ANTH1912: Time: Now and Then

The topic of the class is “time” and our goal will be to understand how time is far more complicated than we might think. Indeed, time is a problem for us: as an experience, as a way of explaining the material world, and as a political and historical phenomenon. Though we cannot go back in time, human experiences of time are not linear or straightforward: memory, prediction, nostalgia, boredom, and regret on the one hand and myth, fantasy, hope, and science fiction on the other, pull us back and forth across time lines and scales. Physicists tell us that time is relative, that it is not a thing or a happening, that it may simply be our name for a structure we cannot comprehend. Meanwhile, in the historical time of Earth, different cultural traditions have experienced, explained, and used time in radically different ways. Moreover, as Europeans colonized the globe, encounters between different kinds of time have produced political effects that remain at the center of conflict, exchange, and inequalities. This course takes an anthropological perspective on time, drawing additionally on readings from history and geography to explore why it is we find time so very troublesome.

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