Hodges (2008) Rethinking time’s arrow: Bergson, Deleuze and the anthropology of time

Since the early 1970s, time has come to the fore as a constitutive element of social analysis in the guise of what the author terms ‘fluid time’. Anthropologists of multiple theoretical persuasions now take for granted that social life exists in ‘time’, ‘flow’, or ‘flux’, and this temporal ontology is commonly accepted as a universal, if habituallyunquestioned, attribute of human experience. Similarly, it underpins today’s dominant paradigm of ‘processual’ analysis, in its many forms. Yet this concept is notably under-theorized, in keeping with a history of uneven study by social scientists of time. Zhis article draws on anthropological approaches by Gell and Munn, and philosophical work by Bergson and Deleuze, to put forward a critical theorization.