The paper is structured in two parts. The first one deals with theories on time representations that have occupied anthropologists. It traces the origin of the notion of “social time” and its influence on subsequent research and theory. Anthropology has often produced classifications—of time among other subjects—whose scientific validity seems questionable, to say the least, but it has also offered rich self-reflexive critiques of these classifications as well as other, more flexible and cogent theories. In the second part, the focus moves to contemporary Western societies’ relationship with time, approached through an

analysis of sociologists’ and historians’ take on the issue. While Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical the former discuss an “acceleration” of so-called modern life, the latter judge our era to be selleck chemical threatened by an overgrowth of the present. I then discuss the material presented, and conclude by highlighting the multidimensionality of collective time representations and offering a hint at a potential direction for future research. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Anthropology of time Anthropologists have traditionally envisaged time through such aspects as time-reckoning, calendric patterns, cultural constructions of the past, time as a medium of strategy or control, etc. For the most

part, the anthropology of time is actually an anthropology of time use in non-Western societies, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical although anthropologists have often framed their work in more abstract terms. Historically, the subject developed slowly from the mid-20th century onwards and reached a peak in the 1990s—at a time when the whole Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical field of social science seemed to have found an interest in the subject of time—with the publication of many influential books and articles. Time as collective representation Much of the anthropological literature on time can be read as the legacy of Emile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology and anthropology, and the first to conceive of a “social time.” In his seminal book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life(1912),1 the French thinker claims that time, like space, cause, and number, is a fundamental Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical category of human thought. Durkheim

holds that categories are socially determined and claims that human temporal awareness, both Resminostat in the form of time cognition and concepts of time, has social origins. For him, time is a “collective representation,” ie, a system of symbols having commonly shared meaning (intellectual and emotional) to members of a social group or society. Durkheim also argues that humans rely on collective representations in their experience of the objective (or real, natural) world. For him, periodizations (eg, days, months, and years), for instance, do not exist in themselves—in the outside world, so to say—but reflect humans’ take on the reality that surrounds them. Durkheim must be given credit for having shown that collective representations of time do not passively reflect time, but actually create time as a phenomenon apprehended by sentient human beings.