Temporality as Value: Ethnography and the Question of Time

What is it about?

Ethnography, Anthropology in India, Temporality

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Why is it important?

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 centering these questions to the domain of contemporary Indian anthropology, this paper 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 the exclusive and soul device of anthropological research, 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 ideological maneuvering 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 up on this register of time from the writing of Johannes Fabian, the paper transposes the framework to understand the currents in contemporary Indian anthropology.