Temporality as Value: Ethnography and the Question of Time

Abstract

How does the question of temporality get translated into the register of values in the process of constructing knowledge through ethnography? Is there a possibility of critical ethnography that tracks politics of time in the accounts of the other? By centring these questions to the domain of ethnographic endeavours in Indian anthropology, this article takes a look into the shifting locations of self and the other in the practice of ethnography with reference to the notion of temporality as value. Ethnography, once a key device of anthropological research, has become one of the significant approaches in almost all social science disciplines today and even in certain domains of humanities, management and market research. Ethnography itself has been reimagined and reshaped under different terrains of interdisciplinary approaches. But one would rarely find accounts of political and ideological manoeuvring of temporal concepts and value orientations which inform the theories and rhetoric in it. It pronounces upon the knowledge gathered from such research a discourse which construes the other in terms of a distance from the self, both spatial and temporal. Drawing upon this register of ‘time’ from the writing of Johannes Fabian, the article transposes the framework to understand the currents in contemporary Indian anthropology.

Keywords

Temporality value ethnography coevalness self and the other

This article will not rehash the debate in ethnography on the question of the other, which has already been thoroughly dealt with, in different intellectual terrains. However, there remains a conceptual lag in reloading the ‘other’ into its temporal ground, where the encounters between the subject and object of inquiry get exposed on the enactment of (un)sharing their situatedness in the present.¹ I would like to develop this dimension of temporality in ethnography by tapping two distinct concerns of methodological significance. The first one is the problem of pedagogy in addressing temporality as value with reference to the conceptual orientation of knowledge production within the European enlightenment project and the corresponding selection of scholarships while dealing with the subjective–objective trouble. The second is about the practice of ethnography concerning the (desired) asymmetry of power not only in the communicative tracks that the knower and the known occupy but also its documenting and documented frames of reference—the act of writing and the finished written account. In other words, the distribution of power between the ethnographer and the people under study in an unequal terrain gets reflected in the process of fieldwork relations as well as in the writing of the monograph.

Let us begin with the second concern before discussing the problem of pedagogy. It demands for a close look into the discursive formations in the locatedness of the subject and object in spatial and temporal grounds. While spatiality invokes the question of proximity and its power dynamics between the knower and the known, temporality enables to map the unevenness experienced by them in distinct ways. This unevenness of location in the sharing of a present that theoretically belongs to the knower and the known in ethnographic contexts makes the core of my argument here. The formulation of temporality as value can be made for scrutiny in other arenas of social relations and value orientations while unravelling the everydayness of power dynamics among individuals and communities. However, I prefer to limit the scope of this article within the production of knowledge about cultures and individuals through ethnographic endeavours. This would offer a critical reading of how ‘the present’ is conceptualized through certain dominant value orientations in the terrains of anthropology, the discipline that claims towards a holistic understanding of the human affairs.

The ‘present’ is assumed to be a site that belongs only to a particular hegemonic class/group of individuals/cultures, whereas the marginalized cultures do aspire to belong to that present. This sense of belonging and the aspiration for the ‘present’ stem from the baggage of European modernity. One can find the reverberations of this formation triggered by modernity in the sites of colonial ethnography to its present-day practices. While contextualizing this uneven temporal location of the self (ethnographer) and the other (people or cultures under study), one can observe that the problem is an insurmountable one that can bring cracks in the disciplinary frame and the very practice of ethnography then becomes an impossibility if the question of coevalness is subjected for a critical scrutiny. My attempt is to contextualize this argument within the practices and reflections that Indian anthropology—as a discipline and a way of inquiry into the sociocultural—experiences in contemporary times. In order to develop this argument, and to make it specific, I choose my frame of reference within the pedagogy in anthropology and ethnographic inquiries carried out as part of institutional traditions, largely found in the functioning of university departments in India. A conceptual roadmap to the site of contemporary ethnographic practices will open up certain pertinent issues related to the notion of time and the corresponding value orientations. Though most of the contemporary ethnographies tend to claim reflexivity and other forms of political and ethical sensibilities, the attempts rarely render a context-sensitive output, tapping the issue of temporal disjuncture between the subject and the object of inquiry.

