The Anthropology of Time

Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images

Alfred Gell

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000323283
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Anthropology

Time - relentless, ever-present but intangible and the single element over which human beings have no absolute control - has long proved a puzzle. The author examines the phenomenon of time and asks such fascinating questions as how time impinges on people, to what extent our awareness of time is culturally conditioned, how societies deal with temporal problems and whether time can be considered a `resource' to be economized. More specifically, he provides a consistent and detailed analysis of theories put forward by a number of thinkers such as Durkheim, Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss, Geertz, Piaget, Husserl and Bourdieu. His discussion encompasses four main approaches in time research, namely developmental psychology, symbolic anthropology (covering the bulk of post-Durkheimian social anthropology) `economic' theories of time in social geography and, finally, phenomenological theories. The author concludes by presenting his own model of social/cognitive time, in the light of these critical discussions of the literature.

I
Differences in the Cognition of Time Attributed to Society and Culture

Chapter 1
Durkheim

The anthropology of time, in its contemporary form, can be traced to a well-known passage in the introductory chapter of Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915:9–11):

what philosophers call the categories of the understanding, the ideas of time, space, class, number, cause, personality … correspond to the most universal properties of things … they are like the solid frame surrounding all thought [which] does not seem to be able to liberate itself from them without destroying itself, for it seems that we cannot think of objects which are not in time and space, that have no number, etc…. Now when primitive beliefs are systematically analysed, the principal categories are naturally found. They are bom in religion and of religion, they are a product of religious thought…. Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities … so if the categories are of religious origin they ought to participate in this nature common to all religious facts … it is allowable to suppose that they are rich in social elements.

For example, try to represent what the notion of time would be without the processes by which we divide it, measure it, or express it with objective signs, a time which is not a succession of years, months, weeks, days and hours. … We cannot conceive of time except by distinguishing its different moments. Now what is the origin of this differentiation? [Durkheim at this point briefly disposes of the idea that private intuitions of successive experiences are adequate for this.]… in reality, observation proves that these indispensable guidelines [which provide]… an abstract and impersonal frame … like an endless chart, where all duration is spread out before the mind, and upon which all possible events can be located in relation to fixed and determined guidelines … are taken from social life. The divisions into days, weeks, months, years, etc. correspond to the periodical recurrence of feasts and public ceremonies. A calendar expresses the rhythm of collective activities, while at the same time its function is to assure their regularity … what the category of time expresses is the time common to the group, a social time, so to speak.

This remarkably forthright theoretical statement does two things: first, it places the problem of the sociology of time in an explicit philosophical framework; and second, it brings out the circularity inherent in interpretative sociology of the kind Durkheim initiated, in that collective representations (of time, space, etc.) are both derived from society and also dictate to society. Not that this circularity is necessarily vicious; it may be described as cybernetic, dialectical or hermeneutic, from different points of view. In embracing this circularity, Durkheim initiated a distinctive phase in the history of thought, to which, needless to say, Marx, Weber, Pareto and Simmel also contributed, namely, the era of sociological interpretation and sociological explanation.

Durkheim raises the issue of time in a philosophical (metaphysical) context, and links his notion of ‘social time’ to the philosophical tradition of Kantian rationalism. He rejects the ‘naive realist’ assumption that time just is what it is, and that time-reckoning concepts enable people to ‘grasp’ time as if it were one more external fact of nature among many. This marks a crucial step forward. It is only at this point, many anthropologists would feel, that the ‘time’ problem becomes interesting at all, i.e. when the possibility is raised that collective representations of time do not passively reflect time, but actually create time as a phenomenon apprehended by sentient human beings. This is an intrinsically exciting proposition for at least two reasons. First of all, it suggests a way of resolving the feelings of perplexity which the notion of time itself has always seemed to generate, ever since the days of St Augustine. The mystery of time will be dissolved, it is implied, once sociology has uncovered its origins in the familiar domain of communal life. Sociological understanding is presented as a path towards rational transcendence, providing the existential benefits of religious faith without the need for faith itself. And second, the thesis of the social origination of human temporal experience offers the prospect of a limitless variety of vicarious experiences of unfamiliar, exotic, temporal worlds, to be gained through the study of the myriad forms of society which have evolved and sustained their distinctive temporalities at different places and during different historical epochs. This is a dazzling, tempting vision.

It would be a most unimaginative reader who failed to respond to the powerful allure of Durkheim’s doctrine of the social origin of ‘time’ as a category of the mind. He directly or indirectly inspired many notable ethnographic analyses of social time, only a tiny handful of which I shall be able to sample here. He also inspired further theoretical work on social time, (e.g. Halbwachs 1925) up to and including the present work, which, without Durkheim, would have no subject-matter. Even Durkheim’s most formidable critics, such as Bloch (1977), work within the field of enquiry he defined, and reason according to the parameters of sociological interpretation which he initially laid down.

