Generations

The Time Machine in Theory and Practice

Judith Burnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317129486
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Generations: The Time Machine in Theory and Practice challenges the fragmented and diverse use of the concept of generation commonly found in the social sciences. It approaches the concept in a manner that stretches the sociological imagination away from its orientation toward the present by building the concept of the passage of time into our understanding of the social. It proposes an innovative and exciting view of the field of generations, lifting it out from life course and cohort analysis, and reconstituting the area with fresh and dynamic ways of seeing. With its unique, intellectually innovative and sustained critical study of generational work, Generations will appeal to scholars across a range of social sciences and humanities, and will be of particular interest to social theorists and anthropologists, as well as sociologists of social history, consumption, identity and culture.

Chapter 1
Meet the Ancestors: Real and Imagined

The concept of generations is an old one which historically sought to address the fact of human existence which occurs in slices of time. It is a concept to which time and space relationships are integral. It speaks of human self understandings as experiencing life as collective and individual in the contexts of co-existence and relatedness.

This chapter explores the categorisation of the universe which allowed the concept first of time and then of human time to emerge alongside the concept of qualities or attributes which could be given to time. It considers perspectives on time and the universe in Ancient Greece and Egypt, and how generations may have been regarded as entities which could be ‘read’, rather like the gods, the wind and the moon. Ancestor worship was common in ancient cultures and we can also locate the concept of generations in this context. The chapter next turns to consider the rise of the concept of lineage, which is gradually represented visually in images of the tree. The tree-like paradigm was popularised in the West by Christianity and was passed down to underpin descriptions of the systems of relatedness such as family and kinship. Individuals with identities defined by their location in the kinship network emerged, in due course with personalities. The seasons of life were complemented by the masks of life, and the lifecourse which individuals ‘have’ or ‘do’, and generations or cohorts into which ‘we’ are embedded.

Pre-Modernity: The Use of the Concept of Generations

Nash (1978) argues that the origins of the concept of generation stems from Ancient Greece, although I suggest it can be further traced back to Ancient Egypt. However, Nash takes, for example, references to generations in Homer’s Iliad, where Glaucus responds to Diomedes’ identity challenge by locating himself within his ancestry – the more general ‘generations of men’:

Greathearted son of Tydeus, why do you question my lineage [genea]?
As is the generation [genea] of leaves, so too of men:
At one time the wind shakes the leaves to the ground,
but then the flourishing woods
Gives birth, and the season of spring comes into existence [epigignetai];
So it is of the generations of men, which alternately
come forth and pass away.

Homer, Iliad, book 6, lines 145–49, in Nash (1978:1)

Nash argues that ancient Greek, Latin and English usage of generation (genos, genea, genesis, gone, genus, generatio, etc.), carry a range of meanings including ‘birth and reproduction to age, time of life, cycle of life, race, family, or even species’ (ibid: 2). Nash also suggests that the ‘words stem from a common Indo-European root’ (*gen-, o-grade, *gone-, zero grade, *gn Sanskit janab), the fundamental meaning of which is ‘to come into existence’ (ibid: 2). However, generation also marked identity borders, ‘allegiance, time of life, span of years, sameness with one group and otherness from the rest’ (ibid: 2). Instantly we see one of the defining characteristics of the concept of generation, its duality, where it refers to both family descent and age sets. It explains the arrival and departure of one cohort after another in the context of a continuous social stream. The concept of time is implicitly present. Firstly, since each cohort experiences finitude while the social stream flows for eternity. Secondly, since offspring are born in one period to a parental family which produces offspring of kin, but are continuously born in wider society, which produces offspring of kith.

A second feature of the concept is its timescapes. Timescapes, as discussed by Adam (1998), demonstrate the way in which consequences and social outgrowths lie latent, to be manifested years or epochs later. In particular, Adam discusses environmental disasters in this context. However, the concept lends itself to discussions of generations, a concept which does not readily fit into short term timeframes or social actions and dynamics which occur in a uniform manner according to tidy units of time. Take, for example, the repercussions of the adventures of one generation produces consequences further down the line in time for another. For example, defeat in battle may be avenged by a subsequent generation. Another case would be the socio economic and cultural transmission which occurs between generations. The starting point of one generation affects its ability to provide leverage to its offspring.

