TIME : a multidisciplinary introduction

Time permeates language, society, and individual lives, but time eludes definition. From grand scales of geologic time to the exasperation of waiting in endless bureaucratic lines, from the unifying sense of ancestral presence at an ancient monument to the imminent question of climate resilience, this volume presents conceptions of time through a kaleidoscope of cultures and disciplines. Accessible to students and scholars alike, the book demonstrates that far from natural, stable, or singular, time is culturally dependent, historically contingent, socially constructed, and disciplinarily specific - and that multidisciplinary and cross-cultural conversations transform our understanding of time. Sarit Kattan Gribetz is an Associate Professor at Fordham University and Lynn Kaye is an Associate Professor at Brandeis University. Acknowledgments 5 Contents 7 Time: How and For Whom? 9 Part I: Time: An Interdisciplinary Overture 13 1 Thinking Temporally Today 13 2 What Does it Mean that Time is Culturally Constructed, Historically Contingent, and Socially Differentiated? 29 3 Time in Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Perspective 61 Part II: Time Across Disciplines: Selected Essays 93 Introduction to Part II 93 4 Circadian and Seasonal Clocks in Insects and Other Organisms 99 5 The Queue as Dystopia 111 6 Temporal Tactility in Trisha Brown’s Locus (1975) 123 7 Proust’s Novel Time 135 8 Time and the Earthworks 147 9 All the Time There Is: Cloth Sack as a Buddhist Metaphor for Time 161 10 The Temporalities of Sound in Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains 171 11 Media and the Cultivation of Time 179 12 Coral Reefs and Climate Change: We Are Running Out of Time 189 List of Contributors 199 Index 203