The time of the interval: Historicity, modernity, and epoch in rural France

ABSTRACT With recognition that historical consciousness, or “historicity,” is culturally mediated comes acknowledgment that periodization of history into epochs is as much a product of cultural practice as a reflection of historical “fact.” In this article, I examine popular “modernist” invocations of epoch in rural France—those positing traditional pasts against fluid presents with uncertain futures—which scholars frequently subordinate to analyses of collective memory and identity politics. Submitting this “response” to French modernity to temporal analysis reveals an additional critique in this periodization, one that valorizes enduring social time over processual temporalities, with implications for the temporal frameworks and ideology of anthropologists.