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The End of Time? Aboriginal Temporality and the British Invasion of Australia. Time and Society (1996)
| Content Provider | CiteSeerX |
|---|---|
| Author | Donaldson, Mike |
| Abstract | For reasons which are both sensible and profound, if somewhat Eurocentric, much of the best scholarship in the history, sociology and political economy of time has focused on the transitions from one temporal order to another. In particular, researchers have been concerned with the origins and global impact of capitalist metric time, that is, of that European 'bourgeois, mercantilist and mathematical account of duration as discrete and equal temporal segments ' (Nguyen, 1992: 29). It is the completeness, acceptance and pervasiveness of this impact which has been most noted. And yet, perceptive as this work has been, it runs the risk of attributing to mechanistic time a facticity and durability which neglects or ignores that of other 'times'. After all, capitalism impacted on something. It came to living, vibrant, changing social orders, possessed of their own stresses, [187] strains and motive forces. And it came unevenly, affecting different parts in different ways, over different periods of time, with dissimilar results (see also Donaldson, 1982: 438). This study challenges Nguyen's (1992: 33) assertion that 'the last vestiges ' of 'all other temporal regimes in the world... remain only in the form of historical and anthropological curiosities'. It does this by exploring the temporal order of Australian Aborigines and argues against the claim that their time 'ended ' with the British invasion of their land and began again only when they 're-entered history ' by engaging with the moving frontier of advancing settler colonialism (see Hunter, 1993: 24). In contrast, I am focusing here primarily on the continuities of the temporal order |
| File Format | |
| Publisher Date | 1996-01-01 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
