Book contents
- An Anthropology of Deep Time
- New Departures in Anthropology
- An Anthropology of Deep Time
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- ONE Time Depth
- TWO Time Travelling Pits and Migrant Rocks
- THREE Excluding Water
- FOUR The Problem with Presentism
- FIVE Mapping Deep Time
- SIX Geology and Biography
- SEVEN Enter Catastrophe
- EIGHT Wasteland
- References
- Index
FOUR - The Problem with Presentism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2020
- An Anthropology of Deep Time
- New Departures in Anthropology
- An Anthropology of Deep Time
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- ONE Time Depth
- TWO Time Travelling Pits and Migrant Rocks
- THREE Excluding Water
- FOUR The Problem with Presentism
- FIVE Mapping Deep Time
- SIX Geology and Biography
- SEVEN Enter Catastrophe
- EIGHT Wasteland
- References
- Index
Summary
This chapter explores the particular significance of the present, and the ways in which anthropology has approached ‘presentism’ as a metaphysical claim, a sociological description, and a means of analysis. While recognising that an analysis of the conditions of presentism is crucial for understanding contemporary social life, the central argument here is that any attempt to embrace presentism as a methodological tool or even metaphysical truth risks distorting human activity in a disastrous way by abstracting it from the material environment that makes such activity possible. The chapter concludes with a reflection upon the relationship between time and mystification in order to understand temporal disjuncture: conditions of life which obscure – and at the same time are violently dissonant with – the temporality of the ecologies and geologies which make that life possible. The task for anthropology is to analyse the conditions of this extraction from deep time, not to replicate it.
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- Information
- An Anthropology of Deep TimeGeological Temporality and Social Life, pp. 78 - 105Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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