Vessels of Time
An Essay on Temporal Change and Social Transformation

[Front Matter]

Other works by Akos Östör

Play of the Gods—Locality, Ideology, Structure and Time in the Festivals of a Bengali Town (1980)

Europeans and Islanders in the Western Pacific 1520—1849:

An Essay on the History of Encounter and Ideology (1981)

Culture and Power—Legend, Ritual, Bazaar and Rebellion in a Bengali Society (1984)

[with Lina Fruzzetti]
Kinship and Ritual in Bengal—Anthropological Essays (1984)
Culture and Change Along the Blue Nile: Courts, Markets and Strategies for Development (1990)

[with Lina Fruzzetti and Steve Barnett (eds)]
Concept of Person—Kinship, Caste and Marriage in India (1982). Second impression with a new introduction, OUP, Delhi (1992)

[with Robert Gardner]
Sons of Shiva (1985), 16mm, colour film, 28 minutes
Forest of Bliss (1986), 16mm, colour film, 90 minutes (co-producer)

[with Allen Moore]
Loving Krishna (1985), 16mm, colour film, 40 minutes
Serpent Mother (1985), 16mm, colour film, 28 minutes

[with Lina Fruzzetti and Alfred Guzzetti]
Seed and Earth (1993), 16mm, colour film, 40 minutes

[Title Page]

[Copyright]

[Epigraph]

Introduction and Acknowledgements

I started this enquiry into time and society over a decade ago when a phone call from Charlie Ryan (then at the Stanford Research Institute) requested me to join a panel at the 1980 meetings of the Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco on ‘The long-term roots of short-term decision-making’. I read a paper on ‘Time in two kinds of societies’, an anthropologist sharing the platform with economists, engineers, futurists. Our performance was repeated at the Stanford Research Institute. The discussions were exhilerating and opened up a whole range of new questions for me. I was sufficiently intrigued to pursue the matter during a year at the National Humanities Centre (North Carolina) 1980–1, where I did much of the research and writing for this volume. The work expanded in every direction and I lacked no stimulus for venturing further afield. With informal discussants such as Allen Ballard, John Kasson, Mihajlo Mihajlov, Paul Ricoeur, and Gregory Vlastos, I needed no excuse to invade other disciplinary domains with impunity.

Between 1980 and 1983 I lectured and conducted seminars on the research in progress at Clemson University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Princeton University. In 1984 I published an essay on ‘Chronology Category and Ritual’ in a volume edited by David Kertzer and Jennie Keith, Age and Anthropological Theory (Cornell University Press). In 1986 another essay appeared, ‘Time and the Comparative Study of Societies’ in Man in India (vol 66, pp 23—66). Parts of those essays are incorporated into this volume. Many people contributed to the formulation of what went into those essays, but I would like to single out David Brent, Lina Fruzzetti, David Kertzer, Michael Lofaro, and Baidyanath Saraswati for their long written comments.

In 1983 I joined the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University, to realize a longstanding aim of making anthropological films. I had hoped to expand the essay and publish a more ambitious work on ‘time’, but I laid it aside to make room for film-making. I continued to discuss the subject with colleagues in various fields. In 1988 I went to Wesleyan University where I have finally been given the opportunity of combining film and anthropology without short-changing either. I promptly started work on a new film and a number of new courses, among them a seminar on Time. This experience inspired me to greatly expand and thoroughly revise the earlier typescript, thus giving the work its current form. I decided on the long essay as the proper format. I realize that I could have written a much longer work, but I prefer to retain the exploratory nature of the enquiry and to give a sharper focus to the questions I am asking. With each successive departure, over the last dozen years, the scope of the study also widened, till I had notes for several volumes. I may yet return to the latter path but if I don’t I hope that the essay offered here will have influenced the journey of others who choose the longer road. The current work bears the imprint of discussions with Lina Fruzzetti and long written commentaries by André Béteille (of Delhi University’s Sociology Department) and Brian Fay (of Wesleyan’s Philosophy Department). As always, my debt is greatest to Lina who refused to accept the condition of the essay remaining forever in the writing.

In the late 1980s, discussion with Santosh Mookerjee, till recently General Manager of OUP, Delhi, mooted the possibility of bringing out new editions of several books by Lina Fruzzetti and myself. Two of these have appeared so far, with more on the way, so I was glad to offer OUP Delhi a first option on this volume. I am very glad to continue this already very fruitful association.

The enquiry starts, simply enough, with an exploration of time in different societies. Profiting from St. Augustine’s caution, I contextulize the study from the outset: time somewhere, at a given moment, for a group of people. Is time among the Salteaux, Balinese, Nuer, or Pitjanjara similar, or different? What if we add medieval Europe and industrializing America? Immediately ‘time’ becomes problematic: is it a concept, a series of concepts, or just a set of measurements? How do we compare: can we be sure that we are dealing with comparable things? Most studies assume time to be axiomatically given: the notions accepted by the author’s society, in terms of which other notions of time become different—or non-existent—and are dissolved into other domains (social structure, economy, kinship, ritual). Further, what becomes of the time question (put in terms of an indigenous equivalent of a western concept, or vice versa) when we ask who is doing the category construction, for whom, when, and where? Then again, what is the purpose to which the comparison is put? Is it an innocent study of temporality or is it a marker of progress, modernization, or dependence?

Roughly half the essay is concerned with questions (theoretical, methodological, interpretive) of what is involved when we talk about time in different societies, Western and Non-western, in contemporary and historical contexts. While the argument is critical, I.attempt to formulate what we can say not just what we cannot. The second half of the study becomes even broader with the addition of changes accomplished during the great transformation of the last two centuries (Karl Polanyi’s phrase) which have by now left no society untouched. Here I discuss additional sources of confusion, especially time (concept and measurement conflated in the notion of clock time) as an idiom for the classification and evaluation of societies on the road to modernity or development. In these cases time becomes a measuring stick for social change: industrializing, modernizing, or (under)developing on a linear path toward capitalism or socialism are contrasted, typed, and judged from a social scientist’s (and a social group’s) point of view of what is desirable, even necessary.

Chapter One looks at a paradox of time in societies. In the West time seems to fragment and speed up. Outside the West, despite rapid change, it seems integrated and still enchanted by sacred ritual. A little probing reveals a whole range of time-related problems across the dichotomy of West/Non-West. Here I propose a comparative, historical, and anthropological approach to time as category and value in different societies. The argument is twofold: one concerns the time of cultures, the other looks at time as a marker of social transformation.

Chapter Two is a critical survey of key writings about time in various societies, some famous, others not so well known. Ranging from the Sudan to ancient China, the discussion is comparative and comes, in a full circle, to medieval Europe. The theoretical and methodological considerations are not an end in themselves; the aim in this and other chapters is to arrive at critical knowledge.

Chapter Three turns to the West in earnest with an examination of time in medieval France, early modern England, agrarian and industrial America. These studies reveal notions of time familiar from the previous chapter. Although measurable clock time increasingly wins out, other notions survive in Europe. Along with time a host of other considerations emerge, pointing to a transformation of society.

Chapter Four revisits Indian and Sudanese societies, with the addition of Algeria. The attempt is made to parallel the discussion of social transformation in Europe with case studies of non-Western societies. Here critical and theoretical departures are occasioned by rapid social change.

Chapter Five is an extended consideration of contemporary America: time in the contexts of politics, religion, economics, and in the special situation of the aged. The last chapter returns to the first and traces the implications of both the critical and the substantive studies. Some of these take the form of lessons societies can teach each other as well as those who would interpret them.

Wesleyan University
January 1993

Chapter I: The Problem of Time in Societies

1. Perceptions and Contrasts

It is widely believed today that everyday life in advanced industrial societies presents itself to the citizen as a series of short-term requirements, piecemeal decision-making, and unending problem-solving—budgets, billing, and accounting periods, terms of office, grants, contracts—in relation to the economic aspects of living.[1] These circumstances occur at all levels of institutional (public) and home (private) relationships. Paradoxically, however hard-pressed the individual, she/he is also aware of a different cycle of time; one that may well be, at least in expectation, more important, referring to history, value, judgement, choice, and the future: the promise of past and present. In other words, the ideological, symbolic, and meaningful aspects of life; the fruit of what is best and potentially realizable in contemporary Western societies; production, power, and prosperity as well as rights, rationality, and responsibility, combining to deliver the fullest human potential for the greatest number of people. Several contradictory assumptions underlie the seemingly unending series of choices, decisions, and short-term responses in Euro-American societies:

• crises are inevitable, but they can be rationally managed, planned, phased, contained, even solved or overcome by decision-making at the right moment, especially by the right people who are positioned at the right junctions of society;

• long-term requirements should take care of themselves, mainly through the efficacy of the underlying values of family, democracy, and ethics (i.e. a certain kind of sociability and civility, unattended to though they may be).

Values in the United States are haphazardly perceived, always assumed and never questioned, yet they are the standards built into the system, the bulwark against the imperfectly seen, but accumulating burdens.[2] The paradox is apparent since even the more optimistic expectations are tinged with disquiet: the duality of short- and long-term responses and considerations of our way of living may not be merely an opposing tendency, but a contradiction. The two may not take care of each other: the accumulation of the former may determine the latter, the entire assemblage adding up to the postponement of something inevitable. Although extensible indefinitely, it may not be any more predictable, hence controllable, for all that. There is a paradox also because economic production today involves planning and time horizons beyond anything experienced in world history, at least in the terms and directions required by invested capital and the determination of production for long periods into the future. Scheduling and planning involve linear projections based on existing conditions. The economic cycles thus predicted are still linear in nature and point to the open-ended view of time in the West: the future will be different and hopefully better than the present.

Time is perceived and experienced as a series of short-term responses to the requirements of production, especially in the unknowns of choice and valuation in consumption, and in the less dominant aspects of industrial society such as kinship and family, religion and politics. Thus the economic and technological factors become separated from the rest of society, as the more fundamental prior reality. If these factors are sound the rest will tag along. But such attitudes go along with an inability to demonstrate, control, and predict the linkages and determinations between economy and technology, and the rest of society.

By contrast, in much of the non-Western world, time is still conceived of and experienced as a broad stream and a series of cycles, originating from ancestors and reaching out towards descendants, with the domains of living still integrated, to a greater or lesser extent, into hierarchical social wholes. Or is it? It appears to us in the West that ‘they’ still live something we merely recollect: a sense of the sacred, of place and time, of a whole, and a transcendence of the finite.

The contrast is not just a part of the Western image of the non-Westem world, it is also a sense loss: many Americans, Europeans, and increasingly Japanese, suspect that their societies were also integrated and holistic once, that their time was also enchanted by ritual, festivals, and celebration. With the coming of clocks, factories, and time schedules all that disappeared, yet the late twentieth century fervently believes in a time free of toil. The world of home, self, and play is opposed to the world of employment and work. Yet there is a massive distortion here, since ‘more’ or less ‘time’ is a recent notion, and saving or wasting time is an idea alien even to the past of the West.

Several questions arise. Is Western industrial time more linear, scarce, fragmented, measured, and separated from other aspects of life than is the case for non-Western, non-industrial societies? Is time for the latter more integrated, cyclical, non-measured, non-autonomous, non-linear than Western time? Are such dichotomies pointless to begin with? Are there more similarities than differences—if so, what do these mean and how are we to apprehend them? Are religion and the sacred linked to cyclical time, or are there secular cycles as well? Are the latter independent of the former? Are the more qualitative aspects separable from the quantitative, and are they both assignable to different kinds of societies? Can we locate the different ‘times’ noted above in all societies, including American and European? If so, how do these times relate to each other within and across societies?

It would be too simplistic to equate the West with historical progress, linear and measurable time, and the non-Western World with cyclical, non-historical, qualitative time. As we shall see, all these kinds of time exist in both kinds of societies. Non-Western societies have histories and conceive of linear time, Western societies can boast of cyclical and non-measurable time. The crucial question is what these times are all about in given contexts? What is the meaning of ‘our time’ and ‘their time’? Is any reflection on the time problem, a hopelessly confusing, solipsistic, and by definition, ethnocentric exercise?

2. Concepts and Methods

The problem of defining the terms of our discussion need not be reified into a strict delineation of what is symbol, value, concept, and category in abstract, classificatory terms. Any of the issues involved can be resolved through the description and interpretation of social life and through the task of analysing concepts comparatively. Nevertheless, in my view, ideology (or even culture) is the totality of beliefs, ideas, symbols, and values current in a particular society. This raises an immediate difficulty since there is no equality among and within these series. Thus values are deeply held beliefs about moral and ethical worth, ultimate ends of life, potential, and the way things ought to be. They are not mere concepts. They are embedded in social conduct, expected behaviour, collective ways, and are expressed through symbols that are linked to the minutiae of social relations, empirical, observable acts, and hence subject to interpretation as well as analysis. Categories, symbols, and values cannot be merely affirmed in the abstract and defined for a specific discourse; rather they have to be viewed in the contexts of social groups and processes—analysed and reconstituted, in other words, into wholes for persons in groups and/or the society at large. In addition this should also mean interpretation through history as well as social structure.

‘Non-Western’, ‘Developing’, and ‘Third World’ are awkward expressions, of little analytic value for fashioning a typology of societies, if that be the aim and end result of the comparative study of societies. Yet they may be of some heuristic use in this essay and they certainly have a cultural, symbolic significance in the world today. They highlight a contrast that is becoming a part of what they would elucidate as well as change: idea into value and action. If ‘modernization’ and ‘dependency’ are on the verge of being abandoned by scholars, the continued life of these concepts in different contexts is a different question. These concepts continue to engage with societies, and even if their tasks are chiefly rhetorical, as in the discussions surrounding the New International Economic Order and the New International Information Order, they are on the way to becoming values and symbols. For the Third World, and for different social groups within that world, NIEO and NIIO are at once political, cultural, and economic {see Laszló et al., 1978; Lozoya et al., 1979). A combination of ideas deriving from modernization and development theories, these new ‘orders’ combine with indigenous, ongoing social situations and cultural, symbolic dimensions in specific societies. In one way or another they shape the conceptual world of discourse and are already engaged in constituting the limits of tomorrow’s worlds.

I will refer descriptively to the developing non-Western, non-industrial (or industrializing) societies, meaning more or less the same thing, to establish a contrast—even though I realize that there is one world market and that Saudi Arabia and Taiwan are different from Chad and Bangladesh. I do not imply thereby a typology of societies because typologies are always in danger of deteriorating into classificatory schemes of evolution or devolution. Yet comparison is fundamental to our understanding of relationships within and among societies. Utilizing indigenous ideologies in the interpretation of societies, I keep close to the dialectic between ideas and practices without imposing external schemes of classification, whether or not these be modernization, underdevelopment, revolution, or tradition.

I will not deal with individual variations in the experience or even perception of time, but collective, cultural categories which are constituted in and through social life. Experience and perception are themselves expressed by and are approachable through cultural concepts, symbols, and values. Research into the relation between personal symbols, values, and conduct is a legitimate but different enterprise—here I shall concentrate on collectives.

One of my aims in this essay is to separate problems of measuring time from concepts of time. Measurement refers to a particular cultural concept of time, while other, differing cultural experiences and perceptions of time, condensed in other concepts and categories of temporality and duration, may have nothing to do with measurement. It is easy, both in our everyday lives and in our anthropological studies, to confuse the measurement of time with the concept of time, since in the advanced industrial societies of the West time is often taken to be measured clock time. Hence the appearance of time as a measurable ‘thing’, the reckoning of which can be compared cross-culturally. Time may appear to be such, however, only under particular cultural (including historical) conditions. Even calendars may not divide and classify time in the sense of measured clock time. They may merely refer to staging rituals, specifying observances, and separating events.

We cannot assume time to be something and then attempt to translate it into other languages and practices, nor can we reverse the process by locating other cultural conceptions in our sense of time. We can expect to find similarities, differences, approximations, and even equivalents among the numerous ‘times’ of Western and non-Western societies (contemporary and historical), and we may find variations in the ‘times’ of academic disciplines such as physics, astronomy, geology, psychology, and history. Whether or not the study of these differences will result in one, or two, or more kinds (concepts) of time is too early to tell. The alternatives are clear: if we cannot assume a pre-existing, absolute time which is divided and apprehended in different ways in different places, then we have to patiently construct time out of cultural elements in a comparative, dialectical (in the sense of reciprocal) fashion, noting similarities and differences, pursuing the cultural logics wherever they may lead us.

A second argument, about social transformation, grows out of the first, about the cultural nature of time. I want to use culturally constituted concepts of time to reflect on the nature of the changes that have occurred in Western and non-Western societies over the past few hundred years. If there are differences in the conceptions of time across societies then these differences may point the way to understanding the transformation of societies. Do concepts of time change in the course of industrialization? What of the impact of colonial and imperial rule? Can the study of time contribute to the understanding of processes such as Westernization, modernization, and domination (in the senses of hegemony and capital-intensive production for world markets)? Does one or another concept of time obliterate other concepts as a result of social change? Do different conceptions of time survive the seemingly fundamental transformation of a society? Is time itself (if we find such a thing) being homogenized in the world today?

3. The Comparative Study of Societies

Anthropology sets itself an immense task: the study of humankind in all aspects, in every sense. As the great French anthropologist Marcel Mauss proposed, this should mean two things: an affirmation of our species being, the essential unity of all human beings, and a comparative study of the differences among societies (Dumont, 1978). I say ‘comparative’ advisedly, in order to reveal regularities, similarities, as well as divergences among the ideas and actions of human beings living together; groups in particular places at particular times. Theory, observation, interpretation, and analysis are combined in this quest, exhibiting the dual significance of Enlightenment (rationality) and counter-Enlightenment (understanding) influences in the anthropological tradition.

