GENERAL/ THEORETICAL General/Theore tical zyx 1023 Time and the Other: zyxwvu How Anthropology Makes Its 0bject.johannes Fabian. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. xv zyxwvut + zyxwv 205 pp. $28.00 (cloth). George E. Marcus Rice University During the 1960s and early 1970s, self- conscious critiques within Anglo-American an- thropology developed on three fronts. A cri- tique of paradigm reshaped the study of culture and society according to symbolic and struc- turalist perspectives. A critique of method ap- peared in the growth of a literature on field- work, which while confessional and celebratory, exposed the vulnerability of anthropology’s claims to status as a social science. And there was a critique of its subject, the isolated primitive Other, through historic connections made between anthropology and Western co- lonialism. While the first critique did change anthropological thinking about culture, these assaults from within had little effect on the way anthropologists work- both in the field and in the sort of ethnographies they have written. Partly, this was because the critiques were un- coordinated, but most importantly, it was because they partook of the ideological atmos- phere and the hopes for or fears of radical social change characteristic of that period. The cri- tiques failed to address the level of practice, and more precisely, the way that anthropologists constitute their subjects in ethnographic and theoretical writing. Now, however, more powerful versions of these earlier critiques have come together in the writing of accounts derived from fieldwork by those who were graduate students during the 1960s and 1970s and for whom the recent putatively antipositivist interpretive fashion in cultural analysis has been formative. Framing the ethnographic works of writers such as Rosaldo, Rabinow, Crapanzano. Dumont, and Taussig, among others, are attempts to apply and express in practice the different strains of critique that appeared during the 1960s. This is a period of experiments in ethnographic writing in the absence of either a unifying debate at the level of high theory or an adequate metastate- ment about the current transformation of an- thropological practice occurring in the writing of critical ethnography itself. Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other is a profound and ambitious effort to provide such a systematic metastatement which delivers a radical epistemological critique of anthropolog- ical writing. In a 1971 article, Fabian was an early voice in pointing the critique of anthro- pology toward an examination of its discourse. Now he has attempted to expand a focused argument into a general critique. His book ap- pears after Edward Said’s similar but less precise argument in zyxwv Onentalissm, and when the point of his critique is already being more or less suc- cessfully taken to heart in the trend of rxperi- mentation with the thoroughly challenged con- ventions of ethnographic writing. Central to Fabian’s argument is the discrep- ancy between the here and now reality of field- work and the way that anthropologists write about their subjects in accounts derived from it. Fieldwork involves engagement between ethnographer and subject, an intenubjective sharing of the same historic time and space- what Fabian terms coevalness-while ethno- graphic rhetoric has systematically distanced the subjects of fieldwork, primarily by denying the contemporaneity of subjects and placing them in temporal frames other than that en- compassing the ethnographer and her reader- ship. Fabian’s book is largely concerned with demonstrating how this denial of coevalness, as he calls it, has been accomplished in anthropo- logical writing. This denial has served to block anthropology’s awareness of its own politicized context and intellectual history. Fabian views this epistemological critique of rhetoric as essen- tial in clearing the way for transforming what anthropologists write about. In expanding this core insight about temporal distancing into a general critique. Fabian assigns himself the task of providing a system- atic, abstract account of how Time (with a capital zyxwv T) has infused the development of an- thropology. His first chapter provides a history of temporalizing rhetoric in anthropology. He demonstrates how sacred Judeo-Christian time became secularized in European intellectual history, culminating in the influential evolu- tionary frame of thought in the 19th century, which spatialized time. This spatialization had unfortunate consequences for the human sciences, such as anthropology, in that subjects were naturalized and denied meaning in a historical sense. Although functionalist-based