ABSTRACT
Anthropological writings on time tend to be ahistorical in their approach. They have often been explicitly concerned to emphasize cultural conventions of measurement and the symbolic structuring and representation of time; but have also focused on the linked issue of the making of social time as an ongoing dimension of social practice. Abstract time-markers can provoke potentially ‘historical’ events: as no doubt a minor example, authors can mention here that among the events marking the recent millennium were two anthropological conferences devoted to the topic of time. Sometimes the timings of human life are compared to those of the physical and organic worlds-to geometric movements or those of the life-cycle of seasons, plants, and animals. As lay people we are conscious that even our most seemingly basic modes of reckoning time are arbitrary and do not fit the world, hence our leap-years and occasional adjustment of milliseconds at the turn of the year.