How does one make sense of the ‘present’ in Indian anthropology in its politically construed temporality? Is there a possibility of critical ethnography that tracks politics of time in the accounts of the other? How does the question of values inform such an epistemological and methodological shift? By centring these questions to the domain of contemporary Indian anthropology, the article takes a look into the shifting locations of self and the other in the practice of ethnography.

Within the framework of the nineteenth-century reconfiguration of modes of inquiry and consolidation of disciplinary boundaries—in the fivefold division among the social sciences in particular—the given territories of anthropology were undoubtedly the ‘non-West’ and the ‘primitive’ in terms of their spatial and temporal understandings.² This enlightenment project towards a new conceptual ordering of the knowledge domain by enunciating the ‘scientific–rational’ and therefore ‘value–neutral’ had impinged a timeless essence on human inquiry. Ethnography had thus been imagined to be a scientific process of constructing value–neutral accounts even though it involves personal and prolonged interaction with ‘the other’—often the ‘culturally inferior’. It pronounces upon the knowledge gathered from such research a discourse which construes the other in terms of a distance from the self, both spatial and temporal. This denial of coevalness of the other rests on a conjuring trick of ethnography, worked with an array of devices that have the common intent to keep the other outside the present of the self. In ethnographic situations in the colonial anthropological projects and in later endeavours by native anthropologists, one can observe that the focus was predominantly on the study of marginalized communities or classes who were identified as ‘less progressed’ or ‘yet to progress’ in comparison with the ethnographer’s location. This imagination of one’s own and the other’s location in the frame of time with a sense of difference gets normalized in the course of modernity. If time belongs to the political economy of relations among individuals, classes and nations, then the construction of anthropology’s object through temporal devices and concepts is a political act located in the domain of certain dominant values (Fabian, 1983, p. x). Drawing upon this register of time from the writing of Johannes Fabian, who has enunciated the question of time in the practice of ethnography, the article transposes the framework to understand the currents in the practice of ethnography in contemporary India, the pedagogic and research contexts in university departments in particular.

Time and the Other: The Case of Indian Anthropology

It has been a long-standing engagement in anthropology to deal with the question of the (inferior) other, which has political and rhetorical implications in the production of knowledge. From the earlier definitional and pedagogic deliberations on ethnography to the more recent critical readings on power, agency, reflexivity and subjectivity, the debate has overwhelmingly grown into the contemporary writings in anthropology (Asad, 1973, 1994; Beattie, 1966; Clifford & Marcus, 1985; Geertz, 1988; Marcus, 1995; Ortner, 1984). These critical reflections have attempted to unravel the question—How does the other get constructed? Or what constitutes the other. The other has thus been interrogated in order to raise pertinent political and ethical issues connecting to the contemporary projects in ethnography. Between the positivist and the interpretive ethnographies of the twentieth century, the ethical concerns in the production of knowledge vary in their political and methodological predilections. The quest for scientism and objective truth that centred the former project was subjected for a repair in the latter’s stress on the inter-subjective and hermeneutic trigger to capitalize on the narrative logic of interpreting culture (Clifford & Marcus, 1985; Geertz, 1975).

Ethnography has become a key approach in almost all social science disciplines today and even in certain domains of humanities, management and market research. Ethnography itself has been reimagined and reshaped under different terrains of interdisciplinary approaches. But one would rarely find accounts of the political and ideological currents embedded in temporal concepts and value orientations which inform the theories and rhetoric in it.