At its very best anthropology considers the universal and the particular—moving back and forth, stressing, as Dumont (1978) reminds us, the universality of being human but realizing that only in particular forms, men and women living in particular societies, is this experience embodied for all of us. What follows from this—and what I am concerned with here—is the promise, not necessarily the current and unfailing practice, of anthropology as a discipline. I refer to a way of seeing ourselves, as well as other societies, in perspective, not just as a methodological or even a moral lesson but as constitutive of our own society and of other societies. Our self-images form, in part, our view of other societies and the latter reinforces our conception of ourselves. The very idea of ‘society’ is of recent origin, stemming from Enlightenment ideology. Anthropology, sociology, and history emerge as disciplines, as a way of becoming aware of our own and other societies. It is no coincidence that other recent institutions and ideas, such as capital-intensive production, commodity markets, equality, individual freedoms, social justice, and human rights, arose at the same time. As members of a society we are embedded in our social contexts and conceptions, yet as comparative sociologists we have to ’•ecognize the way societies are situated in relation to each other, the ways in which they have been changing or persisting over time, and the directions they are likely to take in the future.

How should this comparison work? Societies are made up of existential, sentient beings in relationships, groups, and institutions. These relationships are both practices (actions) and ideas, beliefs, values, or sets of ideas (ideologies). Since ideas form and are formed by practices, it is well to interpret and analyse behaviour in terms of the ideologies of a particular society. The dialectic of comparison and the translation of societies into each others’ terms should rescue us from cultural solipsism and extreme relativism, while the universalistic aspects of our discipline should bring us back to the species being of all humankind. This tension between the universal and the particular should also guard us from the other extreme in the social sciences: the assumption that we may one day approximate the measurement and quantification of the physical sciences.

Ideologies, as I stated above, are the totality of ideas, values, and beliefs current in a society. These change over time according to the positions or situations of persons and groups in society. Thus ideologies are more than just the (mistaken) ideas of others. Here I must enter a caution about the use of simple dichotomies such as modernity and tradition, community and society, development and underdevelopment, primitive and civilized, capitalist and precapitalist. These opposed terms do not designate kinds of societies nor do they refer to actual societies. They cannot form the basis of classification and legalistic statements or generalizations about societies. They are ideological to the core, and thus carry meanings beyond that given to them in specific discourses. Some, primitive versus civilized for example, did not survive the careful structuralist exposition of classificatory logic in so-called ‘primitive’ societies. Others still have a heuristic value and as such depend on what is done with them in the course of analysis and interpretation. Dangers inherent in their use can be counteracted only by extensive narrative and description: not by reifying them into typological, evolutionary, or other schemes. It may be salutary to recall here that the primitive/civilized contrast emerged during the expansion of the commodity market and Western economic dominance. Tradition/modernity parallel the optimism of extending Western rationality to the rest of the world. Development/underdevelopment appear at a time of decolonization and growing doubts about the possibility of continued economic growth in the West.

Finally, while anthropology respects the humanity of all societies, it cannot admit special claims to precedence by any particular one: there is no basis for the domination of one society by another in the anthropological endeavour (see Dumont, 1978).

4. An Outline of the Argument

To anticipate one of the conclusions of this essay: time in an anthropological sense is not a universal and objective condition with a constant meaning throughout histories and societies. In the examples I have referred to so far, time was a category as well as a value in social relations. As a category it is constituted by culturally shaped indigenous concepts, determined and established through local and historical, fundamentally social, experiences. Such constructs order and are ordered by social relations. Values are also indigenous constructs that belong to ideologies of societies. Values, however, are not mere representations or expressions of reality; rather they are recognizable, though often imprecise and immeasurable, sometimes discontinuous, imperfectly articulated, yet widely held throughout a society in belief and in practice as imperative moral injunctions, ideals about the meaning and ends of life. As such, anthropological time (in the cultural sense) creates and responds to the links among economy, kinship, religion, politics, and ideology. These domains themselves differ from society to society but not in the same, predictable way everywhere, every time. On the contrary, domains are differently constructed through history and locality, without immediate, universal meanings leaping to mind ready for comparison. The painstaking task of constituting these anthropological domains out of social ideologies and practices in empirical societies cannot be avoided.

Early anthropological work, such as Hallowell’s (1937) and Evans-Pritchard’s (1939) set up the contrast between ‘our’ time and ‘their’ time. Both writers invest the difference with conceptual significance. But they do not assume (as do later writers such as Bloch, Turton, and Ruggles) that calendars, cycles of cultivation, sacred ceremonial, and the like are evidence for the measurement of time in a universal sense (meaning, in the end, nothing more than Western clock time).

I shall argue that, indeed, there are differences across cultures in the conceptualization of time, but that these differences are not located in the opposition of two kinds of societies, modern, Western, industrialized, on the one hand, and traditional, non-industrialized, non-Western, on the other hand. Conceptual differences are located within and across societies, and the dialectic of analytical and interpretive categories and approaches alerts us to the careful, comparative, case by case construction of similarities. Categories thus separated combine and recombine in different sets of relationships and different hierarchies, in different societies. There are various kinds of temporality and duration, not all measurable in the modern (clock) sense, and our task is to find ways of comparing and understanding these differences. I now turn to the ways of categorizing, understanding, and expressing ‘time’ in different societies—in ways contrasting to contemporary Western experience—with the aim of apprehending ideologies and categories of the West in themselves, in comparison, and in their impact on the rest of the world. This approach should yield some implications for the future of Euro-American societies as well as those now dominated by the seemingly inevitable triumph of advanced industrial societies.

Chapter II: Time in Non-Western Societies

The four examples given below are not the unvarnished facts about a different view of time. Each is trying to make sense of ‘their’ time in terms of Western notions. Each attempts to describe another culture in terms comprehensible to the outsider. The problem of translation (or trans-categorization) should not defeat us, although the framework of discourse, method, and interpretation becomes, to some extent, a part of what is being described. We cannot precipitately leap into another reality: we can merely attempt to approximate that reality. But the difficulties themselves are an initial proof of my thesis and problem, that there are different ways of understanding ideas and experiences of temporality.

1. Aboriginal America

Hallowell’s 1937 article states many of the concerns anthropologists have had and continue to have with ‘time’. Hallowell recognizes the differences between ‘temporal orientation’ in contemporary Western and in aboriginal American groups, and ascribes these to differences in ‘culturally constituted experience’, including different ‘cultural patterns’ and ‘historical roots’ (1937: 670). He argues that certain events in every society act as reference points to express intervals of duration. These points are individually (or personally) oriented and are crucial for an understanding of temporal concepts. It follows that the latter are culturally constituted. Modern concepts, as far as ‘Western civilization’ is concerned, are structured, divided, and quantified. But among the Salteaux (Hallowell’s test case) there are no standardized durational units, and while the movement of stars is recognized and followed, there are no set times for daily activities. By contrast, dances and ceremonies exhibit a ‘temporal patterning’. Christian missions, on the other hand, have introduced and ‘acculturated’ various modern timepieces. The clock-governed bells of the mission divide the day, and call the faithful to Sunday service, but no other activities are ordered in this way. The phases of the moon do not yield a division of continuous time, and days, months, and years do not mark or divide time. Age is divided into grades (not years) and ceremonial keeps mythological beings ‘constantly contemporary with each new generation’ (1937: 667).

Hallowell set up the form of the comparison in terms of ‘our’ time being divisible, measured duration, and ‘their’ time being duration experienced as event, ceremony, age-grade, season, and the like. ‘Their’ time is different conceptually because it is undivided. The equivalents of our time can be stated in their terms but the time thus constituted is different from ours. Other anthropologists also characterized ‘time’ thus arrived at. Evans-Pritchard, writing two years later, gave the term ‘structural time’ to the difference between Nuer time and our time.

2. The Nuer of the Sudan

The Nuer of the Southern Sudan, as described by Evans-Pritchard some forty years ago (1939, 1940), are a pastoralagricultural people, with a singular relation between time and social structure. Indeed, for them time is structural time and distance, being involved in all social relations, as duration and event, and being culturally constituted in different cycles of action. In this the Nuer exhibit similarities with other Nilotic societies of East Africa, as well as many lineage-based groups of sub-Saharan Africa.

Evans-Pritchard notes the ecological cycles of transhumance and cultivation: dry and wet seasons follow each other with parallel shifts in locality, habitat, and group organization, villages shift to cattle camps, and repeated short cycles of activity become long-term regularities. Long-range, repeated patterns are central to kin and marriage relations, lineage and tribe formation, and the progression of age-sets. Different social segments are related and distinguished by structural time: the fission and fusion of lineages follow ancestors back to about five to seven generations, but beyond that, time is telescoped into another five to seven generations, reaching, at that point, mythic origins. This system, which is not genealogical in Western terms because it does not tell succession in the same way, allows the inclusion of outsiders and their ancestors into the lineage, tribe, and federation of tribes, yielding large polities without centralized institutions of administration and authority.

This unfolding system is laid out to make time and space correspond: localities are dwelt in by lineages with time structured within and among them, place and time unifying and separating the social segments. Linked to these cycles of ecology, lineage, and space as an aspect of time, is the age-grade system in which persons progress through a fixed cycle from birth to death, with passages of transition marked by rites and ceremony. From Evans-Pritchard’s point of view, time here is inexorably fixed and structured so that different units of human beings grouped in different segments may pass through immutable grades, the structure being permanent, the people ephemeral. Rather than succumb to this somewhat mechanical image we should view the case as one where time serves persons, through whom all grades and structures pass; time being safely removed from the accumulation of surprises, oriented to people, and amenable to repetition and foretelling.

3. Aboriginal Australia

Hunting and gathering, slash and burn, and small-scale agricultural societies utilize comparatively simple technologies, and their man-tool relations are dominated by men. This is especially true of the indigenous societies of Australia, New Guinea, and Melanesia, American Indian societies before their destruction, and many others scattered throughout Africa and South-East Asia. These are what Sahlins (1972: ch. 1) called, somewhat provocatively, the original ‘affluent’ societies with household-based, unified cycles of production; cycles not separable into their constituent ‘moments’. Sahlins notes that the immediate contrast with our own society is the difference between means-ends relations. Time spent in direct food-producing activity is less, although the extent of this can be argued, especially in regard to the separation and measurement of productive activity. It is still undeniable that more ‘time’ (in the measurable linear sense) is spent in activities connected with magic and ritual, kinship and marriage, and non-economic exchange, than is the case in industrial societies.

It is difficult to tell apart the different domains of activity in these societies—there are unified cycles of production rather than autonomous periods of required action on the part of individuals: ritual and economic behaviour merge in many cases with kinship, aspects of authority, and social order. So it isn’t important to define and separate which is which precisely, in social science terms, but it is imperative to recognize the linkages as well as distinctions through a comparison within wholes, rather than to consider predefined segments. Yet, distinction does not mean isolation. Scarcity is not the necessary and central fact, nor is it determinant of short-term cycles, since this distinction itself is a result of industrialization. Long-term cycles predominate in Aboriginal Australia: there are few needs, wants, and ends, and plenty of means and ways of satisfying them. In addition, what strikes the outsider is under-production in relation to existing possibilities: labour power is underutilized, the profit motive is not central, and there is a distinct anti-surplus bias. Not that ‘economic exchange’ is alien to Australia; rather, exchange is use-oriented and values are not determined by what commodities command against each other in the market. In contrast to commodity markets, these are neither profit-oriented nor based on capital accumulation, and do not demand surplus value for continued expansion.

4. Hindu Bali

In a study of time and social behaviour in Bali, Geertz (1973) provides an example of how persons, cycles of time, and conduct are symbolic structures in the hands and minds of those who live them, providing both the integration and discontinuity (as a subdominant theme) so characteristic of the societies opposed to the West as ‘other’.

Time in Bali is culturally or symbolically grounded with integral links to persons and the ways persons behave. Balinese have many ways of categorizing persons, establishing a finite set far short of the possibilities. People may be named according to birth order, kinship relation, occupation, age, prestige, marriage alliance, in many different ways. Note the implications of the relations among persons for categories of time, but there are also calendrical cycles of great complexity, that in turn relate to ways of behaviour.

The lunar-solar calendar creates an annual cycle, and a task-oriented calendar establishes a pattern of recurrent days, each containing a number from 3 to 210. These recurrent cycles do not tell what time it is, nor the duration experienced through interval; rather, as Geertz puts it, they tell the kind of time experienced in relation to ceremonial and other kinds of activity.

The behavioural aspects of all these are significant: the absence of climax, stage fright, and ceremony are the distinguishing styles of Balinese social relations. The Balinese notion of time and timing is implicit in all of these: climax as closure is to be avoided, the actor may always slip and allow the player of the part to appear, and ceremonial marks all aspects of living. The effect is to rob time of its cumulative, developmental, and transformative aspects; in Geertz’s felicitous phrase, to ‘detemporalize time’. So too, we may add, are people de-individualized, in the sense of the Western individual as a repository of rights and obligations.

Time thus becomes a series of perennially recurrent cycles linking family, person, production, ideology, and ritual without being aggregated into steady progress, rise and fall, lacking a driving force such as the commodity market that fuels the phases of expansion or contraction. However, Geertz cautions that these symbolic structures need not be perfectly integrated and their opposites may exist as contrary potentials with implications for wide-ranging consequences in the direction of the future in such societies.

Insofar as these studies apprehend other realities, the cycle of time approximated by them has a comparative lesson for the West and its future, especially since the advanced industrial societies have been involved in the transformation of the rest of the world for varying periods of time in particular societies. A change in any one aspect of these linked cycles of time may eventually yield fundamental changes in the societies I have considered so far only in their (supposedly) internal state. Integration and discontinuity may both be affected this way, hence several possibilities are given in any society, not a single predictable and determined outcome. As Geertz notes, in Bali anything that may wage havoc with symbolic structures, especially in relation to the patterning of time, may result in the fundamental transformation of society. Among the Nuer a disturbance in the integrated rhythm and flow of time, and among Australians a change in the linkage of ritual, production, and marriage may accomplish the same result.

It is exactly in the links among symbolic structures and among the various cycles and rhythms of life (i.e. ‘time’ culturally constituted) that the increase in production and the expansion of the commodity market creates its most wideranging effects.

I shall pursue these considerations further in relation to India and the Sudan (see Chapter IV) where I have been carrying out field research for the past two decades. The central question is the articulation, either in integrated, discontinuous, or contradictory ways, of Hindu and Islamic ideologies (rituals and beliefs), bazaars and suqs (cycles of production and exchange), kinship and marriage, and polity (social organization, authority, and rule) in relation to both the impact of the capital-intensive, commodity-exchange based world market and the internal evolution of regional and national economies, the two being, by now, inevitably linked.

5. Through Western Eyes Only

Do we run the risk of looking at other societies through our categories alone? How can we be sure that we do not see only what our traditions and ideologies select and know only what our concepts impose as a grid on radically different kinds of reality? Alternatively, can we blithely assume the universality and inter-subjectivity that will deliver us from these complexities without any further effort, and assure us of unmediated access to other realities? Many social scientific theories would claim just that, although the processes and operations which would convince us of the similarity of categories and individual behaviour across societies are equally often left implicit and unexamined.

One way would be to take time as objectively given; concrete, in the world out there, or outside our will, as Marx put it in another context. Time may then become an inexorable historical development which is determined in the final instance by economy and technology, about which both Marxists and Liberals seem to agree. Europe and America became accustomed to consistent technological advance and, in parallel, a linear, evolutionary time moving to some kind of completion or social closure either as scientific progress, social utopia, or religious teleology. Western ideas of history are on the whole lineal and progressive. Until recently the West tended to regard its form of society as the direction in which all other societies were moving: a view suggesting that the West is the proven product of the long-term, the fruit of rational, just, democratic, and ‘good’ values.

Such accounts have taken a battering in recent years and, indeed, it is difficult to account, from within this framework, for the continued conflict, inequality, and injustice in Western, and the unexpected turn in other societies, as well as the possibility of dictatorship. Witness Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and now many countries of Asia and Africa. In regard to other societies, the West went through an optimistic, evolutionary view of modernization during the past two decades: ‘they are becoming like us’ and achieving Western-style liberal politics with free-market economies; and a more cataclysmic, apocalyptic view of Western domination leading to the vicious cycle of dependency, and the consequent necessity of revolution to sweep away all ‘traditional’ and ‘colonial’ orders in order to inaugurate a new society.

Modernization and underdevelopment are inadequate as theories and descriptions of social change because they amount to little more than an imposition of a Euro-American scale and passage of time on the rest of the world. There was little development, and nowhere was revolution followed by the just society. The Nehrus of the Third World were succeeded by Amin, Gaddafi, and Mobutu. Further, the comparative lesson was not drawn for either Western or non-Western societies. People in the West certainly failed to see the changes occurring in their own society as other than linear, progressive, and evolutionary, especially as far as the relations obtaining among politics, economics, and religion are concerned, and in regard to the differences among these domains themselves in different societies.

Together with linear time goes a perception of the fragmentation of life in the advanced industrial societies: an atomized, individualistic social world characterizes the system of production and specific roles in that system, and the peculiar construct of the ‘individual’ emerges as a repository of rights and responsibilities. Individuals in the advanced industrial societies become conscious of the worlds they have lost; clocks break and fragment the previously integrated flow of time; economy and work patterns become completely transformed. They feel dominated by machines and blame the tyranny of clocks, yet they look to these very things for deliverance. Religion is overshadowed by economy, and sacred ritual no longer informs politics, family, and kinship ties. Yet all these seemingly contradictory domains still exist, still take meaning from social worlds, and systems of symbols continue to mediate through categories of human invention.

