Johannes Fabian's Time and the Other criticized anthropology for creating representations that placed the Other outside the flow of time. Fabian offered the ethnographic portrayal of coevalness as a solution to this problem. This article explores four challenges to the representation of coevalness: the split temporalities of the ethnographer; the multiple temporalities of different histories; the culturally influenced phenomenological present; and the complicated relationship between culturally variable concepts of being and becoming and cultural concepts of time. Based on these challenges, this article argues that some attempts at ethnographic coevalness have fostered a temporal framework of homochronism which subsumes the Other into academic discourses of history. To achieve coevalness and to avoid homochronism and allochronism, it is necessary to represent the temporal frameworks that research subjects use to forge coevalness with ethnographers, and to place these frameworks in relationship to commonly used academic representations of time and history. Résumé Dans son livre Le Temps et les Autres, Johannes Fabian critiquait la création par l’anthropologie de représentations plaçant l’Autre en dehors du flux du temps. Selon lui, la description ethnographique de la contemporanéité pourrait être la solution à ce problème. Le présent article explore les quatre difficultés que pose la représentation de la contemporanéité : temporalités dissociées de l’ethnographe, temporalités multiples des différentes histoires, présent phénoménologique culturellement informé, relation complexe entre les concepts culturellement variables de l’être et du devenir et les concepts culturel du temps. Sur la base de ces difficultés, l’auteur avance que certaines tentatives de contemporanéité ethnographique ont suscité un cadre temporel d’homochronie qui subsume l’Autre dans les discours académiques sur l’histoire. Pour parvenir à la contemporanéité et éviter homochronie et allochronie, il est nécessaire de représenter les cadres temporels utilisés par les enquêtés pour forger la contemporanéité avec les ethnographes et de resituer ces cadres en relation avec les représentations académiques du temps et de l’histoire qui prévalent habituellement.
The past is immanent. Its presence in the present takes many forms such as memories, texts, ruins, and monuments. Although the phenomenological existence of the past is in the present, the present does not determine the immanent past. In some cases, conspicuous traces of the past, such as ruins and monuments, demand attention. These traces can even serve as sites to shape intersubjective relations. At other times, experiences in the present produce unwanted, anxiety‐provoking flashbacks. The immanent past can influence the reproduction of knowledge and subjectivity, as much as present concerns can shape the past. By focusing on the cultural and intersubjective engagement with manifestations of the past, it is possible to bridge old distinctions such as global–local, individual–culture, history–memory, and even past–present–future. [past, history, memory, intersubjectivity, immanence]
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.
In On Collective Memory, Maurice Halbwachs asks, “Why does society establish landmarks in time that are placed close together—and usually in a very irregular manner, since for certain periods they are almost entirely lacking—whereas around such salient events sometimes many other equally salient events seem to gather, just as street signs and other signposts multiply as a tourist attraction approaches?” (1992:175). The recognition of the “irregular manner” of history and memory only emerges in contrast to a concept of the regularity of time implied by objectifying chronologies. Furthermore, such irregularity suggests that concepts of time other than chronology are crucial for understanding representations of the past, and experiences of the past in the present. This article draws on nondirected interviews conducted in rural Trinidad in which subjects discussed significant events in their lives. In examining this material, I address Halbwachs's question by emphasizing nonchronological, cultural models of time that organize autobiographical narratives. These cultural models position autobiographical narratives in space and connect them to events of historical significance. [time, memory, intersubjectivity, labor, Trinidad]
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