I read Jay's paper and have followed the commentaries. I couldn't possibly
agree more about the need to consider the relative temporalities of
different phenomena that enter into any social or cultural-historical
analysis. What is surprising to me is the lack of reference to historians
and anthropologists who have written and worked extensively with these very
problems. Among others Braudel, with his proposal of three levels of
"duree" (which are really divisions of what CHAT would call the
meso-genetic), comes immediately to mind especially with such pointed
questions as Phil's:
"How does social history weave its patterns in time? "
"What are likely to be long and short scale social changes?"
Then there is the entire field of world systems theory, from Wallerstein to
Gundar Frank, which has studied in great detail the cycles of
center-periphery systems. When we move down to the level of pre-state
systems, there is Edmund Leach's "Politics of Highland Burma" which moved
the entire field of political anthropology from a structuralist/static
Radcliffe-Brownian model, to the process oriented studies that dominated all
succeeding studies of political process. In short, there is a great deal
done in the area of looking at temporal processes of social institutions and
their interactions with everyday life as well as with other institutions of
comparable temporality.
E.P. Thompson, has written some lovely pieces devoted directly to the
questions of time and the conceptualization and transformation of time
concepts. I would highly recommend "Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial
Capitalism" in Past and Present (Dec. 1967) which begins with the following
delightful quotation from Thomas Hardy:
(retranslated from the Spanish): "Tess . . . went up the dark and winding
alley or street that wasn't meant for moving along rapidly; a street made
before inches of land had value and when clocks with only one hand divided
the day sufficiently." Always the superb anthropologist, Thompson shows how
the very conceptions of time come to fit with the pace and scale of
socio-historical processes.
When we get into the purely theoretic we also have Giddens. As I've been
reading the posts, especially some of Jay's missives that flow into every
nook and cranny of physical and social rumination, I keep asking myself:
What about Giddens' proposal of time-geographies? I'm hoping Jay can
address the relationship between what he has written and Giddens' concepts
of time-space distanciation, time-space edges, and world time.
CHAT itself must have the term "historical" in there for something. When we
return to the marxist roots we find that Marx himself was continually
dealing with process and that the analysis of Das Kapital is based on the
concepts of circulation, expanded reproduction, and historical transition,
etc. In his specifically historical analyses, e.g., the 18th brumaire of
louis napoleon, he moves to a consideration of a variety of temporal cycles
in the analysis of the behavior of different classes in Paris during the
1848-1851 period. In the Marxist tradition, the Dobb-Sweezy debate over the
transition from feudalism to capitalism concerned precisely the questions as
to structural changes in systems that characterize, as Braudel might say,
the long duree. Similarly, Ernst Mandel wrote extensively about different
historical cycles and their interaction with processes of shorter
characteristic temporality. (e.g., the cycles of equalization of relative
surplus value in relation to the process of technological innovation and
adaptation).
I'm wondering whether the psychological/educational orientation of XMCA is
such that the participants to this multilogue are unfamiliar with this
rather vast literature or if there is some other reason for its absence from
the posts so far.
I know that Giddens is well known since his name has come up previously (and
not just from my keyboard) so I'd appreciate some triangulation here if the
thread hasn't already lost steam.
Paul H. Dillon