modern Society" (1976).
15. And ít rema ins problematic in the minds of anthropologists whose oeuvre
is commonly recognized as Marxist; see the preface to Godelier 1973; see the vol-
ume edited by M. Bloch (1975; especially R. Firth 's contributi on), and the first
chapter in Abeles 1976.
16. As far as Soviet ethnology is concerned, the situation is unclear to say the
least. We owe to Stephen and Ethel Dunn an importam lnt roduction to Soviet Eth-
rwgraphy(1974) but their interp retations have been hotly disputed by Soviet émigré
anthropologists such as David Zil'berrnan (see 1976, including replies by the Dunns) .
17. There are signs that anthropologists have begun to develop elements of
such a theory, see Bourdieu (1977) on a theory of practi ce, Fr iedrich (1980) on
the material-ch aotic aspects of language, Goody (1977) on the material conditions
of communication, to name but three examp les.
18. In this respecc, Bourdieu's q uasi-synon;mous use of hermeneutic inter-
pretation and struc turalist decoding is ju stified (see 1977: 1). lt is another question
whether this does justice to recent proposal s for a critica) hermeneutíc .
19. E. Bloch formulated thoughts onGleich.zeitigkeit and Ungleichzritigkeit which
are too complex to be dealt with in this context. l want to note, though, that
cotality was central to him and that he anticipated the critiqu e of visualism when
he insísced thac use of che concept of "to tality mus t not only be critical, but above
ali non-contemp lative" (1962 (1932): 125).
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Index
Abeles, M., 182 Basso, K., 180
.Achronicity, achronic, 77 , 168 Bastian, A., 122
Ad ams, Ch . R., 183 Bateson , C., 50, 99, 134
Adorno , T .. 159 Baudrillard , J. , 140, 174, 180
Agrícol a, 115 Baum an , Z., 177
.'\lloch ro nism, allochr onic, 32, 33, 37-38 , Becker , C. L., 5
49 , 68 , 74-75, 76, 82 , 104. 123-24. Becki ngharn , C. F. , 171
125, 127, 143. 148,1 50, 152-53. 155, Benedict, R., 46-48
156, 179 Benve niste , E., xii, 82-86
Alth usser , L., 158 Berg son, H., 181
Alvares, Father Franc isco, 171 Bidn ey, D., 169, 172, 181, 182
Am ín, S .. 18 1 Bloch, E., 44-45, 52, 171
Amselle, L., 181 Bloch, M. , 42-44 , 182
Anachronisrn, 4, 32 Blumenbach, J. F., 168
Anderson , J. !'\., 176 Boas, F., 20, 64
Animism, 152, 182 Bogoras, W., 172
Anthmpo logy: American, 38 , 45-5 1, 62 , Bohm , D., 71 , 171, 175
69, 169 {~eealso Culturalism); British, Boon,J., 134-36, 179, 180
39-40, 45, 174-75; critique of, x, 32- Bossuet, J. B., 3-6, 1O, 111, 167
33; French, 38, 45, 69, 79, 124, 141 Bourd ieu, P., xii, 141, 172, 182
(see a.lso Structuralism ); German, see Broc, K, 168
Diffusionism; and politics, 28, 48 , 52, Buffon, G.-L. Leclerc, comce de , 168,
64. 67 , 68-69, 79 , 95-96 , 120, 143 , 181
149; symbo lic, 123-24, 133, 134-39, Burke. K., 180
151, 179-80; T ime and the objecr. of, Burridge, K., l 70
28, 30 (seea/,soOther ); visual, 123 Burrow, J. W., 11
Apel, K. O., 176, 180 Butzer . K. W. , 169
Ap oretic, 33, 35 , 148, 179
Arens , W., xiv Campbell, D. T., 20 , 169 , 172
Asad, T., 175 Cascaneda, C., 94
August ine , ix, 167 Clíange, 42-43, 144-45, 154, 171, 181
Aui.obiography, 84, 102; see a/so Pase, Chomsky, N., 97, 116, 162 .
