The Anthropology of Time: History and the State of the Art

Abstract

This essay charts the history of the anthropology of time from the vantage point of what I see as its key contemporary problem: that of temporal multiplicity. I find it endemic to virtually every ethnographic context where one finds often radically different ways to understand time, measure it and account for the past, the present and the future. The problem is, if ethnographically time is multiple, how can we understand relations between different temporalities in such multiplicities? How are they organised? Drawing on my own ethnography and on other current work, I argue for at least two different ways to conceptualise multiplicity through relations of (1) change and (2) exchange between different temporalities.