ABSTRACT
Drawing upon ethnographic material from two very different societies in Southeast Asia,1 I shall examine their respective relationship to the passage of time with specific reference to ideas concerning what we call ‘the future’. Major differences can be observed to exist. I shall try to identify these and relate them to a wide range of social phenomena: subsistence activities, social and political institutions, as well as cosmologies and rituals. I will also consider their different attitudes to children as semantic categories and the part that children are perceived to play in the temporal process.