autobiographic Chronology, 13, 15, 22, 28-29, 111, 147,
159, 168, 172; bibtical. 12, 13; as a
Bachela ,d, C ., 143, 174, 180 code, 14, 57-58 ; and dating, 22, 28,
Barches, R .. 76, 140 169-70
200 Index
Class. and Time, 23
Clock time. 29
Coevalness, coeval, 30-3 1, 34, 37. 38, 68,
13 1-35, 146, 152. 156, 159, 161. 171,
179, 182: circum\'enti n g, 4 1 (dc-
fined) ; d enial of, 25, 3 1 (delincd ), 33,
34, 39, 15, 50. 62, 65, 72. 86, 92, 108,
12 1, 124, 150, 152-53 , 15<1, 156, 179:
preempLing, 52 idefined )
Coiten, R., 1i8
Collingwoo d , R. G., 168
Colomalism, coloni,.ni,;n, 17, 2i . 29, 32,
47, 63, 69. 95-96, 144, 149, 155-56,
172 , 174, 177
Commodifica1ion. and Time, 95-9fi, líi
('.,ommunicalion: and cthnograph)'· 32.
3J, 92, 124, 148, 164, 181: and Ti me,
30-31, 32, 42 -43, 50-51. 71, 170, 172;
(te til.,o Dialog
Comparati,·c method, 16-17, 27. 139
Comtc, A., 14, 129
Comemphnion, contemplati"e, 67, 125,
182
Contem po raneiLy, contemporar~. xi, 3 1.
3-1, 143. 148, 152
Contradictions. m .-1mhropological
pra.xis, xi, ,B, 37. 72-73, 148-49, 159,
l7i
Copans, J. , 168,181
C..opernicu5, 3, 1 15, 167
Cosmology, poliLita l, 35, 74, 87, 111,
113, 120, 152, 159. 182
Cre~swell, R., 178
Creuzer, F., 180
Crocker, J. C., ISO
Cullura li_~m.20-2 1, 78. 113. 150, 169
Cu\'Íer, C., 168
Darwin, C.. 11, 12, 13, 16, 168
[}JLa. and Time. 72-73, 88, 9'.!-93, 95.
132, 155, 159-60, 177
Dt:gfrando, J-\ 1., 6-7, 148. 168
Denida , J., 119, 179
Oescar1es, R., 13, 100
De,·ices: disc ursi \'e, 5; rnct h odo logical.
4; rheLOrical, 5; of tem po ra l distanc-
ing, 3 1. 32, 74, 78. 124,25, 129, 152
Index 20 1
Oiachrony, diachro n ic. 54, 35-36, 76, Epis1emo logy, epistemo logica l, 25, 33, Galtung, J., 177
167 , 174 41. 5 1. 63. 79, 87, 90, 96 , 118. 124, Gcertz, C ., 24, 45, 125, 170, 17 1, 179,
Dialect ic, d ialectical, 47, 119, 129, 136, 140, 147 , 152, 159 , 175 18 1-82
134-55, 157. 159. 162 Ethr1ograp hy. ethnograp h ic. xi, 45 , 59, Gellner, E., 38 -39
Dialog, d ialo¡.,ric,73, 85 , 90, l 18-119, 175 60, 80, 83, 94, 108, 116, 134, 148, Gestalt psycho logy, ,15
Di..imond. S.. 176 160, 17 1. 174; a nd Tim e. xíi, 50, 61, Ginzel, F. K., 172
Dickens, C ., ix 72. 107 ; of Time , x, 41, 107-8, 153- Ciosca . V., 172
Diderot. D., 6 54. 172 ; Jee also Field researc h Givner, D. A. , 178
Differcncc, as d1stanre, su Disrnnce, and Eth n ography of'speaking. 3 1. 181 Cluckman, M.. 41
meth od Echnornethodo logy. 31 Godel ier, .\1., 178, 182
