#coevalness

Since the struggle for control over territory is part of that history, so too is the struggle over historical and social meaning. The task for the critical scholar is not to separate one struggle from another, but to connect them, despite the contrast between the overpowering materiality of the former and the apparent otherworldly refinements of the latter. My way of doing this has been to show that the development and maintenance of every culture require the existence of another, different and competing alter ego. The construction of identity . . . involves the construction of opposites and 'others' whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and re-interpretation of their differences from 'us.' Each age and society re-creates its 'Others.' Far from a static thing then, identity of self or of 'other' is a much worked-over historical, social, intellectual, and political process that takes place as a contest involving individuals and institutions in all societies.

. . . a critical analysis of the role Time is allowed to play as a condition for producing ethnographic knowledge in the practice of fieldwork may serve as a starting point for a critique of anthropological discourse.      . . .      . . . Beneath their bewildering variety, the distancing devices that we can identify produce a global result. I will call it denial of coevalness. By that I mean a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.      . . . If coevalness, sharing of present Time, is a condition of communication, and anthropological knowledge has its sources in ethnography, clearly a kind of communication, then the anthropologist qua ethnographer is not free to 'grant' or 'deny' coevalness to his interlocutors. Either he submits to the condition of coevalness and produces ethnographic knowledge, or he deludes himself into temporal distance and misses the object of his search.