New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations

14. Time and the Individual in Native North America

KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 327 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [327], (1) Lines: 0 to 45 ——— 6.53001pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [327], (1) 14. Time and the Individual in Native North America david w. dinwoodie Introduction The ethnographic record exhibits a division of temporal labor.1 Africa offers up time from the point of view of segmentary social structure, latitudinal and longitudinal (Evans-Pritchard 1940; Fortes 1949). Australia offers up myth-time, past and present (Myers 1986; Munn 1970). South America and Indonesia offer variations on the idea of antihistory (Geertz 1973; Lévi-Strauss 1966). The Middle East offers the idea of experiencing biblical and Koranic events directly in the present (Thompson 1999). Time-obsessed Europe offers up the idea of social seriation in collective memory, architecture, written records, and experiential routines (Halbwachs 1980; Herzfeld 1991; Heidegger 1982). Europe also offers up the idea of the repression of memory, in both political and psychological terms. Suburban America offers up the two ideas of recovered memory, the retrieval of events that for various reasons have been inaccessible to consciousness (Bass and Davis 1994), and false memory, the vivid recollection of experiences that are proved never to have occurred (Wassil-Grimm 1996). If all of these phenomena are evident in every society to some degree, they seem to exhibit a special intensity in the societies with which they are most closely associated. In principle, societies could be compared in terms of which conceptions of time are present and which predominate. In practice, however, a more effective and compelling approach has been to attend to individuals’ efforts to navigate the temporalities of their socioculturally and historically distinctive experiences. Exploring this approach systematically, in fact, might inject life into an anthropology of time, a science that sometimes gives one the impression—after discover- KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 328 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [328], (2) Lines: 45 to 70 ——— 6.5pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [328], (2) ing that “time” is in some sense constructed—of having gone prematurely gray.2 In pursuing the experience of temporality, we might ask what contribution Native American studies can make. The backdrop to the ethnography of Native North America, Edward Sapir once suggested, is the “extreme psychological distance between the aboriginal American cultures and the kind of life they are expected to live today” (Darnell 1990:303). Thus viewed, Native North America offers up the experience of temporal spectra , traditional and modern, in a way that no other ethnographic area does. After all, to generalize grossly, what distinguishes Native North America among all ethnographic areas is the contiguity and sometimes confluence of practices hypermodern, archaic, and everything in between. This approach, the exploration of temporal spectra as epitomized in the experiences of representative Native Americans, would not be entirely new. A start was made in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly in the lifehistory work supervised by Edward Sapir and John Dollard. It has also been developed implicitly in actor-centered anthropology (Basso 1990, 1996; Fogelson 1974, 1984, 1989; Hallowell 1955) and in Native American literature (Erdrich 1984; Momaday 1968; Silko 1977; Welch 1979). For reasons that I do not fully understand, however, North America continues to be primarily associated in the general literature not with anything as interesting or palpable as the experience and management of temporalities but with a retrograde version of the question of whether time is relative. Stated simply, this question reads: Do the Hopi have “time” (Black 1959; Gell 1992; Malotki 1983; Munn 1992)? In order to show how an undue emphasis on this approach has impoverished not only Native American studies but also the anthropology of time, I will discuss a recent incarnation of this debate and compare the sort of material on which it is based to the evidence on temporality from one revisited life history. Rather than closing the book on Native American...