Repertoires of Timekeeping in Anthropology

Abstract

Communities the world over record the timing of objects and events in ways that adhere to notions of both objective measurable time and what may be called the apprehension of time, or time-consciousness. Situating objects and events in time circumscribes the relative certainty of their existence. Speakers of the South American Indian language Aymara, for example, locate objects and events in either present-past time, which is considered visible and knowable, or future time, understood as located “behind” a person, because it has not been seen (Miracle and Moya 1981). Members of communities may have invariant or multiplex paradigms for conceptualizing and marking time. Some members of the scientific community, for example, entertain the idea that time is not absolute but rather runs faster or slower depending upon conditions of gravity and therefore has been difficult to measure (Browne 1998). The intertwining of categorizations of time and certainty means that timekeeping also is a moral matter, implicating such notions as truth, virtue, authority, origins, memory, desire, progress, and anticipation. Ephemeral and durable recordings of the occurrence of objects and events thus warrant analysis that transcends simple timekeeping depictions of calendars, chronicles, and agendas. This collection of essays probes the concept of record through an examination of culturally and professionally diverse modalities for temporally situating events. Modalities for recording include but are not limited to oral, written, material, somatic, and visual forms. Each of these modalities may in turn yield a range of recording genres. Spoken and written records, for example, may take the form of grammatical structure, myth, personal narrative, ritual, theatrical performance, history, a country’s constitution, an official census, a birth, health, mar-