Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary

Thinking of Time and Subjectivity

six Thinking of Time and Subjectivity 9 5 this chapter is a reflection on issues of temporality that surface from the first part of the book as well as a bridge to the next set of chapters in which I try to capture my sense of adjacency to the violence among the survivors in Delhi in 1984. My arguments are not a comprehensive review of notions of time in anthropology—they stem from a very specific issue in the ethnography of the two events under consideration. In the last chapter we saw how Manjit made frequent references to the agency of time. Time is what could strike one, time is what could heal one, she said. I was further interested to note that references to specific kinds of events during the Partition, ones that came to condense the horrors of the Partition in collective memory such as trains arriving at stations with loads of people who were killed or severely wounded as they made their way from one part of the divided country to another, or references to magnitudes reappeared in panic rumors during communal riots. Thus I became interested in questions of temporality, not as representation but as work. What is the work that time does in the creation of the subject? What is the relation between structure and event here? There is a venerable history of thinking about time in anthropology that is structured around the relation between natural rhythms and social rhythms, synchrony and diachrony, cyclical time and linear time, and repetition and irreversibility.1 Issues of cultural variability have been addressed through the literature on calendars asking which calendars are geared toward practical activities (seasons for sowing or harvesting, making time schedules, etc.) and which provide a means of representing abstract concepts such as those of the auspicious and the inauspicious around which members of a given society might orient themselves.2 Are ritual calendars or genealogies about representing the passage of time, or are they about suppressing the idea of duration? These are, indeed, important questions, but they address the relation between time and subjectivity only in an oblique manner. A couple of observations relevant for framing the latter part of the argument may be in order here. One way to think of subjectivity is to think of the differences between phenomenal time and physical time that have engaged both philosophers and anthropologists. The attempt to give a structure to these differences often revolves around the difference between the time of occurrence and the time of telling, sometimes conceptualized as the difference between historical truth and narrative truth.3 For example, Alfred Gell’s laudable attempts to clear up certain metaphysical clouds in anthropological discussions around time are basically a restatement of this difference. Gell bases his discussion of temporality on McTaggart’s distinction between what he calls an A series and a B series.4 An A-series notion of time, he argues, is a categorization of events according to past, present, or future, whereas a B-series categorization refers to their occurrence before or after in relation to each other. Gell’s basic thesis is that “Very roughly, A-series temporal considerations apply in the human sciences because agents are always embedded in a context of situation about whose nature and evolution they entertain moment-to-moment beliefs, whereas B-series temporal considerations also apply because agents build up temporal ‘maps’ of their world and its penumbra of possible worlds whose B-series characteristics reflect the genuinely B-series layout of the universe itself.”5 It seems to me that despite the way in which Gell uses propositional logic to clarify these points, his discussion is basically pointing to the fact that we can put a date on events such as, say, the death of Mahatma Gandhi on January 30, 1948, even though we might debate whether suspicion of the Hindu Right in Indian politics happened before or after. I agree that some kinds of events can be fixed in time by putting a date on them, so long as we realize that there are other kinds of events for which to be dateable means something quite different (namely, that they are not timeless and eternal). For example , could one put an exact date on when one fell in love or out of love, although when such events become public as in a wedding, they can be t h i n k i n g o f t i m e a n...