Alongside all the fragmentation there is still a conception of sacred time for many Americans, in religion (the contemporaneity of Christ and the ritual of sacrifice), Christian ethics, and evangelism. Even in politics the rituals of election and political festivals telescope three hundred years of American history into the present, making the founding fathers contemporaries and their conceptions of democracy eternal, with the expectation that the ideals and values of the past are reaching out, in the world, toward the completion of a just, equal, and prosperous society. The birth of the republic and of the market are re-enacted in rituals of contemporary politics and economics. Thus, the different ‘times’ and ‘techniques’ of societies are created, linked together, and transformed by people. As we shall see in the experience of Europe in the past, comparisons of the long-tefrm yield surprising results.

Of course things are not all that simple: some of the above considerations reflect the popular self-awareness of crisis-ridden advanced industrial societies and show a considerable amount of haphazard thinking about our own society. Is there only linear time and wholesale fragmentation in the West? Is time in the East the mere opposite: cyclical and integrated? It is time we took an Eastward turn.

6. Ancient China

In his magisterial study of science and civilization in China, Joseph Needham (1956–88) has successfully disposed of the idea of a ‘timeless’ East. The extraordinary inventiveness, technological and scientific advance that characterized China assured her of superiority over the West till the dawn of the scientific revolution in Europe. Indeed, Needham came up with a new question: given Chinese accomplishments why did they not originate a great scientific breakthrough?[3]

Time was a central preoccupation of ancient Chinese philosophers. But it is not clear whether or not the dominant view of time was divided into separate spans or boxes: shih (time) seemed to imply specific duties and opportunities—a discontinuous time. This was Granet’s conclusion based on studies of myth and folklore. But this was not the whole story, not even for all realms of Chinese society. Needham writes:

the cyclical view does not necessarily imply either the repetitive or the serially discontinuous. The cycle of seasons in the individual years (annus) was but one link (annulus) in an infinite chain of duration, past, present, and future. [1964: 9.]

Nor was there a dearth of historiography. On the contrary, China ‘possessed perhaps the greatest of all ancient historical traditions’. Historical works had to be objective, official, and normative. The apparent contradiction between these views was resolved by the conviction:

that the process of social unfolding and development had an intrinsic logic, an indwelling Tao, which rewarded ‘human heartedness’ ... with good social consequences when in the long run ... while its opposite brought irretrievable evil [:14].

Furthermore, Chinese science had a tradition of mechanical and hydro-mechanical time measurement.

In addition to Tao, Confucianism invested the universe with morality not because of a controlling deity but ‘because the universe was one which had the property of bringing to birth moral values and ethical behaviour when that level of organization has been reached at which it was possible that they should manifest themselves’. Indian thought (through Buddhism) informed this concept with the idea that the universe passed through alternating cycles of construction and dissolution. From these elements came the notions of both social devolution and evolution. Unlike neoConfucianism, religious Taoism gave a utopian quality to the cyclical view of history: as the sins of mankind bring total destruction, so a few followers of Tao win the new heaven and new earth only to enter again a long period of decline.

7. Ancient India

Much the same things can be said about the ancient Indians. They too conceived of different kinds of time, although the cyclical theory of karma and the succession of yugas dominated their view of the universe. Panikkar writes of time (kala) as cosmic power in India: the principle of fate (karma) as well as the power of god and its opposite, time as illusion devoid of power, ‘The vessel full of time, from which time flows out, is not itself temporal: it contains time, while being itself timeless....’ For some societies the vessel has broken into different spheres of reality; for others it symbolizes the power above time: and yet others regard it as the form of illusion (Panikkar, 1976: 68–9).

Nevertheless, time is also linked to action and the measurement of intervals in a succession of instants. Empirical and phenomenological analyses are not missing from India. More interestingly, ancient Indians linked the perception of time to language and analysed temporality through linguistic categories. Furthermore, there was also historical consciousness and a commitment to a path of action. A religious conception of secular duty (dharma) pervades the Bhagavad Gita which, incidentally, provided an ideological basis to many political movements of the twentieth century: ‘unattached action ... alone is capable of maintaining the universe and the order of the world .. (Panikkar, 1976). This would point to the duty of persons in historical situations.

Furthermore, the itihasas of the ancients (historical myths or myth as history) included different genres of old tales (Purana), events of the epics (itivritta), tales of moral principles {akhiyavtka\ and stories of divine and human beings {udaharana). Later, when these forms diverge, itihasa is narrowed down to past events. Records were kept for royal archives of lists of rulers, genealogies, traditions of great men, sacred lore, as well as production and trade figures, all of which then enter into the formation of political ideologies. Although no ‘history’ in the Western sense, there were also chronicles that concentrate on establishing events and interpretations. Given this wealth of material testifying to Indians’ consciousness of the past it is instructive to find the authors of the massive volume on historians of India (Phillips, ed., 1961) bent on using Western conceptions as a yardstick to measure Indian success or failure in achieving a European style historiography. Lineality as well as cyclical views form a part of pre-British India, not to speak of the teleology introduced by Islam.

What is remarkable about ancient India is that, as Panikkar points out, the starting point for empirical and phenomenological study is language. Temporality, divisions of time, succession of instants, measurements of intervals, and the like were analysed through linguistic categories, Sanskrit verb tenses. Indians succeeded in carrying this a step further in the attempt through Yoga of transcending time. Liberation (moksa) denies time any value. Even cyclical time is finite: time closing in on itself. Beyond time is brahman alone. Even the gods are ruled by time: ‘the object is not to go back to an origin in time ... but ... to break the temporal limits, without relapsing into a more subtle or more elevated form of time (‘... salvation’ [for example],) (Baumer, postscript to Panikkar, 1978: 83).

8. Light from the East

Turning the mirror back to the West, in a series of brilliant essays, Lynn White (1978) traced the Indian origin of many medieval inventions in Europe. Indeed, Western technology would be inconceivable without Indian inventiveness. Indian ‘otherworldliness’ is irrelevant here—the relations between and within cultures are crucial. There was a time when ‘technology transfer’ went the other way.

White stresses the relation between technology and religion in Europe. The medieval church gave early approval to work and innovation, and this was followed by a spectacular burst of creativity. It would be too simple to ascribe these changes to technique or to ideology alone. Yet it all happened long before the Renaissance which, incidentally, White regards as largely irrelevant to the history of social structure and technology. Thus the Needham and Weber questions are inverted and given a new context of time: if so much was taken from Indians, Arabs, and Chinese, what was peculiar about medieval Europe to occasion the enormous expansion of technology? More accurately, why were Europeans capable of giving Eastern inventions a new and different technological form, transforming them in the process into something new in the context of European culture?

Mechanical clocks were inspired by perpetuum mobile derived from the Indian idea of karma. The vertical windmill comes late, transposing the Buddhist prayer wheel. The case of war technology is well known (stirrup, gun-powder) but what of the great Gothic arch, the high point of medieval architecture? The high arch is a direct borrowing from Indian architecture via North Africa due to the presence of a remarkable black monk, Nicholas of Africa, in an Italian monastery. White’s cautious and qualified suggestion is that the plurality of ‘cultural regimes’ and the different religious traditions of European societies at the time give the basis for innovation. No uniform ideology, there were different ‘Christianities’ in regional and local variations. This is what could make something of the light from the East. Technique is no stranger to Asia and Africa, but it became a fundamental factor in the transformation of Europe. Another factor was the ‘serialization’ of Greco-Roman cyclical time: by the ninth century the church enshrines technique (works) as a cultural-ideological as well as practical pursuit, allowing a different application of Indian ideas.

Chapter III: The Pasts of the West

... we are able to understand the workers’ goals in the struggle for mastery of their own labour time: at bottom, no doubt, was the desire for protection against the tyranny of employers in this respect, but there was also the more specific need that leisure time be set aside along with working hours; and, in addition, to regulation wage labour, they wanted time allotted for personal work or a second job.

During working life the salient factor shaping the experience of time for most employees is that time itself ... is what workers are conscious of selling ... for wages.... What one sells one no longer owns. [The employer] ... becomes the owner of the worker’s working hours.... [Employers] also greatly influence how that portion of life left over after work can and will be spent.... What is left over after these demands ... are met is the residual time and capacity workers have to do everything meaningful in life. That time, time for living, thus is constricted, vulnerable, and manipulated.

Surprisingly these two sets of quotations are interpretations of actual work situations separated by 3000 miles and 600 years! The first comes from Le Goff’s study of labour time in the fourteenth century, the second from Pfeffer’s account of his own experience in Baltimore of the 1970s (Le Goff, 1980: 47; Pfeffer, 1979: 72–3). The similarity of these accounts invites reflection and discussion. Most immediately and powerfully these circumstances raise the problematic of change: what has changed in Western societies, from what to what, in what manner, and how are we to understand the structures, processes, and mediations involved? Furthermore, we may well ask about the plurality and/or dominance of time, of kinds of time, in Euro-American societies then and now. How are we to understand the persistence, fundamental transformation, and the relation between time and other ideas and practices in the pasts of our own societies?

1. Medieval France

Le Goff cautions us that in the fourteenth century the temporal framework was still primarily associated with ‘natural’ rhythms: agrarian activity and religious practice. Yet he also shows that a new, measured time emerged in this period, symbolized by work-bells (Werkenglocke), and by the contrast between the church’s time and the merchant’s time: a contrast that becomes increasingly compartmentalized, as if belonging to two different worlds. Le Goff quotes Bilfinger’s studies demonstrating a transition from an ecclesiastical to a secular division of time. The whole society was changing, but one segment of it, urban society, was most in need of this change. ‘Labor time was still the time of an economy dominated by agrarian rhythms ... careless of exactitude, unconcerned by productivity’ (: 44).

The work bells referred to were specifically installed in 1335 at Amiens, and later elsewhere in Europe, to regulate several crafts, and they evoked a violent reaction from workers. Duration rather than wages became the focus of the struggle. The novelty was that instead of time linked to events, there arose a regulated, certain time, no longer the ‘cataclysmic’ time of festivals. The measurable time of everyday life was thus born; a milestone on the way to secularization. What was being lost becomes clear from another Le Goff essay, ‘Merchant’s time and church time in the Middle Ages’ (: 29-42). The church challenged merchants in a field crucial to emerging mercantile capitalism: credit. The church argued that charging interest would amount to selling time, which belongs to God alone. Time, however, is the core of a merchant’s life: storage of stock, anticipation of a sale, trading networks, knowledge of market and production, are all time-bound, costing money. At stake were the conditions of production and the process of secularization. The employment of a monetary sphere required adequate measurement of time.

On the other hand, church time was also a part of the merchant’s existence. ‘In different ways, the ends pursued in the distinct spheres of profit and salvation were equally legitimate for him’ (Le Goff: 38). No hypocrite, the merchant (to use a twentieth-century phrase) merely compartmentalized his existence; In this he was helped by the shifting of penitence from external sanction to internal contrition, and by the disintegration of immutable religious time, parallel to the rediscovery in the West of cyclical, and other than lineal, teleological time. The confessional tries to contain the new time and instead deteriorates into casuistic moralism.

2. Early Modern England

Subsequent to Le Goff’s studies, the English historian E.P. Thompson (1970) discussed the new time in the transformation of Western Europe (1300–1650). He too began with ‘the clock’ and examined the way a shift in the sense of time affected labour discipline and the ‘inward apprehension of time’ for working people. He also used anthropology, as did the Annales historians, to establish the contrast between clock time and more natural rhythms (recall, once again, the Nuer). Thompson (:60) anchors the contrast in the logic of need and task-orientation in agrarian society:

a. Agrarian rhythms are more humanly comprehensible than timed labour.

b. Work and life are not sharply separated.

c. For clock time, a. and b. above appear to be wasteful.

Thompson also cautions us that precise clock time was not the rule at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Rare and imprecise even in the eighteenth century, recorded time (‘the clock’) belongs to the gentry. In labour an attention to this kind of time depends on the need to synchronize labour, and this does not become systematic till the appearance of large-scale machine-powered industry. Through the eighteenth century the pattern is one of intense bouts of labour followed by periods of idleness. It was not all ‘pre-industrial’ either: ‘in the transition to industrialism the stress falls upon the whole culture’, including systems of power, relations of property, religion (1970: 80). Thus it was not a question of changing techniques demanding synchronized labor. Thompson is most concerned with the way the new time discipline was internalized by workers: rebellion and resistance grew steadily and became intense in the nineteenth century.

Tn all these ways—by the division of labour; fines; bells and clock; money incentives; preachings and schoolings; repression of fairs and sports—new labour habits were formed, and a new time discipline was imposed.’ But how far did this succeed? Thompson thinks it did to an extent but expectedly finds it difficult to quantify ‘time-sense’ (:90). The extent is indicated by time-thrift and the distinction between work and life, which still leaves the questions of exploitation and resistance unanswered, since ‘values stand to be lost as well as gained’ (: 93).

Thompson draws some cautionary lessons from the European experience for the migration of discipline to ‘industrializing’ societies, ironically, as he justly says, at a time when the advanced industrial societies are trying to recover experiences all but forgotten. To this I shall return later in the essay. But Thompson ends on a somewhat upbeat note.

If we are to meet both the demands of a highly synchronized, automated industry, and of greatly enlarged areas of ‘freetime’, they must somehow combine in a new synthesis elements of the old and of the new, finding an imagery based neither upon the seasons, nor upon the market, but upon human occasions [: 96].

Time in these studies is ‘anthropological’ to the extent that the latter exhibit a degree of awareness of the differences between societies. Nevertheless they refer to Western history and not comparative, or even non-Western ‘histories’. The long-term consideration of Europe is welcome and draws out a cyclical view beyond the short-term and the unique event. At the same time these studies resist the notion of structure (as proposed by Lévi-Strauss) while utilizing the mode of structural continuity in their analyses. However, questions remain. If the fourteenth century crisis involves a ‘new time’ and yet the old rhythms continue—to the extent of causing riots in the twentieth century—then how are we to understand this opposition of fragmented time versus a flowing cyclical rhythm? And now in the Third World an emerging time disenchanted of sacred ritual activity? And in 1335 the workers of Amiens protesting night work, and in the 1970s Melbin (1978, 1979) ‘discovering’ night to be the new frontier?

3. The Longue Durée

More than anyone else, Fernand Braudel (e.g. 1980) has called attention to the longue durée of historians; a broad, slow flow of time asserted in opposition to the short-term and the succession of events. Indeed, Braudel has suggested that historians should distinguish the moment, the short-term, and the longue durée. But where does this division and especially the longue durée come from? History as ‘long’ time is what Braudel proposes but does not find within societies; it is not society’s consciousness of itself, it is the time of historians as a social group, as the keepers of history. Braudel seems to imply that it is objectively given (as Marx said of things outside our will) and something that should be true of every society, yet the mandate is restricted to the West. The truth of it is given outside society; it flattens out perspectives and cuts through the plurality of time in groups, domains, and societies. It amounts to a God-given (the historian as god?) duration within which social, economic, and other experiences emerge and are made conscious in ideologies. Is it merely a historian’s construct or is it partly an indigenous cultural notion? Braudel often writes as if it were the former, yet the very studying of it seems to signal the continued awareness of cyclical time in the West, a circumstance that is certainly not given outside societies. Is the longue durée a product of practicing the historian’s craft? More unambiguously, it applies to ‘secular’ trends in European history, and Braudel returns time and again to his discovery of price and tax cycles rising and falling in gentle curves through hundreds of years. The longue durée seems to hover around 500 to 600 years. Maybe so, but religion, ideology, revolution, and the like are more difficult to put into secular cycles, as Braudel himself is aware.

Perhaps this independently given aspect of the longue durée is its most troublesome aspect. Not to question Braudel’s great contribution, we may note that he still works from within Western ideology and appeals to an outside arbiter of measure and duration. More explicitly, Le Goff argues against the truly comparative framework of including African and Asian history in the historian’s practice. Braudel in turn cautions against the sociologist’s plurality of times and the anthropologist’s ‘timeless’ structure (here of course, he is countering Lévi-Strauss), thus guarding the boundaries of the historian’s longue durée. Yet comparison and structure remain necessary and key conceptions for taking the longer view. It would appear that in history, as in anthropology, specific analyses and interpretations have to be made with an eye (and a ear) to the interplay between the universal and the particular: all-embracing ideologies encompass differently positioned social groups that contend, harmonize, rise and fall, whether they share ideologies or not, partly because there is no perfect fit between institutions, values, symbols, persons, and ideologies. The comparative approach is necessary to avoid positing an unconstituted objective world, and to liberate ourselves, as students of history and society, from an embeddedness in our own society and our own ideology.

4. A Fundamental Problem

If the ‘tyranny of the clock’ has been in process for at least 600 years then what of the destruction and erosion it has wrought? What have been the effects, changes, and continuities? How can the social fabric regenerate itself? Have there been qualitative differences between the various times? What can one make of the quotations opening this chapter? How long has our society been fragmented and atomized? Where have the alternatives, even if mere dreams of a qualitatively different time, come from? What is the source and structure of a continued striving for cyclical, holistic time? What are the relations between the obviously different ‘times’ of Western societies? What, in other words, are we to make of the ‘clock problem’? Lewis Mumford (1963) was the first to formulate it in these terms, E.P. Thompson took it over, and we have not advanced much beyond it. What is lineal in opposition to cyclical time in the West? Is this opposition enough? After all, cyclical time in the East can be misinterpreted by Western commentators. How are we to link the times of the West together and find hierarchical or pluralistic relations among them? As Marx noted somewhere, it is one thing to point to a problem, it is quite another to make something of it.

5. Agrarian America

Some remarkable things have happened in the United States between 1830 and 1920. From the craft shop, counting house, and farm we come to the great industrial firm. Even earlier, in the decade before the Great War the essential features of the society we know today were in place. Charles de Tocqueville’s description of American society at the beginning of this great transformation is all the more remarkable since he drew attention to ideological and cultural characteristics we tend to associate with the later technological and organizational aspects of industrial society.