But, despite the fact that it would be hard to exaggerate the importance of Elementary Forms of the Religious Life as a contribution to the development of sociological theory in general, and the study of social time in particular, there is a fatal defect in Durkheim’s argument, which needs to be brought to light. This arises from Durkheim’s attempt to promote sociological analysis to the level of metaphysics, by identifying collective representations of time with Kantian ‘categories’. In later chapters I shall demonstrate that this move opens the door to a variety of relativist interpretations of social time, which can be shown to be incoherent and misleading. But the first task is to unpick the details of Durkheim’s argument.

Durkheim’s thesis is that time exists for us because we are social beings. The pervasiveness of time, the mysterious way in which time seems to encompass everything without exception, so that it is not possible for us to think our way around it, reveals the social origins of time, because society is also like this, i.e. all-encompassing and not to be comprehended by the unaided individual. In approaching time in this way, Durkheim is applying to it his more general theory of the social determination of concepts. But with a difference. It is one thing to argue that ‘society’ is responsible for the formation of concepts such as ‘dog’ or ‘cat’ or ‘uncle’ or ‘sacred’ or ‘profane’, for these are particular objects and qualities, and we can imagine the world existing without them, i.e. being without uncles, dogs or cats, or entities designated as possessing sacred or profane qualities. But there is a class of very general concepts which are held by many philosophers to underlie all discursive thought, concepts such as time, space, number, cause, and so on, without which it is impossible to think of any world whatsoever existing. These concepts are promoted in Kantian parlance to the status of ‘categories’, and the essential question in philosophy is to determine whence the categories, the basic framework of all thinking and experiencing, originate.

Durkheim’s purpose is to supply a novel answer to this enduring topic of philosophical speculation. He is therefore not seeking merely to clarify the empirical questions as to how, through collective representations, human beings have sought to codify time, but he is also raising the much more problematic issue of how it comes about that time exists to be codified.

Let me briefly sketch in some aspects of the philosophical background. Philosophers have advanced two kinds of solution to the problem of accounting for the origin of the categories. Ignoring a multitude of important but subtle variations in points of view, one group of philosophers have denied that there is anything about the categories which cannot be derived from experience. The world is real, it is out there, we are aware of it through our senses as it really is, and it really is temporal, spatial, pervaded by relations of cause and effect, and it is populated by objective beings which can be classified into ‘natural’ kinds through resemblance, contiguity in space and time, etc. This is the doctrine of realist empiricism, and in its extreme form it denies that the categories are in any way special or distinct from empirical concepts. Category concepts are very high-level generalizations from experience. They are based on inductions that have turned out true so invariably that they are accepted as absolutely true, but that might none the less turn out to be false. J. S. Mill, in the half-century leading up to the publication of Durkheim’s works, maintained that the truths of logic were like this, i.e. generalizations of frequently successful lines of thought, not fundamentally different from empirical truths. The realist-empiricist approach in epistemology is historically allied with individualism and Utilitarianism in social matters. If the truths of logic could, in principle, be arrived at by a single ultra-methodical individual, by reflection on the repetitive character of experience, then so could such an individual singlehandedly determine appropriate criteria for judging actions to be right or wrong, or judging laws to be just or unjust. Actions and laws can be judged objectively by their contribution to the sum of human happiness, and the furtherance of order and progress in society. Moreover, such an individual could assume complete personal responsibility for the conduct of his social behaviour in relation to others, through contracts explicitly and accountably entered into with them.

All this is anathema to Durkheim, as it always has been to most continental philosophers. Since one of the major motivating factors behind Durkheim’s sociology was hostility towards the social views of nineteenth-century Utilitarians, he was naturally disinclined to accept the empiricist epistemology which the Utilitarians simultaneously advocated. This is perhaps unfortunate, since Empiricism is a more permissive philosophy than Durkheim allows. The coupling of Empiricism and Utilitarianism versus Rationalism and anti-Utilitarianism was taken for granted in Durkheim’s era, and it is not at all surprising that Durkheim, whose ambition was to formulate a non-Utilitarian basis for a just and morally united social order, propounded views on cognition which explicitly turned away from Empiricism in favour of a form of Rationalism. But first, I must say something about Rationalism in general.

Rationalism is opposed to Empiricism in maintaining that it is reason, not experience, that provides the guarantee of truth, and that the categories are not arrived at by induction from experience, but are basic thought-forms, which enable us to have experiences in the first place. The continental philosophers Descartes, Leibniz and Kant are prototype rationalists, just as the Anglo-Scottish philosophers Hume and Mill are prototype empiricists, the English Channel, as usual, playing the decisive role in the epidemiology of philosophical convictions (Sperber 1985). Durkheim’s Rationalism is the outcome of tradition and pedagogy rather than argument and debate - which is only what a good Durkheimian might suppose. At the same time, his brand of Rationalism is, in truth, a highly revisionist one, in that he identifies reason, the guarantor of truth, with collective representations, grounded in transitory social and historical conditions. The impersonal ‘reason’ is really society, which obliges people to think their thoughts in common because their lives are lived in common. This view of the matter is diametrically opposed to orthodox Rationalism of the Cartesian variety, where the emphasis is placed on the private, apodeictic certainty of the lone cogito, set in opposition to everything else, including the body, the external world of appearances, other animate or sentient beings, etc., all of which are doubtful and possibly illusory.

