The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay

Writing a review of the cultural anthropology of time is something like reading Borges's (19a) infinite "Book of Sand": as one opens this book, pages keep growing from it-it has no beginning or end. Borges's book could be taken as the spa ce of time: A page once seen is never seen again, and the book's harried possessors keep trying to escape its "monstrous" self-production by surrepti­ tiously selling or losing it. The diffuse, endlessly multiplying studies of sociocultural time reflect time's pervasiveness as an inescapable dimension of all aspects of social experience and practice. This apparently "infinite complexity" (1:200) seems

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