A Moment's Notice: Time Politics across Culture

Carol J. Greenhouse

Published by Cornell University Press 1996

A Moment's Notice

Time Politics across Culture

Carol J. Greenhouse

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501725029

Overview
Contents

About this book

Focusing on the problem of time—the paradox of time's apparent universality and cultural relativity—Carol J. Greenhouse develops an original ethnographic account of our present moment, the much-heralded postmodern condition, which is at the same time a reflexive analysis of ethnography itself.

Author / Editor information

Carol J. Greenhouse is Professor and Chair in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. She is the author of Praying for Justice: Faith, Order, and Community in an American Town and coauthor, with Barbara Yngvesson and David M. Engel, of Law and Community in Three American Towns, both available from Cornell.

Reviews

Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University:

Carol J. Greenhouse has written an original and challenging book that will give the lie to those who consider the anthropological imagination spent and its object no longer relevant to the modern world. She has taken the political centers of several epochs and places and shown how contingent they are and how much we have to learn from those they rendered marginal in politics, in epistemology, and in life itself.

Greenhouse moves from the idea that perceptions of time and what time plans are culturally specific to the idea that cultural notions of time are linked to cultural notions about how the world works, or 'agency.' She includes discussions of the anthropological theories of time and their relationship to beliefs about death, a critique of the notion of social structure, and case studies that show the relationship of official assumptions of time-as-history to the responses of state elites toward challenges brought against them from below. These challenges to state legitimacy arise from the increasing diversity of populations within the state. The illustrative cases cover a wide range: the late-20th-century US, China 2,300 years ago, and early-16th-century Mexico. They show that official views of time and history are important in establishing and maintaining political legitimacy.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I
1. Time, Life, and Society Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
2. Relative Time and the Limits of Law Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	49
3. Agency and Authority Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	77
Part II
4. Time and Territory in Ancient China Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	113
5. Time and Sovereignty in Aztec Mexico Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	144
6. Time, Life, and Law in the United States Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	175
Conclusion: Postmodernity This Time Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	211
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	279
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	307

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 334
Keywords: Anthropology; History

eBook

Published: July 5, 2018
ISBN: 9781501725029