Anthropological Theory

Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 2(3): 267280 [1463-4996(200209)2:3;267280;026799]

In the present tense

Time, identication and human nature
Richard Jenkins University of Shefeld, UK

Abstract To have personal and collective pasts and to posit individual and collective futures are aspects of what it means to be human. Our past is who we have been, and the future is fundamental to imagining who we will become. However, in order to have either past or future we need a stable present, the space of our everyday lives. In contrast to one understanding of time, I want to suggest that the present is a substantial and relatively unproblematic aspect of the human world, produced and reproduced in language, in the institutionalized here-and-now, in the physical environment, and in the co-presence of embodied human individuals. Since these are also deeply implicated in identication, time and identication are probably best conceptualized together, the one a key to understanding the other. This further suggests that, since identication is arguably a diagnostic characteristic of human being and human nature, the well-worn distinction between social/cultural time and natural time is problematic. Key Words embodiment human nature identity institutionalization the present time

When he rst started brooding on the matter of creation, T. realized immediately that the human brain was so constructed as to be absolutely unable to make the slightest sense of the whole. As we start and stop so, for us, the cosmos must start and stop. But he could also see that his own reasoning was crippled by the built-in limitations of a two-lobe human brain, with its peculiar hang-up on beginnings and endings when it was change that was the nature of nature. But just as he felt he was on the verge of grasping the whole, everything seen and sensed fell away. Back to Go. We ask all the wrong questions . . . And thats why we keep getting all the wrong answers. Gore Vidal, The Smithsonian Institution To begin at the beginning . . . Time passes. Listen. Time passes. Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood
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Our human capacity to have personal and collective pasts memory and our ability to posit individual or collective futures, is part of what it means to be who or what we are. We need to have a past in order to situate who we are in a biography and history, and we need a future in order to imagine who we are, in a vision of what we are in the process of becoming. However, if we are to have either a past or a future and if we are to be able to make a meaningful claim to consciousness then we need to construct a sense of the present, of where we are now. Consciousness, memory, knowing who we are, and becoming are important aspects of identication: as far as humans are concerned, therefore, time and identication are intimately bound up in each other. Just as identication is arguably a distinctive human characteristic, humans cannot live as humans, that is outside of a present, without a past or a future, without time. It is in our nature: we are necessarily chronological beings. These are my themes in this article. But what is my purpose? The quotation with which I begin, from Gore Vidals highly recommendable novel in which meditations on American history collide with musings about the nature of time, allows me to suggest that we are asking the wrong questions about time. Perhaps the most obvious issue in this respect, certainly the most fundamental, concerns what it is that needs to be explained at all. My argument here is that it is not the passage of time movement forward, if you like, and the possibility of hindsight that is, in the rst instance, so difcult to understand. Nor is the issue whether the passage of time is, for example, subjective or objective, whether it is A-series or B-series (to use the terms, which derive from McTaggart [1968], of a recurring strand of conventional debate). No, the real question is, rather, this: accepting that, in the real world no less than in Dylan Thomass Llareggub, time passes both experientially or subjectively, and otherwise, independently of human attention or recognition and that it cannot be prevented from doing so, how do we, as humans, deal with this? How, in the midst of this movement and transformation, do we anchor ourselves sufciently rmly to allow for the possibility of a relatively stable everyday life? In sympathy with at least part of G.H. Meads argument (1980), I want to suggest that what we really need to understand, before we can get anywhere with the rest of the matter, is the present.
THE PROBLEM OF THE PRESENT