Dillüs ionim1, 18-20 , 30, 53, 153. 169 Eth no,óencc, 38, 78 . 97, 116, 17 1 Goody,J., xiii, 179, 182
Di;;course : a nth ro ¡x, logical, l. 2 1, 28, 68 . Evan,-Pritchar d, E. P., 40, 41, 175 Graebner . F., 18- 19 , 20, 169, 170
97, 148; subject vers us ohject of, 30, E,·olu tio n , evolu tion ism, 11. 12, 13, 14 , Greenberg, J., 167
30, 7 1. 75, 12-1-23, H 3. 150-51; see 18,20. 22, 27,3 0 ,35,39.56,61, 101 , Gre imas, A. J., 7i-79, 97, 101, 103, 175,
a/so Coe\·alncss, denial of: Othcr 104, 124, 129, 137, 139, H7, 153, ]76
Distarit.e. distancing: and hermencu tics, 168, 169-70, 181 Gurv itch, G., 172
89: and mcthod. 30, -17, 48-50, 52, 62. Evolutionists, social. 14-15, 169 Gusdort, G .. xii, 3, 5, 167, 177
64, 65. 68, 76, fl9. 92-93, 111, 160; ExoLicism. 135 Gutenberg. 115, 179
and Time. xi, 16. 25-26, 27, 29, 30. Experience, persona l, 33, 61, 65, 73, 88-
32, 35, 39, 44, 62-63, 68 . 72. 75. 88- 89, 9 1-92, 99, 108, 124 Ha bermas, .J.,20 , 169, 180
90. 111, 121, 129, 135-36. 147, 151, Eyck., Jan ~an, 115 Halbwachs , M., 179
159: and writi ng, 72. t!9 Halfmann, J.. 169
Dolgin, J., 137, 170, 180 Fabian, J. , 164, 171, li4 , 177,180, 181 Hall , E. T. , 37, 50-52, 173, 178
noob. L. W., xii Fact , an<l past, 73, 88-89 H amann, J. G., 177
Dougla s, M., 4, 41. 179 Fanon , F., 181 H an son, F. A. , 172
Duchet , ~l.. 167 Fernande1, J. , 181 Ilarari, J., 177-78
Ournonc,j. -P .• 175, 177 Fe uer bac h . L, l 03, 1-10. 178 Har rii., .\1., 157, 168. 173
Dunn . S. and E., 182 Feyerabe n<l, P., 109, 178 Hegel, hege lian , xiv, 56, 58, 103, 123,
Dupré, W., 176 Fidd re,earch, field work: and lan - 125-3 1. 132, )37, 156-57, 159 ,- 165,
Durand, G., xi, guage. 105-6; ami professio n ali7.a- 180
Durbin , M .. 17 1, 174 uon, 66-67, 122. l 18, 175, 179: Heidegger, M., 170
Du rkh eirn, E., 20, 3 1, 34, 42-4'1, 43, 53, and T ime , 50, 63, 89 , 107, 177 II en ry Lhe Nav igaLOr, 170
58,116,129 , 160,179 Firth , R .. 179, 182 ll erder,J.G., 19.20, 159,173
Duvib'ltaud , J., 155. 181 Forde, D .. 35 Hcrmcncuóc . 89 (dcfi ncd ), 90, 97. 134,
Dwyer. K. , 175 Forster, G., 96, 181 176-77, 180. 182
Fortes, M.• 35. 41 H crodotus, 80. 176
Eder, K .• 169 Foucault. ~1., xiii, 54, 139, 168. 174 Hcrskov i1s, M. J., 172
Eins1ein. A ., 14,;, 175 Fraser, J. T., xü Hiera rch y. and order . 99-101. 133. 164,
Eisele) ', L. , 168, 181 Frazer , J. G.. 172 179
Ehade, M.. 167 Frcyc r . H .. 24 History: versus ant hr opo logy, 40, 53-54,
Emp inósm, 106 , 112, 121), 133, 136, Fri cdri ch , P., 182 59-60, 64, 98; n am ral, 8, 16, 26, 57,
