Time

Time, from an anthropological perspective, is culturally specific and inseparable from our understanding of the world and our place in it. Anthropology charts how and to what extent time is culturally constituted, and how, increasingly, these cultural constructs coexist, come into conflict, and colonise each other. This entry introduces time as a field of anthropological inquiry, including its emergence in philosophy and evolutionary thought, and the dialogue between physics’ relativity theory and anthropology’s cultural relativist approach to time. The anthropology of time has asked whether it is a multiple cultural and social construct, and how its multiplicity may be explored ethnographically, be it within a given society, in contexts of socio-cultural contact, or in the context of globalisation. Being attuned to temporal multiplicities enables anthropologists to improve how social and cultural research is conducted and to ask under which circumstances temporal multiplicities can be productive for anthropological theory and practice. The entry concludes with laying out the importance of anthropology to understand time in the age of the Anthropocene.