So, what is mysterious or problematic about the present? The answer appears to be its ontological status, its very nature: what is it? Among the many things held in common, in their discussions of time, by Bergson (1910), Husserl (1964), and although to a lesser extent, since he is not always consistent in this respect Mead (1980), is a vision of the present as fugitive, as somehow inherently unstable. Viewed from the perspective of these philosophers, the present is an ever-changing, helter-skelter nanosecond-tonanosecond from which the past and the future extend in different directions. The present is no sooner here than it has become the past, replaced instantaneously by a new present, which vanishes as quickly as its predecessor, and so on. In these terms, the present, rather than being a substantial reality in its own right, is the narrowest, the most ephemeral, of border zones between two temporal domains, a transitional threshold where one time perpetually and instantaneously becomes another. If the present is its own denite temporal reality, it is a reality of constant ux and transformation; it is where the future becomes or unfolds, as the past slips away into storage
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(and refurbishment as needed). In this sense it is the present, more than any other time zone, which reveals that time itself is no more than an abstraction of human construction. In the non-presence of the present there is nowhere to hide the articiality of time. Our understanding of consciousness is among the things that are at stake here. From the point of view of Bergson and Husserl, consciousness reexivity, knowing who we are and what we are doing, knowing who others are and what they are doing, knowing the world, knowing whos who and whats what is rooted in the future and the past, rather than in the present. From the point of view of Mead, consciousness is reection after or before the fact of action. The future and the past can be known; the present is an innite series of essentially unknowable instances. As soon as the present is known it has become something else, the past. One logical implication of this argument might be to conclude that the present doesnt really exist at all, so unstable and unknowable is it. At this point it could be objected that something similar also applies, for example, to the future. Isnt the future unstable? Isnt the future perpetually becoming the present (and the past)? Isnt the future denitively unknowable? Perhaps, but at least not quite in the same way as the present. The immediate future may well be in a process of immanent and perpetual conversion, via evanescent present-hood, into the past, but something called the future also stretches out in front of us. The future seems to exist, by virtue of its extent for most of us, imprecise and untimed, if not unbounded or innite in a different way than the present does. Whats more, the future is, by denition, indeterminate: uncertainty is, so to speak, of its essence. Our expectations of the future are dramatically different from those that we have of the present. Similarly, although the past is forever changing expanding and contracting, being reshaped, discovered, rediscovered, remembered, forgotten, invented it too has both an extent and a shape, even if neither is denite or nal. The past stretches out behind us. In one conceptualization, the past, like the future, is nearly half of time. Alternatively, if one imagines that time has a beginning and an end whatever that might mean the past is continuously expanding while the future is inexorably shrinking. Either way, however, past and future, taken together, constitute most of time. How much of time does the present occupy? If Bergson and Husserl, in particular, are to be taken at face value, no more than the most wafer-thin, transparent sliver (if that). There is clearly a good deal to recommend a model of the present as an ever-changing becoming, as the moving platform from which we address the future and reect on the past. Indeed, it needs to be restated, and often, that social life is a continuous process, that it is not static, that becoming, rather than being, seems to be the nature of things. However, it is no less necessary to emphasize that We are, as well as have been (Young and Schuller, 1988: 4), although one might wish to expand on this, thus: we are, as well as have been and are becoming. In other words, the world of humans is not experienced by most people as chaos, perpetual ferment and novelty, evanescence, and eeting immediacy. The interesting thing is that we humans give every impression of experiencing our world, and ourselves in it, as a relatively stable reality. There is a present which is more than just a fulcrum of perpetual transition, or an ungraspable, unframed, experience. If so, what is the present? It is at least two things. First, it is a feature of language. Contrary to rumour (Adam, 1990: 22 and 96, for example, referring to Whorf ), there are no timeless languages, and as far as it is possible to say such a thing, all languages
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denote presentness in one way or other (Gell, 1992: 11831). The present is both a way of speaking, and an expression or turn of phrase. As a way of speaking, language, via the use of devices such as tense and modality, allows whatever is being talked about to be temporally positioned with respect to the present moment of the utterance, and the speaker or writer: she is, she was, she will be, she will have been, she used to be, and so on. As a turn of phrase or expression, language allows us to denote the present in at least two ways. The rst of these is the immediacy of the physical co-presence of others, as evoked in English by expressions such as: All present and correct, Anyone here present, May I present Miss Smith?, and so on. The second linguistic evocation of a sense of the present comes in the shape of an indeterminate period, within which all happenings and presences have some kind of temporal equivalence, if not actual simultaneity. This is most clearly expressed in our temporal vocabularies This century, This year, This week, Today, At this moment in time but it can also be found in a less denite set of usages which actively draw upon, and in their use constitute, a notion of the present: For the present, The present day, Ill be along presently,1 The present conjuncture, and so on. Thus we seem to have no problem in using language to call up a notion of the present as something which has a trustworthy degree of stability. Furthermore, grammatically and in turns of phrase, notions of the present bring time together with its intimate bedfellow, space. That time and space are closely related, if not inseparable, notions is a very well worn idea, from a wide range of perspectives (e.g. Campbell, 1994; Clarke, 1992; Giddens, 1981: 2648, 1984: 11061; Hawking, 1988: 1738). I want to suggest that the present may perhaps be the ultimate expression of the indissoluble implication in each other of time and space. It is the here-and-now of the embodied utterance and physical co-presence, and, because, within the cosmos as we presently know it, embodied individuals cannot occupy two places at once any more than they can be in two times at once it also implicitly denotes the rest-of-space, in which it is impossible to be in the present. Grammar and turn of phrase also come together in narrative: telling stories, recounting happenings, commenting on events, and putting together explanations and plans. These are all narratives. Claude Lvi-Strauss famously proposed that myths were devices for stopping, suspending, or even reversing time (e.g. 1968: 211). This view was perhaps most rmly dismissed by John Barnes (1971) as not only trading on an indefensible distinction between traditional and modern time, but also, and by denition, nonveriable, non-operationalisable, and in need of some empirical support (in other words, it was structuralism). However, in a sense that probably neither Lvi-Strauss nor Barnes ever suspected, there is a signicant germ of truth in the proposition. Myths are but one genre of narrative. All narratives establish the time of the story whether that time be cyclical and repetitive structural time, the dream time outside the everyday experience of humans, or the fast and slow forward of historical time and bind it within the boundaries of whatever-is-being-talked-about-at-the-moment. Narratives do not freeze action and events in time. What they do, however, is create a frame (see also Goffman, 1975): a domain of time within which action and events occur; a narrative present, which can be in the past or the future or neither; a once upon a time.