In the 1830s America was still, by and large, an agricultural society, characterized by craft-based production, a mercantile system of trade, and a pattern of time still associated with the seasons and ‘natural’ agrarian rhythms. Yet de Tocqueville (1945) saw several peculiarly American problems of great interest to us in interpreting the American experience. Most telling is the contrast he drew between ‘aristocratic’ and ‘democratic’ societies.

Amongst aristocratic nations, as families remain for centuries in the same condition, often in the same spot, all generations become, as it were, contemporaneous. A man almost always knows his forefathers, and respects them: he thinks he already sees his remote descendants, and he loves them.

Amongst democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition: the woof of time is every instant broken, and the track of generations effaced [1945: vol. 2, 104–5].

Social bonds are weak and so are ‘individuals’ in this case, necessitating many kinds of association among men.[4] Aristocratic societies have strong bonds under a few powerful men and no associations are needed: everyone knows and is in his place. In democratic societies the succession between generations is cut, each being condemned unto itself. Practical, as against theoretical, ‘sciences’ predominate, everyone is in motion, and there is a marked distaste for ‘meditation’. Above all an adherence to ‘facts’ is valued.

Although de Tocqueville did not put it this way, he did perceive a link between a kind of economy and a kind of polity and ideology, even though full industrialization and the commodity economy were yet to come. Yet this very period is now used by historians to heighten the contrast between the craft- and factory-based phases of production in American society of the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is most strongly stated in Herbert Gutman’s three phases in the emergence and triumph of American industrial society (Gutman, 1973).

6. Nineteenth-century Immigrants

Gutman starts with the problem of the Protestant work ethic becoming a ‘fact’ in a nation of immigrants with diverse social and cultural backgrounds. Between 1815 and 1920 the Americanization of factory habits, improved labour efficiency, as well as the remaking of work habits, and the needs of the machine became constant, and provoked recurrent tensions. The central issue is the conflict between different groups new to the machine and a society itself rapidly changing. Limiting his inquiry to free white labour, Gutman postulates three distinct periods (and societies): 1815–43, 1843–93, and 1893–1919. The first he saw as a pre-industrial society with a few factory workers who were products of ‘village culture’. The second is the period when industrial development transforms social structure, and the third witnesses the maturation of an industrial society. In each phase a tension exists between ‘natives’ and immigrants fresh to the demands imposed by the discipline of factory labour. The process is revitalized by continued migration. Thus not only was there a question of industrializing a whole culture, but of introducing new generations of factory workers to the same processes over and over again.

Unlike England where the same period saw a working class of relative national homogeneity, America had to be ‘continually busy (and worried about) industrializing people born out of this society, and often alien in birth and colour, and in work habits, customary values, and behaviour’ (Gutman, 1973 : 541). This was not merely a recurrent cycle because American society itself was changing while new waves of peasants, artisans, day labourers kept altering the compositions of the labouring population. These tensions were not simply those between agrarian and capitalist economies, or between competing élites. The new arrivals brought with them ways of work and values not associated with the industrial ethos.

Despite the scale of change, little is known of ‘worker culture’ in this period. Hence, Gutman has recourse to the cultures these workers came from. Using a variety of sources, including anthropological, he characterizes homogeneous ‘premodern’ work habits. An irregular, undisciplined pattern of work typifies the period before 1843. Festivals and celebrations disrupt early attempts by employers to encourage steady work. This is repeated in later periods with the arrival of East and South European workers. Early in the phase, when labour turnover keeps down the development of a proletariat, there is little protest since male and female workers do not intend to stay long in the factories. Still, tensions build on the contrast between mill routines and rural rhythms. In the Amoskeag of 1853, mill operatives protest the cutting down of an elm tree because it is a ‘connecting link between past and present’, and in autumn it serves as a reminder of ‘our own mortality’ (1973: 553). Relative stability depended on steady work, and with the cycles of recession and unemployment, protest waxes and wanes.

In the middle period the native artisans who are the subject of transition differ greatly from immigrant workers with rural backgrounds. The great economic changes, however, do not destroy the culture of previous times and places. Artisans persist with their irregular work habits, proof of a sustenance derived from their own culture. Immigrants hang on to their family, ethnic, and class ties. Communities of workers are bound together by festivals, rituals, intellectual traditions, mythic beliefs, and a ‘structure of feeling’. Furthermore, workers have their benevolent societies, holidays, sports, recreation, churches, trade unions, politicians, and reformers. Mobility at most reshapes but does not destroy these communities.

7. Industrial America

Let us take a closer look at the question of values. Gutman takes the work ethic to be a fact, but what happens to this fact when its very success undermines its morality? This is the problem Daniel Rodgers explores in a perceptive study of nineteenth and early twentieth century America (Rodgers, 1977, 1978). The work ethic in question was the product of farms, artisan shops, and counting houses; yet with the triumph of the factory system the ethic is transformed, so that by the 1920s the ‘old moral expectations’ do not hold. Thus what happens to work values when work itself is remade? Rodgers’s answer is that the attempt to bring the values of a previous age to industrial work failed, but in such a way that although the ideal was reaffirmed, it was detached from the reality of toil. What starts as the Protestant ethic becomes secularized by the end of the nineteenth century; a social duty that comes to contradict the very result of industrial production aimed at workers’ individual control and freedom, and ends up enslaving the worker.

The key to the triumphant work ethic of the late nineteenth century is usefulness, not the ‘calling’ of the puritans. The ‘middle-classes’ are rewarded and toil becomes a necessity for workers. While the former face the problems of leisure and come up with spontaneity, play, and plenty, wage labour is perceived as slavery. Success is a way out but is not a path open to all. Where Taylorism (time and motions studies of production) aims at individual work and ‘objective’ rewards, workers resist what they see as an encroachment on their independence.

In the early twentieth century machines are hailed as potentially liberating yet workers are opposed to them because machines narrow skills and take over the most intricate and skilled work processes. As the work ethic declines due to an inadequacy of rewards we find different responses by different groups in American society. The middle-class comes to view work as the fulfilment of the creative instinct, yet something that may transform, through vocational education and betterment, the industrial system. Having been a form of self-discipline, work becomes the creative spontaneity of play, while economists still insist that hard work creates wealth through savings and investment. In the 1880s work becomes increasingly mechanized and the control of time becomes an issue. Many workers refuse to internalize this factory faith, and aim at pushing work out of the centre of their lives. Irregular work patterns, mobility, and slow-down abound as shop strategies yet workers reaffirm the dignity of labour. In the 1840s and in the 1880s persistent efforts are made by workers for more free time; while unions press for higher wages, workers concentrate on time as an end in itself. Adjustment to the factory does not come easy: rejection, irregularity, restrictive production practices are commonplace, and the time and motion man’s stop-watch symbolizes the enemy. Some workers internalize the middle-class value of success, just as the latter made a value of the workers’ idea of leisure. But there are cycles of depression and instability in the nineteenth century economy, and for all the increased production, secure work eludes large segments of the labouring population. The economics of cheap labour wins out over steady employment; also a desideratum of employers, and cheap labour undercuts discipline.

Rodgers calls attention to a dual process: industrial economy can make steady workers mobile and turn immigrants with diverse backgrounds into diligent workers. The response to the factory is varied and much depends on the circumstances under which the American economy is encountered. Trade unions seize on the work ethic in speaking for the worker, thus perpetuating the myth of reward, but in turning the ethic to the workers’ advantage a ‘terrible toll’ is exacted: the labour movement has to live with a schism between rhetoric and reality; a pride in work is maintained at the cost of practical alienation.

Rodgers is critical of the ‘modernization’ and ‘acculturation’ theses advanced by Thompson, Gutman, and others. It is true that interdisciplinary borrowing of concepts can simplify complex issues. There is a large body of critical literature surrounding these concepts in their home disciplines. Yet Rodgers concurs with Thompson and Gutman on two matters: ‘industrialization in America, as elsewhere, required a major assault on the existing norms of time and labour, and during the years of that attack the factories were the site of frequent contest’ (Rodgers, 1977: 660). What he disagrees with is Gutman’s suggestion that there were repeated clashes between pre-industrial patterns of behaviour and the industrial setting. He suggests that ‘memory and culture were at the root of these matters’. This argument however succeeds merely in begging the question: what about the culture of the economy? Rodgers himself returned to the problem of constituting working class culture, and is free with the use of concepts like ‘socialization’, ‘culture’, ‘subculture’, ‘generation’. If each generation of workers re-invents a seemingly pre-industrial notion of time as an ideal, then the problem becomes one of ideological continuity since the ‘economy’ cannot be the source of the invention. Witness Rodgers dismissing the possibility that Fall River spinners brought with them a crafts mentality on the grounds that they had been spinning for two generations already. Symbols and values are more tenacious than that: need we quote again the workers of Amiens, ad 1335?

Granted that nineteenth century America fails to fit some theories of modernization. But modernization, and underdevelopment at that, may not ‘apply’ anywhere, in these terms. The crucial question is still the one Thompson, Gutman, and Rodgers as well as a host of anthropologists in Africa, Asia, and America are trying to answer: what are we to make of the rapid changes occurring in particular societies undergoing industrialization. What survives, what changes, how, and why? And in a more complex vein: what are the processes and meanings of transformation, articulation, and/ or contradiction? There is no room for disciplinary chauvinism in this quest. Historians have much to learn from anthropologists but not through uncritical transplantation of multivocal concepts. Anthropologists, on the other hand, have to rid themselves of objectification of historians’ time as if the latter’s accounts are the one sure island of certainty, at least about the past, in the face of complex links between symbols, values, practices, and social experience.

8. Family Time

Suggestive though inconclusive evidence comes from the studies of Tamara Hareven (1977, 1978) and her associates (1978) of ‘family time’ in nineteenth century New England, and of the Amoskeag factory town. Falling into Gutman’s third period at the high point of industrialization, Amoskeag workers recall their experience with pride, as if they were talking about the earlier craft, farm, and mercantile age. The evaluations remain constant: availability and reward of work, good versus bad workers, pride in labour and accomplishment of hand and body, some sympathetic supervisors and some fair treatment from managers. This happens in spite of widespread labour unrest during the period. Significantly, the Amoskeag of the 1920s was favourably contrasted with the Depression era in terms of work continuity, a cycle of work—home linkages, and even the dignity of labour! All this is very different from Pfeffer’s Working for Capitalism (1979), stressing what Thompson calls a more ‘natural rhythm’, except that it does not hark back to the fourteenth century but to the high tide of industrialism. There may be some nostalgia in all this, yet the work/leisure opposition is not sharp, because there is no time for leisure! Women workers may form an as yet little known culture of their own—a. la Gutman—but they also stress the value of labour and its products, for what these secure for home, independence, companionship, respect, and community.

Hareven’s ‘family time’ encounters the ‘tyranny of the clock’: a rhythm different from work discipline where celebration marks the point of entry into the stages of life, continuous and less subject to change than we would expect. However these studies reap some confusion from a contrast between some sort of ‘objective’ time and the slower, more integrated pattern of family time. The latter is not related to other domains of life, merely its contents stand out. Despite this failing the studies grope toward a constitution of otherness in nineteenth century America. Even if Hareven’s ‘historical’ time is too single-minded a contrast to act as an outside measure of difference, the survival of family time is in harmony with the cultural emphasis of Thompson, Gutman, and Rodgers’ studies.

9. Civilizing the Machine

Finally we turn to a historian conscious of the significance of political ideology in the period of American history we considered above. John Kasson (1976) explores the link between republicanism and the commodity market economy of the nineteenth century. Earlier than our other historians, Kasson sees a problematic relation between technology and society in the revolutionary period. As republican values were being formulated, many reacted with caution to the emerging and highly productive economy, warning about a possible loss of virtue. However, the early nineteenth century saw a firm linkage between the market and politics, and the Lowell factory town was hailed as a republican community. Yet by the 1850s the earlier alarm was raised again, and workers’ protests multiplied. We may note with some irony that the cautions raised repeatedly since the late eighteenth century about the success of market production destroying its own ethical foundation should be raised in contemporary America by economists such as Hirsch (1976) and sociologists such as Bell (1978). Circumstances of early America belied the expectations of enthusiastic witnesses to the birth of the market: a cautionary tale brilliantly told by Hirschmann (1977). The hope was that the invisible hand would restrain human passions and produce a new society based on cool rationality, calculation, and restraint.

Kasson argues that the technological ideology dates further back than the mid-nineteenth century; that it was firmly in place sixty years earlier, and the welding of republican values to market and technology was accomplished before the great period of industrialization. In 1830 the USA was still an agrarian society but the ideological context for the later burst of technological innovation had already been created. We may surmise that this linkage of political ideology with the ideology of ‘free’ market production, as an item of faith, may have been the genesis of the powerful (though mistaken) later idea that a particular kind of economy needs a particular kind of polity and politics, and that liberalism is the basis for economic development. Yet this very link was watched with alarm at the birth of the American republic, and the market was distrusted for its potentially erosive effects on republican values.

Chapter IV: Time and the Transformation of the Non-Western World

1. Our Time as Their Time?

In his study of Australian aboriginal societies Sahlins showed us the distance between two ways of understanding ideas and experiences of temporality. But it is a different matter how time may be experienced and understood by the Arunta or Kareira themselves. Since in their terms it cannot be a ‘free-er’ kind of time, it is a different time, categorized and formed differently. Sahlins’s evidence (1972: ch. 1) does not prove an aboriginal ‘leisure’ time but it does demonstrate a different articulation of myth/rite and production. Appropriately enough, another anthropologist, Raymond Firth, writing about another face-to-face society, entitled his study of ritual and economy the Work of the Gods in Tikopia, (1967).

Nevertheless, despite inherent difficulties, the contrast is clear even if not absolute, and not immediately accessible in Western terms. The latter carry us far enough to realize that the fragmentation and separation of time characteristic of advanced industrial societies is meaningless in aboriginal Australia.

Evans-Pritchard’s problem with time is’that he is not speaking about Nuer time at all, but his view of their social structure (1940). The latter appears as a specific categorization of some kind of space-time universal in social life, where individuals pass through segments such as lineages, agegrades, and the like as well as seasons of cultivation and herding. Thus a Nuer ‘concept of time’ becomes illusory because it is the segmentary social structure that is immutable, through which proceed an endless succession of individuals. Ideologies of industrial society intrude here, since time need not be exclusively a linear measuring stick of marked, discrete entities. Several issues come together in the Nuer example: changes and relations among persons are marked in various ways and the social being of persons is constituted through different ‘times’, especially in ritual but also in other aspects of life, which should be referred to each other, rather than to rough and ready (Western) scientific, universal equivalents such as measured time, kinship, economics, and religion.

More recently Turton and Ruggles (1978), following Bloch (1977) and Leach (1961), succeeded in reversing the advance Evans-Pritchard (1939, 1940) made in understanding the cultural categories of time. In a study of Mursi measurement of duration they argue for a universal concept of time, agreeing with Bloch that if ‘different cultures really did have different concepts of time, it is difficult to see how they would be able to communicate with each other through language’ (Turton and Ruggles, 1978: 585). Unfortunately the argument is fallacious and succeeds merely in disposing of the problem by transferring it to another domain. There is nothing wrong with either universalism or relativism as such, but neither is satisfactory alone: each has to be constructed in view of the other. To begin making comparisons we may have to invoke a ‘universal’ horizon but we cannot assume to have done away with the problem by turning around and reaffirming the old approximations, often nothing more than Euro-American folk-models, as proofs of universal categories. These cannot be the sought after universals, since we started out with them in the first place. In the same manner, translatability does not ‘prove’ the universality of concepts since the translation arrived at is the point of contention. Even in physics different worlds have different certainties (or approximations to the latter), and universals themselves are symbolic constructs. The understanding of these constructs has to be deepened further, but not by the voluntaristic assertion of let X among the [...] be Y.

The argument put forward by Turton and Ruggles (1978) is at best incomplete: the initially asserted and seemingly universal time-reckoning, itself a Western ideological notion, is a mere outline, and the indigenous construction (ideological, cultural, and symbolic) is yet to be done. Apart from that, the further step of turning the mirror back into an examination of our own conceptions of time, since scientific measurement is only one of these, and a yet further turn of constituting universals out of this dialectic, are completely ignored. To fall back on the ‘same’ conceptions everywhere leads nowhere, especially when the ‘sameness’ is left implicit without any further discussion. There is no category of time that corresponds to a single truth or reality.

Bloch’s argument for two kinds of time (cyclical and linear, or ritual and pragmatic) is based on a denial of cultural differences. Because there are no absolute differences (if there were we would not be able to communicate), Bloch argues for no differences at all. Pragmatic time is supposed to be the same the world over (we may call it linear, measurable, infrastructural time). It is the time of daily and seasonal practical chores, while cyclical time is created by a religious dread of death (Leach, 1961) or by an obfuscatory priestly-ritual ceremonialism (Bloch, 1977 as well as Turton and Ruggles, 1978).

These arguments privilege the linear: after all, cycles are composed of shorter or longer linear segments—an argument made explicitly by more recent contributions such as Young’s (1989), where a cycle is a mere accumulation of routines and schedules. The next step is to assimilate linear time to measurable clock time, where the clock becomes the standard of comparison and the mediator of translation. Bloch and others end up imposing ‘our’ time and ‘our’ division between ritual and practical reason even more completely than earlier anthropological writings on time-reckoning. They also impose a Western hierarchy: economy dominates and encompasses all other social domains. The alternative to denying absolute differences is not to claim no difference; rather it is a call to understand the nature and kind of difference as well as similarity.