This positionality of generations is not consistently understood or synthesised in the literature on generations, yet is clearly recognised in folk tales and lay accounts which express inter-generational relationships and their consequences over time. In this sense, generations form a system of relationships which span time, their narratives and memory providing connecting threads in culture laid over actual structures and major organising systems. What we learn from this is the use of the concept of generations as a quasi-sociological account, presented as collective legends of the tribe as well as its possible function at the level of ideology, providing explanations for the state of affairs encountered in the present. These ancient stories of generations may tell us much about the dastardly and even heroic deeds of the time which caused what we would call social change to occur (for example a regime change, a change of ruler, or a change of land ownership and so on) but provided little basis for change in the present.

Ancient Greek and Ancient Egyptian Civilisation

These concepts of social groups with an identity and location in time prefigure the modern concept of the human universe. Ancient Greek beliefs accommodated human succession and had a concept of history made by people limited and informed by certain categories of other kinds of entities. Ancient Greek mythological accounts talk of generations among a range of creatures and spirits through which the history of its civilisation is told. Hesiod’s account Works and Days (Hesiod and West 1999) gives an account of the ages of man. These start with the generations of the golden period (the offspring of Cronos, who were forever young) succeeded by the silver generations (the offspring of the Olympians) who followed first and bronze (a warlike people) subsequently. These three generations were followed by an interim generation characterised as heroic and then an iron generation.

The time of each generation was not as literally counted as in the modern sense. A ‘generation’ may have referred to a sequence of generations the sum total of which expressed something Secondly, generational activity is acknowledged as human however are tempered by awesome gods who essentially played with the pawns of men: thus we can say that history was not ‘made’ by ‘the people’ in the modern sense which the concept of generation acquired when it became historicised through modernity. However the concept of generations expresses and indicates both the passage of time and change, as well as providing boundary markers of what I suggest we can understand as being ‘kinds of people’ who lived in ‘kinds of times’.

Alongside the concept of generations expressing time and change, we also see that early on they were described by attributes. Time and attributes were therefore entwined and can be seen in action in time pieces such as the Athenian horologion, the Tower of the Four Winds. The Tower contained a water clock, sun dial and weather vanes, and was used to read the universe as part of a system in which the passage of time was integrally linked to night, day, the weather, and the passage of the seasons.

This allows us to understand that ancient and pre-modern concept of generation may have been very different from ours. Generations were entities which could be ‘read’, as the weather or the stars could be ‘read’. Similarly, we can see that they are endowed with properties (youthful, weak, heroic, fast etc.); they might have been regarded as portents of what is to come or blamed for events which occurred, the genaeology of which could be traced back to them. In this way, the pre-modern concept of generation seems to lack either accurate or significant accounting of time in the modern sense of units or periods, but rather phases which were somehow distinctive.

The generation concept was subsequently to develop its modern meanings: separated from the category of nature and the universe, generations were to become exclusively human and historical. The question of the time to be associated with generations became problematised much later. The time of Ancient Greek mythology may implicitly be hundreds or even thousands of years. Yet Mannheim encountered the timespan defined by the culture of the nineteenth century, and a debate as to whether it is twenty or thirty years (a debate he dismissed as not particularly relevant). In the late twentieth century, this moved again. For example, if the timespan is defined by procreation (‘nature’) then perhaps it is every twenty or thirty years. But if it is defined by consumption, discourse and other identity systems (‘nurture’) then perhaps the space which elapses between generations has shrunk to being as brief as every ten years, and it is possible to imagine generations as now a different kind of entity to even those of the industrial period, let alone earlier.

The mutability of the timespan coupled with the vagueness of the meaning of the concept of generation has been viewed in some quarters as one of the weaknesses of the concept of generation, further evidence of its instability and slipperyness. However, such preoccupation with time and the need to quantify the timespan of generations is itself to read the concept of generation through the cultural lens of the present with its own, specific meanings of the generation concept as a time-based concept defined by the concept of time which we have. In other words, this is a modern problem with the concept of generation. As such, it is largely invented by the moderns.

