When Time Matters

Abstract

This essay introduces a collection of five research articles that address how time becomes materialized, regimented, politicized, and phenomenologically experienced in diverse ethnographic settings. Against notions of time’s uniformity, we explore considerations of its relational nature in physics, linguistics, and anthropology. Temporal frameworks are not given but created, not unitary but multiple, and operate in degrees of lamination, synchrony, or dissonance. In colonial Papua New Guinea, the Ecuadorian and Brazilian Amazon, highland Bolivia, and South Korea, temporal frameworks serve as anchors to diverse social and political projects. These ethnographic accounts illuminate the dynamic and consequential nature of temporal semiosis.