160 Funcóonaü,m, 20, 42-43, 113, 150 . 171- 8i, 123-2 4 ; ph ilosoph ical. 5 , 7. 23,
Engel,, F.. 56, 133, 159. 163 72 11 1-12: sacred, 2: a nd 1.emporality,
En lightenment, xi, 9. 10, 16, 17, 26, 27, Fu ture. as project, 93, 153, 180 77 -78; u nil' ersa l, 3-6, 159
39, 57, 1 11- 12, 1 )7, 146-47, 168; Sl'f' Hohbes. T., 105, 106, 178
a/.5oPhi loso phe s Gadamer , H .-G., 182 Ho<lgen, ~1. E., 179
Ep islt'me, cpistemic, 26. 38, IW , 168 Ga lileo, 3, 178 Honigma n n, J.J., 173, 178
202 l ndex Index 203

Leach,E.,4 1. 124, 173 Metaph or , 175, 180; visual-spatial, 45 , Philosophcs , xi, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12. 117, 147,
H uizer, G., 32
H ume, D., 173 Leclerc, G .. 174, 181 134, 160 168, 178
Leibniz, G. W., 112, 177 Met hod, and print ing, 115- 16; JU also Pinxten, R., 172
Hun tingford , G. W .. 171
Husse r l, E., 170 Lemai re. T .. xiii, 172 \l isian, and mcthod Piskaty, K ., 177
Mét1·eaux, R .. 48, 68, 73 Plato, 179
H ux ley, J., 180 Len in, W. l. . 163
Hymes. D., 32, 173, 177, 178.181 Lepenies, W., xii, 168, 173 , 178 Mon taignc. M. Eyquem de , 181 Po lemic, 38 . 143. 152-53, 180
Lévi-Strauss, C., 14, 37, 38, 52-69, 90- :\fontesquieu, C. de Secondat , baron de, Popper, K., x, 40
lam blichos, 179 9 1, 94 , 97, 98, 99, 101, 122. 146, 160 , 173 Po rt Ro~al, 116
lcon. iconism , 131-35 167, 171, 173, 174,176, 179,182 Moo re, F. C. T .. 168 Power : and knowledge , 1, 48, 144. 1'19;
ldeo lo¡,,y, and Tim e, 74, 76, 104, 123, Levine, S. K., 180 :\1oravia, S., xi i, 6-7, 8. 117, 168 and Ti me, ix, 28-29
Libby, W. F ., 169 ~ orga n , L. H ., 15, 168, 169, 174 P.-agma tism, 124, 126, 180
137, 149
Lichtenberg, G. C., l. 167 :\1ülle 1·. K. E .. 17(; Prax is, 137, 143, 156-57. 161, 165.180;
Imperialism, x, 17, 35, 149, 150
Lind berg, D. C., 178 :\1urdock , G.P., 167, 178 .ee a/so Contra d ictions, in anthro pol-
J ameson, F., 173 Lingu isúcs, 45, 56-57, 74. 79, 8 1. 84-86, l\furray , S. O., 177 ogical praxis
J amin. J., 168 148, 150, 167, 170, 177 , 181 Presem , etlmographic, 33, i6 , 80 (dc-
J arvie, l. C., 171-72, 175 Linnae us (Carl \'0n Linné ), 8, 16. 168 :\ arroll , R., 178 fined ), 87, 97, 150, 176
Jau lin, R., 18 1 Literature, literary, 33, 72, 74, 81, 86, 'lation al charac tc:r, 46, 173 Prester , Joh n , 26, 170-71
Jaync, K. G., 170 87-88, 96. 135, 151 :--liebu hr, R., 145 Primiti ve. 17- 18, 30, 39. 59, 61, 77, 82,
Jenkins , A., 173 Livingston, H., 175 :--lieL
