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Beyond temporality: Notes on the anthropology of time from a shrinking fieldsite

Ringel, Felix

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Abstract

With the help of ethnographic material from Germany’s fastest shrinking city, I critically engage in this paper with the term ‘temporality’. By bringing together recent insights from the anthropology of time and the future, the literature on post-socialism, and contemporary philosophical debates on the problem of presentism, I pursue a thorough re-conceptualization of time as a matter of knowledge practices. I thereby question the idea of temporality as an inherent quality of anthropology’s objects of inquiry. Beyond temporality, I urge for abandoning such temporal attributions altogether whilst scrutinizing the temporal underpinnings of our own theories and analytics, as manifested in the term post-socialism. I claim that if anthropologists, and other social scientists, want to avoid determinists’ fallacies they should acknowledge that there is, indeed, no need for temporality in their analyses.

Citation

Ringel, F. (2016). Beyond temporality: Notes on the anthropology of time from a shrinking fieldsite. Anthropological Theory, 16(4), 390-412. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499616659971

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jun 27, 2016
Online Publication Date Dec 14, 2016
Publication Date Dec 14, 2016
Deposit Date Sep 8, 2017
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Anthropological Theory
Print ISSN 1463-4996
Electronic ISSN 1741-2641
Publisher SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 16
Issue 4
Pages 390-412
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499616659971

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