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Narratives organize events in time to create a period and, to reiterate, this can be a cycle, it can be internally undifferentiated, or it can have a beginning-middle-and-end within which the story makes sense (and outside which it would not). Social science accounts do this as well. The time frames of anthropological narratives, for example, have shifted during the last 50 years from the structural time of an ethnographic present to the beginning-middle-and-end of history and interaction (Fabian, 1983). The routine importance of narratives in all walks of everyday life lies not simply in their processing of the action, but in their persuasive evocation of a present (if not the present). There is, however, more to the present than language, as powerful as that is. To borrow a well-worn expression from Fredrik Barth (1969), we must also attend to the rest of the cultural stuff . The present is thus to be found in the institutionalized world constructed by humans and in which they live. Institutions are here dened in very general terms, as established patterns of practice, recognized as such by actors, which have force as the way things are done (Jenkins, 1996: 24). The use of the present tense in this denition is signicant: the collective production and reproduction by humans of an ongoing institutional environment, which has for them a perceived stability and denite reality (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Searle, 1995), is a major contribution to the presence of the present. This is achieved in a number of ways. One of the most important of these could, to paraphrase Anthony Cohen (1985), be described as the symbolic construction of the present. Following Geertz (1973), the present is in this sense the web of mutual signication in which we are all suspended, if not caught. Minimally-shared mutually-intelligible symbolism, signication, and accepted ways of doing things constitute the taken-for-granted background, so beloved of ethnomethodologists, which is such an important part of the present. It allows where and when we are, the here-and-now, to be bracketed off, not thought about, to be taken as read, to be sufciently real for us that we do not have to be concerned about it. For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to conne myself to two further aspects of the institutionalized world of humans: the physical environment, and individual embodiment. Beginning with the physical environment, this has time inscribed on and in it in many different ways: buildings, monuments, routes, paths, tracks and roads, patterns of cultivation, named and storied features of the landscape, and so on (e.g. Lowenthal, 1985: 14882, 23849, 263362; Nuttall, 1992: 3858). None of these are time-neutral, and they help to conjure up the present in at least two ways. In the rst place, these are, more often than not, a steady and visible presence in the present. By and large, they are there in the morning when one wakes up, just as they were yesterday and the day before. These are evidence that the present state of affairs has some solidity, that all that is solid does not melt into air. They are, however, also datable, even if only imprecisely. They can be situated with respect to the future as well as the past: old or new, in use or out of use, In the days of the Gods, that hill was where their children used to play with mortal children, The house was built by mothers father, Here are the bullet holes where the resistance men were shot, The ice in the harbour will melt come the spring and the channel will be clear for the supply boat, Next year the municipality is going to widen that road, and so on. In this respect the environment also offers us evidence that not everything is solid, that things do change. But even this is necessarily a positioning with respect to the present, and it often offers further evidence for the relative solidity of the present. The
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house may have been built by grandfather, but it is still a good house, dry and habitable: good enough for us, it hasnt changed so much. The hill where the children of the Gods played is still there, and you can still see the circle of stone seats on which they rested. The ice will last at least until late February, all other things being equal it isnt going to melt in the morning. And so on. In the creation of the sense of presentness about which I am talking, taken-forgranted mutually intelligible co-existence in the here-and-now and the materiality of the physical environment have a powerful ally in the organically-embodied identication of human individuals. Individuals are here and there, a little like other aspects of the environment: they are both the constructors and constituents of the world of contemporaries that is another way of talking about the present (Schutz, 1967: 176214). Furthermore, as accepted and recognized ways-of-doing-things, identied and embodied individuals are, in a sense that is anything but trivial, institutions in their own right (or, at least, they are what Searle [1995: 27] calls institutional facts). They have materiality and a reassuring presence. They necessarily change, but they also persist. For humans, plus a change, plus cest la mme chose is the normal state of affairs; or, at least, there is consistency as well as transformation, something to which I will return later. Before moving on, there is one other part of the argument to be sketched in. Lest I be misunderstood, the present is absolutely not perpetually stable. Change and disruption are commonplace, whether minor or major. To return to our point of departure, this in part explains why the present is, in fact, so necessary. Humans have to create a stable time-space for themselves in order to be able to do anything at all: it is one of the foundations of human ontological security (Giddens, 1984). But this also points us inexorably towards a recognition of the periodicity of the present: if there were no change from one present to another then there would be no present at all (if only because there would be no time at all). Although the pace of change in the modern world may have increased successive presents may fall more quickly by the wayside than before, and are perhaps more rapidly succeeded by others that is not to say that the present has, in some postmodern fashion, ceased to be reliable. Taking this further, I would want to suggest that the present is in fact always made up of an array of presents, depending on point of view, context, who is dening them and to what end, and so on. There are distinct individual, group, and organizational presents. There are other peoples presents and our own. Each individual has a variouslydened and overlapping array of presents; or, to put this another way, each individuals sense of the present will vary according to purpose, context and so on. Each of these different presents, in and out of which we move all of the time, has its own tempo, its own register, measurement and prioritization of time, its own boundaries. This helps us to understand why, for example, the intrusive and dominating present of capitalist industrial time (Thompson, 1967) was never wholly victorious. Family time, for example, persisted and ourished (Hareven, 1982). It also helps to explain why despite the vocal abandonment of grand narrative, the institutionalization of perpetual transformation as the normal state, the globalized transcendence of diurnal rhythms as part and parcel of timespace compression, and the enthusiastic embrace of refractory difference postmodernism has yet to have much impact on the everyday experiences of most men and women (and why it may, indeed, already be in recession: a time-expired nde-sicle mini-epoch, whose historical present has been and gone).
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To sum up, I am suggesting that the present is neither ephemeral nor eeting nor mysterious. Various aspects of language, the taken-for-granted mutually intelligible hereand-now, the physical environment, and the relative constancy of organically-embodied, identied individuals, all conspire to conjure up and maintain a domain of the present which is sufciently stable, real and workable for human life to proceed. The present is the invisible time of everyday life (Adam, 1994: 508); it is, indeed, the locus of reality (Mead, 1980: 132). If this argument is correct, however, what does it suggest about the past and the future?
PAST AND FUTURE

