Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object

Time and the Other is a classic work that upended the relationship between anthropologists and their subjects and reoriented the approach literary critics, philosophers, and historians took to the study of humankind. Johannes Fabian challenges the assumption that anthropologists live in the "here and now," that their objects live in the "there and then," and that the "other" exists in a time not contemporary with our own. He finds in the history of anthropology the emergence, transformation, and differentiation of a variety of uses of time that set specific parameters between power and inequality. A new postscript revisits conceptions of the "other" and attempts to produce and represent the knowledge of other(s).