The positon(ing) of the ethnographer and ‘his’ people (the ethnographic object) in a ‘strategic distance’ has been revisited towards problematizing the construction of the other. However, these reflections, while interrogating much of the spatial dimension of distance, have tended to ignore the question of time and its conceptual possibility. In much of what is currently written about ethnographic method as critical reflections on political, ethical and intellectual presuppositions, the awareness on the problem of time remains at the margins of literature, pedagogy and practice in anthropology. Even though the concept of time made its entry in anthropology in the writings of Johannes Fabian in the early 1980s, its possibility was not explored or rather largely neglected in the accounts of reflexive ethnography, pedagogy and public debates as well. I would like to trace here the ‘why’ question in the relative absence of time as a conceptual category and so is Fabian in debating contemporary ethnography.³

A brief account of Fabian’s theoretical postulates on the aspect of time in anthropology would provide a ground for developing a thesis on the political economy of its absence in contemporary anthropology with reference to India. Johannes Fabian examines the uses of time in past and present as ways of construing the object of anthropological inquiry—the other (Fabian, 1983, 1990, 2006). He argues that if time belongs to the political economy of relations among individuals, classes and nations, then the construction of anthropology’s object through temporal concepts and devices is a political act; there is a ‘politics of time’ (Fabian, 1983, p. x). Time becomes a form, a carrier of signification, much like language or money, through which the content of relations between the self and the other is negotiated. Fabian deploys this perspective of time for a critique of knowledge production in cultural anthropology (Fabian, 1983, p. 2).

Pedagogy and textbooks in anthropology consistently insist that the discipline rests on ethnographic method (many a times read as fieldwork), involving personal, face-to-face, prolonged interaction and communication with human agents. The knowledge gained from such research is also treated as a discourse, which construes the other in terms of both spatial and temporal distance. Fabian examines the array of devices through which the theoretical absence of the other is ensured in order to meet with the common intent that is to keep the other outside the time of anthropology. And in that process, he maps that ‘the empirical presence of the other coincides with his theoretical absence’ (Fabian, 1983, p. xi).

The idea of distance or distancing of the object from the subject has found its archival presence in the project of enlightenment and modern science (read as scientific method), the natural science methodological tenets in particular. This is the process of the object being constituted by method, or the method bearing reference to the object. The method in its form of scientificity is featured by an exteriority to its object. It implies the subject’s access and understanding of the object are taking place from a certain point outside the object, and as enabling a cognitive grasp of the object—the subject’s capacity for accessing the object of inquiry (Hegde, 1994; Mahajan, 1992). Irrespective of its appearance from this or that perspective, the calculated and enabled cognitive grasp of the object from the distance matters while mapping the relations of power and equality in situatedness between the subject and the object. Here, the generality of perspective, which gets transposed into the idea of method, becomes the locus of mediation, involving, at once, an object and a subject constituting the object (Hegde, 1994, p. 87).

The distance that evolved through an epistemological and a methodological demand thus becomes a necessity in social science inquiry, where knowledge has primarily been foregrounded in the act of possession of things into consciousness, enabled through observation.⁴ The object is therefore being taken ‘possession’ of from the viewpoint of the way in which it can be known rather than the ways in which it exists (Hegde, 1994, p. 89). The question ‘what something is in terms how it is known’ becomes central to our concern of understanding the placement of the object in a different temporal position (in the past of the subject) that is manoeuvred through the viewpoint. This viewpoint was deliberated upon the pedagogy of colonial anthropology, a persistent feature of modern intellectual culture in and around the discipline, in the form of an essentializing signature in the perception of the other and its temporality.⁵ This configuration enables the subject position to consolidate the presupposition that the object is something outside (behind) in irrespective of its contemporaneity with the subject. This point is contextual to the practice of ethnography which implies the interaction between human agents in a given time.

Reading the history and present of ethnography with reference to Indian anthropology would yield interesting insights into pondering on the question of the other and its temporal unevenness. Recent reviews on the present and future concerns on Indian anthropology track certain key shifts that are taking place in the practice of ethnography; from rural contexts to urban spaces, from social institutions such as family, marriage and kinship to media, globalization, slums, diaspora and virtual communities. One of the observations in these writings is the shifting terrains of ethnography from traditional settings and tribal communities to cities and other urban contexts (Srivastava, 2012; Venkata Rao, 2011).