To return to the earlier mention of Bergson and Husserl, I have been arguing that, rather than consciousness existing primarily in relation to the past and the future, consciousness has a meaningful and useful base in the present, a domain within which to roam and operate. This is no more than might be expected if one adopts that position which argues, following Marx and Mead, that consciousness is the outcome of ongoing interaction with other humans, rather than its wellspring or cause (Jenkins, 1996: 2938). What is more, staying with Mead (1980) for the moment, I would want to insist that the present is the only possible source of the past and the future: neither makes any sense without the present, from which to be perceived and within which to be produced and reproduced. The future, for example, is made concrete, inter alia, in laying plans, in strategizing, in the hopeful expectation of regularity and repetition exemplied by agriculture, and in imaginings, all of which happen in the present in the rst instance. This suggests, furthermore, that the well-known argument perhaps most famously formulated in Heideggers concept of Dasein, our being unto death that the human sense of time is the product of our apparently distinctively human fate of foreseeing, not our own death, but the fact of the inevitability of our own death, is probably wrong (or at least it is only part of what is going on). No less likely is a counter-argument to the effect that our experience in the present of the death of others, our capacity to talk in the present about those deaths with still living others, and our remembering and memorializing those deaths in subsequent presents, is the source of our knowledge and anticipation of our own deaths. The human self-knowledge of death is thus, like so much else, rooted in our capacity to take the place of the other. Strictly in terms of time, this means that the human sense of the future is rmly rooted in the present (and, through remembering, in the past). That past is a different matter, but here again the present proves to be crucial to our understanding. The past is not what happened in any unproblematic sense, although that is very far from irrelevant, in that often something did happen, and it is often possible to apply meaningful criteria of truth in the process of trying to discover what happened and when. Allowing for this, however, the past is what we believe, argue, pretend, and propose (and so on . . .) happened. In other words, to put matters a little brusquely, the past is a product of the complexities of memory which are neither utterly individual nor reducible to cerebral activity and the strategic or tactical uses to which the past can be put (Connerton, 1989; Fentress and Wickham, 1992; Ferro, 1981; Halbwachs, 1980; Lowenthal, 1985). Memory, strategies and tactics are all features of, and exist in, the present. It is there, in the present, that past and future come into play
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with each other, in planning, politics and policy-making, for example, or in the knowledge of past and future that is central to agricultural cycles. In other words, one of the reasons we have a future, is because we have a past (and vice versa) and we only have either in the present. No matter what else and there is a great deal which for reasons of space I cannot cover here the everyday world of humans is lived in the present tense of who is who, what is what, and what is to be done.
IDENTIFICATION

