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FOUR - The Problem with Presentism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2020

Richard D. G. Irvine
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
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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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Chapter
Information
An Anthropology of Deep Time
Geological Temporality and Social Life
, pp. 78 - 105
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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