Despite its emergence as a discipline in the early twentieth century, the growth of anthropology in India has been slow and uneven, a consequence of which has been attributed to a process of ‘interiorization’ of anthropologists (Srivastava, 2012). Vinay Kumar Srivastava, in one of his recent essays on the current issues in Indian anthropology, notes that ‘inward-gazing’ is the most pressing problem of the discipline in this part of the world that it could not carry forward an influential role in the intellectual as well as in the public domain. Srivastava’s account suggests that the researchers within the university departments of anthropology mostly carry out their research in India unlike their Western counterparts who generally draw their research projects on a wider canvas of cross-cultural sites (Srivastava, 2012). I would like to quote from Srivastava on his extended observations to the point made here on the choice of the ‘native’ culture by the Indian scholars as their study object. He notes ‘Indian anthropology has been, by and large, “native anthropology” and “auto-ethnography. Our research students return to their own communities (or even villages and neighborhoods) for study. Rarely does an Indian student venture outside India for fieldwork…’ (Srivastava, 2012, p. 361). He explains further that Indian students who are studying abroad normally return to India for conducting fieldwork, or carry out fieldwork among the diaspora community and fellow Indians residing abroad. This ‘other’ world, Srivastava argues, is thus very rarely explored ethnographically by the Indian scholars. Referring to Evans (2005, p. 43), and characterizing ‘Indo-centrism’, central to the common ethnographic practice, Srivastava echoes his comment that Indian students do not show any inclinations to study a culture different from their own (ibid.).

These observation of Srivastava and others obscures the concept of the other and inward-gaze as they remain in their convenient location within the frame of nation-state rather than in the cultural boundaries marked by other categories, such as region, language, religion, caste and gender. If we reconfigure the dynamics of the other in relation to the ethnographer’s location beyond the frame of the nation-state, it is unambiguous for us to understand that Indian anthropologists were researching mostly on their ‘inferior other’, whose location was found below in the vertical hierarchy in the social order. It does not imply that no anthropologist in India so far worked on one’s own community or a ‘bottom-up’ approach was a complete absence. Rather the point here is to suggest that a survey of anthropological ventures would reveal the location of the subject and object in an asymmetrical power relation where the former had an assumed upper-hand in negotiating the ethnographic tracks. The dominant practice of doing tribal studies by non-tribal scholars as part of academic departments as well as state-run administrative programmes points to the consistent mapping of the ‘inferior other’ as a convenient logistic to organizing fieldwork. Indian anthropologists rarely could exercise their ethnographic expertise to produce knowledge on their ‘superior other’ or the relatively ‘equal other’ within the boundaries of the nation.⁶

For identifying and accessing the object of the study, more than the problem of foreignness or unfamiliarity, the cultural location of the other becomes the key in the choice. Textbooks of ethnography tell us about the strategies that one would deploy to get access and avail responses in the field. There goes the elaboration on concepts such as gatekeeping, key informants, rapport building, gaining trust and going native. Here, I argue that these strategies will work out only in certain contexts—that recognizes the power dynamics between the self and the other—that can provide access to the ethnographer and facilitate the field in desirable conditions of interaction and data collection. The consent is normally sanctioned on the power (advantage of being situated ahead of the time of the other) of the ethnographer’s privileged cultural location. Here, one can observe that given the desired power dynamics between the ethnographer and the people under study, there is a possibility of absolute denial by the latter in their power and agency (in certain contexts) over the ethnographer’s cultural location. Ethnographies on the elites, state-run institutions, bureaucracy, business organizations, corporate firms, army and financial banks, etc. have yet to take off producing a considerable body of literature in ethnographic projects in India is a case in point to substantiate the trouble of ethnography, when it attempts for a ‘studying up’ project.