Turton and Ruggles claim to give an ‘untouched’ account of measurement among the Mursi: a curiously ahistorical argument to be making in the late twentieth century! Yet all the concepts they use are translated Western ones: the translation being made into an objective other as if that were the measuring stick of duration fixed forever, for all societies. But what are these universals? We cannot assume all concepts to be the same, sameness having a quantified bias with the further assumption that quantities are qualitatively the same. That without this ‘sameness’ we cannot communicate does not follow since this would refer all complexity and problematic back into a single referent, the latter being somehow independently given.

The reflections of Paul Ricoeur’s are apposite here: ‘Human thought has not produced a universal system of categories capable of embodying a personal experience of time and history itself having a universal validity’ (Ricoeur, 1976: 24). And again: ‘For it to be possible to obtain a perspective on all cultural attitudes to time, there would have to be a non-interpreted, non-immobilized universal time. But time cannot be apprehended in that way. The only conceivable universality is in the opening of each culture to all the others’ (Ricoeur, 1977: 20).

Evans-Pritchard’s incomplete, though to an extent culturally constituted, ‘Nuer time’ is an advance on previous speculation, including Frazer’s and Levy-Bruhl’s, just as Geertz’s (1973) ‘kind of time’ in Bali is an advance on current anthropologies of ‘time-reckoning’. The problem is the continued insistence on finding, against all odds, rough equivalents of (Western) measurement without realizing the symbolized, mediated nature of measurement itself.

There is no immediate access to difference. Anthropological studies of time-reckoning do not succeed in giving their (the other’s) time because they are incomplete. They do not constitute ‘us’, a task that would be necessary to make the contrast with ‘them’ fully dialectical. Furthermore, they assume that they know all about time and command it both as category and value.[5] Turton and Ruggles search the Mursi in view of this kind of time, but is duration what the Mursi measure? Even for the West measurement, whatever that may be, is yet to be constituted culturally and symbolically, and even that will have been only a part of the time story. In exploring time concepts through social relations, the ‘scientific’ norm does not exhaust all ideologies and cosmologies. Time as technique of measurement is not enough, although it may constitute the dominant ideology in the West. Yet when Sahlins contrasts hunting-gathering societies with the capitalintensive economy of Western societies we may point to just as telling a contrast between mid-nineteenth century and twentieth century ‘capitalism’ in America.

What is being ‘measured’ in these cases is the clock time of activities in social domains but the latter are the differentiated domains of economy, polity, and family of the West. Where domains are structured differently, as in Geertz’s Bali, then the question is no longer one of ‘time-reckoning’ but of the kind of time the Balinese have, since they do not have ‘time’ in the Western sense. What Geertz accomplished is the further step of showing the links between symbolic structures which allowed him to raise the time question anew in a more fruitful way.

2. India: Time Disaggregated[6]

Here the extremes coexist: capital-intensive production, commodity market, colonially inherited state of governance and administration in situ for 200 years, on the one hand, and on the other hand the enduring Indian social structure that can be understood in terms of the basic, underlying cultural principle of purity and pollution common to the social characteristics: the separation (hierarchy) of groups into high and low; the division of labour from priest to untouchable sweeper; the endogamy of groups in marriage guarding the boundaries of purity. Louis Dumont (1980) characterized this society as hierarchical where the basic structural relation is that between an encompassing and an encompassed element.

Status and power are, relationally, separated in the link between priest and king (the former being superior), with rule, kingship, bazaar production and exchange, kinship and marriage, articulating in distinct social and regional wholes, in terms of pure and impure. Purity and pollution, being ‘religious’ principles, are linked to notions of sacred order (dharma), ceremonial action in relation to the ritual of sacrifice yielding a hierarchical whole that is sanctified by the gods and cosmic regularities.[7] Religious ideology rather than economics is dominant in this society, yet there is no perfect fit among these symbolic structures: opposing and contrary themes exist in Islamic, Buddhist, and colonial British ideologies along with the emergent commodity market relations and other aspects of British dominance: educational, judicial, and administrative principles and systems. In the pre-colonial situation the bazaar, as distinguished from the market economy, existed in a hierarchical articulation with kingship and rule in terms subject to the sacred order and to the religious principles of purity and pollution throughout the societies of the subcontinent. The success of this kind of society has to be seen in its ability to command people’s beliefs relating to the ends of life, as well as the social relation of people in terms of a sacred, sacrificial ethos.

The major question in India is the local rise and impact of commodity production, exchange value based and profit biased markets that begin to differentiate the economy from other domains. This process cuts across discrete face-to-face societies that are unified only by cultural principles, and at one stroke alters the articulation of indigenous domains in a hierarchical society. The first significant changes are in the division of labour and in the autonomous, entrepreneurial activity of the market, which ‘liberate’ the new domain from being dominated by dharma and other cultural principles. The critical question then is the extent to which Indian societies are still ‘hierarchical’ and how far they are dominated by the ‘economy’?

Here again it is not enough to set up contrasts between a pre-colonial and post-colonial (traditional versus modern?) situation; rather we have to consider the more complex and reciprocal influences in the transformation of Indian societies. How does the commodity market articulate with or contradict ‘holistic’ or ‘hierarchical’ societies?

To answer this question we have to look beyond onedimensional studies of a single ‘field’: economy, religion, kinship, caste, or polity. My own work on indigenous constructions of history, rebellion, ritual, kinship, and bazaar in Bengal allows the linkage of several domains apprehended ideologically and interpreted in terms of cultural categories. We can constitute these domains through the ideologies (values and concepts) of the society in question with each domain participating in the other, exhibiting a holistic relation between parts and totality (Ostor, 1980, 1984a & 1984b; Ostor et al., eds., 1982; Fruzzetti and Ostor, 1984, 1990).

The regional bazaar in Bengal still articulates the production of some foodstuffs, aspects of redistribution, festivals and rituals, principles of purity and power, caste-kinship-family relations, ecological cycles, long-range trade, exchange with non-profit bias, face-to-face social relations, need and use orientation, and handicraft production. The bazaar also symbolizes and uses an integrated, non-differentiated stream of time, parallel to ritual, ecology, family, history, rebellion, and other indigenous constructions of reality. Hierarchy characterizes the bazaar: the principle of sakti (divine female power) still infuses all actions not just celebrations of the Goddess. Sakti appears in the kinship-marriage—caste relations that also participate in the bazaar, and is also linked, in the ideology, to bazaar principles of ability/power (khamata} and thought/time/knowledge fbhabf Respect is placed above calculation, credit is not approved as gain at someone else’s expense, and time-stocks-credit-capital are relatively undifferentiated. All these relations and actions participate in a temporal cycle that is unified to an extent, capable of being intuitively grasped by the participating actor.

Yet this integrated rhythm and cycle in the bazaar does not articulate in any one to one correspondence with markets of commodities and finances, planning and development, central and regional politics, and administration, communal conflict, rebellions and regional challenges to authority. Contradictions emerge precisely because of the imperfect configuration of hierarchy (sacred order) with the overweening domains of market economy, central government, and administration which embody different principles.

Indian bazaars, thus noted, are situated within regions and towns representing parallel orders of time, society, ideology, and locality. The bazaar itself participates in other domains of hierarchy (economy dominated by religious ideology and practice). The bazaar is society and person, not economy-oriented, subject to ideologies that hold across the distinct regional and local societies. With the rise of the market economy, including ancillary institutions and concomitant practices, the economy becomes differentiated, and the market embraces and cuts across regional hierarchies that articulate societal domains in terms of the ideology of the sacred. The new commodity market draws into itself the activities of other domains more centrally than any polity did before, leaving a residue different from hierarchy, yet also not the same as industrial society. The impact of the market can be seen especially in the division of labour, occupation, and the contrast between urban and rural societies. Yet, contrary to expectation, hierarchical society has not been swept away, since the patterns and rhythms of time still parallel each other in kinship, bazaar, ritual, and ceremony.

As commodity markets are increasingly differentiated and command segments of social relations, bazaars still articulate with other domains of hierarchical society, but they are partially transformed by the dominance of exchange values and a profit bias centrally determined by national and world markets. The exchange of market values is not anchored in the same principles, and although it dominates the bazaar, it does not replace the latter because bazaar time is still ‘enchanted’ by ritual, festival, ceremonial, and parallel symbolic structures.[8] Domains of living are integrated to some extent while being dominated by the market economy, and are tending towards greater differentiation of the economy from kinship and religion.

3. Sudan: Time Transformed?[9]

The impact of colonial and world markets is more recent yet more intense and pervasive in the Sudan. Distinct societies, with relatively autonomous subsistence such as the Nuer, are increasingly drawn into central, national markets, a planned commodity economy, and a military-bureaucratic state. Yet there was no lack here of overarching institutions in times past: sultanates, kingdoms (Christian and Islamic), as well as the Madhist (revivalist theocratic) states having embraced the once supposedly pristine tribal societies.

What is new in the processes transforming the Sudan is the convergence of different regions and different societies subject to the effects of market economy, and the accelerated development effort planned both politically and economically. At the same time the integration of cycles and domains of living is challenged. Development projects cut across the use-oriented, non profit-based economies, and do not respect the structural time that, in the past, articulated the kind of economy, ideology, and kinship these societies evolved over the previous millennia. There follow regional imbalances and the disintegration of the hierarchically integrated domains— under Islam or African religion as ideologies—encompassing, and not leaving to its own devices an autonomous market institution. Thus the economy becomes liberated from its links with and concomitant controls by kinship, ritual, and (societal) ideology; wage labour replaces integrated activities of the past, and ceases to articulate with other aspects of experience in long-term patterns and recurrent regularities; the suq no longer acts in concert with other domains of life but responds in part to the world market (hence the significance of Gezira cotton for the Sudanese national economy), and in part to what the market economy can handle of the unified time-credit—capital aspects of social relations which were part of kinship and religion before (see p. 49 above). As these become separated the suq is deformed by responding to the market, and pre-market social institutions are burdened by new demands with which they cannot meaningfully configure. Since the relation between time, economy, religion, and kinship has changed, the market is now dominant, with the categories and patterns of time representative of a different society still existing in partial articulation.

In the past kings, sultans, and dominant lineages have appropriated a part of the production. Some have benefited more from the implications of an integrated society than others. Trade was linked to Islam, and overarching polities appropriated a portion of trade and wealth from exchange. Yet never before were these societies faced with the demands of world financial and commodity prices (cotton, oil, seeds, and World Bank loans): never were they biased toward profit and exchange values rather than persons, kinship, and religion in social life, and use values in production. This, of course, does not mean that these societies were at any time ‘egalitarian’ in the western sense; only that the ‘economy’ in capital-intensive, commodity terms was not dominant, and that once it becomes so, the conditions for articulating different kinds of time in society also change. Today what may make ‘economic’ sense in relation to the world market may also intensify social inequality, regional imbalances, and problems of national integration. Hence, export-oriented development become a culprit in being determined by world markets. As a result different kinds of time emerge in trade, production, and exchange, being no longer balanced by an integrated rhythm or flow in their link with Islam, kinshipmarriage, and polity.

The Sudan is similar to India in that it was also subject to British colonialism, but even more so in that small kingdoms alternated with less centralized societies in vast regions, and an overarching ideology (Islam in this case rather than Hinduism) commanded people’s beliefs to a greater or lesser extent while other, ancestral beliefs articulated with or confronted Islam. Age-grade and segmentary lineage societies appear to be more ‘egalitarian’ than the ‘hierarchical’ societies of South Asia. The Sudanese suq, however, is close to the Bengali bazaar. Here too the market articulates with other indigenous domains such as gabila, (‘tribe’), tariga (Islamic brotherhoods, literally ‘ways’), ayla-usra-awlad (kinship, family) relations. Islam is a way of life in the suq with Arabic as both the language of the Koran and of ‘submission’, the literal meaning of Islam, as well as the instrument, together with trade, of Islamizing non-Arab peoples. Hence, also, the importance of dress, demeanor, and the personal example of living habits: merchants are the primary means of spreading Islam in the Eastern Sudan.

Time in the suq combines several cyclical and long rhythms of activity and ideology: the Islamic year (as practices, beliefs, and values) ranging from daily to annual action (pilgrimage, sacrifice, fasting, redistribution, and many festivals); patterns of long-range trade and production (local produce taken out and outside goods imported in accordance with the rhythm of seasons); cyclical trading practices (such as kambalaya and other ways of turning over stock-capital-credit through time, based on values of respect, honour, and trust among merchants); deep-seated notions of self, independence, and freedom as the ways of the suq-, equality and justice as a part of Islam; and finally the km and marriage cycles (especially father’s brother’s daughter and mother’s brother’s daughter marriage) that link gabila and the suq through alliance in lineage as well as in trade relations.

Changes come through administration, centralized politics, national and world markets, and the push for development. New sources of credit introduce calculation: demands issue from beyond gabila society, and profit, surplus production become overriding concerns. Different terms and cycles of payment, new production requirements and social relations, including local and central governments, political parties, and occupational structures loosen and shake the integration and articulation of domains. The large-scale movement of labourers frees work from being tied to local societies. Development projects are set down among pastoral and subsistence agricultural people, where ecological cycles of transhumance predominate and shifting cultivation returns to the original plot of land in seven to nine years.

Wage labour appears, a mobile working force develops, trade unions begin to organize, ethnic conflicts erupt, giving the appearance of class-like groups in place of the ‘tribes’ of the recent past, and politics-economics begin to be differentiated from religion, family, and tribe. Previously these small-scale societies went through the cycles of time together’. in production, age-grades, ritual and festivals, and the life cycle. What was articulated now becomes fragmented, and the integrated flows of time as experienced previously yield to the demands of the short-term in these societies also. Tensions emerge between market, administration, gabila, and tariga relations, and time is no longer enchanted by ceremonial.

4. Algeria: Time Disenchanted

Bourdieu’s inquiry into the transformation of Algerian society (1979) is one of the few devoted explicitly to categories of and orientation to time. Under the impact of colonial ‘economic development’ the unified cycle of production breaks up into several aspects: credit becomes differentiated from overall social and ethical relations, ritual and kinship no longer parallel the rhythms of the seasons; ethos and economy become linked under different conditions (calculation, gain, and profit become separated as ends). All in all, under the impact of the commodity market, time is no longer enchanted by related activities of ceremonial, ritual, kinship, polity. Under the pre-market system, family, production activity, and occupation partake of the same cycle of time: male-female, high-low, wet-dry, and other category oppositions are of a design, and the order of the universe is found in symbolic, structural parallels (e.g. the Kabyle house). However, today, action and practices are no longer integrated into the same totality; kinship, economy, and polity partake of different cycles of time.

In the transformed economy the customary dispositions to and apprehensions of time become changed and persons are no longer equipped to master new conditions. The world becomes ‘disenchanted’ because time is no longer ‘the moving image of eternity’ (Bourdieu, 1979: 26). Two major groups are noted by Bourdieu in the production cycle: unskilled workers and the skilled labour élite. For the former, life is arbitrary and irregular, and the new cycles of time cannot be grasped intuitively as a unity. Traditions are swept away, yet it is impossible to work out a rational life-plan. The labour élite is also differently positioned in the emergent society. The modern apartment expresses this transformation: it satisfies the linked conditions of new status (earning, position, and family life); it requires adaptation to a new system, practices, and representations; it demands a new kind of behaviour (isolates, individualizes, and limits life in contrast to village houses); and it fosters different values and social relations. The élite becomes separated from its fellow beings in the shanty towns, in a way that the conditions for crossing the threshold are actually the boundary between classes.

Bourdieu’s thoughtful and suggestive interpretation is applicable beyond the limitation of a particular case. Capitalism comes to the Third World in a way different from what happened in Europe. That way is not through an internally evolving society but through acceleration from the outside. In Europe the entrepreneur produced the capital-intensive economy in a non-capitalist context, hence the inventiveness of the process: today the world market produces entrepreneurs. In the encounter of commodity market and Third World societies we need not look for interacting values; the value transformation is both a precondition and a consequence of economic transformation. Transformation comes about through the mediation of individuals unequally placed in culture and society. Thus there is the possibility of a creative, therefore new, re-invention of ‘capitalism’ in the Third World, not in the manner that the invention took place under the original conditions in Europe, since the different rhythms of economic structure and ideology coexist at the moment. The past and future are different because cycles of production differ in a ‘pre-capitalist’ context. Ethos and economy are linked, honour and respect as against calculation and waste are ‘temporal categories of consciousness’ through which economic practices can be understood.

Chapter V: America Today

1. Sacred Time

What of American social life in towns and cities, let alone the countryside, in more recent times? Is it all a question of fragmented linear time? We saw that nineteenth century American societies were very different from what we would have expected. Let us turn to a study that should provide part of the answer to these questions from the more recent past. In a remarkable work entitled The Living and the Dead (1959),[10] Lloyd Warner gave us an insight into the symbolic life of Americans. He studied ‘Yankee City’ (Newburyport, Massachusetts) rituals in much the same manner as the Murngin of Australia (1937). There are many pasts in this American town, and many kinds of time. We recognize de Tocqueville’s ‘aristocratic’ time; trees still symbolize the passing of generations, sacred and secular rituals make a timeless past contemporary, and values attach to symbols, making the continuities real. Warner looks at politics, holidays and celebrations, cemeteries and the Christian ritual year, in a rich, cultural, symbolic work that was written over thirty years ago, yet resembles, in its sweep and power, the more recent achievements of cultural, structural, and symbolic studies in anthropology.

Warner selects significant events and individuals to reflect on cultural meanings in a particular community, and by implication, in American society in general. Fundamental values are expressed in symbols, the former being a part of the latter’s meaning. Symbols in turn refer back to the social context and constitute the mutual values of group or society.

In interpreting the rise and fall of a local politician, Warner utilizes the concept of the hero. Heroes express fundamental cultural themes. These themes are symbolic statements that organize the beliefs and values of a community. ‘Abstract principles, precepts, and moral judgments are ... more easily felt and understood, and more highly valued, when met in a human being endowed with symbolic form that expresses them’ (:14).

