A Moment's Notice: Time Politics across Culture

“In this regard the time of anthropological knowing runs counter to that of political and economic rationalities, to the reason of policy and governance, which makes people the objects of technical fixes with specific, temporally limited stages of progress and evaluation (Greenhouse 1996).”

“Greenhouse 1996: 82 Only Marxism ... takes up ... a time that is always internal-external – hence collective foundational – and at once antagonism.”

“Much recent attention has been devoted to issues of “temporalization”: time as symbolic process, recurrently manifested in everyday forms of conduct and power relations (Munn, 1992, Gell, 1992, Greenhouse, 1996).”

“Another approach is illustrated in the work of Carol Greenhouse (1996), an anthropologist of law.”

“In anthropological terms, this is accordant with a critique of linear time (cf. Greenhouse, 1996); and it enables the adoption of an anthropological apparatus influenced by phenomenology as advocated by Munn, and its development in novel ways through a consideration of the relationship of lived…”

“…room therefore broadens the analytical frame beyond the anthropology of science and brings it into conversation with a wider set of concerns in the anthropology of gender, politics, exchange, time, and law (Greenhouse 1996; Maurer 2005; Strathern 1999; Verdery 2003) as well as in feminist theory.”

“…past, present and future (whether this be linear or nonlinear), it becomes possible to ask how time operates as a system for social collaboration (Sorokin and Merton 1937), how it legitimates some and ‘manages’ others (Greenhouse 1996), or how it works to support systems of exclusion (Fabian 1983).”

“In the third major contemporary work, Greenhouse (1996) does address the relationship of time and narrative in several places, but neither this relationship nor the literature that surrounds it are central to her work.”

“…Greenhouse pushes this approach to time further: Since ‘social time has no practical existence or intrinsic logic apart from its contexts of use’ (Greenhouse, 1996: 212), we must attend ‘the multiple ways in which the nature and meaning of time are indeterminate even in contexts where its…”

“For the relationship of temporal hierarchies to imperialism and anthropological epistemologies see Boellstorff (2007); Fabian (1983); Greenhouse (1996); Clifford and Marcus (1986).”

“Greenhouse (1996) notes how life-histories are demonstrations of personal autonomy and agency, but yield this ‘difference’ in terms of commonly understood forms.”

“As Greenhouse argues, linear time tends to naturalise events and structures by rendering them part of an irreversible, logical progression from past to present (Greenhouse 1996).”

“But a tree planted for a person also stands for that person and allows the 19 Carol Greenhouse (1996) also notes that mortal time is linear and cosmological time is cyclical in the Western tradition. gardener to imagine an intertwining of the human life span with the longer history of the tree, projecting beyond human…”

“Barbara Adam (2004), Joseph K. Adjaye et al. (1994), Keletso E. Atkins (1993), Bain Attwood (1989), Jean Comaroff (1991), Frederick Cooper (1992), Carol Greenhouse (1996), Mike Donaldson (1996), Sally Hodson (1993), Janet Hoskins (1993), Mark M. Smith (1997) and Maureen Perkins (1998, 2001).”

“…past, present and future (whether this be linear or nonlinear), it becomes possible to ask how time operates as a system for social collaboration (Sorokin and Merton 1937), how it legitimates some and ‘manages’ others (Greenhouse 1996), or how it works within systems of exclusion (Fabian 1983).”

“…unpack key domain-specific issues in biology (Feldman et al.,), culture (Fabian, 1983), ecology (Egri & Pinfield, 1996), management (Du Gay & Vikkelsø, 2012), organizations (Ancona et al., 2001), physical reality (Rovelli, 2019), politics (Greenhouse, 1996), and society (Elias, 1993), among others.”

“…on different levels, and the calling forth of different state and/or religious representatives at National Integration Camps denies the internal diversity of the represented ‘community’ in order to make a claim about diversity on a different level (that of the nation) (see Greenhouse, 1996: 230).”

“Greenhouse (1989, 1996) argues that these two important temporal concepts, cyclical time and linear time, repeatedly crop up in human cultures.”

“That is, she argues, that ‘ruling or aspiring elites address, in temporal terms, the political challenges from new forms of cultural diversity among their constituents’ (Greenhouse, 1996: 8).”

“…and interaction of shared ideas (Schwartz 1978; Goodenough 1981; Swartz 1991; Hannerz 1992; Shore 1996), the study of cultural ideas of time has shifted from characterizations of a society’s time to discussions of multiple times and their relationships (Rutz 1992; Greenhouse 1996; Birth 1999).”

“…and extending Durkheim’s notion of social time to questions of legitimation in government, in particular, with the ways officializations of time encompass by calculated absorption symbols of moral and political communities outside the state (Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Greenhouse 1996, 2003, 2011a).”

