Preface

229
Thereafter the debate came to be focused more on ethnographic
problems than on the grand theoretical issues. Leo Howe, who actually did
research in Bali, argued that Balinese do indeed have a single, coherent and
distinctive concept of durational time. Taking issue with ‘Bloch’s claim
that the Balinese possess two distinct conceptions of time’, Howe stated
‘instead that they have a single coherent concept of duration’ (1981: 220).
This ‘is conceived of as being, in the main, cyclical but for all that the
people are fully aware of the irreversible flow of time’. Both notions are
not confined to ritual but permeate ‘all spheres of the culture’ (1981: 223).
(‘Ritual’, incidentally, is treated by all these authors as a substantive,
identifiable category of action, rather than at most ‘an odd-job word; that is,
it serves a variety of more or less disparate uses’, Needham 1985: 156.) 189
‘Cyclicity seems to be inherent in the system’ (1981: 227), all cycles
having ‘similar properties, namely, segmentation, orientation and
irreversibility’ (Howe 1981: 229). Balinese representations of duration
exhibit ‘properties of both cyclicity and linearity’ (cycles returning not to
the same temporal, but the same logical, point, 1981: 231). That Balinese
do not speak in these terms does not matter. The ignorance of the native is
axiomatic to most anthropology. I wonder what would happen to our
presumptions about explanation were it ever finally to dawn on enough
anthropologists that the people we work with may have thought through
matters more subtly than have their self-appointed commentators and
analysts?
There are several difficulties with Howe’s account. First his
analysis treated duration as a fundamental property of time, which the
philosopher D.C. Williams long ago pointed out rests upon the pernicious
spatial metaphor of ‘the myth of passage’ (1951). Because time, as
conceived in such analyses, is abstract, it is constituted as a describable
phenomenon by the use of such techniques as metaphor, without which the
analysis becomes vacuous. Time is neither cyclical nor linear: such
descriptions are, rather, implicated in ways of world-making (Goodman
1978). Nor can definitive interpretations of how people perceive or
conceive time be read off collective representations without an act of
determination by the anthropologist. What we are left with arguably is
successions of events and the ways in which such sequences are variously
represented for whatever purposes by people under different conditions.
Tautology and catachresis are two great standbys of the anthropologists’
189 I would go much further and argue that ritual is an imaginary category, required in
much academic discourse as the antithesis or foil to give the notion of rationality the
semblance of relevance (see Chapter 7).