This is a book about time, but it is also about much more than time—it is about how the objects we use to think about time shape our thoughts. Because time ties together so many aspects of our lives, this book is able to explore the nexus of objects, cognition, culture, and even biology, and to do so in relationship to globalization.

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Reviews

"This book will be invaluable for cognitive anthropologists, scholars of material culture, and theorists interested in time historically and in our global age . . . All of us feel bound to our alarm clocks, wristwatches, and daily planners, but few of us have given thought to where these devices come from and how they have altered us as social and biological beings. In this engaging and intellectually far-reaching work, Birth has done much of the work for us." - American Anthropologist

"An important contribution to the anthropology of time and material culture studies, this volume takes as its primary point of departure that the mechanisms for 'telling' time (the author focuses on clocks and calendars) are engaged in shaping our experience and subsequent enactment of temporal realities as much as they are nominally thought of as representing them." - American Ethnologist

"An admirable attempt to ground the study of time within the empirical specificity of objects and culture." - Time and Society

About the author

Kevin Birth is a professor of Anthropology at Queen's College, CUNY.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title: Objects of Time
Book Subtitle: How Things Shape Temporality
Authors: Kevin K. Birth
Series Title: Culture, Mind, and Society
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137017895
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan New York
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture Collection, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-01787-1Published: 10 October 2012
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-137-01788-8Published: 10 October 2012
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-01789-5Published: 10 October 2012
Series ISSN: 2637-6806
Series E-ISSN: 2634-517X
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 211
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Social Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Sociology of Culture, Psycholinguistics, Anthropology, History of Science

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Table of contents (6 chapters)

Front Matter

The Material Invention of Time

A Necromantic Device, or How Clocks Think

Calendrical Uniformity versus Planned Uncanniness

Polyrhythmic Temporalities (Confounding the Artifacts)

Globeness: Time and the Embodied, Biological Consequences of Globalization

Creeping Cognitive Homochronicity and the End of the Time of Earth

Back Matter

About this book