Since the early 1970s, time has come to the fore as a constitutive element of social analysis in the guise of what I term here 'fluid time'. Anthropologists of multiple theoretical persuasions now take for granted that social life exists in 'time', 'flow', or 'flux', and this temporal ontology is commonly accepted as a universal, if habitually unquestioned, attribute of human experience. Similarly, it underpins today's dominant paradigm of 'processual' analysis, in its many forms. Yet this concept is notably under-theorized, in keeping with a history of uneven study by social scientists of time. In this article I draw on anthropological approaches by Gell and Munn, and philosophical work by Bergson and Deleuze, to put forward a critical theorization. I then discuss its ramifications. Ultimately, I argue that this model points to a rapprochement between the anthropological study of time and history, sociality and temporality, and an enhanced role for temporal analysis in anthropological theory.
Adam, B. (1990) Time and Social Theory. Cambridge : Polity Press.
2.
Adam, B. (1998) Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards. London and New York: Routledge.
3.
Agamben, G. (1993) Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience. London and New York : Verso.
4.
Ansell Pearson, K. (1999) Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze. London: Routledge.
5.
Ansell Pearson, K. (2002) Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life. London: Routledge .
6.
Bachelard, G. (1950) La Dialectique de la Durée. Paris: Les presses universitaires de France.
7.
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981) The Dialogical Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.
8.
Barnes, J. (1987) Early Greek Philosophy. London : Penguin.
9.
Barth, F. (1987) Cosmologies in the Making: A Generative Approach to Cultural Variation in Inner New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
10.
Berger, J. (1984) And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos. London: Writers and Readers.
11.
Bergson, H. (1944[1907]) Creative Evolution. New York: Random House.
12.
Bergson, H. (1960) Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. New York: Harper and Row.
13.
Bergson, H. (1988[1896]) Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books.
14.
Bloch, M. (1998) How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, Literacy. Oxford: Westview.
15.
Borges, Jorge Luis (1970 [1941]) 'The Garden of Forking Paths', in Jorge Luis Borges Labyrinths, pp. 44-54. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
16.
Boundas, C.V. (1992) 'GillesDeleuze: The Ethics of the Event', in D. Goicoechea and M. Zlomislic (eds) Joyful Wisdom, pp. 169-99. St Catharine's, Ontario: Thought House.
17.
Boundas, C.V. (1996) 'Deleuze-Bergson: An Ontology of the Virtual', in P. Patton (ed.) Deleuze: A Critical Reader, pp. 81-106. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
18.
Bourdieu, P. (1963) 'The Attitude of the Algerian Peasant Toward Time' , in J. Pitt-Rivers (ed.) Mediterranean Countrymen, pp. 55-72 (trans. G.E. Williams). Paris and the Hague: Mouton.
19.
Bourdieu, P. (1977[1972]) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
20.
Braudel, F. (1989) The Identity of France. Volume One: History and Environment. London: Fontana Press .
21.
Braudel, F. (1990) The Identity of France. Volume Two: People and Production. London: Fontana Press .
22.
Chambers English Dictionary (1990) Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers Ltd.
23.
Chodorow, N.J. (1999) The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.
24.
Clark, T. (1999) 'A Whiteheadian Chaosmos: Process Philosophy from a Deleuzean Perspective', Process Studies28(3-4): 179-94.
25.
Currie, M. (2007) About Time: Narrative, Fiction, and the Philosophy of Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
26.
Damasio, A. (2000) The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion, and the Making of Consciousness. London: Vintage.
27.
Delanda, M. (2005) Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum Books.
28.
Deleuze, G. (1956a) 'Bergson (1859-1941)', in M. Merleau-Ponty (ed.) Les philosophes celebres, pp. 292-9. Paris: Mazenod.
29.
Deleuze, G. (1956b) 'La Conception de la différence chez Bergson' , Études bergsoniennes4: 77-112.
30.
Deleuze, G. (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: Athlone Press.
31.
Deleuze, G. (1990[1969]) The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press.
32.
