Time: Histories and Ethnologies.

For years, social historians have been advising their colleagues to learn from ethnologists, to abandon a naive chronologicism and materialism and to embrace the social constructions of rituals and language. Some anthropologists have equally been arguing for a reassessment of the ahistorical approaches of the Levi-Strauss tradition and to develop more nuanced understandings of the meanings of time in different cultures. This volume, commissioned by the interdisciplinary journal, Comparative Studies in Society and History, is meant to help find some common grounds between these two disciplines in a collection of essays that explores the reckonings and meanings of the past.

Like most anthologies, this book lacks a common project or terminology. "Time" as memory predominates over lived duration. The collection ranges from ancient India to contemporary Dominica in the Caribbean. But no essay engages time in urban industrial societies.

Bernard Cohn and Maria Minicuci compare meanings of "local time" in contemporary rural India and Calabria. They show how groups explain and justify their social statuses by their distinct recollections. Collective memories also reflect specific economic and demographic situations. Especially subtle is Jonathan Wylie's contrast between Creole-speaking British subjects on Dominica who show little interest in the past and the Faroe Islanders (from a self-governing dependency of Denmark) whose culture is richly endowed with genealogies and historical narratives. These differences point to fascinating variations in these peoples' attitudes to independence and community.

The collection, however, goes beyond the distinct and plural memories of village peoples to what the editors call "big time." Three essays challenge the still common view that linear time is a product of literate and advanced society while the ordering of the past in cycles is necessarily traditional and somehow primitive. Nancy Farris notes how the katun, a Mayan cycle measuring time, was a product of a highly literate minority and that it long survived the "modernizing" Spanish conquest. While she acknowledges that the continuation of traditional agricultural and village life may account for this persistence, she notes too that the Mayan cycle did not simply affirm Mayan passivity. Expectations of the recurrence of past glories prompted rebellion in 1546-47 too. Anthony Grafton revises the view that the "mapping" of the past during the Renaissance signified modernity. Although he notes the connection between a new obsession with chronology and a growing openness to change, he finds in the historical work of Conrad Dasypodius, a curious mixture of "historical criticism and creative fantasy." (p. 161) Thomas Trautmann puts the contrast between linear and cyclic time into the context of British colonization of India. In response to the challenge of Indian philosophy, British writers defended sequential time as progressive against the "backwardness" and passivity of the endless cycles of time in Indian thought. This dichotomy, developed in the early nineteenth century, continues to shape western thinking even though Mosaic chronology, upon which it was based, was soon overthrown. These and essays by Peter Rigby and R. H. Barnes challenge the diachronic and synchronic dichotomy.

Finally Peter Hughes argues that modern history and anthropology have common origins in the eighteenth-century discovery of time as duration. Anthropology was rooted in a fascination with human nature, but a nature fixed in temporality. Hughes claims that recent anthropology's revulsion against time, often identified with French structuralism, is related to the shock of the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940. Yet Vico and other late Enlightenment figures also reacted to the disturbance of radical change by seeking an understanding of the "ruins of time."

Separately these essays are often insightful and well-researched. But they generally do no t address the interdisciplinary agenda of the editors. None consciously tries to build bridges between history and ethnology. Both the anthropological and historical essays challenge orthodoxy within their own disciplines, but they do not break out of the confines of their professional discourses. Unfortunately, this book will probably not do much to help resolve the contest between the formulaic and "materialist" methods of the (now old) new social history and the fragmentary and often polemical essays of the "new" cultural history. I wish there had been some extended discussion of the process of how meanings of time change over time. Instead, the anthropologist's bias for "slow" cultures predominates. Peter Hughes is right to say that historians may need to understand better "the fascination with the synchronic and syncopated in modern culture." (p. 288) But few of the papers really addresses the changing meaning, much less experience, of time in the modern era.

Gary Cross Pennsylvania State University