Time and the Other

How Anthropology Makes Its Object

Johannes Fabian

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780231537483
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

Time and the Other is a classic work that critically reexamined the relationship between anthropologists and their subjects and reoriented the approach literary critics, philosophers, and historians took to the study of humankind. Johannes Fabian challenges the assumption that anthropologists live in the "here and now," that their subjects live in the "there and then," and that the "other" exists in a time not contemporary with our own. He also pinpoints the emergence, transformation, and differentiation of a variety of uses of time in the history of anthropology that set specific parameters between power and inequality. In this edition, a new postscript by the author revisits popular conceptions of the "other" and the attempt to produce and represent knowledge of other(s).

Chapter One / Time and the Emerging Other

Apart from time there is one other means to bring about important change—force. If one works too slowly, the other will do it faster.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ¹

Of course the history and prae-history of man take their proper places in the general scheme of knowledge. Of course the doctrine of the world-long evolution of civilisation is one which philosophic minds will take up with eager interest, as a theme of abstract science. But beyond this, such research has its practical side, as a source of power destined to influence the course of modern ideas and actions.

Edward Burnett Tylor ²

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. That commonplace applies to anthropology as much as to any other field of knowledge. But commonplaces usually cover up for not-so-common truths. In this first chapter I want to set down some of the terms for an argument to be pursued throughout these essays: Anthropology’s claim to power originated at its roots. It belongs to its essence and is not a matter of accidental misuse. Nowhere is this more clearly visible, at least once we look for it, than in the uses of Time anthropology makes when it strives to constitute its own object—the savage, the primitive, the Other. It is by diagnosing anthropology’s temporal discourse that one rediscovers the obvious, namely that there is no knowledge of the Other which is not also a temporal, historical, a political act.

Perhaps this covers too much ground; political can mean anything from systematic oppression to anarchic mutual recognition. The epigrams chosen for this chapter are to indicate that our attention will mostly be directed to the oppressive uses of Time. Anthropology’s alliance with the forces of oppression is neither a simple or recent one, as some moralizing critics would have it, nor is it unequivocal. The brief sketches of some of the historical contexts in which anthropological uses of Time developed have the main purpose of recounting a story whose conclusion is open-ended and contradictory. Anthropology may, during the period covered here, have succeeded in establishing itself as an academic discipline; it failed to come to a rest vis-à-vis a clearly defined Other.

From Sacred to Secular Time: The Philosophical Traveler

In the Judeo-Christian tradition Time has been conceived as the medium of a sacred history. Time was thought, but more often celebrated, as a sequence of specific events that befall a chosen people. Much has been said about the linear character of that conception as opposed to pagan, cyclical views of Time as an éternel retour.³ Yet such spatial metaphors of temporal thought tend to obscure something that is of more immediate significance in an attempt to sketch the ancestry of Time’s anthropological uses: Faith in a covenant between Divinity and one people, trust in divine providence as it unfolds in a history of salvation centered on one Savior, make for sacred conceptions of Time. They stress the specificity of Time, its realization in a given cultural ecology—the Eastern Mediterranean, first, and the circum-Mediterranean with Rome as its hub, later.

Decisive steps towards modernity, those that permitted the emergence of anthropological discourse, must be sought, not in the invention of a linear conception, but in a succession of attempts to secularize Judeo-Christian Time by generalizing and universalizing it.

Different degrees of universalizing Time had of course been achieved in an abstract form by earlier philosophical thought. In fact, “universal Time” was probably established concretely and politically in the Renaissance in response to both classical philosophy and to the cognitive challenges presented by the age of discoveries opening up in the wake of the earth’s circumnavigation. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to look for decisive developments, not in the moments of intellectual rupture achieved by Copernicus and Galileo nor, for that matter, by Newton and Locke, but in the century that elaborated the devices of discourse we now recognize as the foundations of modern anthropology—the Age of Enlightenment.⁴

If we follow G. Gusdorf we may locate the starting point of these developments, a sort of barrier that had to be broken through, in one of the last attempts during the seventeenth century to write a universal history from the Christian viewpoint, Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle (first published in 1681).⁵ Perhaps it is too simplistic to put Bossuet at the other side of a premodern/modern watershed, for in many ways he anticipated the Enlightenment genre of “philosophical history.” His opposition to modernity is not so much in the detail of his methodological prescriptions as it is in the position that integrates his views: faith in the evangelical specificity of all of history as history of salvation. A brief reading of the introduction to the Discours, entitled “The General Plan of this Work,” will illuminate the importance of Bossuet’s treatise.

Bossuet’s professed aim is to alleviate confusion caused by the multitude of historical fact. This is to be accomplished by teaching the reader to “distinguish different times (temps)” with the help of “universal history,” a device which “is to the histories of every country and of every people what a general map is to particular maps” (1845:1, 2). In this analogy the universal is aligned with the general, which signals a certain ambiguity (one which, incidentally, is still with us in anthropology’s quest for universals). Universals appears to have two connotations. One is that of totality; in this sense, universal designates the whole world at all times. The other is one of generality: that which is applicable to a large number of instances.⁶ The important point, borne out by the body of the Discours, is that Bossuet does not thematize the first connotation. His account does not cover the world, it never leaves the circum-Mediterranean. Writing within the horizon of the history of Christian religion, he does not see his perspective, nor does he look beyond his horizon. The former is self-evident as an article of faith, the latter is bounded by his political position at the French court of Louis XIV, whose succession to the Christian Roman Empire he takes for granted. Perspective and horizon of the Discours are tied together by the all-pervading intention to validate (albeit not uncritically) the political realities of his day by a history that is universal because it expresses the omnipresent signs of divine providence.

