Time and space as concerns for social anthropologists derive from the work of Durkheim and his associates such as Hubert and Mauss (1909). But there are also important methodological issues regarding time and social anthropology which have been raised in a particularly acute way by Bourdieu (1990).
For Durkheim, time and space can only be conceived of in so far as they are mediated by society, or rather by the collective representations generated by, and therefore reflecting the social structure of, particular societies. Awareness of extension as space and duration as time is only possible by distinguishing different regions and moments and by encountering their associated boundaries and intervals. These divisions and distinctions have their origins in social and collective life. ‘We cannot conceive of time, except on condition of distinguishing its different moments … It is the same thing with space’ (Durkheim 1915: 10—11). This kind of thinking echoes ancient Indian traditions where the Hindu temple is a map of the cosmos and a representation of the cosmogonic processes which produced the universe. The construction of a temple is then the recreation of the universe. The Upanishads and the Vedas refer to the gods measuring time and space and as a consequence creating the cosmos. The Sanskrit term referring to the temple, vimana, means ‘well measured’, or ‘well proportioned’. Given the diversity of societies, and the feeling we have that time and space are somehow of cosmic and fundamental significance, Durkheim opened up the attractive prospect of exploring and documenting by empirical field research, as opposed to metaphysical speculation in the study, a vast range of radically different space—time worlds.
Space: symbolism and phenomenology
For the people of the Guinea Coast of West Africa there is a widespread cultural distinction between the space of the settlement and the space of the forest. The latter is regarded as a vastly rich and diverse life-sustaining resource, but it is also dangerous and life threatening for it is in the forest that serious injuries are most likely to occur. The relationship between settlement and forest is also temporal, both in the sense of the origin of settlements and in the dynamics of the continuing relationship between settlement and forest. Not only were houses built by founding ancestors in a space cut out of the forest, but the settlement and its inhabitants are sustained only by re-establishing a relationship between settlement and forest. Peoples’ experience of the relationship between forest and settlement lies at the heart of Guinea Coast cosmology, where the relationship is a metaphor of the more abstract relationship between the visible world of mortals and the invisible world of spiritual beings.
However, the symbolism of sacred architecture and the metaphorical appropriation of the landscape to provide the terms of an account of the ineffable are both quite compatible with a scientific concept of space whose attributes are that it is continuous, homogeneous, isotropic, and the ultimate container of all things. Some anthropologists, by exercising restraint in the resort to symbolism and metaphor, have attempted to infer from the data of their ethnographic research a phenomenology of space which suggests that space is actually radically different for people of other cultures. Lit-tlejohn (1963) sought to establish that for the Temne of West Africa space was neither homogeneous nor isotropic. He concluded on the basis of what Temne say and do that space for them comprises qualitatively different yet coextensive ‘regions’ which are actual and objectively present. These ‘regions’ are not mere metaphors for modes of existence, such as the English expressions ‘worldly’ and ‘other worldly’. Temne space is identical with dream space, and consequently for Temne happenings in the one are as objectively real as happenings in the other.
Time: relativities and constants
As with space so with time, and attempts have been made to show not only that time indications and reckonings are culturally relative but also the concept of time itself. Among Nuer, Evans-Pritchard (1940) noted that seasonal activities were used to indicate times. The time of a notable event is referred to the activities of that time, such as the formation of the early cattle camps, the time of weeding, the time of harvesting, and so on. Likewise daily activities are timed by what Evans-Pritchard has called the ‘cattle clock’. The passage of time through the day is marked by the succession of tasks which constitute the pastoral daily regime and this is used to coordinate their actions: ‘I shall return at milking’, ‘We shall meet when the calves come home’. The Nuer year is divided into two seasons, tot and mai, but the terms refer to the cluster of social activities characteristic of the height of the dry season and the depths of the rainy season. In this sense Nuer may use the words as verbs in utterances such as ‘going to tot [or mai]‘ in a certain place. The times correspond to localities, to village residence and to residence in the cattle camps. So far there is nothing here that is exceptional to a commonplace understanding of time. However, it may be that the quality of time in these locations and during these different periods is rather different. For example, mortuary rites are confined to the villages, as is procreation; the rites of sacrifice are also different, so that in general the experience of the cattle camp is one of affluence, and of a proximity of Divinity, a conjunction of the celestial and terrestrial. The villages, on the other hand, are dominated by production and reproduction, they are associated with birth and death, initiation and wedding ceremonies, and therefore by a sense of transition and change. The time of the cattle camps seems to approximate to that quality of timelessness that prevailed at the beginning of time.