To root future and past in the present is not to dismiss them as somehow less important epiphenomena of the here-and-now. Time is not the present. In fact, in a perpetual present, as in the lm Groundhog Day, time would not stand still, there would simply be no time as we know it (and time is only ever as we know it). Time is past, present and future, and the complex relationships between them. What is more, to reiterate one of my opening propositions, that we do have personal and collective pasts, and can imagine individual and collective futures, is central to whatever it means, as humans, to be who or what we are. Without a past we could hardly know who we are; without a future the notion of becoming would make no sense at all. Thus, identication which is inextricably bound up with the human consciousness that emerges out of interaction is completely bound up with a sense of time. This is no more than might be expected given that, despite the persuasiveness of established usages in common sense and social science, we are considering a process of identication rather than xed attributes of identity (Jenkins, 1996). Like any process, identication can only be understood over time. However, that we commonly talk about identity as if it is like any other of Durkheims social facts a thing, suggests that, process or no, humans generally experience identication as to some extent a matter of consistency and stability. The ongoing construction during processes of identication of a sense of denite and dependable identities is exactly analogous to the construction of the present that I have been talking about in this article so far. In order to make this point, George Herbert Mead comes to our aid here again. In one of his best known formulations (Mead, 1934, drawing on William James) he distinguished between aspects of selfhood that he called the I and the me. The I is the active aspect of selfhood and consciousness that is perpetually in motion: doing, becoming and taking forward various initiatives; the me is the individual understood as a reexive product of self-consciousness. The I exists in some kind of perpetually changing, impossible-to-tie-down present; the me is always a little behind the game, an ex post facto sense of being rather than becoming. The nal aspect of selfhood for Mead is the generalized other, the socialized internalization of the mores and norms of signicant others. Integrated selfhood is a perpetual conversation between the I, the me and the generalized other. However, Meads I is somewhat elusive; very much like his notion of the present, in fact. He argues that, I cannot turn round quick enough to catch myself (1934: 174); as soon as one recognizes an I it has already become a me. Apart from the implausibility of his model of selfhood as a discursive trio, a fugitive I raises similar problems to those which I have already discussed with respect to a fugitive present. In the rst place, if one can only ever know the I in the past tense, as a me, what is its ontological status? Can it even be said to exist at all? In the second, it seems to be the case that most
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of the time, most human beings experience themselves in a taken-for-granted present tense as relatively unitary and stable entities. When individuals do not, when they experience themselves as fragmented or unstable, we recognize their condition as extraordinary and problematic and we have vocabularies for talking about it. This axiomatic individual human stability does not, of course, preclude transformation or exibility, and must perpetually be produced and reproduced in the present during ongoing processes of identication (which necessarily draw on our relationships to the past, as well as on our assumption that there will be a future). Identity is thus, like the present, every bit a human construct. The relationship between the two is even closer than this, however. In a number of respects, identity and the present are mutually implicated in each other. First, identication knowing who we and others are is, before it is anything else, a present-tense activity. Second, the stability of identity, the working assumption that so-and-so will also be so-and-so tomorrow and the next day, depends in part on having a working interactional space of the here-and-now the present in which to be stable. Third, our working sense of the stability of the present depends in part upon the axiomatic solidity of individuals. This solidity is, at least in part, a matter of ongoing organically embodied continuity and integrity. Taking the broadest view, the relative stability of identity is rooted in the same factors as the relative stability of our sense of the present: shared language, a taken-for-granted here-and-now of mutually intelligible co-existence, a relationship to the physical environment, and, not least, the co-presence of embodied, identied humans. The stability of identication and the present is never absolute, however: both are only stable until change occurs, and, to reiterate a basic point, both are characterized by change as well as by stability. There are two other respects in which time is fundamental to identication which also deserve a brief mention here. First apropos mutually intelligible co-existence identication is always a matter of self-identication and identication by others, and the relationship between the two. Elsewhere I have called this the internal-external dialectic of identication (Jenkins, 1996). A dialectic may not actually be the most appropriate image, however, implying as it does a xed temporal sequence: rst A, then B, then the product, C, and so on. Without wishing to deny the importance of time as a strategic and tactical interactional resource, ongoing simultaneity seems also to be of the essence of the relationship between the internal and the external, between self and others, between us and them. Simultaneity is, however, a difcult concept to handle in linear, tensed language. In attempting it we risk a return to a model of identity as eeting, elusive and essentially unknowable. We need a sense of the present as a stable performative space where simultaneity can be something other than a succession of thin instances if we are to have a sense of identity as an ongoing interactional production, rather than as a given attribute. If we are to conceptualize identity as something other than a reication, a xed thing, some kind of stable present is required, as the context within which negotiation and change can take place. Identity is also a matter, always, of the coming together of individual and collective similarity and difference. More speculatively, it is possible to argue that each seems to have a slightly different relationship to the present. In terms of individual identication,
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similarity is largely a matter of personal consistency over time: I am the same person today as I was in the past and will be in the future. Difference, however, is either a matter of comparison with and among diverse individuals, typically in the here-and-now, or of denite change at a particular point in time (often ritually marked as a liminal passage from one present to another). With respect to collective identication, however, the temporal tables may be turned in some respects. The similarity of collective identity (us) seems to be established, at least in large part, in the here-and-now of some kind of co-presence, whether actual or potential (although one could just as easily say the co-presence of some kind of hereand-now). Collective difference, however, while also implicating collective co-presence, is arguably rooted, by denition, in a history of collective relationships over time.
HUMAN NATURE

