The bending of space-time in anthropology: An anti-heuristic proposal

Abstract

In this article I explore two very different ethnographies in search of a heuristic or heuristics to understand temporality in each one of them. The first is of a UFO contact group in Chile, who insist that we exist in a sort of separate temporal frame from the “real” time of the universe. In this parallel existence we are working to save ourselves from imminent destruction; in the “real” time we have already destroyed ourselves. The second is of a particular dance, the cueca sola, performed by women who have lost their partners to Chile´s military dictatorship (1973–90), which systematically disappeared and executed political opponents. The women dance with the “disappeared,” which has led to a mostly memory-centered understanding of this performance. But the cueca holds a temporal depth which cannot be reduced to memory alone. In this article I argue that we must seek or invent an anthropology that looks outside of itself to make sense of such temporally plastic extremes. I propose two frames, or anti-heuristics. The first is the astronomical science of dark matter, and the second is the physics of time, which adds to a dynamic anthropology that conceives of social forms as temporal forms (Handelman 2021).