Contenu du sommaire : Vivre le temps

Images and uses of timeWhereas philosophers from Aristotle to Heidegger have endeavored to conceive of temporality in their world and times, anthropologists have, with surprising self-assurance, decided what time is like in far-off, exotic societies: reflecting social rhythms, time there is necessarily cyclical and repetitive. The genealogy of this "doctrine" runs through a few classical texts, ranging from Durkheim to Lévi-Strauss. This critical review proposes to grasp time less as a cognitive representation than as an outcome of practices.

Dwelling in time. Port Moresby and its dijointed temporalitiesIn Port Moresby, the temporality of expatriates is completely foreign to that of the poverty-stricken. In the capital of Papua New Guinea, time is always laden with random uncertainty against a backdrop of everyday insecurity. There are many sequelae from the colonial Australian past; and future development (especially in mining) is unforeseeable. Hence, individuals are easily thrown back onto the immediate present. Rather than the superficial transition from the stone to the jet age, the intricate overlapping of all these "disjointed temporalities" makes it hard to "dwell in time" in Papua New Guinea.

Berlin: Intertwined memoriesWithin a century, five different political and social systems have followed each other in the Berlin area: imperial Berlin till 1918; the Berlin of the Weimar Republic from 1918 to 1933; the Berlin of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945; eastern Berlin as capital of the German Democratic Republic from 1949 to 1989; and western Berlin which, since 1945, has been part of the Federal Republic and, since reunification in 1989, should soon become the capital. Each of these systems had its institutions and, too, its ways of life and world-views. Moreover, the switch from one system to another usually involved violence and has, from one time to the next, been more sudden. Since these systems have left their marks on the city, each new era copes with having to "manage the past" : what remains from the past systems are to be kept or eliminated? how to change what is kept? The various solutions worked out during each era have made Berlin the city of intertwined memories.

Elastic time. Students from public housing developments and university examsOn the basis of a survey of four students (sons of immigrant workers) who live in a public housing development in an industrialized area in eastern France but who happen to attend university, the "dominated relation" to education is seen to be linked to the elasticity of experienced time. The observation of these young men's rhythms and "ways of studying" sheds light on the "flunkees" resulting from the academic acculturation performed by the contemporary system of education. These young men's relation to time is but the flip side of the enthusiasm for, or disenchantment with, higher education. The temporal disorganization these men experience when they attend university is closely connected with the deinstitutionalization of academic time; it reflects the internalization of a "dominated relation" to the legitimate culture.

Suspended time. Rhythms and duration in a Portuguese prisonTime is an omnipresent reference in prison. Incarceration changes the relation to time, the latter becoming more objective. This many-sided relationship varied depending on the "periodization" made by the inmates studied in a prison for women in Portugal. Present, past and future became discontinuous realities. Since past and future could be located only in a temporality outside the prison, the penitentiary present became a nonprogressing time through which an undifferentiated duration flowed. This duration was marked not by calendar units as such but by periodical moments relating inmates to the outside. The way of estimating time depended on the phase in the prison sentence; and time was experienced as expanding or contracting. Time in prison was perceived as a problem because the world changes at another rhythm outside the penitentiary.

A moment and eternity. Jewelry in women's livesThe contemporary marketplace provides women with the chance to buy (or be offered) novelty as well as high-priced jewelry. The preference for one of these two sorts depends not only on monetary factors or a strategy of social distinction but also on the valued relation to time that the jewelry represents. Novelty jewelry, light and fragile, is associated with the idea of frivolity and inconstancy. For this reason, mainly young girls wear it. Real jewels are intended to crystalize the woman's individual identity and represent what she owes to her forebearers.

Forgetting the dead and remembering the murdered. Experiences of history among the jivaroJivaro "historiology" is characterized by separate discourses for the experience of change (which is related to relations with other cultures) and for "internal history" (which is organized following a rationale of vengeance). A "dechronologized" form of therapeutic ritual statements is used for the process of history, conceived in analogy with the experience of sickness, whereas warriors' autobiographies recount the linear story of individual destinies. These tales play on a complex relation between voluntarily forgetting the deceased (a condition for reproducing the potentialities of existence) and perpetuating their memory in the narration made by their enemies. Light is shed on the "logic" in this particular pattern of relations with the past.

Say, sing and do. Constructing the homeland through the Hungarian national anthem and "The Exhortation"The ethnological approach to two poems-songs that are the mainstays of Hungarian conceptions about the homeland, inquires into the traditional association of patriotism with nationalism. In these songs, which are both mythical stories condensed for various ritual uses and reservoirs of spatial and bodily metaphors related to the community in question, the patriotic bond seems to form a relatively autonomous symbolic reality that cannot be reduced to the religious or political spheres given: this bond's hybrid, fragmented, infinitely variable symbolism; its moorings in a spatial referent astride national borders and historical models of legitimation; and its roots in a common, central European interethnic stock of ritual forms and symbols about the homeland as a virtual space and a category of bonds.

The gardens of nostalgia. How the English garden has become a national heritageEngland is very often associated with its gardens, particularly those of the country houses dotting the English countryside. They conjure up both a certain idea of garden style and a traditional way of life. However, on closer analysis, it appears that historic gardens have only recently gained their reputation of national emblems, through the careful workings of a strategy which aims at ensuring cohesion and social stability within the country while conveying a certain image of national identity to the rest of the world. The evolution in the protection of the heritage of gardens allows a glimpse of what is at stake, i.e. politics behind horticulture.

From the overgarment to garments with openings. A Provencal contribution to a study of appearancesThe overgarment (in particular aprons), the basis of dress in many regions, symbolized feminine virtue. Against this background arose, in the Arles area of France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a dress that, though not having any apron, nonetheless concentrated in its upper part several signs of moral qualities. The skirt itself bore a sexual symbol with a catonière opening, which should be compared with other openings in women's dress. But it was back to start when a symbolic skirt panel (called a tablier) came to counterbalance the aroused connotations. Underlying these facts is the idea that, although the garment in question was involved in the part of the body being covered up, the proximity between body and dress was not a determinant. This study in symbolic ethnology is mainly based on lexical data and an analysis of techniques.

For a comparative anthropology of ritual: Becoming acquainted with "Batesonians"Ritual and ceremony have been, and still are, one of the major empirical and theoretical issues in ethnology. From native "discourses" to scientific definitions, identifying a ritual still raises problems. Under a hypothesis that refers ritual to a specific contextual framework, two objectives are pursued. First of all, to introduce a group of American researchers whose writings are not well-known or, at least, not much referred to in France (Bateson, Turner, Babcock, Stewart, MacAloon, Schechner and Goffrnan) - these works stimulate a very heuristic conceptual approach to understanding ritual as a fictional game. Secondly, to sketch an analytical framework for a comparative anthropology of major contemporary rituals, ranging from masses to football games.