MDDM Ch. 76 The Dark Ages upon Display

[Dave Monroe]

"'No one knows why, but he intends to go to the
Hebrides, to the furthest Isle, to view the Dark Ages
upon Display.'
   "'The uncomplicated People, laboring with their
primitive Tools,' gushes Mason, '-- the simplicity
of Faith, lo, its Time reborn.'
   "''Tis fascinating, this belief among you Men of
Science,' remarks Dr. J., 'that Time is ever more
simply transcended, the further one is willing to
journey away from London, to observe it.'
   "'Why, Mason here's done the very thing,' cries
Boswell.  'In America.  Ask him.'
   "Mason glowers, shaking his head.  'I've
ascended, descended, even condescended, and the List's
not ended,-- but haven't yet trans-cended a blessed
thing, thankee.'" (M&D, Ch. 76, pp. 745-6)

And from Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How
Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia UP,
1983), Ch. 1, "Time and the Emerging Other," pp. 1-35
...

"Knowledge is Power....  Nowhere is this more clearly
visible, at least once we look for it, than in the
uses of Time anthrpology makes when it strives to
constitute its own object--the savage, the primitive,
the Other.  It is by diagnosing anthropology's
temporal discourse that one rediscovers the obvious,
namely that there is no knowledge of the Other which
is not also a temporal, historical, a political act."
(p. 1)

"In the Judeo-Christian tradition Time has been
conceived as the medium of a scared history.  Time was
thought, but more often celebrated, as a sequence of
specific events that befall a chosen people.  Much has
been said about the linear character of that
conception as opposed to pagan, cyclical views of Time
as an eternel retour.  Yet such spatial metaphors of
temporal thought tend to obscure something that is of
more immediate significance in an attempt to sketch
the ancestry of Time's anthropological uses: ...
sacred conceptions of Time....
   "Decisive steps towards modernity ... must be
sought, not in the invention of a linear conception,
but in a succession of attempts to secularize
Judeo-Christian Time by generalizing and
universalizing it.
   "Different degrees of universalizing Time had of
course been achieved in an abstract form by earlier
philosophical thought.  In fact, 'universal Time' was
probably established concretely and politically in the
Renaissance in response to both classical philosophy
and to the cognitive challenges presented by the age
of discoveries opening up in the wake of the earth's
circumnavigation.  Nevertheless, there are good
reasons to look for decisive developments, not in the
moments of intellectual rupture achieved by Copernicus
and Galileo nor, for that matter, by Newton and Locke,
but in ... the Age of Enlightenment." (pp. 2-3)

"... we may locate the starting point of these
dvelopments, a sort of barrier that had to be broken
through, in one of the last attempts during the
seventeenth century to write a universal history from
the Christian viewpoint, Bossuet's Discours sur
l'histoire universelle (first published in 1681)...."
(p. 3)

"On the whole, the philosophes, whom we recognize in
many respects as our immediate ancestors, schieved
only a sort of negative modernity.  In the words of
Carl Becker: 'Their negations rather than their
affirmations enable to treat them as kindred spirits'
....  Or, as Gusdorf puts it, these thinkers replaced
Bossuet's Christian myth with the 'myth-history of
reason' ..." (pp. 5-6)

Becker, Carl L.  The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth- 
 Century Philosophers.  New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 
   1963 [1932].

Gusdorf, Georges.  L'Avenement des sciences humaines
   au siecle des lumieres.  Paris: Payot, 1973.

"... which, by and large, continued to use the
conventions and devices of earlier periods.  If one
wants to show how Time became secularized in the
eighteenth-century and onward he [sic] must
concentrate on the transformation of the message of
'universal history' rather than on the elements of its
code....  The transformation of the message had to be
operated on what we identified as the specificity of
Christian 'universality.'  Change also had to occur on
the level of political interest or 'judgment.'" (pp.
5-6)

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   "In fact, among the many expressions of change one
could cite is the evry transformation of one man's
all-significant passage on earth into the topos of
travel....  Religious travel had been to the centers
of religion, or to the south to be saved; now, secular
travel was from the centers of learning and power to
places where man was to find nothing but himself." (p.
6)

"'The philosophical traveller, sailing to the ends of
the earth, is in fact travelling in time; he is
exploring the past; every step he makes is the passage
of an age' ...." (p. 7)

Degerando, Joseph-Marie.  The Observation of Savage
   Peoples.  Ed. F.C.T. Moore.  Berekeley: U of
   California P, 1969 [1800].  p. 63

"It is in this sense of a vehicle for the
self-realization of man that the topos of travel
signals acheived secularization of Time....
   "The manifest preoccupation in this literature ...
was with the description of movements and relations in
space ('geography') based primarily on visual
observation of foreign places.... 'philosophical
travel,' that is, the conception of travel as science,
could leave the problem of Time theoretically implicit
because travel itself ... is institud as a
temporalizing practice.'
   "Why this should be so is explianed by the
subsumption of travel under the reigining paradigm of
natural history.... the project of scientific travel
was consciously conceivd to replace an earlier,
enormously popular, genre of mostly sentimental and
aestheticizing tales of travel.  The new traveler
'criticized the philosophes: the reality of lived
experience and of things seen was now opposed to a
reality distorted by preconceived ideas....' Acording
to La Perouse ... 'the modern navigators only have one
objective when they describe the customs of new
peoples: to complete the history of man'" (pp. 7-8)

Cf. "that Mandeville of Mohawks" (M&D, Ch. 76, p. 746)

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   "Physical Time is seldom used in its naked,
chronological form.  More often that not, chronologies
shade into Mundane or Typological Time.  As ditancing
devices, categorizations of this kind are used, for
instance, when we are told that certain elements in
our culture are 'neolithic' or 'archaic' ... or when
certain styles of thought are identified as 'savage'
or 'primitive.'...  To use an extreme formulation:
temporal distance IS objectivity in the minds of many
practitioners...." (p. 30)

   "To recognize Intersubjective Time would seem to
preclude any sort of distancing almost by
definition.... social interaction presupposes
intersubjectivity, which in turn is inconceivable
without assuming that the participants involved are
ceoval .... for human communication to occur,
coevalness has to be created.  Communication is,
ultimately, about creating shared Time." (pp. 30-1)

   "These examples all lead up to the crucial point of
our argument: Beneath their bewilidering variety, the
distancing devices that we can idnetify produce a
globla result.  I will call it denial of coevalness. 
By that I mean a persistent and systenatic tendency to
place the referent(s) of anthrpology in a Time other
than the present of the producer of anthropolgical
discourse.
   "What I am aiming at is covered by the German terms
gleichzeitig and Gleichzeitigkeit...." (p. 31)

And, again, from James Clifford, "Notes on Theory and
Travel," Inscriptions 5 (1989) ...

"The Greek term theorein: a practice of travel and
observation, a man sent by the polis to another city
to witness a religious ceremony. 'Theory' is a product
of displacement, comparison, a certain distance. To
theorize, one leaves home. But like any act of travel,
theory begins and ends somewhere. In the case of the
Greek theorist the beginning and ending were one, the
home polis. This is not so simply true of traveling
theorists in the late twentieth century."

http://humwww.ucsc.edu/DivWeb/CultStudies/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_5/clifford.html

http://humwww.ucsc.edu/DivWeb/CultStudies/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_5/v5_top.html

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