Introduction

The present collection emerges out of the ASA 2016 conference, “Footprints and Futures: The time of Anthropology”, held 4–7 July at Durham University. This introduction elaborates on the definition of chronocracy in order to situate the authors' argument within the existing field of anthropological studies of temporality, to demonstrate how it represents a modest advance on existing scholarship and, finally to show how the contributors to the volume each in their own way illustrate and take forward the chronocracy thesis. Since the parallel publications of Gell and Munn in 1992, we can trace two analytical genealogies in the anthropological literature on time. The first, influenced by Gell, emphasises the present, locates diversity at the level of multiple understandings and experiences of time, and calls attention to the effects of what humans do with time. The second can be traced back through Munn to the phenomenological approaches of Bergson and Deleuze.