The Ancient Greek formulation was in part the result of a civilisation characterised by complexity and a relatively wide geographical reach, as well as one which inherited key ideas from the Ancient Egyptian civilisation regarding a spiritual universe.

The Ancient Egyptian state endured for at least three thousand years in its unified form and for another thousand previously as two or more states. The civilisation passed through distinctive periods of Kingdoms and dynasties. Nonetheless, the core of Egyptian belief and social organisation is notable for its continuity as much as change even though the fear of change (which was interpreted as disorder) was substantial (Kemp 2006).

In Ancient Egypt, developing shared concepts of time was important, since this allowed two things, firstly the organisation of agriculture and using the rise and fall of the Nile for which prediction was needed, and secondly, to facilitate religious rituals to occur. Religious rituals were the one of the major lubricating oils of Ancient Egypt. They provided for the passage of time to be constructed by creating ‘before and after’ periods of time as bookends to magical, transformative events as well as accounting for the passage of time through mythic narratives which provided explanations for the events of the universe and thus indications of how life should be lived including the holding of rituals. The timing of rituals was provided for by the use of objects (both flat dishes and pillars such as obelisks) as sundials; the astronomical instrument the merkhet which allowed the movement of stars to be tracked; and the innovation of the first water clocks which allowed for greater accuracy in timing the rituals particularly feasts in the hours of darkness. The Egyptian calendar may have been based upon the cycle of the star Sirius, which rises every 365 days near the sun.

The overarching time system of social life was organised around the categories of ‘this’ life (where we are now in the present); the fact of corporal death; and, most importantly, the afterlife. The concept of time in the afterlife included both the problematic of where or how the elite) will live in the future (largely as a disembodied entity in the sky), as well as its existence therefore as a parallel time which is continuous i.e., the afterlife is also an on-going stream of consciousness in which other kinds of entities dwell. Social life was organised around the assumption of a largely unchanging brief present followed by main course of eternity and was geared to the needs of the elite to ensure its place. Much of the industry and activity of Egyptian society was performed in order to create the future, and ancient Egyptian society invested a greater proportion of its wealth than any other (Redford 2003).

For much of the time of the Ancient Egyptian civilisation the afterlife was a privilege confined to the elite of the pharonic dynasties. The religious belief was that while all humans had a ka (a life force) which left the corpse upon death, initially pharaohs also had a ba (a special kind of life force made of distinguishing attributes) which remained attached to the body. The funeral practices were designed to free the ba so that it could be reunited with the ka from which point it could continue its energy as a new kind of intangible entity which lived in the stars (mainly) or occasionally in the West, behind the mountains near Luxor (Redford 2003). The ba returned to the body at night to regenerate, thus preservation of the body for eternity was essential.

The ritual opening of the corpse’s mouth by the son to release the spirit was considered critical to the success of the journey to the afterlife. Initially this possibility was restricted to dynastic families and was therefore a privilege assigned to them as a sacred act. However, as the First Kingdom declined, the concept of the ba changed to include the possibility that other categories of humans might possess one, officials for example. Unlike the true elite however, officials could not become gods in the afterlife. Rather, they lived with their families and undertook activities such as hunting. Whether this was the case or not was determined by an act of weighing the heart (upon which all of the good and bad deeds were recorded) against a feather on a pair of golden scales The proliferation of social groups who could participate in such rituals also increased the probability that the corpse may not have a son to perform the opening of the mouth ritual, this being one of the key funeral rites (Smith 2009). In later dynasties, this duty was increasingly taken on by especially appointed officials in a system of institutionalised surrogacy which got around the problem of a lack of kin. These substitute systems for kin were to become an important aspect of ancient civilisations playing a contributory role to the development of administration and bureaucracies.

Tombs and pyramids, and other mortuary fortifications were meant to maximise protection from raiders as well as performing symbolic acts which expressed sacred myths. The construction of buildings commenced early in life and much of the activity surrounding the Pharaoh was connected to ensuring the future. In the dominant ideology the religious traditions and ritualistic character of society all point to the relative lack of importance of the present, which is positioned as a waiting room for the eternity of cosmic transcendence in the afterlife. The organisation of Ancient Egypt and its major industries were as much about the preservation of the future as attending to the needs of the present, which nonetheless were dealt with by an evolving and necessary agricultural and trading system. Art and writing originated in death rituals and the need to pass on mortuary practices. Advances in science, medicine and maths were explicable in terms of both the development of material systems such as rule, trade and money, and the social infrastructure needed to service and uphold the morass of contradictory, dominant ideologies which circulated until late in the Middle Kingdom. Hierarchies of gods were established, with the emergent concept of a unitary supreme being at its apex.