Durkheim’s Rationalism is not of the solitary variety, the kind that toys with the forbidden fruit of solipsism. His views are derived not from Descartes but from Kant, and his whole doctrine, both the secular religiosity of his social and ethical programme, and the rationalist tone of his cognitive theory resemble the equivalent portions of Kant’s output quite closely, with the single outstanding difference that whereas, for Kant, reason is an aspect of nature, for Durkheim reason is an aspect of society.

The Kantian doctrines we need to consider are two in number (Kant 1929; Wilkerson 1976):

(1) Transcendental idealism: The world of sensory appearances, for which Kant’s term is translated as ‘representations’ in English and French (cf. collective representations) belong to the order of phenomena. The phenomenal world is wholly distinct from the substrate of noumena, the ultimately real world of things-in-themselves. We cannot speculate about the noumenal order because our thought and experience are confined to the world of phenomena; but the final truth of the world and the definitive moral law are noumenal rather than phenomenal.

(2) The dependence of intuitions (sense experiences) on concepts (i.e. categories): ‘Representations’ cannot cohere except in conjunction with a ‘transcendental aesthetic’, i.e. certain ground-conditions, contributed by a faculty inherent in the perceiving subject, which bind together the raw materials of intuitions so that they manifest themselves as spatio-temporally confined external objects. The appearance of an external universe of objects arrayed in space and time is produced ‘subjectively’, not in the sense that the external universe is determined by the subject’s private whim, but in the sense that only the ‘faculty’ present in the percipient, imposing the categorial prerequisites for phenomenal status (i.e. spatiality, temporality, number, etc.) on the noumenal order, can make possible the manifestation of the noumenal as the phenomenal.

Time and space are ‘pure concepts of the understanding’. By this Kant means not only that they are contributed by the understanding to the process of representing the noumenal as the phenomenal, but also that they belong to the understanding alone, and that they are not derived from the world of appearances which they permit the understanding to represent to itself. One of Kant’s most important points is that pure concepts of the understanding, and logical manipulations of these pure concepts (e.g. mathematics, metaphysics, logic) do not incorporate, and cannot by themselves be made to dispense, positive knowledge concerning the contingent nature of the noumenal truth of the world. ‘

We can now reconsider these points while sketching in Durkheim’s ‘sociological’ reworking of Kantian rationalism.

(1) Durkheim is a rationalist in denying that the senses can provide the input needed to form a representation of the world, without the additional contribution of organizing ideas. To this extent he follows Kant. But though Durkheim is operating with a two-tier notion of ‘reality’, a preconceptual substrate overlaid by a postconceptual ‘phenomenal reality’, just as Kant is, the crucial gap between the two tiers is very differently positioned in each case. In Kant’s theory, the categories (or pure concepts of the understanding) mediate the transition between the noumenal and the ‘natural’, whereas for Durkheim the categories mediate the transition between the natural and the social. Durkheim has nothing to say about the noumenal realm of things-in-themselves imagined by Kant; the equivalent place in his theory of cognition is played by a realm of natural appearances prior to all conceptual ordering, something akin, perhaps, to the ‘blooming, buzzing, confusion’ evoked by William James in his own not dissimilar account of the nature of cognitive processes (James 1963). For Kant, the primordial stratum is not only unseen, it is prior to all seeing; not only unrepresented, it is wholly unrepresentable. Quite different is the primordial stratum presupposed by Durkheim, which is manifest to the senses and to the mind, but which is featureless and chaotic, devoid of the familiar landmarks and guidelines which make reality intelligible to us.

Collective representations, in their categorial role, bring it about that ‘nature’ is placed ‘inside society’, as Durkheim puts it. By this he does not mean that the sun or the moon, or tables and chairs, are members of this or that society, but that the sun-that-I-know, the moon-that-I-know, etc. would not exist as the objects-of-knowledge they actually are in the minds of perceiving subjects were these subjects not capable of bringing to bear on them a series of conceptual schemes which are socially derived. Kant and Durkheim, therefore, share the view that the phenomenal world is structured by mind-contrived conceptual underpinnings. The ‘real’ world is created by our ideas; this is the essential point, and the one denied by Empiricism.

(2) Durkheim is quite explicit in identifying the primary reality-circumscribing concepts provided for in his theory with the Kantian categories, including time, the category we are primarily interested in. The substrate of pre-categorial nature is timeless, or at least devoid of time as we would recognize it. But Durkheim opposes his conception of the category time to Kant’s (at least by implication; cf. the passage on space which immediately follows the passage on time, quoted above, p. 3). He says that the Kantian categories of space and time are ‘homogeneous’,...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Differences in the Cognition of Time Attributed to Society and Culture
• Part II Time-maps and Cognition
• Part III Time and Practice
• References
• Index