![]() ![]() The Nuer have no expression equivalent to “time” in our language, and they cannot, therefore, speak of time as though it were something which passes, can be wasted, saved, and so forth. ![]() Here, Ingold quotes the “justly celebrated passage” from E.E. While in the West task time is subordinated to industrial capitalism, Ingold makes the case that it persists outside-the-West into more contemporary times. And my favorite “in Medieval England, duration could be expressed by how long it took to cook an egg, say a prayer, or (apparently) to have a pee–though this latter time-span, known as ‘pissing while,’ does seem ‘a somewhat arbitrary measurement’ (Thompson 1967: 58)” (Ingold, 325). For longer duration it might be how long to plant a field. So for short duration tasks you might compare it to cooking an egg, or cooking rice. “If you want to say when something happened, you do so by relating it to another regular activity that took place concurrently–for example, ‘so-and-so arrived in the camp at milking time.’ And if you want to say how long it took for something to happen, you do so by comparing it with how long something else takes” (324). In such societies, there is no such thing as time as something outside of the activities themselves. It is not something objective and external, against which tasks may be measured or on which they can be located, since it has no existence apart from the tasks themselves” (324). In such societies, the conception of time is “inseparable from the everyday round of activities. “For work is life, and any distinctions one might make within the course of life would be not between work and non-work, but between different fields of activity, such as farming, cooking, child-minding, weaving, and so on” (324). ![]() In this orientation, there is no separation between work, life, and our activities. Ingold labels this “task orientation” or we might call it task time. When we look historically at European societies or at some contemporary non-Western societies, we find a different conception of time. The division between work time and leisure time is particular and peculiar too industrial capitalist society. And that is exactly what happens in the classroom, where sometimes as a professor I can cause students to do something! Task Time Or as Ingold puts it: “The distinction being drawn here between living and working is really one between what we do, and what we are caused to do between action that issues from ourselves as responsible social agents, and action that stems from the pressing of various trained capacities into the service of a project that is not ours but is subject to the dictates of an alien will” (326). Work is what you have to do, and when we tell someone to “get a life,” it almost always refers to leisure activities, where we often feel the most alive. Most did not remember, or reported that time “flew by” as compared to the excruciating slowness of class time.Īnd that’s the point–because for college students a comparison between in-class time and Saturday night time is often as close as we can get to the division in industrial capitalist society between work time and leisure time. When we return to the classroom, I ask them about their Saturday night check-ins. Then, I ask students to do a similar 10-minute check in for 1.5 hours on Saturday night. Someone volunteers to have an iPhone timer go off every ten minutes and we interrupt class to “check in” with our feelings. In the normal version of this course, during the previous class I ask students to write down how they are feeling every ten minutes. In 2022 I revisited the Ingold chapter in a course on the History of Anthropological Thought: Note: This material was for Cultural Ecology 2020 and was then featured in an online introductory course in anthropology, Ethnographic Insights Across Cultures. ![]() We also read chapters by Jens-Christian Svenning on “Future Megafaunas: A Historical Perspective on the Potential for a Wilder Anthropocene” and Andreas Hejnol “Ladders, Trees, Complexity, and Other Metaphors in Evolutionary Thinking” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Ghosts, G65-G102). For Cultural Ecology 2020 we read Tim Ingold’s, “Work, time and industry” in The Perception of the Environment. ![]()
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