A Moment's Notice: Time Politics across Culture - Hardcover

Greenhouse, Carol J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801430615 ISBN 13: 9780801430619

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 1996

Synopsis

Focusing on the problem of time―the paradox of time's apparent universality and cultural relativity―Carol J. Greenhouse develops an original ethnographic account of our present moment, the much-heralded postmodern condition, which is at the same time a reflexive analysis of ethnography itself. She argues that time is about agency and accountability, and that representations of time are used by institutions of law, politics, and scholarship to selectively refashion popular ideas of agency into paradigms of institutional legitimacy.

A Moment's Notice suggests that the problem of time in theory is the corollary of problems of power in practice. Greenhouse develops her theory in examinations of three moments of cultural and political crisis: the resistance of the Aztecs against Cortes, the consolidation of China's First Empire, and the recent partisan political contests over Supreme Court nominees in the United States. In each of these cases, temporal innovation is integral to political improvisation, as traditions of sovereignty confront new cultural challenges. These cases return the discussion to current issues of inequality, postmodernity, cultural pluralism, and ethnography.

About this title

About the Author:

Carol J. Greenhouse is Professor and Chair in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. She is the author of Praying for Justice: Faith, Order, and Community in an American Town and A Moment's Notice: Time Politics across Cultures, both available from Cornell.

Review:

"Carol J. Greenhouse has written an original and challenging book that will give the lie to those who consider the anthropological imagination spent and its object no longer relevant to the modern world. She has taken the political centers of several epochs and places and shown how contingent they are and how much we have to learn from those they rendered marginal in politics, in epistemology, and in life itself."

(Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0801430615
• ISBN 13: 9780801430619
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 334