Lineage and the Tree Concept

A particular example of the use of the concept of generations which survived from ancient times through to modernity, and lives on in some forms today, is that of lineage i.e., the social task of providing a clearly articulated account of who is related to who by blood relationship, and thus providing an account of the transmission of rule. The Bible contains many examples of the use of the concept of generation and accounts of lineage for example in Genesis 5:1:

Verse 1 This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him;

… Verse 3 And Adam lived a hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, and after his image; and called his name Seth:

… Verse 6 And Seth lived an hundred and five years, and begat Enos:

… Verse 9 And Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan:

… Verse 12 And Cainan lived seventy years and begat Mahalaleel.

However, accounts of lineage are performed according to key principles, for example, back through the line of the Father or back through the line of the Mother. The Bible most famously in the geneaology of Jesus Christ provides us an example of lineage difficulties. Presented in only two key passages in the Gospels (Matthew 1:1–17 and Luke 3:23–28) the geneaololgical provenance of Christ differ, Matthew’s lineage is set out via King David’s son King Soloman and back to Abraham, and Luke via King David’s son Nathan and back to Adam.

A critical challenge in the Biblical geneaological accounts, apart from translating time periods which do not map onto our own, is to deal with the fact of life of siblings i.e. that there may be multiple births each of whom may have claim to relationship, rights, status, the throne, power, inheritance, or in some other way disrupt the ‘true’ line of direct descent. Being able to demonstrate the antecedents and true descendents of Christ and the ability to demonstrate his connection to God, became ever more important in the Christian world, such that by the Middle Ages the authority of the Church and its agents was well established and had become codified into particular discourses and images.

Much of the imagery of the period has influenced our modern paradigms of generations and lineage including the concept of youthful generations and family trees. A popular and longstanding Christian image is that of the Tree of Jesse. Such images of trees typically show the ancestors of Christ, their inter-relationships, and their direct connection to God or his agents (such as Abraham). These images of the Tree of Jesse legitimate the line of Christ as the true son of God. The Tree of Jesse began to appear in Christian imagery around 1000/1100 AD (Watson 1934) and was popularised through the growth in illuminated manuscripts and the booming craft industries of the Middle Ages, which provided decorative opportunities in stained glass, stone work, paintings, tiling and textiles (see Male 1973; Reddish 2003).

Sources of these images included Psalters (Helsinger 1971) which were collections of biblical Psalms, other songs, and speeches were illustrated with the family tree of Christ. For example, Psalm 1 in the St. Omer Psalter in which the capital letter B (B stands for the Latin Beatus vir/ blessed the man), was decorated and updated by Humphrey Duke of Gloucester in the fifteenth century (British Library 2009).1

The textual basis of such illustration includes images such as that found in Isaiah Chapter 11 verse 1–3: And there shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse and a root shall grow out of its roots.

The image of the family tree of Christ typically took the form of a central tree trunk at the top of which was Christ or an oversized Mary (Christ’s Mother), with his ancestors arranged beneath him on a series of branches. The base of the tree with its roots was reserved for either God (as Jesse) or his agent (such as Adam), depending on the geneaological account given.

The images are typically in simple, often wavy and entwined branches made of plants, the tails of animals, plaques or banners which sprout from the central trunk. The earliest surviving window in the York Minster, York (United Kingdom), depicts figures sitting on the join of just two branches which meet, arc and re-connect. Other trees are much more complex with multip...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Meet the Ancestors: Real and Imagined
• 2 Mannheim and the Modern Concept of Generation
• 3 After Mannheim: Lifecourse, Cohort, Generations
• 4 The Epic Generation of 1914–1918
• 5 The Boomers: The First Wave
• 6 The Boomers: The Second Wave
• 7 Ageing and the Generations of the Future
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index