zschc, F.• 45 91, 121, 137-39, 165. 176
Locke.J., 3, 108, 160, 178 t\ilsson, ,1. P., xii Prod uc tion , 59, 62-63 , 97, 138, 162,
Jules-Roseue, B.. 175
Lovejoy, A. O. , 176 ;\i sbet, R. A., 172, 175 174; versus rc p rcscntation, 62 , 79
Kaberry, P., 35 Lucas,J. R., 17 1,172 l\'ewton. 3, 16. 17 1 (ddined), 87, 137, 139-40, 151, 161-
Kant , l. , 34, 160, 168, 177 Lu hmann, N ., 20, 169 , 182 Xorthrop, F. S. C., 145-46, 175. 18 1 63
Kinship, 116; as temporalizing concept, Lyell, C., 12-13, 14, 16, 168 ~owcll-Smith, P. H. , 172 Proudhon , P.-J., 158
75-76 PyLhagoras, 179
Klcm p t, A., 167 Oa kley, K. P., 169-70
Kluc khohn , C., 173, 181 :\1cLuhan, M., 179 Objectivity. su Distance , and mcthod Rahinow, P., 177
Knowledge: anthropologica l, x, 28; Maffesoli, M., xi,· Obse rvation , 25, 45 , 60. 67. 86-87, 91. Race . 182
ethnogra ph ic, 2 1, 28 , 32; theory of , Maillet, B. de, 181 107-8, 117, 122. 132, 136, 151, 179; Radcliffe -Brown , A. R., 39. -13
106, 108-9, 112, 12 1, 151, 159, 160 Mair, L., 35 participant, 33, 60, 67 , 95 R.adniuky , G., 176
Kojeve, A ., 180 Mairet. G., 176 Ong, W ., xii, xiii, xiv, 114-22, 179 Ramus. Rarnism, xii1, 114-16 , 118-22 ,
Koselleck, R.. 167, 176 Ma linows ki , D., 20, 33, 35, 40, 4 1, 160, 01·ient, 1O, 123. 126-27 132, 151, 168 , 179
Ko;-ré , A .. l 78 171, 172 Othe r, ix, xi, 2. 16, 51, 63, 64-65, 85- Ranum, O ., 5-6. 167
Kramer, F., xiv, 172 Maltz, O. M., 172 86, 87-92, 121-22 , 125, 127-28, 130, Rappaport, R., 180
Kroeber, A., 15, 20 , 157, 160, 169, 182 Mannheim, B ., 32 136-37. 143, 148. 119. 152-51, 156. Ratic l, F., 19-20, 159
Kub ler, G., xiii Marc-Lipiamky, M ., 173 157, 16-1, IGS. li0;u1;ai.)·o Discou1~e. Raymo nd Lull. 179
Kuhn, T. S., 20, 102, 109 , 114, 178 :\farx, mar xism, 44, 58, 59, 95, 103, 105, subjcct versus o bject of Reíd, H. C., xii
Kuper, A., 174 139-40, 143, 155-59, 162-63, 165, 178. Owusu, :\1., 32, 35 Rcflexiv ity,90-91, 101
180, 182 Relativism, cu ltural, 34, 38-52, 62, 6i,
La Barr, W., 173 Mater ialism , ma ter ialist, 125. 138. 156 . Palmer , R. E., 1i7 78, 145, 150, 153, 172
Lacro ix, P.-F., 172 158,159, 161-63, 182 Parsons, T. , 20, 23. 40-4 1, 157, 169 Relaúvity, 22, 29, 38,145, 171, 175
La Foncaine, 71, 103-4, 175 , 178 Mauss, M., 20 , 62, 68. 178 Past: autobiograph ic. 87-97, 150. 176; Representation , s.ee Production . verms
Lamar ck, J.-B., 168 Maxwell, J. R., 172 possessive, 93-96 ; see also Fact. and represen tation
Langer, S. K., 179 Mead, M ., 38, 48-50, 134, 173 pas t Rheturi c, ,·isualist'. xiv, 109- 13, 114, 117,