The particular hero, Biggy Muldoon, changed little as a person through the process; what changed ‘were the symbols, and their component beliefs and values that were attached to him ... symbols that first made him a hero ... and then ... a “fool” and even a “traitor” ’ (:16). His fortunes dramatize some basic conflicts of American society, especially those around technological change. ‘Symbolically he supported the values of progress and change against those of conservatism, which support the moral aesthetic, and intellectual worth of the past’ (:42). In thus challenging the authority of the old families and the principles by which the latter establish control, Biggy posed a threat to an ‘aristocratic’ way of life. He then became a ‘traitor’ and even a ‘clown’ because his challenge also had the potential of turning him into a ‘martyr’. The latter sacrifices himself or some precious object for moral or civic principles. He may achieve this status for only a social segment, meaning that there are opposing values in the culture and groups strengthen their cohesion through such a symbol. ‘Traitors’ are made when the hero of superior status identifies himself with the lower orders and the judgement of his own class is accepted by the entire community, and then martyrs become traitors. The clown or trickster plays a different role by releasing moral and logical restrictions. Laughter may be directed outward or inward: it acts to maintain the moral order, but also frees a person from morally disapproved wishes. All these were bound up in Yankee City (and American) politics. Biggy’s initial success conformed to the American myth: a hero against all odds. Later what made him a hero for some, turned him into a martyr, villain, and clown for others. This progression occurred because Biggy unlike others (Lincoln for example) did not play the game of social mobility according to the old rules. ‘When they [other ‘low fellows’] did so, the values, beliefs and themes which permeate the basic structure of our society were easily attached to them by those who became their followers.’ Biggy tried to introduce other values which threatened the whole symbolic order.

Different kinds of time are expressed not only in the symbolism of politics but also of the past. Yankee City ritualized the past, and Warner analysed the symbolic meaning of the town’s celebration of its 300^th birthday. The celebration selected significant events from American history, not only portraying what happened but also what the town wished its history to have been and not to have been. The preparations for the great procession of floats were an ‘unintentional, impersonal, secular ritual of consecration’ (:120). Rational Yankee City citizens could not call up the ancestral souls through totemic rites, but they did call up ‘images that evoke for the living the spirit that animated the generation, that embodied the power and glory of yesterday’ (:121). The procession made the past present and perfect through 42 floats divided into six periods: The Creation, Before Man Came (4); the Beginning of Life on the New Earth (2); The Early Fathers (8); The New Nation (8); Climax: The Power and the Glory (8); the Aftermath to Greatness (9); We Endure (2).

Warner interprets the procession through the themes of the Permanent City and the Moving Frontier: the expanding world horizon and the decreasing role of the home town within it, the value of progress and its doubting, covert contradiction. ‘... the ... composed city, unordered progress, technological and cultural advancement, the wilderness and the untouched world, all are part of the city’s feeling toward the frontier’ (:209). However the frontier is also motion and time. The city is the permanent, proud New England ch ilization, while the frontier moves on. The collective rite of the procession also brings home the autonomy of the individual and the symbol. This was not a sacred but a rationalistic celebration: the words of the fathers were detached and became moveable symbols. Once this happens individuals are free to choose from among them, and ‘each generation is partly liberated from the thralldom and absolute authority of the preceding generation.... These sacred and secular objective symbols of the past are present, free from the control of their creators and their contexts of origin, as they move, may radically change their meanings and the manner of their acceptance; the sacred word may become secular, or the secular marks of economic and political agreement of the [Massachusetts Bay Colony] Charter semi-sacred’ (:214). Thus the sign becomes autonomous (just as the individual), dependent on the ‘values and beliefs of society for its freedom of movement’ (:217).

Not surprisingly there is a specific time aspect to this interpretation. ‘The significance of time in Yankee City is not in the here and now but as it once was, in an enduring Yesterday that has remained while present time has gone elsewhere’ (:221). Of the many kinds of time, despite the dominant notion of a unitary character, Warner considers ‘objective’ (clock) time which is applied to the regulation of social time. Human values are attributed to this time, and thus the life cycle, social status, and transitional activities of the self are measured in this way. Symbols of time also appeal to our species-being: the biological organism in its environment. Thus three categories refer to different realities: ‘objective time and space references to physical, social, and self phenomena: non-logical systems of feeling, which refer to the same three; and species sensations, which order experience about the objective world, beyond other organisms as they are socially related to each other, and the self as being apart’ (=225).......

Having considered secular rituals and political/historical time, Warner moves on to symbols, both secular and sacred. Here he analyses the symbolic life of the many associations people form in Yankee City. The significance of these groups and their rituals is that they participate in a dual tendency of American society: one towards the increasing formation of individuals into autonomous units, the other towards the unification of segmenting units into overall symbol systems. Symbolic relations also dominate the link between the living and the dead. Memorial Day rituals are sacred because they relate the living to sacred things. They are a cult because participants are not formally organized into a church but combine informally to order sacred action. ‘The cult system of sacred belief conceptualizes in organized form sentiments common to everyone in the community about death’ (:278). Cemeteries are cities of the dead, collective representations of social values and of the ways persons fit into the ‘secular world of the living, and the spiritual society of the dead’. Ceremonial connects spiritually the living and the dead. The funeral ‘removes the time-bound individual from control by the forward direction of human time’ (:281). In the minds of the living the dead are in a timeless realm; living time cannot be understood without the time of the dead. The latter is sacred, uncontrollable, suspended, eternal. The sacred problem of a cemetery is to express this through symbols; the secular problem is to rid the living of the decaying corpse in a fixed social place, where the living can also find peace. Cemeteries too have a life span: when no further burials take place in it a graveyard loses its quality as a living sacred symbol and becomes a historical monument. In less stable communities this last process does not happen and the land is reused: thus reflecting the people’s disregard of the cemetery as a value in the links with the dead and/or the past.

Finally, we consider with Warner purely sacred symbols. Here we have come to study, in some detail, Christian values, myths, and rites. The major division is between Catholics and Protestants. The latter brought with them a tension between a revolt against authority, religious authority, and local as well as individual autonomy. Furthermore, Protestant worship rejected the Catholics’ visually connected symbols and shifted to the greatest degree possible to oral—auditory ones. The final authority is the written word, tending towards rationality in concepts, and leaving the evocative aspects of symbolism to hymnals, preachings and, in some cases, very emotional participation by the congregation. At one end of the scale spiritual ecstasy takes over and at the other the rationality of science. In the latter case the grace to believe is disallowed, eliminating the ‘sacred symbols from the mental life of many of those who once believed’ (:336).

The masculinity of Protestant worship eliminated the cult of the Virgin Mary. If Mary stood for symbolic moral approval of the species then Protestantism was a movement against the values placed on species-life by the traditional church. The more recent revival of the cult re-established the focus of species-life: woman as procreative partners, bearing and caring for children. Mother’s Day and other celebrations of the family in Protestant churches is an aspect of this. Puritanism was authoritarian, male-dominated, with a religious symbolism from which female elements were banished. This cutting of ties to family through the mother may have contributed to autonomizing and freeing the individual, but also separating monads from their species-being.

Sacred sexuality, on the other hand, transforms the specieslife and the values/beliefs of a society. Sexuality, procreation, and marriage are central to Christian symbolism. ‘The harsh, not to say cruel and vengeful qualities of the father image are transformed into the gentle, loving, peaceful son of the woman. The fighting, aggressive, male Jehovah, becomes a gentle, peaceful male Christ, capable of loving men as well as women, not in an erotic way but within the limits and bounds of the moral rules of a brother. In Christ as the brother, men and women are protected from sexual anxiety and fear because they share common bonds of incest with him. He obeys the moral rules as they themselves hope they will act in any situation’ (:388).

Sacred symbols also act to link the notions of time, so important to the community, with species and family so important to Christianity. The sacred year follows the life cycle of Jesus. Thus the Christian calendar is ‘infused with the ultimate values and beliefs of the moral order ....’ Each year it acts out a story about the symbolic significance of man’s existence; a cycle that begins and ends in the same place. This sacred time transformed both ‘social time’ and ‘technological (objective) time’ into the ‘powerful symbols of the life span of a god man’ (:400). The different ‘times’ are thereby bound to the significant crises of human individual experience.Technological time thus yields to the crises of birth, life, and death. Ordinary existence, secular mortality, sequences of past events and future projections disappear into ‘the liturgical stillness of an eternal present’ (:401). ‘Sacred time relates in one system the rational and verifiable references of objective time—of calendar, clock, and construct—to the feeling, moods, and significances of the emotional and non-rational orderings of social time and those of the species level’ (:418).

We may note in criticism, without taking away from Warner’s remarkable achievement, that it is a mistake to single out ‘objective’ time as an outside measuring stick to which everything can be referred as an impartial arbiter. This kind of time is also a symbolic construct, mediated through Western ideologies. In India planetary motions are linked to a cycle of time with quite different affect. The same confusion comes up again with Warner’s linking of something ‘objective’ with chronological time in American history, a reality that can be discovered incontrovertibly and absolutely. ‘Scientific’ objectivity is also ideological, in that it gives a value as well as concept/category context to time, becoming one of the kinds of time in advanced industrial societies. We give ‘objective’ time its character and value, and apply its standards to other domains of life. Warner realizes this when he suggests that the sacred year reconciles social and scientific time, thus transforming time values for the community of the faithful.

This long digression into a single work was necessary to establish that different kinds of time continue to be categorized, experienced, valued, and symbolized in American societies to this day: ecological and seasonal cycles; clock time; scientific time with its variations from micro-seconds to light years; [11] fragmented work time and leisure or free time; historical cycles; social time; a telescoped secular-ritual time of the past; associational and political time; and finally the eternal, unchanging moment and cycle of sacred time.

2. Limits to Growth, Cultural Contradictions, and Metronomic Societies

Recovering sacred time in America may be welcome and beneficial but what is the overall position today? Have there not been fundamental changes since the 1950s? Has not life become more fragmented, individualistic, unequal, unsure, and problematic for many people in the United States? On the other hand, have not some prospered? Have there not been successful, almost revolutionary transformations for minorities and women in American society? If in one sense the more things change the more they remain the same, in another the opposite is true, which is merely to highlight the complexities facing us if we want to discuss in parallel time and social transformations today. On the one hand we can recognize many kinds of time in the West (in view of the situation in non-Western societies), on the other, it is difficult to apprehend American society as a whole in terms of the relation between time and social change. Here, for the first time, my discussion becomes sketchy and speculative. However, I shall attempt to trace some of the contemporary manifestations of the argument I have advanced about Western societies.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the long-term expectations of capital-intensive production and commodity markets are not being borne out. In Hirsch’s perceptive study (1976), the early successes of the market rest on a pre-market social ethic. The sociological arguments of Bell and the historical political economy of Hirschmann complement Hirsch’s account (see Chapter III above). Hirsch argues that absolute social limits are placed on the market: in contrast to the material economy, which is infinitely extensible through technological innovation, the positional economy has definite social restraints. With the increasing social limits to growth, the ability of advanced industrial societies to ride out cyclical crises (occasioned by a search for new avenues to secure surpluses) becomes ever more problematic. Sociability declines, crowding and absolute scarcity dominate the positional economy. Additional time is needed for consumption and greater income is needed to maintain the same position in society.

The ethical basis of social behaviour is ignored, the very success of capitalism erodes the pre-capitalist ethos which made that success possible. The contrary tendencies of collectivization and individualism intensify after 150 years of development, and economic inequality increases while different kinds of freedom proliferate. The earlier ethical injunctions no longer correspond to institutions. Hirsch’s work highlights the importance of concepts, dispositions, and values of time (and the possible ideological continuities reaching into the more distant past) when increased pressures are exerted, through scarcity, on the secular (short- and long-term) demands of linear and cyclical time.

Daniel Bell’s landmark study of cultural contradictions in American capitalism appeared in the same year as Hirsch’s (paperback edition in 1978) and advanced a broader yet parallel argument from sociology. Bell’s thesis is the disjunction between the realms of contemporary society: techno-economic structure, polity, and culture. Tension and contradictions arise from the bureaucracy and hierarchy in the first, the ideal of equality in the second, and the fulfilment of self in the third. When puritan ethics no longer trammel the economy, only hedonism remains and production turns to the self-centred demands of culture. The polity, increasingly autonomous, cannot reconcile equality and representation, individual and collective ends.

In opposing current trends Bell calls for a liberalism created by conjoining three actions: ‘the reaffirmation of our past, for only if we know the inheritance from the past can we become aware of the obligation to our posterity; recognition of the limits of resources and the priority of needs, individual and social, over unlimited appetite and wants; and agreement upon a conception of equity which gives all persons a sense of fairness and inclusion in the society ...’ (Bell, 1978: 282).

Partial, empirical confirmation of Bell’s and Hirsch’s claims comes from an important study of individualism and commitment in American life by Bellah and his associates (Bellah, et al., 1985). Echoing and extending arguments and concerns from de Tocqueville to Hirschmann, the authors argue that an apparently unrestrained individualism is threatening civic virtues and private interest is overwhelming the public good. Individual fulfilment, rather than equality and other values, seems to be winning out and poses a fundamental challenge to the collective survival of the republic. Evidence of decline is found everywhere; love, self, marriage, face to face relationships, associations, citizenship, and religion. Like Bell, Bellah et al. see much more in religion than an autonomous domain of society. For Bell religion is the source of morality and ethics that ensured the achievements of American polity and economy. Religious ethics undergird social relations (public and private), and their erosion threatens dire consequences. For Bellah and his colleagues the declining role of religion in public life and citizenship is equally alarming.

It is not all doom however: Bellah et al. find a glimmer of hope in the revival of ‘a public virtue that is able to find political expression’ (1985: 271). In an eloquent concluding passage they call attention to the values still held outside the modern West, in the ‘practices of life, good in themselves, that are inherently fulfilling’, in ‘work that is intrinsically rewarding’, in ‘commitment to those we love, and civic friendship toward our fellow citizens’, and in ‘common worship, in which we express our gratitude and wonder in the face of the mystery of being itself’ (:295).

In criticism we may note that these outstanding studies are written from within the dominant time perspective of the West; that of linear, measurable time. They follow linear projections from the past, through the present, to the future, and justly call our attention to the contradictions and dangerous consequences of current ideas and practices. They see the decline and fall of the bourgeois world (though eclipsed today by the more precipitate fall of the communist one), but they are less clear about what is emerging. To see the outlines of what is becoming, we have to include in our inquiry the non-Western world, as well as the more distant and recent pasts of all societies. Values are to be gained, not just lost, as E.P. Thompson put it, and the values critics are looking for may still be held in the West by people and groups in a dominated position—minorities, women, people in less ‘central’ regions and localities in cities, towns, and countryside. And, there is the time of human and transcendental occasions to be regained in the manner of practices still alive in parts of the non-Western world.

In one of the few book-length, anthropological studies of time, Fabian’s Time and the Other (1983) attempts to link a rather gloomy survey of ‘our time’ in the West with imperialism, exploitation, and the ‘allochronism’ of anthropology. Fabian rightly notes that anthropologists often deny coevalness to the societies they study: being located in definite space and time, anthropology fashions its ‘other’ in a timeless dimension. This is a significant, potentially fruitful line of inquiry; unfortunately Fabian does not make the most of it. Having made a promising, critical beginning he is too eager to jump to the unequal relations between Western and non-Western societies. In the end he does not constitute the time of coevalness in any society and thus considerably weakens his case. Nor does he provide a comparative study of time as category and value, although he makes an attempt to place time in a global context. In Fabian’s hands time becomes an instrument of hegemony and domination, with anthropology bearing a heavy share of responsibility.

Fabian’s extravagant claims are not established and remain polemic possibilities. How does anthropology dominate and how does time dominate anthropology? What is time in this context? Fabian writes from within the Western ideology and his times (physical, mundane, typological, inter-subjective) are the times of the West. Paradoxically, Fabian tells us almost nothing about the time of his ‘other’ and uses ‘allochronism’ only as a meta-critique of anthropology. The direction he takes does not allow him to consider ideas of time as indigenous, analytical, and interpretive categories. The implication is that once the (bad) contemporary world is replaced by another (braver) world then the time question (in societies as well as anthropology) will also be somehow resolved. The problem with the argument is that it criticizes anthropology but fails to draw significant conclusions for anthropology. It is in too much of a hurry to indict the West but does not explain how imperialism and exploitation are due to the anthropologist’s time, nor is the possible lesser claim (that anthropology may be an instance of what is wrong with the West) demonstrated. This is a pity because the issues are important and deserve better treatment. Further, Fabian neglects to set out how anthropology is to be written now, in the light of all that he finds reprehensible. He comes close to saying that anthropology is an impossible project because of its past and present burdens. But he steps away from the latter claim only to suggest that a coevalness may yet rescue anthropology. Just how he does not tell us and fails to discuss the ways coeval anthropology would relate to the works he considered and dismissed. How much of current and previous anthropology is to survive, if any?

Taken together, the studies of Bell, Hirsch, Bellah, and others confirm the assumptions of our starting point. Time is not singular in the advanced industrial societies and it is changing before our eyes. They also confirm the dominance of the linear, measurable, clock time, to which we have also alluded, since it is from within the dimensions of that time that their prognostications are made. The images of increasing scarcity, contradictions, and individualism in clockwork societies are cast in the same mould as the assumptions in terms of which the interpretations themselves are offered. The concept of time is linear and measurable, and follows the trajectory of developments (in separate domains such as economics, politics, or culture) recognized and constituted in the recent past, reaching straight into the future. Hirsch, Bell, and the others present a series of possibilities from one, maybe even the dominant, point of view. But their warnings come alongside the continuing potential of creative transformation. Other categories and values of time are still alive in American culture even if in a non-dominant position. Given the vast changes still going on or indicated in the advanced industrial societies, these categories and values may emerge in newly invented and as yet unpredictable social forms and relationships.