These concerns invite us to trace the necessary conditions to do urban ethnographies in India, and to see who the ethnographers are venturing towards such projects. The notion of temporality becomes a value in determining the whole discourse of practicing ethnography in such contexts. These methodological concerns demand an elaborated response by tracing the dynamics of institutional and individual choice of inquiries and the favourable and negative conditions generated as response to such ventures. I would like to bypass that larger empirical project from the scope of this article in order to limit here by flashing a conceptual template connecting to the idea of time and the unevenness of cultural locations of the subject and the object. The ‘impossible terrain’ of ethnography has to do with the recognition of location in time by and of the subject as well as the object. The ‘other’s capacity to gain coevalness as a response to the power of the ethnographer leads to the impossibility of ethnography and that dimension remains absent in the concern raised by the critics on Indian anthropology—why Indian anthropologists fail to produce ethnographic accounts of their immediate ‘cultural superiors’ or the relative equals? By tracing the history and present of ethnography in India, one cannot claim that Indians have more or less engaged in studying one’s own community or people, it is predominantly the inferior other (here class, caste and the urban–rural locations matter more than other cultural categories) has been qualified as the potential site of study. In that sense, contrary to Srivastava’s argument, a large majority of anthropological explorations in India remain on the ‘other worlds’ with a qualifier prefix to it, the ‘inferior’.

The ‘inferior other’ in ethnographic contexts need not be a one-dimensional entity. T.K. Oommen refers to particular ways of identifying the other within the geopolitical and historical positioning of people within the colonial and the postcolonial discourses. He proposes three categories—the savage other, the black other and the oriental other—which have been perceived differently within the colonial, postcolonial and globalizing discourses (Kumar & Welz, 2003).⁷ The framework of understanding the other in a global context (by drawing upon West and East, global North and South, etc.) offers its reverberations once that gets transposed into the frame of the nation-state, stretching to the reincorporation of similar categories of the other given the multicultural and class dynamics beyond the imagined homogeneity of the nation-state (Chatterjee, 2001).

Temporality as Value

The idea of temporality in its ‘scientific’ sense inherently signifies a shared moment in history that belongs to human agents within the frame of a value—which enables everyone to access that moment/time equally—irrespective of their cultural difference. In that sense, temporality constitutes the value of ‘being’ in a particular frame in history that signifies the idea of equality in situatedness in that frame of history. Time is an inescapable and necessary condition for communication if it is performed in the realm of relations among culturally different human agents. The baggage of modernity that has set the future of the other as the already existing present elsewhere keeps certain cultures and groups in the ‘waiting room of history’—which rests on the ‘stagist theory’ of history construed in the European ideas of political modernity.⁸ The colonial forms of knowledge on the non-European cultures premised upon this logic, which predicates upon the colonial encounters of ethnography (Asad, 1973). The sharing of a common present in the colonial encounters of anthropology was thus never a possibility. The ‘now’ remained a remote future for the other, as once the other tends to sort of achieve that idealized present, it would have already become the past of the ethnographer. Interrogating this construction of the other in distant spatial and temporal condition, Fabian examines anthropology’s consistent attempt to demote its object through its temporal relegation, what he calls the ‘denial of coevalness’ (Fabian, 1983, p. 76). The hierarchical negation of simultaneity and contemporaneity of the ethnographic objects pushes the anthropologist ahead in time and places the other in a lesser stage of development and progress in the deployment of categories such as the ‘primitive’. Fabian describes this process of denial as ‘the allochronism of anthropology’ that signifies the curtailment of simultaneous existence for sharing a common present for the ethnographic object and subject, the observed and the observer. The viewpoint preserves the position of the West in the present and the rest in its constitutive past, drawing from the evolutionary frame of history. The givenness of other has to be therefore rejected on the ground that the other is never simply found or encountered, but framed and made in the colonial gaze through the lens of modernity. This viewpoint destabilizes temporality being located in its value for equal situatedness of human agents irrespective of their cultural distinctions and geopolitical differences.