“Time is cultural; it is socially constructed (Engel 1987), in part to signal political legitimacy within legal systems (Greenhouse 1996) and mobilize institutional power (Bloom 2015).”

“Greenhouse (1996) similarly argues that, ‘If linear time dominates public life in the West, then, it is because its primary efficacy is in the construction and management of dominant social institutions, not because it is the only “kind” of time that is culturally available’ (p. 23).”

“38 Greenhouse, C. J. (1996), A Moment’s Notice: Time Politics across Cultures, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.”

“Although it is impossible to tell whether this difference owes to translation glitches or intentional manipulation, it could be an example of what Greenhouse (1996) calls a "counter-discourse of time" in a game of time politics that presses Cahuitans' case for legitimacy through the juxtaposition…”

“Stories, for me, convey and produce experience; they are agentic in the sense that they disclose usually implicit thinking about how the world works (Greenhouse 1996).”

“If time can be a tool for managing social differences through the production of commensurabilities (Greenhouse, 1996), Ameera’s story shows how gendered and racialized difference can be fabricated and excluded through incommensurabilities.”

“Another call to focus on political uses of time representations comes from Carol Greenhouse.7 For the American anthropologist, social time is about “the vulnerability of political institutions to legitimacy crises of different kinds” (p 15).”

“Their anthropologies of space and science thus offer new tools for an anthropology of time (see, e.g., Appadurai, 1981; Herzfeld, 1991; Gupta, 1994; Greenhouse, 1996; Fabian, 2002), for understanding how science as culture diversely produces the “neutral grid” of time.”

“Especially scholars in the emancipatory tradition sought to reconnect temporalities to spatiality (see, for instance, Harvey 1990; Massey 1992; Osborne 1995; Greenhouse 1996, but notably also the later “discovery” of time by Grosz 2004).”

“Law and time have plenty to do with one another (French 2001; Greenhouse 1989, 1996; Melissaris 2005; Ali Khan 2009) and continue to arouse the interest of legal scholars (von Benda-Beckman 2014; Valverde 2015; Lefebvre 2008; Bjarup and Blevad 1994); not just because of the occasional explicit…”

“Temporalities are human-designed; folded throughout legal and political economies and conceptualised through the order of socio-political systems (Cohen 2018; Grabham 2016; Greenhouse 1996).”

“Drawing on classic and more recently published literature on time (Adam 1994; Greenhouse 1996; Little 2022; Zerubavel 2003), we conceive of clock time and linear time as particular temporalities.”

“In her seminal book, A Moment’s Notice , anthropologist Carol Greenhouse (1996) argues that the con-trol of people’s time through the law does not solely originate from the law itself but from bureaucrats who control the creation and implementation of these laws, including politicians, the judiciary, employers, busine…”

“Field notes and interview, December 3, 2016. marginalization and domination of people who represent an unwanted future or past (Greenhouse 1996, 98–100).”

“However, like Greenhouse (1996, 96) and Lucas (2005, 94), I would argue that understandings of time are highly complex and mutable, defying simple generalizations.”

“The study of 'social time', in particular, seeks to understand "the ways in which social experience defines the forms, meanings and relevance of time" (Greenhouse 1996, 25).”

“This is so with regard to the “agency of things” (e.g., Bennett 2010; Latour 2005; Navaro-Yashin 2009), and the temporal significances of materiality (e.g., Bender 2002; Greenhouse 2018; Stoler 2012).”

“…it conflates an irreversible sense of time with a repetitive (‘cyclic’) one.35 Yet the conception of irreversible (‘linear’) time which we find in messianic movements is not at all equatable with the processes of entropy and decay which both Leach and Maurice Bloch emphasise (cf. Greenhouse 1996).”

“Research on legal temporality has emphasised law ’ s active role in making, rather than passing through, time (Greenhouse, 1996).”

“…of multiple temporalities is important, epis-temological re fl ection is also necessary in order to not reproduce divisions and power relations between the separate temporalities of the anthropologists and their research participants (Greenhouse, 1996: 3; Ramsay, 2019; Vargas-Cetina, 2007).”

“Time is ‘what makes things happen, and what makes acts relevant concerning social experience, however, conceived’ (Greenhouse, 1996: 1).”

“…it has posited time as a collective representation of experience in society (as in Durkheimian theory) or as a progression of changing social forms (as in Marxist thought), social theory has contributed to the reproduction of the hegemony of historical and chronological time (Greenhouse 1996).”

“A uthor M anuscript A uthor M anuscript A uthor M anuscript A uthor M anuscript experienced and understood, such as ritual, calendrical, or cyclical time (Geertz 2000; Greenhouse 1996).”