In a remarkable study of time and space in Europe and America between 1880 and 1918, Kern (1983) brings together many of the strands pursued separately by other students of culture and society. Kern’concentrates on the experiences and senses of time through the linked and parajlel, rather than causally related changes in technology, society, literature, music, and the visual arts. Central to his argument is the blow given to absolute time: James Joyce declares that all time is relative to the system by which it is measured and Albert Einstein affirms that temporal coordinates are relative to a specific system of reference (1983:18).

The greatest difference with previous epochs is the invention and private variety of times. If public time is subject to speed, fragmentation, and measurement by clocks, so private time is varied, reversible, and non-measurable. While time is no longer an absolute, unidirectional progression made up of discrete units, and while it is stated to be in flux and flow, clock time emerges as the mediator among the many, differing ‘times’. While not absolute, clock time is accessible, capable of retaining and reconciling variations. Perhaps for this reason the public versus the private becomes the central opposition, and the varieties of the present and of private time are increasingly elaborated. The process is not one of accumulating idiosyncracies—Kern’s deliberations concern collective ideals and valuations, characterizing whole societies through a period in time.

Kern concludes with a paradox: measurable time becomes a commonplace only to be challenged by private time and the senses of the present. The simultaneity of many times, mediated by measurable linear time, has both temporal and more significantly spatial consequences in society, politics, and religion (1983: 315). Yet not all is of a piece—opposing ideas exist and while Kern does not emphasize these, he is at least aware of them. It is well to recall here the potential significance of non-dominant categories and values in societies experiencing change.

Recent works of social science recognize the continuities of time in advanced industrial societies. Young (1988), Zeru-bavel (1981), and others emphasize the cyclical aspects of time in contemporary European and American societies. Inspired, in part, by biological and psychological research, students of time today stress the ‘natural rhythms’ and ‘biological clocks’ underlying much of social life. Schedules, timetables, and planning calendars all point to recurrent, cyclical activity in institutions and social groups. The role of celebration (sacred and non-sacred) and ritual in politics, sports, and everyday life is also recognized, and cyclical time is restored to a significant, albeit still subordinate, position alongside the dominant linear time.

However, the nature and position of some restored cycles are still at issue in relation to the society as a whole. Recurrent tasks, routines, and circadian rhythms are not cyclical in the sense of the sacred (cf. Chapter II). Each repeated task is a linear segment within which the arrow of time still dominates.

Hence the relation between cycle and line is not clear in American cultural terms, so the cyclical time of Zerubavel and Young remains secular, unlike the holistic time of the sacred or even the celebration of human occasions. The contrasts between different cultural versions of time stand out more clearly when we attempt to view the societies of the West as wholes. The question then becomes not the presence or absence of cyclical time in Europe or America (we have already answered that in Chapter III) but the cultural constitution of time in different social domains and the relations of hierarchy, equality, dominance and hegemony within and among domains and times. It may be instructive now to consider the problems of time in relation to a particular social group which experiences time in advanced industrial societies with particular force, the case of the aged in America.

3. Age, Time, and Ritual

Age is a special problem in America where the very notion places the elderly in a liminal position: structurally outside social bounds, superfluous, and expendable. The aged become a social problem because they are not in the producing economy (note the parallels with minorities, the unemployed, and welfare recipients). They are ignored until they are organized as political pressure groups, consumers of goods and services. Even in this case they have greater difficulties in gaining access to services because of the scarcity and fragmentation of time in American society. As time becomes fragmented and individuals become increasingly autonomous, the elderly become mere charges. Note the terms ‘care’, ‘nursing’, and ‘delivery’, emphasizing incompetence, dependence, infirmity, and the like, pointing to mere decrepitude, which is held separately in other societies as only one of several possible things that can be recognized universally, yet age and power may also be linked differently. Thus in India bur a. is not merely old but ripe, potent, wise, and powerful. Furthermore gurujan (elders) are respected with attributes of divinity and sacredness, quite separately from the problems of infirmity, senility, decline.

Age is inevitably linked to time, society, and in turn to ideology. In the United States this means linear time and capital-intensive production in a ‘democratic’ society. Open-ended, cumulative, measured time emphasizes change. In other societies there is hardly anything approximating this: cyclical, plural, non-measured, non-fragmented time is not time in the same sense. Yet in both kinds of societies the question cannot be considered without discussing other domains of social behaviour since symbolism links age, time, ritual, production, and authority. Hence, we would expect that the transformations of age and time parallel changes in other domains. Old folk, senior citizens, the aged constitute a separate category and a special problem. But functional equivalents of the ‘aged’ in every society cannot yield hypotheses about universal genealogical position or even gerontocracy since categories, actions, social relations have to be constituted first, and cannot be assumed. The concomitant questions of power, control, dominance, production, and ritual must be examined throughout the society, not just in pre-established segments. Such a constructivist approach depends on comparison and on the (ideological) interpretation of behaviour.

Age, time, and ritual are linked to the question of the individual in American society. Here Dumont’s distinction of person and individual helps clarify the problem. The individual as an autonomous unit allows the abstraction of the aged from the rest of society. This is reinforced by the elderly being cut off from economic and political (i.e. productive) ‘roles’, the person being split up into role-performances—a circumstance that is meaningless in an integrated, holistic society where the whole person acts in integrally linked social domains. What is the culture of the aged in America in relation to class, religion, and work? Especially work since the work ethic is contradicted by the widespread recognition that most workers will not attain the rewards available to the few. Further questions relate to the secularization and the lack of enchantment in the lives of the aged. The time of the elderly is not enchanted by ritual and myth that is shared throughout society. Individuals, as de Tocqueville stated, are condemned unto themselves alone. Mere age becomes a marker of status, separation, role, bereft of value and wisdom. The link between generations is cut and the past no longer informs the present.

In the United States atomized time and fragmented domains separate work and home, contributing to the measurement and categorization of age. Schneider’s American Kinship (1968) suggests that the elderly would have particular significance in the home, family, and kin domain, yet this domain is in a subordinated position in society. In comparison, precisely these aspects of social relations are left to surviving pre-capitalist formations in Africa and Asia, where the emerging domains of economy and polity cannot cope with integration, holism, and hierarchy (cf. Bourdieu’s suggestive work). Thus, in America, ‘homes’ for the aged try to reconstitute the family-kin domain but in a separate way, detached from the rest of society. The reconstitution of the elderly in America as a society with its own rituals (a la Myerhoff) would run into problems because in our African and Asian examples society as a whole passes through cycles, grades, rituals, and experiences production, power, and the sacred. At least the parts act in relation to the whole or an understanding and experience of it. The elderly left to themselves with their esoteric and feeble rites, without disturbing the rest of society, may be just what the latter wants, but this would be inconceivable in the pre-industrial societies of Africa and Asia from which the examples of integrative, holistic ritual are derived. These lessons cannot be transplanted directly since the articulation of domains in the two kinds of society differs, persons are differently positioned in time, ritual, and other domains, and the domains themselves are differently oriented to the whole society. Ritual, symbol, and myth are not a mere reflection of the social and/or economic base. Society must also be constituted (partly through ritual) in terms of category and ideology. Going further, ritual may be constitutive of time, age, and person, and hence symbolic and cultural approaches acquire a new significance in the comparative understanding of societies. Though many would claim it today, few can actually demonstrate just how ritual constitutes reality. More often than not the problem devolves into a mere minimalist claim: ritual as police, expressing and resolving social conflict and tension.

The problem with ritual is that in other parts of the world rites are acted out still, in many cases in integrated social contexts with everyone participating in the same universe. The separate world of the old in America, in a dominated, isolated position even if re-invented through ritual, remains detached, with the significance of symbolic action unrelated to the rest of society. In part this is the reason for the lack of ritual in the later phases of the course of American life. Though crises are much emphasized, divorce, death, illness, mourning are not ritualized, except in hastening a communal amnesia, a denial of the possibility that ritual constitutes those realities or, to put it differently, rituals are meant to deny and isolate, not to constitute and transcend.[12]

Because it ignores the cultural nature of domains and the articulation of features of structure and process, the social science of age and aging reproduces a lineal progression of time in other societies, past and present. Here I can do no more than call attention to category, domain, person, structure, and process. But the disciplinary problems of social science surrounding the question of age will not be resolved till comparative cultural and historical studies of the kind outlined here are carried out in advanced industrial as well as other societies. Studies of the elderly in America are particularly marked by unexamined assumptions regarding generation, measurable time, linear chronology: ‘life cycle’ is a misnomer since in actuality no cycles are studied. Concepts are arranged into recurrent types but do persons circulate through these typologies? Do groups go through the life cycle? Who returns where? ‘Life crisis’ also proceeds from Euro-American assumptions and highlights universal stages of birth, maturity, and death, begging the question of time and cultural meaning in different societies. Notions of cycle, crisis, and course reaffirm the older notions of age and stage typologies. Even the more sophisticated recent anthropological studies select the ‘old’ for special attention across societies, noting but not discussing the differences in the cultural understanding of age. Rather than speak of age in abstract, universal terms it may be more helpful to think of persons in and through time in particular societies. All societies recognize persons as sentient beings, but not in the same way, in the same cycles, passing through the same stages. As with teligion, kinship, and economy, so there are problems with typologies of age.

By resorting to ‘cycle’, ‘crisis’, and ‘generation’, anthropologists avoid facing the problems of time. Age thus becomes a part of linear, measurable, universal, but unconstituted time. ‘Crisis’ appeals to supposed universals without establishing meaning. ‘Generation’ is too imprecise to refer to a group and, as Laslett (1979) argued recently, it subsumes a whole host of unexamined meanings. The notion of ‘cycle’ should, in the first instance, contradict ages, stages, and generations. Yet all these are offered together, ‘analytically’. What can analysis mean here? What does a cycle span, what returns from where to where? What is being repeated and how? Where do cycles begin and end? Adding ritual to this unholy mixture merely begs the question of cultural marking and definition.

Symptomatically, the Frieds’ recent book (Fried and Fried, 1981) on transitions is neither about age nor ritual, and certainly not about time. It is about the four stages of life, as a universal given, with lots of cultural variations within each set. Stages themselves are in the centre; different societies may make more or less of each. Transitions are marked in some ways. The connection between stage and ritual is tenuous: what are rituals beyond some kind of marking? This is a difficult problem for anthropology, since if ritual is constitutive of something (as many assert) then it must be more than a marker of passages (whose and for whom anyway). The age component of stages, passages, and cycles merely counts the years, a general anthropological concern. But many of the rites in question have nothing to do with counting the years, with counting period. Thus ‘time-reckoning’ is neither the key nor even an important meaning of time in other societies. The meaning of age, transition, and generation is still open. The concept of person is significant since, in India for example, rituals complete persons and form, to a significant extent, an integral part of the kinship/caste domain (Ostor, Fruzzetti, Barnett, eds., 1982).

Outside anthropology the prejudice is that the life-span is objective chronology with biological invariants of beginning, middle, and end that cultures divide up in their own ways. Almost all contributors to Handbook of Aging and Research in the Social Sciences (Binstock, et al., eds., 1976) share this assumption (‘social age’ as the term goes). The implication is a one to one correspondence between social system and the objective measuring stick of time, neither of which is discussed culturally. Most sociological and gerontological studies take time to be a given and have a completely unproblematic view of it. Time-trend and time-base studies are chronological but forge links to ‘social generations’.

Recent work, although including some promising new departures, still takes a chronological and generational base of age. A series of edited works with a commendable cultural rather than sociological focus demonstrate clearly the advances accomplished and the distances left to travel: Myerhoff and Simic, eds., 1978; Fry, ed., 1980, 1981; and Amoss and Harrell, eds., 1981, should provide the grounds for a brief assessment of the situation today.

On the whole these contributions stop short of a holistic, comparative, cultural approach. Overly concerned with individual life histories and strategies, and the contrast between culture and society (ideal and reality), they do not constitute the culture, do not link person to group and ideology, and do not sustain a systematic comparison between societies. Why the concentration on the individual elderly? Why the neglett of indigenous categories? How are individuals linked to groups and in what terms is this accomplished? Where is a theory for charting the individual’s path through relationships within the total cultural context? Assumptions about analysis, theory, science, comparison, society, and measurement account for the failure to regard time, person, historical change, and underlying differences among societies as crucial to the anthropology of age.

The ‘culture’ of these studies is not constituted, the ‘social’ is too sharply and concretely separated from the cultural, and individual passages are charted through the social/cultural system without any further ado. How does a whole culture categorize age, time, person, and not just chronology or the aged? What do ideologies categorize, especially in the West? A focus on the whole society and culture is missing from studies of advanced industrial societies.

There are other problems with views of individual strategy and manipulation of culture. Both Myerhoff (1978) and Moore (1978) stress individual variations in aging and invoke ‘culture’ as a monolithic background against individual strategies. Culture is to be used and varied according to this view yet we are not shown what this culture is; in other words, a holistic cultural analysis is missing. We are given dyadic interaction of individuals and relations between individuals and culture. But this linking of culture and individual is not accounted for. Nor are we given a theory for change in different kinds of societies that would affect in crucial ways the cultural constitution of person, time, and relationship.

The distinction between culture and society was powerful and served a purpose at one time even though it was misleading. In these studies it hardens into a rigid separation: society as concrete reality is opposed to merely symbolic culture. The actual reality of individual social arenas is opposed to the vague backdrop of culture; a softer reality to be manipulated by individuals. Lifetime social arenas, space and social relations, secular ritual, and the like are notions of substantive content, not interpretation and, as with culture and society, are never established, never discussed in relation to form, measurement, structure, and process in particular societies. The life history method, although an indispensable tool, can end up abstracting the individual out of the ideology and the whole society. It also begs the cultural construction of the person in different societies, as if the individual of industrial society was a universal construct. The received wisdom of cross-cultural comparison is in fact non-cultural. The dialectical interplay of different societies and ideologies (the investigator’s and the informant’s) contextualized in history and locality, tends to get lost and the problematic nature of constructing analytical and interpretive categories under these circumstances is hardly recognized.

There are problems also in anthropologists’ study of their own society. Myerhoff’s (1970) sensitive and pioneering work succeeds in establishing that the elderly in America do not simply fade away but create vibrant communities complete with ritual and symbolic dimensions. Without detracting from this achievement we may note that the next step would be to show how the communities of the elderly are related to the totality of American society. What are the ideologies of various groups in relation to each other and to what is ‘American’? Discussions and studies of values, symbols, histories, regional and social variants are yet to be carried out. When different ages, as constructs, are not placed in contexts they reinforce the folk models of fragmentation and separation—which Myerhoff’s data would argue against in all circumstances. In addition to the elderly we need a focus on other persons, time, and the whole society.

As a rule studies of old folk do not account for the group from within the whole society; only in separation from the latter. Clark (Binstock et al., 1976) for example ties the situation of the elderly directly to American values without a cultural analysis of American society. Whenever values surface they are merely invoked, presumably conjured up from the native status of the anthropologist.

The emergence of an industrial society, the continuity of pre-industrial patterns of time, the growth of individualism, the significance of history, ritual, and sacred time cannot be ignored when discussing ‘aging’. Ritual and time in turn refer to the concept of person, a construct completely ignored in current studies. Yet the indication of connections is unmistakable. Work, time, person, and society are linked together in systematic, cultural terms. The work ethic, capitalintensive production, sacred and non-sacred ritual, notions of the past and of the individual converge in constituting persons in the life-span, with various categories and divisions. Particularly striking is the possibility that capitalism, Protestantism, and changing work patterns created retirement and its attendant problems. Work and age are culturally understood in American society, and production as a key value has something to do with the separation of the elderly. The aged may have the time in America but not the ability to convert time into power and affluence. In this sense the situation is the opposite of Sahlins’ original affluent society (Sahlins, 1972). Furthermore, while time is scarce for those who produce, and therefore time means money as well as power, various categories of persons are situated in this process in very different ways. Continued work, incompetence (at least for production), retirement, and the separation of the old are significant links, but so are the possible ties between workers’ struggle for time, ritual, personhood in the face of rapidly diminishing rewards, and changes in ethics and leisure time. Thus workers may be in the same position vis-à-vis the whole society as are the elderly. This parallel may seem fanciful yet it is saying: just as we know little of the culture of the aged so we know hardly anything about workers’ culture through time.

The indications I have given of agrarian rhythms surviving into the industrial era, the continuing relation between time and the work ethic, the separation of age and the significance of ritual (especially as regards individualism) are the starting point for a holistic anthropological study of age. The survival of non-fragmented time, of personhood (rather than statuses and roles), of values of the past, of sacred ritual time, and so forth are inseparable from the study of age. Gerontology in this sense is industrial society’s folk model of aging, conducted entirely from within a particular ideology without regard for the kinds of consideration developed above. The final piece in the puzzle is contributed by comparison. Asian and African examples should alert us to different constructions of time and person, different cultural definitions through ritual and belief. We have to journey to other societies to realize that subdominant alternative patterns of age and time survive in our society and that industrial production and capital markets did not do away with holistic symbol and meaning. Comparison is also necessary to understand the impact of advanced industrial societies on the rest of the world. To what extent do hierarchical aspects survive in Asian and African societies? What of the future in the whole range of societies? What elements of structure and continuity may link up to produce; what kinds of changes under what sorts of conditions?

