REVISING TIME IN CULTURAL RESEARCH: PREFACE TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE OF TRAMES

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Time is multiple. It is easy to imagine differences in individual, collective and social time, cosmic and biological time, global and historical time. Time could be related to our perception of beginnings and ends, intervals and transitions; could be handled as resource, commodity, measure, regulatory structure and gift (Adam 2002:87, 89). During the 20th century, academic thinking has abandoned the monolithic approach to and temporality and reached the awareness of temporal diversity. The approach to within social theory has become ontologically and epistemologically varied. Side-effects of this multi- and interdisciplinary treatment of temporality also brought about some ambivalence. In 2002 Bernhard Albert, while summarizing the discussion held at the 9th Conference Tutzing Time Ecology Project in April 2000, asserted: Everyone talked confidently about temporal diversity but it was not everyone meant the same thing (Albert 2002:92). While the notion of 'time' is covered by a variety of interpretative frames and approaches which are constantly open to renegotiations, it also offers complexity and universality that opens possibilities for interdisciplinary frameworks concerning theoretical understanding of contemporary cultural research. If 'time' is an additional dimension for various disciplinary approaches in social sciences and humanities, it might be therefore worthwhile to ask if it is possible to shift towards hybrid notion of timing as one tool for revisiting cultural theory. The concept of timing as Tamara K. Hareven (1991:168) defines it: ... sequencing, coordination and synchronization of various clocks, individual, collective and social structural (historical) time--could be useful to understand interaction between different types as well as to see how different 'clocks' have changed over history and varied in different cultural settings. The notion of timing as synchronic and diachronic process including human agency is a step further from the original idea of this special issue of TRAMES that derived from an idea of 'chronotypes'. The concept coined by Bender and Wellbery (1991) to mark the reflective turn in research toward a multiplication of times. With a reference to Bakhtin's 'chronotope', 'chronotypes' can be understood as models or patterns through which assumes practical or conceptual significance. Chronotypes are themselves temporal and plural, constantly being made and remade at multiple individual, social, and cultural levels. They interact with one another, sometimes cooperatively, sometimes conflictually. They change over and therefore have a history or histories, the construal of which is an act of temporal construction. Chronotypes are improvised from an already existing repertoire of cultural forms and natural phenomena. Numerous chronotypes intertwine to make up the fabric of time (Bender and Wellenby 1991:4). The notion of chronotypes is here used as a cover term for different types of and temporal order. Hence, in order to capture the complexity and variety of time-approaches in different disciplines we propose the two-dimensional 'matrix': timing and chronotypes. The articles in the present issue of Trames are engaged in both aspects: authors describe the different time-types by using disciplinary tools that make them visible or reachable and at the same analyse the timing practices and methods. This issue brings together a range of disciplines on the premise that and temporality is a central and recurring notion in most social or human research, either implicitly or explicitly. The implicit-explicit scale depends on the historical context of a discipline as the 'temporal turn' in disciplinary thinking has taken place and is happening in different periods and for different reasons. Concerning the temporality from the perspective of cultural sociology, Elzbieta Halas claims in this issue that although and timing always exist inside social phenomena, sociology of remained on the periphery of the discipline for a long time. …