The argument so far has one further set of implications which are worth exploring briey in closing. The opening quotation from Gore Vidal hints at the common conventional wisdom that there is human time, also known as social or cultural time time as constructed, understood, and experienced by humans and the time according to which the physical and biological universe ticks over, however that is understood, also known as natural time. This distinction between social or cultural time and natural time explicit or implicit, and theorized in a variety of ways is a persistent theme in sociological and anthropological discussions of time. On the one hand, we nd doing and waiting, coming and going, entrances and exits, routines and calendars, ritual cycles and liminality, myths and histories, and forecasts and projects. On the other, there is the objective inevitability of nuclear decay and half-life, the movements of the heavens, the circadian and annual rhythms of the sun, the moon and the stars, the ebb and ow of bodily functions, and the growth, ageing and death of organisms. One is supposedly a denitive construction of humans, the other supposedly independent of human acknowledgement (which is not to say that it is believed to be above human meddling). Where one is subjective, cultural, and articial, the other is objective, natural and real. The power perhaps, for some purposes, the necessity of this way of thinking about time is not to be denied. Despite the best efforts of modern physics to confound the issue, in the shape of relativity theory and beyond (Hawking, 1988), the timepieces of the blind watchmaker continue to tick away in our everyday and anthropological imaginations. Even a sociologist such as Barbara Adam, whose entire theoretical project (1990, 1995) hinges in part around an argument that the distinction between natural time and socio-cultural time is articial and unhelpful, has great difculty in breaking free of it altogether.2 Like the bass line of a complex musical arrangement, it is a powerful residual presence conditioning all of her work. In particular, she seems to be reluctant to pursue to their logical end either the qualitative difference between time as a human construction and patterned transformation as a property of the non-human universe, or the impossibility of knowing the latter other than through the lens of the former. However, in support of Adams basic argument that, in this respect as in so many others, the nature-culture dualism is unhelpful an argument which has also been forcefully put with respect to time by Alfred Gell (1992) I want to suggest that the argument
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I have been putting forward in this article about the inseparable relationship between identication and time implies that social-cultural time should be regarded as, in some sense at least, natural.3 It is arguably human nature to keep time, however this may be done in different local contexts. This point of view rests on the presumption about which G.H. Mead, for example, was in no doubt that selfhood and identication are denitively human and should be considered fundamental to our species-specic nature. One of the things that distinguishes humans as a species is our capacity to know who we are and who others are, and to communicate both to each other in complex ways. The condence of this assertion is founded on the belief that human nature is not something about which we should be afraid to talk, provided we are aware that we are likely to be engaged in philosophizing rather than anthropology or sociology (if distinctions of that ilk really matter).4 The point, therefore, is that if identication is an aspect of our human species-being or nature, and if identication and our sense of time are intrinsically implicated in each other, then there seems every good reason to propose that our capacity for keeping time should be considered as part of human nature too. Fundamental to that capacity is the imprecise stabilization of the present as a working time-space within which we can get on with doing those things that we typically call culture, society, or whatever: the achievement of the enduring, if not perpetual or unchanging, more-than-the-sum-ofthe-individual-parts that is the distinctive collectivity of the world of humans (and the distinctive subject matter of anthropology and sociology). This is founded on and in language, institutions, the physical environment, and the consistency of embodied identied humans. Which brings me back to the distinction between natural time and social/cultural time. By the argument that I have been making here, there is, on the one hand, only social/cultural time. On the other hand, however, as a species-specic aspect of human nature, then social/cultural time is in at least some senses, which are not trivial natural, too. Transformation, movement, instability, complexity and chaos, growth and decay, repetitive cycles: these are universal, in the most literal of senses, but they are not time. Time is something that humans do, naturally, and human life without time is unthinkable. What we call time is, in fact, perhaps best understood as an inevitable consequence of our need to have a working sense of the here-and-now if we are to go about the business of everyday life, in a universe of perpetual, and in a very real sense timeless, transformation.
Acknowledgements

