Time: Histories and Ethnologies ed. by Diane Owen Hughes and Thomas R. Trautmann

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 183 Dr. Guajardo received his doctorate in Latin American Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and is a professor in the Department of Interna­ tional Studies at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, Mexico City. Time: Histones and Ethnologies. Edited by Diane Owen Hughes and Thomas R. Trautmann. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+306; notes, index. $54.50 (hardcover); $24.95 (paper). “The problem of time, in both history and anthropology, contin­ ues to haunt the disciplines that grew out of attempts to solve or resolve it.” So begins this engaging collection of essays, which aims to offer a comparative appraisal of distinct conceptual approaches to the cultural dynamics of temporality within these two areas of enquiry. Most of these essays are drawn from a conference held at the University ofMichigan in 1992 under the sponsorship of Compar­ ative Studies in Society and History. The exceptions are drawn from that journal’s pages. This volume provides a richly insightful treatment of the “differing ways of narrating and analyzing the otherness of the past and the pastness of the other,” which should be of interest to researchers throughout the humanities and social sciences. If it is true that the past is a foreign country, then these essays may be read as an attempt to map its terrain for a diverse array of differ­ ent cultures. Following a thoughtful, if rather sketchy, introduction by Diane Owen Hughes, the book divides into three sections, each with three essays. The first, titled “Local Time,” begins with Bernard S. Cohn’s exploration of “The Pasts of an Indian Village.” Cohn focuses on Senapur, a fairly large, agricultural village in the Ganges Valley, examining its multiple pasts as expressed by peasants belong­ ing to the twenty-three castes present there. Two general types emerge: a “traditional past” linked to the mythology and sacred cus­ toms of northern India and a “historic past” of social and political ideas about the remembered experiences of local people, and their content varies widely. Jonathan Wylie’s contribution concerns the sense of time as it informs discourses of the past in two fishing vil­ lages: Casse, located in Dominica, and Alvabpur in the Faroe Islands. Wylie argues that whereas time in Casse is “shallow” and history all but dismissed as a product of “white ways” or “God’s word,” in Alvabour time is “deep” and history a matter of popular concern. Maria Minicuci’s closing essay contrasts time and memory in two villages in Calabria, southern Italy. Of particular interest here is the role of memory in the communities’ shared appropriation of the past as an experience of domination, leading Minicuci to suggest that “both villages make use of time remembered, but they scan differently, they calculate its speed differently, and thus they repre­ sent it in different modes and at different levels” (p. 98). 184 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The second section, “Big Time,” commences with Nancy M. Farriss’s essay on time among the Maya of southeastern Mexico. Farriss seeks to counter the tendency in anthropological accounts to invoke a binary opposition between cyclical and linear conceptions of time. In the Mayan system of thought, she maintains, not only do both senses of time coexist, but linear time is incorporated into an all-encompassing cyclical pattern (p. 113). To ensure that their world would be reproduced across time, then, the Maya had to per­ form various rites of renewal: “Theirs was the task of helping the gods to carry the burden of the days, the years, and the katuns [the katun round is described as an endlessly recurring sequence of thir­ teen twenty-year periods, or a 260-year cycle] and thereby to keep time and the cosmos in orderly motion” (p. 130). Anthony T. Grafton’s essay concerning the efforts of Renaissance intellectuals to “master time” provides an intriguing point ofcomparison. Begin­ ning his account with a description of “the famous Clock of Stras­ bourg,” which delighted crowds in the early 1570s by showing not only the time of day but “eternity, the century, the periods of the planets, the yearly and monthly revolutions of the...