The creation of coevalness and the danger of homochronism

Abstract

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.

Out of Conclusion: On Recurrence and Open-Endedness in Life and Analysis

“…: 78). But as Birth (2008) has so precisely observed, the past is never just one, and to give it a place in analysis means first of all knowing which past is at play in the given lives under study. Which personal experiences, concepts of time, and culturally shared ideas are being combined?…”

Time, indigeneity and white anti‐racism in Australia

“…The temporal implication of this is that white anti‐racists are reluctant to let go of allochronism as the alternative can only be incorporation and assimilation, a problem Kevin Birth refers to as homochronism (Birth ). While allochronism is the placement of the other outside the dominant flow of time, homochronism places them within it, displacing them from their own distinctive temporalities .…”

“…Birth distinguishes between the ‘intersection of different temporal subjectivities’ and coevalness, arguing that a communicative exchange he shared with an informant was the former and not the latter (genuine coevalness). He argues that shared time, or even shared understanding of temporality, is not sufficient to produce coevalness, and the use of history in anthropology produces merely an ‘illusory coevalness’ as the Western historical clock is the reference point (Birth : 14).…”

Foucault among the Melanesianists

“…An additional reason is that the discourse of modernity and postmodernity is prevalent in ‘European and North Atlantic civilisational fields’ and responding to Fabian's () call that the denial of coevalness to anthropological subjects should be avoided meant that Melanesians would have their own form of modernity ( cf . Birth ). Whether this is the case is an ethnographic issue which can only be judged by the fidelity of the accounts and not by the analytic language alone.…”