Deleuze, G. (1991[1966]) Bergsonism. New York : Zone Books.
33.
Deleuze, G. (1994[1968]) Difference and Repetition. London: Athlone Books.
34.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1984) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press.
35.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia . London: Athlone Press.
36.
Derrida, J. (1994) Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
37.
Durkheim, E. (1915) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen & Unwin.
38.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1939) 'Nuer Time Reckoning', Africa12(2): 189-216.
39.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1940) The Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon.
40.
Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
41.
Faulkner, William (1993[1937]) Absalom, Absalom! (The Corrected Text). New York: Modern Library.
42.
Foster, R.J. (1995) Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia: Mortuary Ritual, Gift Exchange, and Custom in the Tanga Islands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
43.
Geertz, C. (1973) 'Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali', in C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures , pp. 360-411. New York: Basic Books.
44.
Gell, A. (1992) The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images. Oxford: Berg Books.
45.
Giddens, A. (1979) Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. London: The Macmillan Press.
46.
Giesen, B. (1992) 'The Temporalization of the Social Order: Some Theoretical Remarks on the Change in "Change"', in H. Haferkamp and N.J. Smelser (eds) Social Change and Modernity, pp. 294-319. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
47.
Goodwin, B. (2001) How the Leopard Changed its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
48.
Greenhouse, C. (1996) A Moment's Notice: Time Politics Across Cultures . Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.
49.
Grosz, E. (1999) Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures . Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.
50.
Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson , eds (1997) Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
51.
Gurvitch, G. (1964) The Spectrum of Social Time. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
52.
Harris, O. (1996) 'The Temporalities of Tradition: Reflections on a Changing Anthropology', in V. Hubinger (ed.) Grasping the Changing World: Anthropological Concepts in the Postmodern Era, pp. 1-16. London: Routledge .
53.
Harvey, D. (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
54.
Heidegger, M. (1993[1927]) Being and Time. Oxford : Blackwell Publishers.
55.
Heise, U.K. (1997) Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
56.
Henare, A., M. Holbraad and S. Wastell (2007) 'Introduction: Thinking through Things', in A. Henare, M. Holbraad and S. Wastell (eds) Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, pp. 1-31. London and New York: Routledge.
57.
Hirsch, E. and C. Stewart, C. (2005a) 'Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity , in "Ethnographies of Historicity"', Special Issue of History and Anthropology16(3): 261-74.
58.
Hirsch, E. and C. Stewart , eds (2005b) 'Ethnographies of Historicity' , Special Issue of History and Anthropology16(3).
59.
Husserl, E. (1966[1887]) The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness . Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
60.
Ingold, T. (1990) 'An Anthropologist Looks at Biology', Man (New Series)12(2): 208-29.
61.
James, W. (1996) Essays in Radical Empiricism. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.
62.
James, W. and D. Mills, eds (2005a) The Qualities of Time: Anthropological Approaches. Oxford: Berg Books.
63.
James, W. and D. Mills (2005b) 'Introduction: From Representation to Action in the Flow of Time', in W. James and D. Mills (eds) The Qualities of Time: Anthropological Approaches, pp. 1-15. Oxford: Berg Books.
64.
Jameson, F. (2002) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London and New York : Routledge.
65.
Kahn, C.H., ed. (1981) The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
66.
Kearney, R. (1994) Modern Movements in European Philosophy: Phenomenology, Critical Theory, Structuralism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
67.
Kirk, G.S., J.E. Raven and M. Schofield (1983) The Presocratic Philosophers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
68.
Lambek, M. (2002) The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar. NewYork and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
69.
Latour, Bruno (2007) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
70.
Leach, E. (1961) Rethinking Anthropology. London : Athlone Press.
71.
Levinas, E. (1989 [1946]) 'There is: Existence without Existents', in E. Levinas The Levinas Reader, pp. 29-36. Oxford : Blackwell Publishers.
72.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963) Structural Anthropology I. New York: Basic Books.
73.
Lukács, G. (1972) Studies in European Realism. London: Merlin Press.
74.
