What's Time Got to Do With It?

Abstract

What's Time Got to Do With It? Susan J. Pearson (bio) In their introduction to this forum, Holly N.S. White and Julia M. Gossard define "double age" as "the idea that one body can inhabit two ages at one time." The essays that follow remind us that, though double age may be easily defined as difference between those two ages, these divergent ages have been produced historically by institutional, scientific, legal, and cultural logics. In the nineteenth- and twentieth-century examples provided in this volume, double age is produced by the difference between a person's chronological age and the functional age ascribed to them based on their perceived capabilities. Time and development have fallen out of step with one another in some important ways. Considering this disjuncture—between time and development—reminds us that, like other ascriptive categories, age is a function of power. Though historians swim in the currents of time, few historicize, let alone theorize, it. Of course, I do not mean to slight the work of very fine historians who have historized time—whether to call attention to the medieval practice of two nights, the early modern extension of the day's activities into a newly secularized understanding of the dark evening, or the work of historians of the United States who have documented the standardization of time wrought by industrial capitalism. These historians have demonstrated that time itself, while it may seem to be dictated by the turning of the Earth on its axis and its revolution around the Sun, is in fact a highly mediated, culturally and historically contingent phenomenon.1 And while the story historians tell is often one in which cultural understandings of time proceed from less to more specificity and regularity, Western cultures regularly excise entire peoples from the smooth and regular progression of time. As Habiba Ibrahim argues in her recent work, Black Americans are often caught in a "zone of untimeliness," cast as out of step with both human development and historical time. Ibrahim's analysis reminds us that that normative human development and historical progression have been mapped onto one another in intellectual projects from the Enlightenment forward.2 Anthropologist Johannes Fabian, for example, describes how anthropology has [End Page 434] historically placed cultures on a continuum from savage or primitive to civilized. While anthropologists insisted that this scale was universal—something that all human societies can and should progress along—they also placed some cultures further back on the scale, a move that Fabian termed the "denial of coevalness." This meant that the anthropological Other—the primitive—was described as existing in a past stage of development despite existing at the same historical moment—or being coeval—with the anthropologist's own "civilized" society.3 This scale of human cultural development is familiar to historians as well, since such stadial schemes have played an important intellectual role not only in the foundational epistemology of anthropology, but also in Enlightenment-era concepts of human nature, progress, and education. To historians of childhood, this view of history should sound a familiar theme, as theorists from Rosseau to G. Stanley Hall have described human development as an evolutionary procession that recapitulates the historical movement from "savage" to "civilized." A stadial, or developmental, view of the way that both human beings and human societies progress through time works in two ways simultaneously. On the one hand, developmentalism standardizes and universalizes time by proposing a single series of stages through which all cultures progress. On the other hand, this description acts in a normative way by providing a language through which to identify and evaluate the backward, the deviant, the savage, the orphans of time's forward motion. In an important sense, we might think of Fabian's anthropological Other as double aged by history—both present with us and stuck in the past. In other words, double age marks a person as out of time in two senses—one developmental, the other historical. Like Fabian's and Ibrahim's analyses of how developmental and historical time act to construct otherness, the essays in this volume illustrate the complex relationship between time and development in a society structured by chronological...