Time Flies Like an Arrow

Abstract

It is scarcely a historical accident that two anthropologists who have made major but quite separate contributions to our understanding of human thinking have also made significant analytical use of the concept of time, have written at length about the relation between anthropology and history, and have sought to delineate the position of anthropological study itself in the intellectual and political history of our own civilisation. Yet though they grapple with the same topics, they remain far apart. Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande differs from La pensee sauvage in scope, method and conclusion, while Anthropology and history diverges from the Lepon inaugurale in concepts, objectives and intellectual affiliation. 'Nuer time-reckoning' perhaps lies closer to Levi-Strauss's work (cf i963 b: 289), but the gap is still large. What brings Evans-Pritchard and Levi-Strauss together is an interest in determining a set of contrasts and similarities dividing and uniting the two disciplines of history and anthropology; they are interested, as it were, in ensuring that the search for an efficient division of labour between the disciplines does not degenerate into a demarcation dispute (cf. Lefort I952: 99-IO4). Many of their professional colleagues have ignored this issue. There are certainly several contingent or historical reasons why these two writers in particular have concerned themselves with this inter-disciplinary relation, but part of the explanation lies, I think, in their common search for order or pattern in data that are, at first glance, characteristically disorderly, random and chaotic. Human thought, so we might imagine, is free of the constraints that systematise human action and, short of 1984, we are all free to think as we please, however coerced by culture and society we may be in our acts. And yet, so it seems, if we look carefully enough we can discover a pattern or structure in our thoughts that contrasts sharply with the apparently arbitrary and unpredictable sequence of historical events. EvansPritchard and Levi-Strauss respond to this paradox in complex but different ways, and the views of neither can be stated adequately in a few sentences. EvansPritchard, like many of his British colleagues, writes in the shadow of that afterdinner remark by a legal historian made nearly seventy years ago: '. . . by and by anthropology will have the choice between being history and being nothing'