Language, 157, 161-62, 177; and Time, Meltze r, R . N., 180 Peel, J. D.\' ., 11, 12. 15, 23. 168-69 120, 124, 136. 15 1, 179
ix, l, 14, 25,42, 50-5 1, 163 Memory. 110; are of, 3, 109-13 , 125, Peirce, C. S., 124, 126 Ricardo , D. , 139
La Pérouse, J. F., 8 136, 15 1, 164, 178; ancl rc flexio n , 91- Per r}', W . J., 59 Ricoeur, P., xiii, 167
Lapointe, F. H. and C. C., 173 92 Pcrson , persona lism. 1 19-20 Riue r, 11. H., 173
 Ind ex 205
204 lndex
147, 170:Judeo-Chr istian conceprion Vansina, J., 176
Rivett,, W. H. R., 116 sificatory. taxo nomi c, 19, 54, 57, 116,
of, 2, 26, 146: mundane, 22-23. 30; Ver haegen, B., 176
Rogers. F. '.\l.. l iO 12 1. 14i
n atur¡¡ lizat io n o f, 11, 13, 14. 16, 25, Vico, 12, 168. 173
Romantic ibm, 9, 18-19, 45, 126. 129-31, Spencer, H., 11, 12. 15
26, 56, 1'17, 168; pe rce pti on of, 43; Vision : a nd method, 106-9, 110, l 17-
137, 159 Spen gler, O ., 44-45
p hysical, 22. 29-30, 56, 145-46 , 147; 18, 119-20, 121-22, 17R; ancl Space,
Rommetveit, R., Jiu Sperber, D.. 180
politics o f, x. xii, 1-2, 28, 35, 46, 48- 7,106, 113; theor iesof. 178
Rosen, L.. 174 Sprug , J., x ii
50, 52. 69 , 97 , 144, 182 l,seealso Co- Visualism, ,~~ual, 67. 87, 106 (defined),
Rossi. J., l 73 Stagl. J., xiii, 168
lon ialism; Impc1·ialism); public, 144- 107, 110-11, 118, 12 1, 134-35, 151.
Roussca u , J J., 176 Stempel. W .-D ., 176
45, 18 1; and relations belween cul- 179, 182; <eea/so Observation; Sight,
Rub y, J., I 23 Ste neck , N. II ., 178
tu res, 45, 49-50 . 145-46, 149; ~ecu- versus sou n d
Rudol p h, W .. li 2 Steward, J., 168
larit.a tio n o f, 6- 7, 11, 26, 146: spatia l- Vogcl, F. W., 168, 173
Ruggb, C., 172 Stocking, G., 11, 168
izatio n of, 2, 16. 25 , 58-59, 111, 147, Vo lncy, C. F .. 6, 9-IO, l l
Structuralisrn, 20, 52-69, 97 - 104, 116 ,
160, 168; and tense. 80, 82-87: typol- Voltairc, 5
Sahlins, .\ 1., 125, 137-40, 157, 168, 171 124 , 133, 137, 153. 173-74, 179, 182
ogical, 23-24. 30 , 33, 147; universali-
Said, F,., xiii Structural ism-functi on alism, 39-44, 78
zatio11 o í, 2-3: uses o f, x, 2 1-25. 32, Wagn, K., 17 1
Salamone. F. A .. 175 Subjecriv ity, 59-60, 84-86, 88-89
34. 37, 38, 14 , 46, 5 1, 56, 80. 145 Wagner. R .. 180
Sapir, D., 180 Sullivan. W. M .. 177
Tob~,J., 169 Wallerstein, l. . 182
Sapir. E., 169 Surn l.:.i,P. T., 17'.1
TodorO\•, T., 179 Wamba-dia-Wamba, E., 181
Sanre, .J.-1'., 52, 55, 38, 59. 174, 182 Symbol, syrnbolizat ion, 45 , 113, 123.
