Looking Forward, Looking Back

Abstract

This paper surveys the disparate literatures on time, and the relative paucity of metaphors available (based on spatial analogues or mirroring past and future onto one another). Parallels between approaches to the past and future are considered and different intellectual traditions surveyed in futurology, memory, history (chronotopes), archaeology and philosophy. Causation across time, how the past affects the present, how the future may affect present and the past are considered as ways of better understanding how tensed statements in time and of time are essential elements of history and of anthropology. Pluralizing is suggested as a positive step: we should be talking of pasts, futures and even of presents. This has consequences, for example, the Thin Red Line of actuality must be broadened to be perhaps the Thick Reddish Braid. As introduction to a special issue of History and Anthropology I consider the papers that follow and how they contribute to the theme.

Keywords:

• Past
• Future
• Present
• Futurology
• Historiography

Acknowledgements

The workshops were administered by Penny Fraser and Natasha Samuels (in Yaoundé) and Nadine Levine (in Oxford). Other papers from these workshops have appeared in the inaugural issue of an online journal Vestiges: Traces of Record, http://vestiges-journal.info/. I am extremely grateful to the AHRC for supporting these activities and to the many other participants in the workshops who were not able to provide papers. Among others, these include Hamadou Adama, Ghislaine Glasson Deschaumes, Verkijika Fanso, Haidy Geismar, Alexander Kiossev, Perla Innocenti, Bren Neale, Susannah Radstone, and Leon Wainwright. Summaries of the workshops themselves are available from http://www.mambila.info/Futures/. Statement on access to the underlying research materials: this is a theoretical piece of work based on library research, see bibliography below.

The paper has been greatly improved by comments and suggestions made workshop participants, by the late Dave Reason and subsequently by the referees and the editors of History and Anthropology for all of which I owe much thanks.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

[1] One of the motivations for the discussions reported in Shryock and Smail (2011a) is the perceived need for a new set of metaphors to help comprehend “Deep history”.

[2] Surely the clearest evidence that time travel does not occur is that even in Europe (where we have written records covering (patchily) a couple of thousand years) there are no records of time travellers arriving from the distant future. Now of course absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and time travellers may have covered their tracks very cleverly indeed, but I think this is at the very least suggestive! For the more general point about not going backwards, see Hughes (1995, 2 citing Maurice Bloch). Relatedly Lewis argues (1987) that time travel is conceptually possible but does not occur in this possible world. See also Reason (this issue).

[3] She takes the protention/retention distinction from Husserl.

[4] Rosenberg and Harding (eds.) provide a survey of this terrain in their collection “Histories of the Future” (2005a).

[5] I understand chronotypes to be different types of Bakhtin's chronotope, a characterization of an attitude or orientation to time (Harro-Loit and Kõresaar 2010 citing Bender and Wellebery 1991, 4).

[6] In his major contribution to discussion of the philosophy of time McTaggart distinguished A-series of events in time with judgements about them changing as to being past/present/future (so an event's position will change relative to an observer with a specific position in time) from B-Series in which pairs of events are judged relative to another, one occurring before or after the other occurring. See below.

[7] Olivier (2001, 62) makes a similar point about houses and similar structures. Bryant's work in Cyprus provides a vivid example of how such histories trump dates (2014, 683).

[8] A move also made by Hirsch and Stewart in their introduction to a special issue of History and Anthropology (2005, 263).

[9] See Zeitlyn (2009) for a parallel argument about partiality and incompleteness, expanded in Zeitlyn and Just (2014).

[10] For another example which has repercussions for the idea of historicity see Matt Hodges review of Charles Stewart's discussion of the political power of dreams in Greek Island politics (this issue).

[11] See above for discussion of whether the definite article is appropriate here.

[12] We should note that recent work on classical divination casts some doubt on this. Beerden (2013, 22) gives an account of classical Greek and Roman views of the future as strikingly modern, “open but not empty” in which divination was seen as providing “advice” which may influence the choices that people made. She emphasizes that this was not universal: the Mesopotamian view of the future and divination was far more deterministic (220).

[13] Charles Golden in a review essay (2005) argues that the literature on memory is heterogeneous and lacks a single agreed set of conceptual underpinning. As he argues for memory I am arguing for time.

[14] Robert Textor calls this “tempocentrism” (2003, 524–525).

[15] Walter Benjamin reflecting on Proust talks of “convoluted time” (1968, 206).

[16] As mentioned above Heidegger illustrates this with the example of someone walking towards an acquaintance in the street. He asserts that, for the walker, the friend several metres away is “more proximate” than is the pavement underfoot (1978, 142).

[17] Braddock (2010) argues for the relevance of the psychoanalytic concept of countertransference for anthropology and I would suggest by extension to more general intersubjective knowledge of others. It might also be productive to apply the idea of countertransference to present relationships to futures and pasts.

[18] I am very grateful to Julia Binter for suggesting this connection.

[19] Or even more complicating “Moore's actions may have consequences eighty years earlier once the museum is created at some point in the future”.

[20] See also Walton (1990, 331) and subsequent discussion: Martin (1986) and Walton (1986) as well as Maynard (1997) and other references discussed in Pettersson (2004).

[21] He also points to how forecasts can be seen as conservative action—acting to make the future like the past!

[22] William Burton, “The use and abuse of history” quoted in Lowenthal (1985, 263).

[23] As was said above, in slightly different terms, McTaggart identifies the A-Series of absolute positions in time (colloquially dates) across which moves a shifting Now changing as it travels the dates from lying in the Future to being in the Past. He distinguishes this from the B-series in which pairs of events are classed as Before and After each other, and this does not change according to when the judgement is made, the position of Now in the A-series.

[24] An extreme case might be a geologist considering processes over millions of years but still feeling boredom during a phenomenologically interminable committee meeting, see Shryock and Smail (2011a).

[25] Serres uses superimposition (Knight 2012, 357) but I prefer the shorter superposition, partly because it is used in classical accounts of wave refraction and interference which may provide a different metaphorical base for these discussions.

[26] Mishler (2006) uses a similar metaphor discussing personal history narratives: he talks of a doubled arrow of time, in a narrative structured on sequence but started from the end like a detective story, written backwards since the narrator knows “what happens next”.

Additional information

Funding

This paper has arisen from a series of workshops run under the auspices of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), “Care for the Future Programme” [grant number AH/K005170/1].