This article was originally written as a plenary address to the April 2000 Annual Meeting of the Danish Ethnographic Society, held at the University of Aarhus and devoted to the theme of On the Track of Time: Time as a Concept and a Cultural Resource. My thanks to the organizers for encouraging me to think about this topic, and to the participants for their useful questions and comments. I am also grateful to members of the Anthropology, Ethnology and Cultural History seminar at the University of Aberdeen for their helpful comments, and to Professor Tim Ingold for inviting me to try the article out in that context. Subsequently, my colleague Dr Sharon Macdonald and two anonymous referees for this journal made a host of useful criticisms, in response to which the article has been remodelled.
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Notes

1 Ill be along presently is a particularly interesting usage, in that it evokes a sense of a present within which there is an active temporality: in other words, within our sense of the present there can also be a sense of movement forward in time. 2 As, for example, when she argues that clock and calendar time are not our only sources of reference and cannot therefore be contrasted with natural, social and religious times (Adam, 1994: 509). Later in the same piece she argues that industrial time is a time that is abstracted from its natural source (1994: 514, original emphasis). 3 A suggestion that does not, however, carry with it any reciprocal implication that natural time however we might understand this idea is to be regarded as social. 4 Anthropologists and sociologists are becoming more prepared to engage with the naturalness of humans, as exemplied in discussions of human nature, human needs, organic vulnerability, and so on. See, for example: Archer (2000), Carrithers (1992), de Swaan (2001), Ingold (1994), Kuper (1996), Runciman (1989: 3748), and Turner and Rojek (2001).
References

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RICHARD JENKINS was trained as an anthropologist at Belfast and Cambridge, and has done eldwork in Northern Ireland, England, Wales and Denmark. He is presently Professor of Sociology at the University of Shefeld. Address: Department of Sociological Studies, University of Shefeld, Elmeld, Northumberland Road, Shefeld S10 2TU, UK. [email: r.p.jenkins@shefeld.ac.uk]

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