Time is a fundamental dimension of human experience, but its study presents special challenges, including the methodological problems of how to get people to talk about time and how to recognize discourse and actions that reveal cultural conceptions of time. In addition to classic ethnographic approaches that related conceptions of time to social organization, the growing concern over time-space compression in the study of globalization adds an additional set of concerns in the social scientific study of time. Through recounting some of the author’s own mistakes and efforts at studying time in Trinidad, this article makes suggestions for how to ethnographically approach the topic of time in order to understand the connections between cognition, cultural conceptions of time, social organization, and the relationship of global influences and local actions.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Adam, B. 1995. Timewatch: The social analysis of time. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
2.
Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at large: Culture dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
3.
Birth, K. 1999. Any time is Trinidad time. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
4.
Bloch, M. 1977. The past and the present in the present. Man12:278–292.
5.
Bourdillon, M. F. C. 1978. Knowing the world or hiding it: A response to Maurice Bloch. Man13:591–599.
6.
Clifford, J. 1986. Introduction: Partial truths. In Writing culture, edited by J. Clifford and G. Marcus, 1–26. Berkeley: University of California Press.
7.
Comitas, L. 1973. Occupational multiplicity in rural Jamaica. In Work and family life: West Indian perspectives, edited by L. Comitas and D. Lowenthal, 156–173. Garden City, NY: Anchor.
8.
Cottle, T. J. 1976. Perceiving time: A psychological investigation with men and women. New York: Wiley.
9.
Durkheim, E. 1965 [1915]. The elementary forms of the religious life. Reprint, New York: Free Press.
10.
Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. London: Allen Lane.
11.
Friedman, J. 1994. Cultural identity and global process. London: Sage.
12.
Geertz, C. 1973. Person, time and conduct in Bali. In The interpretation of cultures, edited by C. Geertz, 360–411. New York: Basic Books.
13.
Giddens, A. 1984. The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.
14.
Goodenough, W. 1981. Culture, language and society. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin Cummings.
15.
Greenhouse, C. 1996. A moment’s notice: Time politics across cultures. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
16.
Gross, D. R. 1984. Time allocation: A tool for the study of cultural behavior. Annual Review of Anthropology13:519–558.
17.
Hallowell, A. I. 1955.Temporal orientation in Western civilization and in a preliterate society. In Culture and experience, 216–235. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
18.
Hannerz, U. 1992. Cultural complexity: Studies in the social organization of meaning. New York: Columbia University Press.
19.
Harvey, D. 1990. Between space and time: Reflections on the geographical imagination. Annals of the Association of American Geographers80 (3): 418–434.
20.
Howe, L. 1981. The social determination of knowledge: Maurice Bloch and Balinese time. Man16:220–234.
21.
Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson. 1980. Metaphorswe live by. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.
22.
Lakoff, G. 1999. Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books.
23.
Levine, R. 1997. A geography of time: The temporal misadventures of a social psychologist. New York: Basic Books.
24.
Marcus, G., and M. M. J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as cultural critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
25.
Marx, K. 1977. Capital. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage.
26.
Miller, D. 1995. Introduction: Anthropology, modernity and consumption.In Worlds apart: Modernity through theprism of thelocal, edited by D. Miller,1–22.New York:Routledge.
27.
Miller, D. 1997. Capitalism: An ethnographic approach. Oxford, UK: Berg.
28.
Mumford, L. 1963. Technics and civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
29.
Munn, N. 1992. The cultural anthropology of time: A critical essay. Annual Review of Anthropology21:93–123.
30.
Olwig, K. F. 1993. Global culture, island identity: Continuity and change in the Afro-Caribbean community of Nevis. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic.
31.
Rutz, H., ed. 1992. The politics of time. American Ethnological Monograph Series, no. 4. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association.
32.
Schwartz, T. 1978. Where is the culture? Personality as the distributive locus of culture. In The making of psychological anthropology, edited by George Spindler, 429–441. Berkeley: University of California Press.
33.
Shore, B. 1996. Culture in mind: Cognition, culture, and the problem of meaning. New York: Oxford University Press.
34.
Smith, T. C. 1986. Peasant time and factory time in Japan. Past and Present111:165–197.
35.
Swartz, M. 1991. The way the world is. Berkeley: University of California Press.
36.
Thompson, E. P. 1967. Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism. Past and Present38:56–97.
37.
Vico, G. 1984. The new science. Translated by T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
38.
Weber, M. 1976. The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. New York: Scribner.
39.
Wolf,E. 1982. Europe and the people with out history. Berkeley:University of California Press.
40.
Young, M. 1988. The metronomic society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
