Investigating Culture
Time can be defined as the indefinite progressive development of existence and events in the present, future, and past observed as a whole. However, there are several ways in which an anthropological approach has boosted our entire understanding of time. For example, Carol Delaney in her book Investigating Culture, refers to time as money, in which time becomes a valuable commodity rather than a standard medium that life is lived. Also, Delaney argues that time has to be spent on work but not on pleasure; thus, less money is gained when time is not used for work because each hour is more equivalent to the total amount of money gained. Inclusion, the anthropological approach helps in deepening our understanding of the entire cosmological time concept, which is the logical way of orienting ourselves in the whole world. For instance, Delaney discusses the relativity of time, in which time development is viewed as a linear in the calibration and extreme to second. Further, she explains that in the relativity of time most individuals in the present day see time as a river that flows on and on. Hence, this enhances our general outlook of time, which expands the mechanical sense we have in time due to the dominance of our culture by machine inventory (Delaney, 2004, p.80).
Additionally, most anthropological approaches such as relativity theory, promote human understanding of the existences and causes of the non-uniformity of time. For example, the theory of relativity explains that the gravitational field becomes the primary cause of the non-uniformity of time maintenance experienced in the atomic clocks (Delaney, 2004, p.96). Also, the anthropological approaches boost human understanding of time as a device for unity, which eliminates the difference perceptions of time that may arise from several religious, ethnic groups. For instance, Delaney firmly explains that when time could be regarded from different religious points of view, then there could have been different thoughts, meaning and course of time as well as the historical backgrounds. In addition to earlier arguments anthropological approaches enhance our understanding of the major lifecycle events, which do not often correlate with the propagated notions of the lifetime. Delaney gives support to this by saying many anthropologists have put their full study attention to the rituals of the lifecycle that begins with birth, rites of passage, marriage, and death; where death marks the end of a lifetime (Delaney, 2004, p. 100).
The spatiotemporalization that we discussed as a phrase that combines time and space fosters the full development of epistemic operation encompassed by the ethnographic counterpoints of past, present, and future of its core functions. However, I find it surprising that time is highly taken as a system of circulation, in which the translations of the global and local events, as well as terms of the historical context, are still dealt with in a random manner (Comaroff, 2010). Hence, this has fully enabled me to have a broader view of time rather than seeing it from a single clock point of view. Additionally, the informative discussion we had on the anthropological history of Turkish equipped me with adequate knowledge of all the activities that occurred. For example, the establishment of the Turkish anthropology that took place during the period of late Ottoman to period of Republican regime of consolidation. Thus, this anthropological study gave me an outstanding view of time because all the achievements of the Turkish anthropological research came into reality due to the deeper scrutiny carried on the particular time location (Demirer, 2010). Therefore, it clear that the anthropological approaches have significant contributions to our understanding of time.
References
Comaroff, J. (2010). The End of Anthropology, Again: On the Future of an In/Discipline. American Anthropologist: Press Print
Delaney, C. (2004). Investigating culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.
Demirer, S. (2010). Anthropology as a nation-building rhetoric: the shaping of Turkish anthropology (from 1850s to 1940s). Dialectical Anthropology, Oxford University: Print
