26:T4c6,

The reception of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy within anthropology has often centred on his concept of being-in-the-world, a concept that has proven fruitful for exploring human entanglements with others and their environments. Much of this work draws on the first division of Being and Time and on Heidegger’s later writings, with relatively little attention paid to the political dimensions of his thought. While his affiliation with Nazism does not invalidate his philosophical insights, engaging more directly with the political resonances of his work can open up new avenues of inquiry. In my own research on historical trauma among children of Holocaust survivors in North America, I turn to the second division of Being and Time to suggest that, from a phenomenological perspective, certain forms of mystified historical consciousness may underwrite right-wing political imaginaries. This ethnographic case study offers one way of engaging the second division that avoids both the repetition of well-worn anthropological-phenomenological motifs—such as the centrality of intersubjectivity—and the disavowal of Heidegger’s widely acknowledged political commitments.

27:T503,

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).

28:T83e,