A Moment's Notice: Time Politics across Culture / Edition 1

by Carol J. Greenhouse

Overview

Focusing on the problem of time—the paradox of time's apparent universality and cultural relativity—Carol J. Greenhouse develops an original ethnographic account of our present moment, the much-heralded postmodern condition, which is at the same time a reflexive analysis of ethnography itself. She argues that time is about agency and accountability, and that representations of time are used by institutions of law, politics, and scholarship to selectively refashion popular ideas of agency into paradigms of institutional legitimacy. A Moment's Notice suggests that the problem of time in theory is the corollary of problems of power in practice.Greenhouse develops her theory in examinations of three moments of cultural and political crisis: the resistance of the Aztecs against Cortes, the consolidation of China's First Empire, and the recent partisan political contests over Supreme Court nominees in the United States. In each of these cases, temporal innovation is integral to political improvisation, as traditions of sovereignty confront new cultural challenges. These cases return the discussion to current issues of inequality, postmodernity, cultural pluralism, and ethnography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801482281
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	06/27/1996
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	334
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Carol J. Greenhouse is Professor and Chair in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. She is the author of Praying for Justice: Faith, Order, and Community in an American Town and coauthor, with Barbara Yngvesson and David M. Engel, of Law and Community in Three American Towns, both available from Cornell.

Table of Contents

Preface
IntroductionPart I
1. Time, Life, and Society
2. Relative Time and the Limits of Law
3. Agency and AuthorityPart II
4. Time and Territory in Ancient China
5. Time and Sovereignty in Aztec Mexico
6. Time, Life, and Law in the United StatesConclusion: Postmodemity This TimeNotes
References
Index

What People are Saying About This

Michael Herzfeld

Carol J. Greenhouse has written an original and challenging book that will give the lie to those who consider the anthropological imagination spent and its object no longer relevant to the modern world. She has taken the political centers of several epochs and places and shown how contingent they are and how much we have to learn from those they rendered marginal in politics, in epistemology, and in life itself.

Editorial Reviews

Greenhouse moves from the idea that perceptions of time and what time plans are culturally specific to the idea that cultural notions of time are linked to cultural notions about how the world works, or 'agency.' She includes discussions of the anthropological theories of time and their relationship to beliefs about death, a critique of the notion of social structure, and case studies that show the relationship of official assumptions of time-as-history to the responses of state elites toward challenges brought against them from below. These challenges to state legitimacy arise from the increasing diversity of populations within the state. The illustrative cases cover a wide range: the late-20th-century US, China 2,300 years ago, and early-16th-century Mexico. They show that official views of time and history are important in establishing and maintaining political legitimacy.

Choice

Greenhouse moves from the idea that perceptions of time and what time plans are culturally specific to the idea that cultural notions of time are linked to cultural notions about how the world works, or 'agency.' She includes discussions of the anthropological theories of time and their relationship to beliefs about death, a critique of the notion of social structure, and case studies that show the relationship of official assumptions of time-as-history to the responses of state elites toward challenges brought against them from below. These challenges to state legitimacy arise from the increasing diversity of populations within the state. The illustrative cases cover a wide range: the late-20th-century US, China 2,300 years ago, and early-16th-century Mexico. They show that official views of time and history are important in establishing and maintaining political legitimacy.

-- "Choice"

From the Publisher

"Carol J. Greenhouse has written an original and challenging book that will give the lie to those who consider the anthropological imagination spent and its object no longer relevant to the modern world. She has taken the political centers of several epochs and places and shown how contingent they are and how much we have to learn from those they rendered marginal in politics, in epistemology, and in life itself."

Michael Herzfeld