The colonial project of distancing the other from its own present to the past of the ethnographer (the distortion and denial of the contemporaneity of human condition) involves strategies of representation, crafted through various kinds of semantic and symbolic apparatus towards the creation of the distance. The urge to write ethnography towards this political project summarizes the whole business into an act of making the ‘then’—of the other—into a ‘now’. The other’s ethnographic presence tantamount to his/her theoretical absence. In ethnography, the other is displayed and therefore contained as an object of representation in the absence of one’s own voices, demands, technologies of resistance and counter-theorizing (Fabian, 1990, p. 761). Dialogue as a political idea provides an ethical possibility between the subject and object in the fieldwork situation, and it becomes a desirable technique to addressing the question of power located in temporal conditions. Conversations and exchange in a dialogical sense, informed by ethical and political sensibilities, could yield context-sensitive relations of valuing the equality among humans in sharing a common present. However, this ethical standpoint in ethnography gets confined to the encounters during the fieldwork. But a crucial question is whether actual dialogue as it occurs in a field situation could ever be represented in a written dialogue (Fabian, 1990, p. 367). There emerges clarity on the relation between dialogue as an event and dialogue as a literary form in Fabian’s intervention in his strategic separation of ethnographic sites. The temporal conditions experienced in fieldwork and those experienced in the process of writing and teaching often contradict each other. In that sense, the consistency in dialogue that achieved to a certain extent in the field need not necessarily yield context-sensitive output and a dialogic affair when the other gets represented in the ethnographic monograph; especially when the other most often finds his/her absence in the act of reading and making a political engagement with the text.

Valuing Equality: The Idea of Sharing a Common Present

How does one address the oppressive use of time in anthropological encounter with the ‘other’? A productive empirical research informed by a political and ethical sensibilities will be possible only when the knower and the known prepare to believe in a shared present, enabling coevalness in their interactions and exchanges. This amounts a value-based notion for making sense of equality beyond the scientific appropriation of method that is historically predicated on the modern intellectual trajectory. The undesirable overlap between scientific reasoning and value-oriented ethics was always a key concern in the moments of consolidating the social sciences, a set of fledgling disciplines—in the nineteenth century and after—competing for reaching on par with their counterparts in the domain of natural sciences. Between the cannons of scientific approach in organizing the inquiry and the inescapable terrain of values and ethics, the perspectives and practices of the anthropologist often set the ground for contradictions—in the process of negotiating between objectivity and subjectivity—and the ethnographic accounts thus tend to signal paradoxical representations.

Anthropology in India is well known for its twin status as it is located in both the natural science departments and the departments of social sciences in different universities, depending on the emphasis given in the fields of physical or social and cultural anthropology. Institutions offer degrees in sciences and arts faculty, and students working in these different fields find little vocabulary to interact with each other on their disciplinary concerns and practices. Both science and social science students and researchers in anthropology carry out a common task, the fieldwork, while the former tend to work with physiological aspects of particular communities (mostly tribal and rural population)—collecting samples of blood, hair, skin, etc.,—and their bodies within the biomedical perspective—the latter involve in gathering ideas about sociocultural factors through observation and interviewing, life histories and so on. The meeting points of value orientation, ethical quest and empathetic understanding alongside the load of scientificity on the perspective of the ethnographer call for a fundamental conceptual and methodological realignment at the level of institutional practice and pedagogy.

Recontextualizing the discipline and re-examining critically the subject matter and methodology become imperative in order to revisit the genealogy of the ‘other’ towards an ethical project. This demands for a reversal of the romanticized narratives on the ‘exotic other’ that we often come across in anthropological encounters with the ‘other’. The dialectics of organizing empathetic understanding and detachment by mapping the strategic distance—knowing the object of study with values and empathy by immersing in it as well as keeping the distance for making it objective—has been identified with the life and career of many anthropologists (Armbruster & Laerke, 2008; Geertz, 1988; Marcus, 1995; Mead, 1972; Rabinow, 1977). Many among them mark the role of anthropologists becoming the advocates of the demands and claims of the people, representing and safe-guarding their interests and eventually become ‘activists’ (Geertz, 1988; McGranahan, 2006; Messer, 1993). This celebrated anthropological project centred around the idea of ‘empathy’ for the object of study (from the early versions applied anthropology to the more recent projects in public anthropology) neither challenges the Euro-centric knowledge frame of modernity nor attempts for a critical reorientation on the questions of development and progress.