MacIntyre, A. (1981) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth.
75.
McTaggart, J.E. (1908) 'The Unreality of Time', Mind (New Series)17(68): 457-74.
76.
Malinowski, B. (1927) 'Lunar and Seasonal Calendar in the Trobriands' , Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland57(January-June): 203-15.
77.
Marx, K. and F. Engels (1952[1848]) Manifesto of the Communist Party. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
78.
Mellor, D.H. (1981) Real Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
79.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) Signs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
80.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1989[1945]) Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge.
81.
Mintz, S. (1985) Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking Press .
82.
Mosko, M. and F. Damon, eds (2005) On the Order of Chaos: Social Anthropology and the Science of Chaos. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
83.
Mullarkey, J., ed. (1999) The New Bergson. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
84.
Munn, N. (1983) 'Gawan Kula: Spatiotemporal Control and the Symbolism of Influence', in J.W. Leach and E. Leach (eds) The Kula: New Perspectives on Massim Exchange, pp. 277-308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
85.
Munn, N. (1986) The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
86.
Munn, N. (1992) 'The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay', Annual Review of Anthropology21: 93-123.
87.
O'Brien, J. and W. Roseberry (1991) Golden Ages, Dark Ages: Imagining the Past in Anthropology and History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
88.
Ong, A. and S.J. Collier (2004) Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
89.
Orlove, B.S., ed. (2002) Repertoires of Timekeeping in Anthropology, Special Issue of Current Anthropology43(S4).
90.
Ortner, S.B. (1984) 'Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties', Comparative Studies in Society and History26(1): 126-66.
91.
Ortner, S.B. (2005) 'Subjectivity and Cultural Critique', Anthropological Theory5(1): 32-52.
92.
Osborne, P. (1995) The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde . London and New York: Verso.
93.
Parmentier, R.J. (1987) The Sacred Remains: Myth, History and Polity in Belau. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
94.
Pickering, A. (1995) The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science . Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
95.
Proust, M. (1999) Time Regained (In Search of Lost Time Vol. 6. New York: Modern Library.
96.
Pynchon, T. (1973) Gravity's Rainbow. London: Picador.
97.
Rapport, N. and J. Overing (2000) Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts . London and New York: Routledge.
98.
Rheinberger, H.-J. (1997) Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test-Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
99.
Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
100.
Rorty, R. (1991) Essays on Heidegger and Others. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
101.
Roseberry, W. (1989) Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History, and Political Economy. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press.
102.
Sartre, J.-P. (1956) Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. New York: Pocket Books .
103.
Schutz, A. (1962) The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
104.
Scott, M. (2007) The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place, and a Melanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
105.
Serres, M. and B. Latour (1995) Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
106.
Shields, R. (2002) The Virtual (Key Ideas)London : Routledge.
107.
Stevenson, R. (1998) Modernist Fiction. Hemel Hempstead : Prentice Hall.
108.
Strathern, M. (1988) The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.
109.
Taussig, M. (1987) 'The Rise and Fall of Marxist Anthropology', Social Analysis21: 101-13.
110.
Terdiman, Richard (1993) Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.
111.
Thomas, E.J. and G. Hjort, eds (1996) Early Buddhist Scriptures . New Delhi: Aryan Books International .
112.
Thomas, N. (1996) Out of Time: History and Evolution in Anthropological Discourse (second edition). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
113.
Thompson, E.P. (1967) 'Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism' , Past and Present38(December): 56-97.
114.
Tonkin, E. (1992) Narrating our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
115.
Turetzky, P. (1998) Time. London and New York: Routledge.
116.
Viveiros de Castro, E. (2002) 'O nativo relativo', Mana8(1): 113-48.
117.
Wagner, R. (1981) The Invention of Culture. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press.
118.
Whitehead, A. (1979[1927-8]) Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press.
119.
Wolf, E. (1982) Europe and the People without History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
120.
Woolf, V. (2000[1925]) Mrs Dalloway. London : Penguin.
121.
Wyschogrod, E. (1990) Saints and Postmodernism. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