Despite the immense diversity of metaphors for time and of the indicators used to tell time, in the end time generally tends to be perceived as both a linear flow and as repetitive. The former is probably based in an awareness that life irreversibly moves from birth to death, from a beginning to an end, while the latter is based in the experience of periodicities such as heart beats, menstruation, the recurrence of days and nights, of the moon, and annual seasons. For example, in Northwest Amazonia Hugh-Jones (1979) has described how for the Barasana the patrilineal links between men of successive generations form a continuity between ancestral times and the present. This patrilineal path removes the living progressively further from the creative powers of their ancestral origins. Women, on the other hand, are symbolically associated with alternation and repetition through their being exchanged between patri-lineal exogamous groups and the periodicity of menstruation. Barasana rituals which seek to promote change and regeneration borrow extensively from female symbolism. In Papua New Guinea for the people of Umeda on the upper Sepik river, the annual ida ritual of regeneration, though lasting only two weeks towards the end of the dry season, is the conclusion of a period of time which began with a day and a night playing musical instruments some nine months before. Not only has the playing of the music to be orchestrated but villagers have also to decide who will play the ritual roles of the ida to come, since they will immediately have to observe restrictions on their activities up to the ida. The ranking of these roles from junior to senior results in a personal experience of irreversible progression through the series. So though the ida rite is part of a repeating annual cycle, for any individual it also marks the non-recurring stages of their own maturation (Gell 1992).
Some anthropologists have been tempted to argue that in cultures where time is represented and experienced predominantly as repetitive it is conceived of as static. According to this view the return of the rainy season is literally the return of the previous rainy season, so that life is merely an alternation between two contrasting states, and time has no depth, no beginning or end. Geertz (1973) has, for example, argued that given, among other things, their complex calendar, for the Balinese time is ‘a motionless present, a vectorless now’. This view has been disputed by other ethnographers of Bali who have pointed out that Balinese frequently use their calendars to calculate the passage of time (Howe 1981). The return of, for instance, the rainy season is also the appearance of another rainy season which will in due course be succeeded by yet another rainy season, and nobody has any trouble talking about the passage of rainy seasons or years. However, calendrical rituals which seek to recover the generative and life-promoting qualities of a cosmic beginning may well attempt to articulate a sense of the rites as being not only the most recent in a series of such rites but also as representing the qualities of the original creative beginning, just as the current rainy season shares attributes with all previous rainy seasons. So Barasana dancers dance the dance performed by the anaconda ancestors when they first emerged from the river and settled the land. In short, a persisting resemblance among recurrent events does not necessarily imply a conception of time as static.
"Van Gennep’s (1960 [1909]) analysis of the structure of rituals locates them at the conjunction of the spatial and temporal dimensions of social life. The three fundamental components of what he called rites de passage — separation, liminality, and incorporation — appeal to both spatial and temporal metaphors. Rites bringing about a change in the social status of an individual, or group of individuals, will not only involve crossing thresholds, such as from the interior of a dwelling to the exterior, from the village into the forest, but these will also take place at dusk, or at dawn, between the dry season and the wet season, etc. In so doing these rituals also bring about the differentiation and therefore the recognition of time and space. It has been suggested that the liminal phase of rites de passage may be characterized by the reversal of the normal profane flow of time. The evidence for this is that normal conduct is reversed: juniors take precedence over seniors, women dress as men and vice versa, normally invisible spirits appear in the village while people disappear in the forest, and so on. But such an inference is unfounded. There is no reason to suppose that the people carrying out the rite perceive time to be flowing backwards during a period of licensed deviance. Indeed, if time were perceived to be flowing back then they would return to the first phase of the ritual rather than progress to the last, and they would never accomplish what the ritual project set out to achieve.
Time and space, practice and structure
Finally, time has become a matter of theoretical interest for social anthropologists not only as a matter to be studied in its cultural representations, but also as a methodological issue in the practice of anthropological research and in the writing of anthropological accounts. Bourdieu (1990) in his critique of, for example, the structuralist analysis of the social significance of gift exchange, has pointed out that the giving, receiving, and the return of gifts is not the outcome of the autonomous workings of some abstracted and synchronic ‘law of reciprocity’, but rather is a consequence of the political judgement of the agents involved as regards the timing of the giving of the initial gift and then of the counter gift. Without the lapse of time between the gift and the counter gift, a lapse of time which is a matter of the agent’s judgement, the exchange could not function. Bourdieu’s argument is part of a more general critique of the possibility of a science of social practice. Structural analysis deals with a synchronic virtual reality which tends to privilege spatial relations and their analogues in such forms as synoptic tables, diagrams (structures) and figures, while practice, which includes anthropological practice, necessarily unfolds in time and has all the properties which synchronic structures cannot take into account, such as directionality and irreversibility.
Recent anthropological works have continued to explore the intersection of time, space and practice. In the late twentieth century, the concept of landscape was taken up as a way to articulate these intersections. Some work has emphasized temporality to a greater degree, particularly work on ‘social memory’ (Climo and Cattell 2002; Mills and Walker 2009); studies of collective memory draw from the seminal work of Halbwachs (1992 [1925]). As in much of anthropology, scholars have grappled with theorizing whether a significant shift in collective understandings of time may be attributed to a postmodern condition (Guyer 2007). Other work has explored the social construction of space through time. For example, Low (2000) considers ‘peoples’ social exchanges, memories, images and daily use of the material setting’ (p. 128) to examine the creation of public space. As with studies of temporality, some works have considered whether a rupture in conceptualizations of space happened in the late twentieth century, to the extent that even the ‘death’ of place has occurred (Auge 1995). However, the earlier emphases of Durkheim and Mauss have persisted in many recent anthropological approaches to time and space (e.g. Pellow 1996).
