Time and the Other

TIME AND THE EMERGING OTHER Let us retain at this point that the temporal discourse of anthropology as it was formed decisively under the paradigm of evolutionism rested on a conception of Time that was not only secularized and naturalized but also thoroughly spatialized. Ever since, I shall argue, anthropology’s efforts to construct relations with its Other by means of temporal devices implied affirmation of difference as distance. By claiming to make sense of contemporary society in terms of Evolutionary stages, the natural histories of evolutionism reintroduced a kind of specificity of time and place – in face a history of retroactive salvation – that has its closest counterpart in the Christian-medieval vision contested by the Enlightenment.

This was politically all the more reactionary because it pretended to rest on strictly scientific hence universally valid principles. In fact little more had been down than to replace faith in salvation by faith in progress and industry, and the Mediterranean as the hub of history by Victorian England. The cultural evolutionists became the Bossuets of Western Imperialism. OUR TIME, THEIR TIME, NO TIME Lévi-Strauss’ position on history and subjectivity, I believe, can be read in two ways: either as a rejection of history qua ideological prop for a misconceived subjectivity; or as a rejection of subjectivity for fear that history – and with it Time – might pierce the armor of scientific anthropology. Be that as it may, it is important for our larger argument that structuralism’s problem with Time is in various ways linked up with a reluctance to admit conscious, intentional, and therefore subjective activity as a source of knowledge, native or anthropological. Perhaps one needs to be reminded constantly that this position grew out of a critique of a rival camp on the French intellectual scene; otherwise one fails to appreciate the urgency with which it is advanced. But it is truly intriguing in the international context of anthropology that rejection of subjectivity did not lead to contempt for ethnographic “observation,” to use Lévi-Strauss’ favorite term for fieldwork. The structuralists, at least those who practice anthropology, do not escape the aporia arising from the conflicting demands of coeval research and allochronic discourse any more than their historical and relativist predecessors and contemporaries. TIME AND WRITING ABOUT THE OTHER …relativism and in anthropological discourse and temporal distancing are internally connected. Moreover, it is now possible to read that connection in both directions: Historical discourse (of the positivist variety) is incapable of giving more than relativistic reproductions of the societies and cultures that are its referents. Conversely, relativistic discourse (such as structuralism-functionalism or American culturalism, or, for that matter, remote descendants such as “ethnoscience”) can always be expected to rest, epistemologically, on temporalizations, even if it professes a lack of interest in history. CONCLUSIONS

Tradition and modernity are not “opposed” (except semiotically), nor are they in “conflict.” All this is (bad) metaphorical talk. What are opposed, in conflict, in fact, locked in antagonistic struggle, are not the same societies at different stages of development, but different societies facing each other at the same Time.