The anthropological problem of age cannot be comprehended in the absence of a comparative, cultural study of societies. For ‘age’ this should mean, first, a recognition of the differences between advanced industrial and other societies; second, a pursuit of the changes that have occurred in advanced industrial societies in the light of these differences; third, the changes transforming African and Asian societies today, partly as a result of the impact of advanced industrial societies. We start with an initial comparison between different societies, and then explore changes in the past of Euro-American societies. We would expect a different division, understanding, and experience of age in contemporary America paralleling other changes in economy, polity, family, and religion. The American example alerts us to changes we can expect in the linkage of cultural domains in industrializing societies, while the experience of these rapidly changing societies may make us aware of the potential for change in America.

Age, like time, totemism, and kinship, is based on an illusion, an assumed and uninterpreted universal that may be true enough as a general expectation, but false as a skeleton to which cultures bring the different appearances of flesh. Can time be measured any more than religion, economy, kinship, and marriage? We may get somewhere just by counting, but beyond the limited secular trends that emerge we still need to know what we mean by age/time (measurement is not enough), economy (production and distribution are not enough), politics (authority is not enough). We are still left considering the differences among societies. The alternatives are not between positive science and cultural solipsism: in commanding the tension between general and particular lies the possible contribution of a comparative anthropological science.

Chapter VI: Vessel Above Time

1. Time and Societies

In comparing Indian and Sudanese societies with the West, at the level of cultural principles, we find not merely a dominance of religion in contrast to the pre-eminence of a commodity economy in the West, but also differences between Islam/Hinduism/Buddhism, and variations in the length of the colonial past, the role of history, and the possible directions for the future. Especially significant is the impact of the West on Africa and Asia, and resulting contrasts between advanced industrial and other societies, already developing, in situ as it were, in the Sudan and in India.

These contrasts led the French anthropologist, Louis Dumont (1978, 1980), to formulate a comparison of Western ‘egalitarian’ societies (and their ideological base in the individual as an autonomous construct of rights and responsibilities), with hierarchical societies (and their holistic ideologies situating the empirical person in the group as a whole). The ‘individual’ is in a different position in the two kinds of societies. The universal aspect can be found in the recognition that all societies have a concept of the empirical person (the sentient being), but only the more recent (industrial) societies of the West developed the conception of the individual as a repository of rights and duties, a monad, the microcosm of a social group, and the society as a whole. Further, in non-individualistic societies the person is recognized as a member of a group; lineage, caste, age-grade, and the like as seen in the significance of persons in caste purity in South Asia and blood feuds in the Middle East.

The impact of colonial/imperial rule is different in India and the Sudan. Europe originated the current situation of domination and transformation of societies. Euro-American societies transformed themselves completely in the process, yet it is not necessary that this should be the result elsewhere. Two alternate accounts have been offered by students of society:

• dependency was produced by European expansion and accumulation of wealth at the expense of other societies, or

• Europe became wealthier because it has been developing longer than other societies.

Either way, the implications hold problems for the future in the relations between societies. Neither ‘underdevelopment’ nor ‘modernization’, as these processes came to be called, answer the question: What, after all this, can be said of Indian and Sudanese societies today? There is still the significance, even dominance, of religion (not the western notion of religious piety) in the combination of politics-religion-economics-kinship domains in a relatively less differentiated way of life than is the case in the industrial societies of the West.

Yet I also noted the rise of commodity production, new political systems, and nationalism as unintended consequences of British rule in India/Sudan. Few brown Englishmen were produced as a result: the outcome was different and the question remains whether or not capital-intensive, technology-based production is possible in conjunction with different ethics, values, beliefs. Indeed, such an articulation may only be possible in a situation where a radically different ethical context stimulates the invention of new productive systems. The question of articulation among different social formations is more important at the moment. I note again the bazaar and suq as examples, where we find:

• no profit and exchange values, but rather useorientation and people centredness;

• an integration (to an extent) of political-religiouskinship domains;

• commanding people and respect is more significant than calculation;

• the market is grasped intuitively in regional cycles of production and distribution.

But the articulation of bazaar/suq with the commodity market and political institutions is imperfect, and we have to recognize the emergence of contradictions in these societies: the principle of equality is becoming universal yet extensive social forms are still based on inequality. The cyclical view of time dominates but there is a compartmentalized acceptance of linear time in production. The same can be said of politics (conflict) and of religion (the emergence of individualistic pietism). The difference between Sudan and India, for example, is due in part to scale: composition and social structure; religion (Hindu versus Islamic, although Islam is in a subdominant position in India); the length of the colonial past. There are some suq and bazaar contrasts as well, yet the significance of religion in politics (brotherhoods in Sudan, Hindu sects and castes in India) is similar. In India, politics and sectarian religion, in the Sudan tariga/tijariya. (Sufi brotherhood or mercantile trade) connections mark the integration of religious-political-economic-kinship ties in a way that is different from that in Western societies. Even if these linked domains are beginning to differentiate and separate, the results vary: witness the continual surprises for the West produced by these societies:

• mullahas and baza ar is in Iran unite against modernization and Westernization;

• the possibility of authoritarianism re-emerges in India and Sri Lanka: equality merging into hierarchy with explosive results;

• the continued importance of Islam in the attempts of both military and political party regimes at a politics of reconciliation-in the Sudan, which endeavours to reach all groups.

Some lessons evade us and we learn from bitter experience, both as societies and scholars: the changes in Iran took most American students of that society by surprise; there is a continued exasperation with the turn of events in India (Indira Gandhi in and out of power and the Nehrus’ dynastic politics), and coup follows coup in Africa. Frustration is due in each case to expectations of linear development as they finally begin to approach us. The way out of this impasse is by recognizing differences: in a situation of religious dominance and contradiction brought about by modernization and technology, values and beliefs do not necessarily change as a consequence of economic or political impact and can continue to exist alongside in a contradictory relation to new institutions. Whole societies do not get transformed by capital accumulation and production: we should still look at the holistic aspects of these societies, especially the principles on which they are based. This should also serve as a lesson not to see Western ideologies, masked by rationality as they are, working inexorably and lineally to similar and predictable ends in other societies. I say ‘masked’ advisedly, since even the societies of the West do not bear out such expectations of rationality. Exporting this rationality becomes a factor in the access to and control of the Third World. The march of rationality in other societies rebounds on our own by likely attempts to apply technology and bureaucracy to control and dominate those in dependent positions: minorities, employees, and those with unorthodox lifestyles.

2. Vessels of Time

The burden of my discussion is the contrast that emerges between different societies with regard to the symbol, concept, and value of time, not in terms of grand theory, a classification to end all typologies, but rather as a comparative way of understanding the universality and particularity of social experience.

The central contrast in apprehending societies in terms of their ideologies is the position of cycles and arrows of time (paralleling other aspects of living), at the one end of a continuum, and the atomization, fragmentation of these cycles into short and long terms in paradoxical relations within autonomous social domains, at the other end.

In the course of the essay I have noted some striking contrasts:

• economy (scarcity) dominates in advanced industrial societies, with kinship and religion in a subdominant position;

• the position of the individual differs: the ‘individual’ as a microcosmic, autonomous actor, entering into and responding to short-term cycles, is unknown to nonindustrial, non-Western societies;

• in non-Western societies the person participates in separate though integrated cycles of time as a member of caste, lineage, age-set, or other groups;

• with the expansion of commodity markets the ‘individual’ also appears, participating in different rhythms and patterns of time;

• decision-making processes and fragmentation of roles reveals the differentiation of domains, the emancipation of economy from all-embracing (religious) ideologies, and the rise of short-term responses in a variety of ways.[13]

In a different context de Tocqueville noted long ago the breaking up of time in ‘democratic’ as against ‘aristocratic’ societies: especially in the costs of association (requiring yet opposing individualism), and in the separation of kinship, political, and religious aspects of a unified flow of time leading each generation to be condemned unto itself alone.

In turning the mirror back on the West we should recognize the relation between time and society, and the culturally determined nature of this relation. Thus the market economy has a temporal, dispositional ethos (as Islam and Hinduism have) with its long-term concomitants, which is obscured by the short-term requirements of the market and the seemingly natural-law-like appearance of market rationality, hiding from view a historical embeddedness in a cycle of time, and further obscured by an ideology which is nevertheless part of the market as a cultural system. The example of Bali, India, Sudan, and Algeria should alert us to similar continuities in the advanced industrial societies even if these themes are subdominant and hidden from intuitive consciousness. The most important lesson therefore is comparative, theoretical, and methodological: we can contrast kinds of time because we have societies like India and the United States, and because we can compare them and study them in the context of their histories, ideologies, categories, and social practices. The market economy and the study of economics hide the subject of social relations, the acting-experiencing person behind the, nevertheless, cultural principles of rationality and the like, supposedly correcting human, subjectively-oriented mistakes—itself a long-term expectation.

In view of changes in the West new alternatives appear for India and the other societies we considered:

• there is a possibility of social transformations in the light of ideological continuities (in relation, for example, to both the commodity market and bazaar/suq);

• in the Sudan and other African/Middle Eastern societies, Islamic ideologies may combine with continued economic growth, creating possibilities open neither to face-to-face societies (which no longer pass through an integrated cycle of time, as societies) nor to the market-dominated industrial societies;

• change may be triggered from within the links between institutions, symbolic structures, and ideologies which no longer articulate with each other but which, nonetheless, retain the possibility of creative and unpredictable future developments. Due to changes now taking place in the West, the ‘deformation’ of nonWestern societies appears less certain and the predictability, purely in economic, market terms, of the directions of social and cultural change becomes less certain.

We should realize, by now, that change is possible, even imperative, in all the societies we have discussed, because existing symbolic structures are not immutable and are often countered by opposing tendencies, even if, under the circumstances obtaining at any given moment, the latter may be in a non-dominant position.

The Third World can teach us that ideological continuity may survive institutional change; that although the market may deform the integration of time in non-Western societies, it does not sweep symbolic structures away; that the long-term implications of these cultural factors for a market economy cannot be predicted from within the economic ideology. Especially so today since the advanced industrial societies are themselves undergoing a transformation and the ideological continuity with the past (the pre-market and pre-industrial societies of the West) may prove to be crucial. Thus the outcome is still not clear in India, Sudan, or in America, and the future is not completely foreclosed. The comparative study and the example of other societies may suggest certain possibilities. There is no lack of long-term themes in the West: history as a discipline has helped Western societies to become conscious of themselves. Various methods from Vico to Marx, as well as sociology and anthropology today provide ways of seeing ourselves without being taken in by our own assumptions. The West may be aware of its crises and economic cycles, yet it also needs the contrast of aboriginal Australia, India, Sudan, in addition to its own pasts.

There are lessons here also for the non-Western world: market production will not completely transform societies in predictable or even expected ways, the emerging individual (in the modern sense of rights and responsibilities) will be differentially positioned in Sudan, Algeria, and India in relation to a disaggregated cycle of production. Since the commodity market is a cultural and symbolic construct it takes a re-invention of its ethos to make it work in a different context; hence there will, to begin with, be inequalities, and temporal and cultural mediations will be necessary to prevent symbolic structures from being swept away. This means different conditions to those faced by entrepreneurs in the West today: as Bourdieu (1979) said of the Algerians, the individual in Third World societies acts in terms of a different cycle of time. Just as a pre-capitalist ethos dominated the action of the early European entrepreneurs, so the necessity and difficulty of re-inventing capital-intensive production in Africa and Asia.

In social transformations symbolic structures pl’ay a mediating role and a shift in the latter is, as Bourdieu put it, both a consequence and a precondition of change. Technology is not a detachable component, hence it is pointless to speak of transfers and transplantations. In carrying out the tasks before them the men and women of our several worlds need no determinism and linear teleology; no stages through which societies have to pass; no Western forms of pobty and economy as the precondition for the just and good society; no images of their future shown to the ‘underdeveloped’ by the ‘developed’ societies, or vice versa; and they certainly do not need any historical inevitabilities. There are many worlds, human beings are the world makers, and the future is still open-ended.

3. Time and Time

There is a dual conclusion to be drawn from my discussion; one has to do with cultural variation in the concept, perception, and experience of time—the other with the parallel changes taking place in societies and time concepts as a result of the complex industrialization process.

In discussing time I started with contemporary America. We have to start with a society since, as we have seen, there is no absolute vantage point outside the human group to serve as a universal standard of time. So we proceed from given social situations, with given cultural categories, which are established as such in the course of analysis. In our case these happen to be the times (private, public, clock, sacred, seasonal, generational, fragmented, lineal, cyclical, speeded up, slowed down, political, economic, and so forth) of contemporary Euro-American societies. The procedure leads to further variations and contrasts in other disciplines, other societies, and other histories of our own past and those of other cultures. In this way we become aware of different experiences, practices, and categories, and examine them comparatively and contextually. The result is a recognition of multiple time concepts and dimensions in every society (some of which may not be time at all in any simple or single sense, Western or otherwise). The question then becomes not an abstract ‘What is time’, but what cultures make of time, given that we begin with a set of time considerations in Western societies. Comparison with other societies in terms of given cultural contexts, posed from internal and external points of view, leads to an interpretive, dialectical understanding of temporality, duration, cycle, and interval in different societies.

In our two-pronged approach, time as category and value as well as a way of apprehending the transformation of societies, leads to new questions and discoveries in our own society. We recognize the notions of time characteristic of other societies still existing in our own, alongside the dominant linear clock time. From such a basis we can go on to discuss a more abstract, universal, human time (seasons, production cycles, aging, ritual, and celebration), or we can deepen the differences and particularities of the times of cultures. This is no more than what we should do with kinship, religion, politics and economics, as social science categories, in relation to the cultural construction of social domains {see Fruzzetti, 1982; Ostor, 1980, 1984; Fruzzetti and Ostor, 1984, 1990). Even the most elusive cultural categories and values are approachable in this way; not ‘scientific’ and ‘universal’ in a narrow (positive) sense, but emerging from a dialectical relation between Western and non-Western systems of knowledge.

We can recognize similarities and differences by virtue of their existence in given social and historical (thus cultural in an encompassing sense) situations. Our time is just time till we meet the Balinese, Nuer, or Bengalis, when it becomes clock time in the face of their seasons, generations, calendars, and rituals, and in turn the latter become time in view of our clocks. While neither exists in the other’s terms, both exist on their own terms and in contrast to each other. It makes no sense to reduce time to a singular notion; after all, the oft-designated cyclical and linear time are versions of the same concept, with the latter dominating in the modern context (cf. Young, 1988). The procedure of arriving at such a universal (and inevitably measurable) idea of time is a mere abstract exercise because it leaves unanswered the question of what kind of time we are dealing with in different contexts. The puzzle of what we are faced with if we cannot measure it by clock time, remains equally unresolved.

Designating cyclical or linear time (or both) in a society is less significant than constituting the kinds of time a society categorizes and values in different contexts. There are kinds of cyclical and linear time; cycles of sacred ritual are not the same as the periodic crises of capitalist production or hospital and factory schedules. Most social relations have a temporal dimension and combine cyclical and linear aspects; witness the patterns of cultivation, transhumance, descent lines, and marriage alliances. Without relational analyses and an orientation to the whole—a social domain as a whole, the latter in relation to an entire culture, and cultures in comparison—we have no way of making sense either of discrete instances or of contrasts.

Not all ways of measuring (i.e. anthropologies of timereckoning) yield different concepts of time, nor does all measurement refer to the same concept, nor all that is non-measurable refer to different concepts of time. Divisions, measurements, and experiences of time are categorized differently by groups and societies. Thus we come to have (historically and culturally) a measurable, clock time in our own (advanced industrial) society, in view of which other societies are deemed to ‘have’ and ‘reckon’ time. But this is to impose a preconceived grid which limits the cultural universe of other societies. The reference points of such a reductionist exercise are not the cultural constitution of temporal categories, but the (Western) systems of empiricism, positivism, functionalism, materialism, and the like.

Out of the comparative, reciprocal study of societies on their own terms, arises the possibility of conceiving a new relationship and dialogue between North and South, East and West. Their categories will contribute to our systems of knowledge and vice versa till the very dichotomy is replaced by finer distinctions. This dialectical encounter will participate in the opening of cultures and traditions to each other in a more egalitarian way than was possible in the past. Various times, recognized through the differences of categories in social contexts, alert us to similar notions of time in every society, and the contexts of equality and hierarchy indicate likely changes in Western as well as non-Western societies. Being encircled by dominant ideologies we often fail to apprehend what is present in our society and others but is not easily recognized. Yet it is the islands of difference within and across societies that carry the potentials of justice, freedom, and transcendence; overcoming oppression and exploitation, liberating the social person to creativity, responsibility, and fulfilment.

Select Research

Bibliography and References

Index

[1] Instances of these items abound. I refer, in particular, to popular writers such as Toffler (1970, 1980), literati such as Kerr (1962), economists such as Linder (1970) and Hirsch (1976), and sociologists such as Bell (1978) and Young (1988).

[2] Note also Maziarz, ed. (1979) and Boulding (1973, 1979).

[3] Needham’s Time and Eastern Man was written in part to contrast with Wyndham Lewis’ Time and Western Man, which Needham did not consider worthy of serious philosophical discussion, except as symptomatic of Western nonsense about the timeless Orient.

[4] I shall turn to the distinction between the ‘individual’ and the ‘person’ below.

[5] These criticisms hold for Fabian’s later work (1983). See below, pp. 66–8.

[6] This section is based on Ostor, 1980, 1984.

[7] ‘Religious’ not in the sense of western pietism or church practices but as the ideology of caste hierarchy.

[8] Max Weber called attention to the disenchantment of the world through processes of rationalization.

[9] This section is based on Fruzzetti and Ostor, 1990.

[10] All references in this section are to this work unless otherwise indicated.

[11] This particularly felicitous coupling I owe to Dr Charles Ryan.

[12] An oft-voiced American complaint is that it would be easier to cope with loss, anxiety, bereavement, separation if these were more deeply embedded in ritual.

[13] For example, the ‘no-fault’ proliferation of recent years detaches the individual from the connection between actions and long-term implications.