Of dogs alive, birds dead, and time to tell a story [1991]

I should like to start by making a distinction. In a general way, construction of time has been on my mind for years. The more I think about it, though, the more useful I find it to narrow my focus by looking at constructions with or through time. Construction of time, I take it, stands for an approach that opposes construed ideas or manners of speaking about (or otherwise symbolically expressing) experience of time to something out of which such constructions are made. Presumably this would be ‘real’ or ‘physical’ time. As an anthropologist I cannot help but recognize in this view the nature-culture opposition that pervades our discipline, serving as a kind of ontological foundation. Talk of ‘construction’ emphasizes, above all, construed-ness, that is, a property thought to be the formal prerequisite for there being different, specific types of time, chronotypes. If, to rehearse an ancient argument one more time, experience of time came ‘naturally’ then, nature being one, experience would be one (at least formally; material differences due to conditions affecting experience could still be considered).