Customer Reviews

Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object

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A lot of the critique of how anthropologists "make their object" in the 80s and 90s can be traced back to some of the ideas in this book. It is a profoundly important analysis of how time is manipulated in such a way as to create a boundary between "them" and "us." As the other reviewer says, it is not an easy read, but I don't think you can really know the history of recent anthropological theory without giving this book some of your attention.

In this book the anthropologist Johannes Fabian, who received his PhD from the University of Chicago, brings a fresh insight to a central topic in anthropology: time. Fabian criticizes structuralism's perspective of time and aims to prove how time is often ignored in ethnography as coevalness is usually denied to the other.

The thesis of this book I found quite interesting and accurate: that anthropologists consider their subjects as existing in a different time from themselves, in some mythical past. However, the style of the writing seemed as if it was literally translated from the German. I found it very difficult to understand, opaque, and wondered many times why I was bothering to slog through the thing.