Subjects of Modernity: Time-Space, Disciplines, Margins by Saurabh Dube

Author:Saurabh Dube [Dube, Saurabh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History & Theory, Social Science, Political Science, Anthropology, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781526105110
Google: 1bf7jwEACAAJ
Goodreads: 30216451
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T14:10:18+00:00

Ethnography and temporality: key protagonists

In tune with these considerations, let me turn to some of the contradictions and contentions that have characterized ethnographic orientations to time and temporality, which further carry critical connotations of space and spatiality. I shall first focus on aspects of the work of Franz Boas, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and Pierre Bourdieu, three masters of the anthropological craft who represent different historical moments, explanatory efforts, and epistemological styles from the discipline’s pasts. My choice of these scholars has much to do with their particular engagements with temporality. Then, I shall bring home these deliberations by discussing an ethnographic study from India, located on the cusp of colony and nation, which intimates the acute articulations of time-space with the anthropological enterprise at large.

We have noted the racial assumptions that underlay evolutionary anthropology in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Franz Boas (1858–1942) issued the single greatest early disciplinary challenge to such schemes and presuppositions.10 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Boas defined anthropological knowledge as consisting of “the biological history of mankind in all its varieties; linguistics applied to people without written languages; the ethnology of people without historic records; and prehistoric archaeology.”11 Across his career, he added to all these forms of inquiry. At the same time, Boas’s distinctive contribution to anthropology derived from his insistence on the diachronic dimensions of the discipline.12 As George Stocking, Jr., has argued, “For Boas, the ‘otherness’ which is the subject matter of anthropology was to be explained as the product of change of time,” an insistence that covered his unifying definition of the discipline.13 Here was to be found his critique of evolutionary assumption, “a neo-ethnological critique of ‘the comparative method’ of classical evolutionism.”14

Today there is appreciation not only of how Boas constructed a domain of inquiry mostly free of biological determinism to lay the basis for the modern disciplinary conception of culture as pluralistic and relativistic, but also of how his particular turn to the diachronic, the historical, and the temporal signified a road mainly not taken by anthropology during most of the twentieth century.15 Indeed, Boas’s orientation to anthropological knowledge can emerge in current commentaries as primarily building on nineteenth-century romantic and hermeneutic traditions in European science, philosophy, and history.16 Yet it would not do to simply celebrate Boas’s critique of evolutionary and racialist presuppositions from the vantage point of our present. Nor would it be enough to emphasize only the romantic underpinnings of his anthropology. In fact the work of Boas is best understood as straddling the dualism between progressivist and romantic traditions, at once braiding together while retaining a tension between these opposed tendencies. Here is to be found the salient entwining of contending schemes of modern knowledge, which have variously shored up anthropology and which reveal ambivalent articulations of time-space, as key components of worlds of modernity.

On the one hand, in the work of Boas, the progressivist stance was profoundly manifest in key nineteenth-century liberal beliefs, which stressed scientific knowledge and individual freedom. They expressed Boas’s broader historical vision and developmental viewpoint.

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