In order to centre the ethical question that can at least map out the temporal locations of the subject and object beyond the enunciation of reflexivity, one has to revisit the ‘political’ in the choice of the subject matter in anthropological encounters. How does a subject matter get imagined towards a potential site of knowledge production with a signature of reason? What qualifies then it to be studied and theorized? In the process of foregrounding experience and emotion against the ‘universalistic’ notions of theory and reason (Euro-American parochial implied in such a representation of the universal), the former is subscribed into a single dimensional entity, placed in a temporal backwardness, and therefore informs a limiting and partial embodiment of knowledge, yet to be part of the present. The incompatible presence of experience and emotion in the realm of theory and reason reinforces the anthropological other to be demoted conceptually (in its temporality) and simultaneously uplifted towards progress to ensure that the other never access a shared present along with the ethnographer. The categories of experience and emotion seemingly assumed to have essential locations of pain, oppression, victimhood, poverty and other forms of subjugation; hence situated outside the grounds of theory in its positivist frames. On the other hand, the experiences that amplify the human condition (freedom and power for exercising choices) into privileged phases of life and emotions of pleasure are discredited and remained unfertile grounds for theorizing equality and temporality.

Against the whole notion of celebrated reflexivity in ethnography (the imagined ethical sensibility of ethnographer which is often one dimensional), there are multi-layered negotiations and responses manoeuvred by the ‘other’ in contemporary Indian ethnography. Examining the ethnologics of multiculturalism in India, and refiguring the proverbial encounter between anthropologists and tribes, Middleton interrogates the real-time dynamics with which both sides negotiate and take on normative ethnological paradigms (Middleton, 2011).⁹ The choice of performing a contextual and strategic backwardness in front of the ethnographers that the tribal communities—to avail tribal status, state benefits of funding and other advantages—render a counter-intuitive political drama that in a different sense teases out the temporal relegation historically imposed upon them by colonial ethnography and the modern intellectual projects.

In conclusion, I make an attempt to trace the pedagogic take on the issues of temporality and scientificity in Indian anthropology. These observations are largely connected to the practices of pedagogy and research reflected in institutional structures and university departments. A major concern here is about the consistent uncriticality on the question of the ‘scientific’ and the relative neglect of feminist and postmodern critique in pedagogic interventions in anthropology departments as one can observe that the curricular practices rarely make room for such a critical pedagogy approach. A brief survey through the nature of courses that listed in the university departments of anthropology and the themes of the conferences and seminars that are organized by these centres in the past years would endorse this point. Reviews on the crisis of discipline in contemporary India relatively fail to engage with the theoretical currents evolved in and around the ‘writing culture’ debate and similar other crucial turns in theory and method (Abu-Lughod, 1990; Clifford & Marcus, 1985). Students of anthropology generally gather such debates outside the pedagogic and curricular frames of one’s own department, from other disciplinary fields, such as, history, political science, cultural studies, literary studies and media studies.

Despite the relentless echoing of feminist and postmodern theories in our academic corridors and the growing body of critical reflections on scientism and universalism (projected against the European enlightenment and modernity), the time question—that impinges on the unequal placement of human condition—yet to find its place in the pedagogic grounds of Indian anthropology. From Johannes Fabian (1983), Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) and Partha Chatterjee (2001) to Prathama Banerjee (2007), the critical accounts of the politics of time, a significant theoretical template to reconfigure the question of equality in ethnographic contexts, remain in the peripheries of the pedagogic discourse in Indian anthropology. Once the time question is pedagogically negotiated and addressed towards a political project carrying ethical sensibilities on the other’s location in the past, then the present has to be shared equally by the subject and object in the real-time interaction in the field as well as in the process of writing. The absence of such a power imbalance tends to cause a denial of ethnography itself, and I argue that it constitutes the predicament of Indian anthropology’s inability to release its ethnographic site from the ‘inferior other’ (tribal, rural and urban slum communities) and to shift its focus on the ‘modern elite’, who occupies in a more or less equal or higher temporal order in its situatedness. The reordering of the other in its temporal location often betrays the ethnographer denying him/her the guaranteed interaction and communication, facilitated in conventional ethnographic relations between the knower and the known. The relative absence of challenging the gatekeeping process in the contours of ethnography in terms of its pedagogy and practice within institutional settings—the denial of entry into lives of the ‘hegemonic other’—eventually results in the denial of the value of temporality.

Footnotes

Notes

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