发表在英国人类学杂志MAN上的一篇书评。
关于Gell, Alfred 的 The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images. (book reviews) by Janet Hoskins.
Gell, Alfred. xii, 341 pp., tables, bibliogr. Oxford, Providence: Berg, 1992.
The anthropology of time has long attracted imaginative and intellectually ambitious researchers who wanted to probe not only ethnographic variation but also broader philosophical and metaphysical problems. In this new book, Gell argues that this search is misguided because \'there is no fairyland where people experience time in a way that is markedly unlike the way we do ourselves\' (p. 315). Arguing forcefully against a number of distinguished anthropologists and his own earlier work, he has produced a critical review of the literature which is original, disturbing and sometimes brilliant -- but does not lead only in the direction he indicates.
He begins by taking apart Durkheim\'s assertion that differences in the cognition of time can be attributed to society and culture, which Gell links to a variety of \'incoherent and misleading\' relativist interpretations. Evans-Pritchard, Levi-Strauss and Leach are each taken to task for using interesting ethnographic materials to argue for unjustifiable metaphysical conclusions -- such as the idea that different peoples have fundamentally different concepts of time or that there can be a conflict between synchrony and diachrony in ritual symbolism. Gell faults his own earlier analysis of an Umeda ceremony for falling into the trap of temporal cultural relativism. He now says that what he once perceived as \'contradiction\' between synchrony and diachrony was in fact a confusion of classificatory mechanisms (synchrony) with historicity (diachrony).
Turning to the controversies over Geertz\'s description of Balinese time as \'a motionless present, a vectorless now\', Gell argues that Geertz has often been misread. He may have exaggerated the degree to which the Balinese are indifferent to the cumulative effects of historical time, and been blind to the ways a complex calendrical system is also an instrument of power and influence. But the \'defamiliarizing\' literary artifice of Geertz\'s descriptions is not necessarily identical with the extreme relativism and idealism for which Bloch attacks him. Bloch\'s critique, based on distinguishing universal temporal cognition (\'practical time\') from ideological \'ritual time\' substitutes the misleading idea that only hierarchical societies use a cyclical notion of time to legitimize authority. Gell shows effectively that it is the agricultural productive cycle which focalizes recurrence as the most salient feature of time in agrarian societies -- for reasons which have little to do with mystified authority or hierarchy.
Evidence from Piagetian development psychology and linguistics is then surveyed to present a case for the universality of time cognition. Gell argues that philosophical approaches to time (and their anthropological offshoots) can be sorted, using the terminology of R. Gale, into an \'A series\' of phenomenological orientations, where time is experienced as dynamic and \'becoming\', and a \'B series\' where time is seen as objective, measurable and \'real\'. Gell describes himself as a moderate B-series supporter, who still has some sympathy for A-series efforts to represent human subjective time consciousness. However, he presents an objectivist theory of time cognition which tries to show that the B-series encompasses the A-series, and so there are no real ontological differences between past, present and future events.
Gell uses a number of concepts from economic theory (opportunity cost, probability studies) to measure how we construct temporal maps based on our experience of the world. Time is itself a scare resource which must be distributed socially, and time-geography provides a method to map out this supply in space. Such discussions across disciplinary borders are provocative, but run the risk of generalizing an allegedly universal economistic model of time use to social groups which may perceive it very differently -- focusing on a longue duree rather than a calculus of minutes and hours, or seeing time supply as cumulative rather than partitive. Gell is aware of these counter-arguments, and notes that certain groups, like the Umeda, may be A-series dominated in that they make temporal judgements without clocks, calendars or schedules, but he believes they still refer to a B-series time map which is \'modally uncertain and metrically uncalibrated\'.
The strongest part of the book is the discussion of calendars and power, where Gell shows how traditional time-keepers negotiate with others over the timing of ceremonies and the lunar/solar year. He focuses on the Trobriand malamala festival, linked to the annual swarming of the palolo worm off Vakuta island, which is the same phenomenon celebrated in the nale rites of Eastern Indonesia I have studied (The play of time: Kodi perspectives on calendars, history and exchange, University of California Press, 1993). Gell\'s stress on the strategic advantages of centralizing the calendrical ritual in one district, and its co-optation by colonial officers, resonates tellingly with the Kodi case where traditional calendrical knowledge was also a crucial political resource. But he fails to note that an \'objectivist\' approach to the politics of time in these cases would fail to grasp why the year itself must be ritually constituted or how the failure to hold a certain ceremony could cause a cosmic imbalance. I remain sceptical about the applicability of time-budgeting studies to peoples who see the passage of time as an accretion of value rather than a waste of resources.
While Gell wants to dispel the aura of mystery and paradox that surrounds time, his incisive commentaries weed out some of the wilder fantasies of different time worlds, but not the phenomenological argument for different experiences of temporality. Gell has little to say about history, traditions or memories, admitting that he has neglected these topics because of his own \'present-focused mind set\'. However, since it is precisely the great value given to the past which is the distinctive characteristic of many non-Western societies, this flaw is a rather fatal one.
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楼主: 刘宗迪
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发表于 2005-1-21 22:20:57
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