In contrast, Bossuet is quite conscious of problems implicit in the second connotation of universal. How can one present history in terms of generally valid principles? He argues that such a project rests on the ability to discern in the “sequence of things” (suite des choses) the “order of times.” Methodologically this calls for an “abbreviation” of sequences in such a way that order can be perceived “at a glance” (comme d’un coup d’oeil, 1845:2). A long history of the “art of memory” is behind this remark, and a history of the visual reduction of temporal sequence—its “synchronic” understanding—lies ahead of it.⁷

A methodological device that opens the view over Time is the epoch, conceived, not in its currently most common understanding of a period or interval of time, but in a transitive sense derived from its Greek root. An epoch is a point at which one stops the journey through Time “to consider as from a place of rest, all that happened before or after, so that one may avoid anachronisms, that is, a kind of error which results in confusing the times.” In exposing universal history one proceeds by treating a “small number of epochs” in secular and religious history, the outcome of which will be—and here Bossuet’s methodology rejoins his faith—to make visible the “PERPETUAL DURATION OF RELIGION, AND … THE CAUSES OF THE GREAT CHANGES IN THE EMPIRES” (1845:3, 4). Thus both, the external, spatial boundaries of history and its inner continuity are of religion. Where mere sequence might cause confusion, the distinction of times in the light of divine providence creates order. It demonstrates the omnipresent work of salvation.

O. Ranum, the editor of a recent English version, reminds us that Bossuet used the term discourse in the title of his work deliberately. He wanted to break with conventions according to which highly stylized secular and religious histories were produced during the seventeenth century (see Ranum 1976:xviii). Bossuet asserted his freedom to abbreviate, condense, and emphasize without being bound by the then firmly established canon of historical facts each historian was expected to report. In this he anticipated the “philosophical history” which Voltaire opposed to mindless chronicling and out of which the first projects of modern anthropology were to grow. Less obvious, but equally important, is the model set by Bossuet for what one might call sermonizing history, which is another possible connotation of discourse. Bossuet wrote his work for the enlightenment and education of the Dauphin (and his father, the Sun King). It was meant as a refutation of attacks on the literal understanding of the Bible and as a defense of a Gallican, French-centered, reformed Catholicism. In short, his “distinction of times” is embedded in concrete political-moral concerns. He expressed himself through discursive devices that were rhetorical in the classical sense: aimed to move and convince the reader. His political intent and its rhetorical form were to influence the writing of the philosophes and to become part of anthropology’s heritage as, in Tylor’s words, a “reformer’s science.”

We set out to show in Boussuet’s Discours an example for a premodern treatise on universal history; now we seem to end up with more similarities than dissimilarities if we compare his method and devices to those of the Englightenment philosophical histories. We are confronting here a well-known problem in the interpretation of eighteenth-century thought. On the whole, the philosophes, whom we recognize in many respects as our immediate ancestors, achieved only a sort of negative modernity. In the words of Carl Becker: “Their negations rather than their affirmations enable us to treat them as kindred spirits” (1963:30). Or, as Gusdorf puts it, these thinkers replaced Bossuet’s Christian myth with the “myth-history of reason” which, by and large, continued to use the conventions and devices of earlier periods. If one wants to show how Time became secularized in the eighteenth century and onward he must concentrate on the transformation of the message of “universal history” rather than on the elements of its code. The latter display a remarkable continuity with preceding periods down to the Greco-Roman canons of the arts of memory and rhetoric. The transformation of the message had to be operated on what we identified as the specificity of Christian “universality.” Change also had to occur on the level of political intent or “judgment.” It was on that level that the philosophes had to overcome Bossuet who “was never reluctant to judge all of the past in the light of the single most important event of all time: the brief passage of the man-god Jesus through a life on earth” (Ranum 1976:xxvi).

In fact, among the many expressions of change one could cite is the very transformation of one man’s all-significant passage on earth into the topos of travel. In the Christian tradition, the Savior’s and the saints’ passages on earth had been perceived as constituent events of a sacred history. To be sure, this had occasioned much travel to foreign parts in the form of pilgrimages, crusades, and missions. But for the established bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century, travel was to become (at least potentially) every man’s source of “philosophical,” secular knowledge. Religious travel had been to the centers of religion, or to the souls to be saved; now, secular travel was from the centers of learning and power to places where man was to find nothing but himself. As S. Moravia had shown in his brilliant studies, the idea and practice of travel as science, prepared in Diderot’s encyclopedia (1973:125-132), was definitively established toward the end of the eighteenth century, especially among the thinkers known as “ideologues” (see Moravia 1976). Two names, those of J. M. Degérando and C. F. Volney, are of special interest in this connection of travel and the secularization of Time.

