The Play of Time in Anthropological Writing

Moving from the here-and-now reality of fieldwork to writing about those experiences in an ethnographic monograph creates a discrepancy between personal memory and an analytic account. The mixture of empathy, nostalgia, and guilt that I felt after my departure from the field was processed into descriptions which took various forms—a dissertation, articles, films, and drafts of the present manuscript. I returned to Kodi six times, bringing some of these materials for my former teachers to look over, but few were really interested in the theoretical questions that I address here. Our sharing of the same historic time and space during fieldwork—what Fabian (1983) calls "coevalness"—was replaced by a temporal and spatial distance which made the final writing a retrospective exercise that was mine alone.

The problem of "primitive temporality" that I explore in this study has not generally been linked to the concerns of history, anthropology's own politicized context, or the world economic system. Several recent writers have even questioned whether the argument that other peoples live in different time-worlds amounts to a "denial of coevalness"—an exclusion of them from our own temporal framework and an assertion that they live outside of history (Fabian 1983; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Clifford and Marcus 1986). In my view, this need not be the case; but to free ourselves from such false assumptions we must first get rid of the adjective primitive . As Fabian (1983, 18) says, "Primitive , being essentially a temporal concept, is a category, not an object of Western thought."

This work is about a specific historical and social system of timekeeping—Kodi temporality. This system is not treated as a subtype of "the primitive"; rather, the conceptual distance between Kodi time concepts and our own is the focus of analysis, not only so that we may delineate differences between "us" and "them" but also to problematize our own concepts, showing them to be neither necessary nor universal. Although the highly contested nature of the past has been the subject of much debate among Western historians, few ethnographic studies address it directly.

To restore the topic of indigenous temporality to responsible examination, I have tried to avoid certain traps in ethnographic writing which

recent writers have called to our attention (Fabian 1983, 1991; Sanjek 1991; Thomas 1989). There is, for example, no "ethnographic present" in this book. Descriptions of Kodi life are drawn from historically situated events and persons, who bear their real names, as my Kodi informants requested. The sense of personal engagement and shared experience that I had in the field is revealed through use of the first person in situations where my own involvement was important. This book is not, however, a work of "reflexive anthropology" in the sense that it takes as its primary subject the encounter between the anthropologist and her hosts. My initial feelings of confusion about time are relevant to this theme, but to dwell excessively on each mistake and misunderstanding along my path would be self-indulgent and ultimately solipsistic. Fieldwork is a time when most of us become painfully aware that we are neither objective nor omniscient. In writing about the experience, therefore, I concentrate on how I was ultimately able to make sense of some of these initially alien concepts.

Notions of time are notoriously slippery and hard to grasp. In describing the Western ideas I brought along as part of my own conceptual baggage, I must speak in metaphors. We say, and believe we understand what we mean, that "time is money" and "history moves forward in a linear progression." The people of Kodi say, and tried to explain to me what they meant, that "time is value" and "the presents turns to the past" to seek models for innovation and change. Both of us, in dialogue, often have trouble understanding what lurks beneath the metaphors; we require the context of lived experience to clarify such apparently abstract distinctions. This book tries to provide that context, describing how the past is represented in narrative, objects, and action, and how Kodi calendars and exchange transactions play out specific notions of time. The story must begin with the social groups and categories that I had first thought would be the subject of my study of Kodi. They start to tell us a story about a different way of moving through time-but they are only the beginning.