Some years ago, I met a classic of British
anthropology literature, which end up exerting a profound influence on me when i started to rethinking
the relationships between society, speace and time, it was "The Nuer" written by
British anthropologist Edward Evans Pritchard, especially in chapters 2 and 3
of this work, respectively entitled "Oecology" and "Time and Space".
Originally published in 1940, "The
Nuer" is an intense monograph built on a dense field work, in which
Evans-Pritchard explores the ways of life and political institutions among the
tribe of the Nuer in Sudan during the early years thirty. What makes this work
particularly interesting from the reflections that are part of the
"spatial turn" is that precisely this early ethnography anticipates
several relevant issues. Evans-Pritchard interpreting the Nuer ways of
understanding space, denatures their own western spatiotemporal conceptions, for
the Nuer people (the author says) there are no categories of space and time as
independent forms, but rather, both are actually constituent in an integrated between
society and environment, mediated by social rhythms.
While authors of classical sociology as Émile
Durkheim and Marcel Mauss (1902)of French School of sociology and ethnology, or
the German sociologist Georg Simmel (1903) addressed the issue of space as an
epistemological and sociological category, the particularity of Evans-Pritchard´s
work was that this is a theoretical reflection rooted in ethnographic research,
constructing theoretical reflections from field work, which shows the
integration between the rhythms of social life and activities, the materiality
of space and social relations between humans and animals as relational elements
to understand the time and space as processes overlapping social existence,
revealing the constructed character of space.
In chapter two, the author describes and think
about diverse aspects that constitute the material and spatial frameworks of
the Nuer, a tribe that at the time of Evans-Pritchard´s fieldwork, was a group
of people with seasonal mobility in periods of flooding in areas bordering the
Nile river. in this second chapter, Evans-Pritchard importantly highlights the
place of the cattle, which had an economic relevance for the Nuer, exploring
also a social dimension in relations between the people and their animals, that
is especially relevant to understand the theoretical reflections of chapter
three, on the notions of time and space as representations while materialized
as social practices.
Years later, reading the work of philosophers
like Henri Lefebvre (1991, 2004), or geographers as Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) or David Harvey
(1989), I found some important parallels to the pioneering ideas and empirical
work of Evans-Pritchard and the so-called "spatial turn", however,
has been not studied and read in contemporary geography. In the sociology of
the "Movility turn", Evans-Pritchard and in particular his work on
the Nuer has been re discovered by authors like John Urry and Scott Lasch
(1994), who also had rethinking the space and the rhythms of social life in the
global world and late modernity.
Reading the classic and inexhaustible Henri
Lefebvre´s "The Production of
Space" I found two mentions of Evans-Pritchard work, no one of the
references refers to "The Nuer" or the chapters mentioned in question,
so that the links between philosophy spatialized Lefebvre and the work of
Evans-Pritchard as a pioneer of space reflection based on empirical research,
still opened for futures development and research. In fact it is part of one of
my future projects in which I will explore the links between spatial
perspective of anthropology of Evans-Pritchard and other theoretical and
disciplinary lines on human geography.
For some notes of chapter three on spanish
click here.
I remembered the intersection between space time, regarding a comment made by my dear friend, the geographer Philippe Gervais-Lambony, about one of my presentations on environmental justice and creative destruction, when He argued that we can´t think about space without thinking about the time and temporality
.
REFERENCES
-Durkheim, Émile y Mauss, Marcel.
1996[1902]. “Sobre algunas Formas de
Clasificación Primitiva. Contribución al estudio de las representaciones colectivas”
En: Durkheim, E. Clasificaciones Primitivas (y otros ensayos de antropología
positiva). Barcelona: Ariel.
-Evans-Pritchard, Edward. 1940. “The Nuer: a description of the modes of
livehood and the political institutions of Nilotic people”. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
-Harvey, David. 1998[1990]. “La Condición de Posmodernidad: una
investigación sobre los orígenes del cambio cultural”. Buenos Aires:
Amorrortu Editores.
-Lasch, Scott & Urry, John. 1994. “Economy of Signs and Space”. London:
SAGE.
-Lefebvre, Henri.
1991[1974]. “The
Production of Space”. Oxford: Blackwell.
2004[1992].
“Rhythmanalysis:
Space, Time and Everyday life”. London and New York: Continuum.
-Simmel, Georg. 1997 [1903]. “The Sociology of Space”. En: Frisby,D
& Featherstone, M (edS). Simmel on Culture. London: SAGE.
-Tuan, Yi-fu. 1977. “Space and Place: the perspective of experience”. London and Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