It was Degérando who expressed the temporalizing ethos of an emerging anthropology in this concise and programmatic formula: “The philosophical traveller, sailing to the ends of the earth, is in fact travelling in time; he is exploring the past; every step he makes is the passage of an age” (Degérando 1969 [1800]: 63). In this statement, the attribute philosophical echoes the militant enthusiasm of the preceding century for a science of man to be conceived by man and for man, one in which religious and metaphysical searches for mankind’s origin and destiny were to give place to a radically immanent vision of humanity at home in the entire world and at all times. Now man is, in Moravia’s words, “placed, without residue, inside of a world-horizon which is his own … to travel means, in this framework, not only to quench the thirst for knowledge; it also signifies man’s most intimate vocation” (1967:942). It is in this sense of a vehicle for the self-realization of man that the topos of travel signals achieved secularization of Time. A new discourse is built on an enormous literature of travelogues, collections and syntheses of travel accounts.⁸

The manifest preoccupation in this literature, in its popular forms as well as in its scientific uses, was with the description of movements and relations in space (“geography”) based primarily on visual observation of foreign places. However, this does not contradict the contention that elaborating a secular conception of Time was its underlying concern. Precisely because secular Time was its presupposition, logically speaking, or its signified, in semiotic parlance, the new discourse had (with exceptions to be mentioned later) no need to thematize Time. (Philosophical History, as is well known, was strangely ahistorical). Such distinction between intent and expression is an important principle of interpretation which will be more fully elaborated in chapter 3. It also invites consideration of the reverse case: A discourse in which Time is thematized may be about an atemporal referent.⁹ As we shall see, nineteenth-century evolutionism is a case in point. At any rate, “philosophical travel,” that is, the conception of travel as science, could leave the problem of Time theoretically implicit because travel itself, as witnessed by Degérando’s statement, is instituted as a temporalizing practice.

Why this should be so is explained by the subsumption of travel under the reigning paradigm of natural history. Moravia has shown that the project of scientific travel was consciously conceived to replace an earlier, enormously popular, genre of mostly sentimental and aesthetisizing tales of travel. The new traveler “criticized the philosophes: the reality of lived experience and of things seen was now opposed to a reality distorted by preconceived ideas” (1967:963). One also begins to reject the linkup, unquestioned by earlier voyagers, between travel in foreign parts and military conquest. According to La Pérouse, one of the most famous figures in this story, “the modern navigators only have one objective when they describe the customs of new peoples: to complete the history of man” (cited in Moravia 1967:964 f).

There is a significant double entendre in the verb to complete. As used by La Pérouse, it signifies belief in the fulfillment of human destiny: travel is the self-realization of man. It also has a more literal, methodological meaning and might then be translated as filling out (as in “to complete a questionnaire”). In the episteme of natural history¹⁰ the exercise of knowledge was projected as the filling of spaces or slots in a table, or the marking of points in a system of coordinates in which all possible knowledge could be placed. It is therefore not surprising that with the rise of an ethos of scientific travel we also see the emergence of a genre of scientific preparation for travel quite different from the instructiones European potentates used to give to the early navigators and conquistadors. We know its modern offspring, the Notes and Queries on Anthropology which accompanied generations of anthropologists to the field.¹¹ Only recently have we rediscovered and come to appreciate such predecessors as Degérando’s The Observation of Savage Peoples, issued from the short-lived activities of the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme. It is most revealing to find that a model of the genre was conceived by that natural historian par excellence, Linnaeus (Institutio Perigrinatoris, Uppsala, 1759).¹² This confirms, if confirmation is needed, beyond any doubt the roots of the new science of travel in natural-historical projects of observation, collection and classification, and description.

The new travelers did not mindlessly subscribe to empiricism and pure, positive description. Volney, one of the most eminent representatives of the genre, is also the one who advocated a critical stance based (and in this he is closer to the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenment) on explicitly historical, i.e., temporal considerations. During his voyages in Egypt and Syria he constantly had to face the dilapidated monuments of a once glorious past. Contrasting past and present became an intellectual concern as well as a literary device pervading his writings (see Moravia 1967:1008 f). It was elevated to a poetic-philosophical vision in his Les Ruines ou Méditation sur les Révolutions des Empires, Better than any commentary, the opening page from Ruines will illustrate the poignancy of contradictory experiences of past and present and the political nature of Volney’s concern with Time:

In the eleventh year of the reign of Abdul-Hamid, son of Ahmed, emperor of the Turks, at a time when the victorious Russians took the Crimea and planted their banners on the coast that leads to Constantin...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Foreword: Syntheses of a Critical Anthropology, by Matti Bunzl
• Preface to the Reprint Edition
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1. Time and the Emerging Other
• 2. Our Time, Their Time, No Time: Coevalness Denied
• 3. Time and Writing About the Other
• 4. The Other and the Eye: Time and the Rhetoric of Vision
• 5. Conclusions
• Postscript: The Other Revisited
• Notes
• References Cited
• Index