Time In Practice

Time is one of the fundamental concepts of human being.Human practice not only constructs time,but also is conducted over time and shaped by time.Two essential attributes of time are time-reckoning and temporality.Time-reckonings are a variety of methods that people learn or create in the interactions with other human and non-human elements to calibrate the past,the present,and the future.Temporality is the consciousnesses of the past,the present,and the future unified in the consciousness of here-and-now,which evoked by the functioning of and the dynamics between three mental processes:memory,perception,and expectation.Time-reckoning not only expands itself in temporality but also affects people's temporality.On the other hand,temporality not only gives rise to time-reckoning but also is influenced by time-reckoning.Time-reckoning and temporality are unified and correlated within temporal practice.Temporal practice and social culture construct each other mutually.Temporal practices vary across societies and cultures.Even within the same social-cultural group,the temporal practices usually present itself differently based on the variety of social identities and the diversity of scenes of human practices.This dissertation is an ethnography of the Fangnan Miao people's multiple time-reckonings and temporalities.The Fangnan sub-ethnic group of the Miao people primarily lives in the middle and upper reaches of the Qingshui River in Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture,Guizhou Province,China.By examining the basic notions of time,the time-reckonings,the temporal practices of various social actors,the characters of time in different scenes,and social actors'specific processing of overlaps,conflicts,and coordination of time,this dissertation explores the meaning of time for the Fangnan Miao people from the perspective of their social and cultural life.This dissertation consists of six chapters.Chapter 1 first provides a systematical overview of previous time studies in social cultural anthropology.After reviewing main problems,concepts,theories and methods debated in the quest for understanding time,it suggests that the majority of previous anthropological studies focus on diverse time-reckonings,multiple temporalities,and their interrelationships involved in various social practices.Then the chapter set forth that this study specifically deals with the time-reckonings and temporalities which are important in Fangnan Miao people's everyday life,social systems,and cultural ideas.Chapter 2 is a profile depiction of the society and the culture of the Fangnan Miao people in terms of their human ecology,livelihoods,kinship system,social organization,and beliefs.It reveals that the fundamental social ideals of the Fangnan Miao people are to maintain the unity of families,clans,and villages,to build the network of exchange across families,clans,and villages,and to improve production and reproduction under the protection of ancestors and gods.Chapter 3 offers a comprehensive analysis of the Fangnan Miao people's basic noitons of time,their views on the origin of time,the content,origins,functions,and significances of their multiple time-reckonings,their degree of mastery of using different time-reckonings,their basic time units at various levels and units' internal diversity caused by multiple time-reckonings.This chapter highlights the role of time-reckonings in maintaining the social order,the diversity of the time-reckonings,and a more numerical and portable evolvement of time-reckonings manifested in generational changes.The following chapters reflects the Fangnan Miao's time-reckonings and temporalities in their actual process of temporal practice.Through ethnographic cases,the following chapters unfolds how the temporal practices of the Fangnan Miao are conducted by different social roles and in different social scenes,reflecting the timescapes of the Fangnan Miao's society and culture.Chapter 4 discusses the various time-reckonings and temporalities in the scenes of livelihoods,showing differences in temporal practices and temporal overlaps,conflicts,and coordination among elderly men,middle-aged men,women,and children resulted from the social division of labor.It further exposes the changing feature of livelihoods time,such as how the men's market-economy-oriented time is more dominant as compared with the elderly men's farming-oriented time,and how school children's national-education-oriented time discipline enjoys a higher priority than the women's housework-oriented time.These cases express the changeability of livelihoods time.Chapter 5 discusses various time-reckonings and temporalities in the scenes of rituals.The first type of time under examination is the ceremonial time.Taking a funeral as an example,it surveys the sudden liminality of the ceremonial time and the ritual experts' authority over time.The other type is the festival time.Based on case studies of three festivals,this chapter describes the time characteristics of the Fangnan Miao festivals,highlighting the fixed liminality of local festival time,the effect of collective habitus on time.The two types of time together reflect the fixedness of ritualized time.Chapter 6 takes the Dragon Boat Festival,a highly ritualized large-scale ethno-regional agricultural festival,as a case to present how the Fangnan Miao's livelihoods time,ritualized time,household time,village time,and different social actors' time blend into a unifying ethno-regional time,through a series of coordination.The exploration does not only analyze the origin of the regionality,periodicity,and complexity of the Dragon Boat Festival time,but also discusses the coercive force accumulated by villagers' collective time,the supervision authority over time of the village leaders,and the ritual experts' authority over collective time.Also,it argues what constitutes as a foundational driving force behind the incorporation of various temporal practices into a single framework of time is Fangnan Miao people's socio-cultural ideal,which attempts to maintain the stability of the socio-cultural order,and to maintain production and reproduction under the protection of ancestors and gods.