Topos, topoi of d iscourse, 109-10. l 17, \,\.'ax, R., 178
Saussure, F. de, 20, 53. 55, 56. 68, 124, 179-80, 181; Heg el's theory o l , 125-
136, 178 Weber , M .. 23, 24, 16 1
161, 177 31
Totality, 47. 156-58, 182 Weinrich, H., xii, 82-86
Sa,agery, savage. )7, 27, 30, 75, 77, 95 , Synchrony, sync hronic, 20, 31, 39-40.
Toulmín, S., 20, 168, 169 Wek ~c ker, C. F. von, RS-89
121, 147 54 . 56, 76, 99 , 121, 161 , 167.174
Trage r, G. L., 178 White, II., 175
Schapera, l., 35 S),tem, and Time, 177, 182
Travel: as ~ciencc . 6-9, 113, 146 , 167- White, L.. 11, 168, 182
Schlegel, F. ,011, 180 S,ombaú-Fabian, l., 170, 177
68; as topo s. 6, 113 \\'h itehea d. A.~-. 132-33, 180
Schmitz. H. W. , 181
Trec , raxonomic, 15. 19, 116, 12 1, li9 Whitrow , G., xii
ScholLe, B., 38, 1í3, 175, 1R2 T agliacozzo, G., 168
Trilles, P., 94 , 177 Wh orf, B .. 106
Schumacher, D. L., 175 Taxonom~, l.txon omi c, 52, 54, 55, 5i,
Turnb u ll, C., 33 Wh yte, W. F., l 73
Schutz. A., 24, l 70 58, 62-63, 79, 97- 104. 132. 147. 148,
Turncr , V., 4 1, 133-34, 179, 180 Wild en, A., 177, 178
Selby, H . A., 180 15 1, 174; lee alrn Structu ralism: Tree ,
Tun on, D .. 172 Wilson, G. and M.. 35, 41
Semiology , semiological, 68, i5, 124, 15 1 tax onomic
Tylo r . E. B., 1, 5, 167, 178 Wr iLin g, an thropologica l. and Time , 2 1-
Semiodcs, scmi olic, 77-79 , 124, 139, T eachi ng. and visu.ilism, 1 14 , 117, 120-
22, 71 -72, 76 , 80
150-51 22; ,u alm Ram u~
t:nco nscious , 51-52, 65
Senes, :\1., 101-4, 151. 177-78 Te dloek, D., 173
l: n ívc:rsals, u n iversal, 3-4, 167 Yaket, H .. 172
Sen ice, E., 168 l'emporal : illusion, 78, 148; plmal ism,
Us.sher, Bisho p, 12 Yates, E., xíi. xi,·, 109-13, 117, 180
Siglu. ,·ersus soun d. 108, I IO. 115, 1l 9. 29 , 144, 171. 172; refercnce versus
131. 178 connotation, 74-75, 82; slope, 17, 103-
Vajda, L. , 178 Zelkind , I. , xiii
Sign, 45, 77, 79 , 127-28, 150-51 1, 15 1. 152
Va lue st11díes, 46-47, 173 Zil'berman, O.. 182
Signifier, signi fied, sígni6rnlion, 45, 77 , Temporalization, tem po ralizi ng. 6, 7.
79, 88, 150 11, 24, 28, 59 , 7-1 (defincd), 7i-78, 79.
Simonis. Y .. 173 87, 9.'>. 125-26, 129, 150, 160: lex ical-
Simultaneity. simultaneo us. 31. 67, 145- semantic, 75. 82; stylistic-textual, 76,
16, 147 82; syntac tic, 76, 82
Skorupski, J., 180 Tenne kc s, J.. 172
Soviet e th nology, 182 Time: c:yclical versu~ linear conception
Spacc: and consciousness, 111, 113, 132, o l , 2, 41 , 167; elimina tion of , SG-57.
164; d istrib ution in, 18- 19, 25, 29, 54. 68; enc:apsu lation o f, 41 , 150; intcr -
55. 58, 64, 168 , 169-70; l,tbula r, das- subjcctive. xii, 24, 30-3 1, 42. 92, 123,