ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with social experience and the anthropological knowledge of temporality. It sets out first to identify anthropology's conventional notions of time within the context of a modern heritage. The chapter argues that in non-secular societies basic notions of temporality are encompassed by mythic rationality and religious principles. The renewed interest of the social sciences in 'pluritemporalism' and 'heterochronous' conceptions raises a topic that anthropology has been dealing with for a long time. The social production of a nameless emotional process may be functionally indispensable for the preparation of those very rituals that socialize temporal concepts. Time and space are fundamental notions in the history of Western thought in general, and of modern Western social theory in particular. Within theories of times, an important dimension of investigation concerns the relations between cultural concepts and the continuous experiences of time and space.
