Time and Society

Time-consciousness—long a shared objective of philosophy and social thought—is key to understanding different cultures and their cognitive adaptation to one another. Warren D. TenHouten's remarkable book achieves this goal by providing a bold and original three-level theory of time-consciousness, its neurocognitive basis, and social organization. Using classical and contemporary ethnographies of Australian Aborigines and Euro-Australians to support his theory, TenHouten shows how involvement in hedonic sociality—emphasizing equality and community—leads to time that is cyclical, present oriented, and more generally natural; whereas agonic sociality—based on inequality and agency—leads to time that is linear, future oriented, and more generally rational.

Preface
Acknowledgment

1. Introduction
2. A Case Study of the Australian Aborigines
3. Patterned-Cyclical Time Consciousness
4. Patterned-Cyclical Time Consciousness, Continued
5. Ordinary-Linear Time Consciousness
6. Patterned-Cyclical and Ordinary-Linear Time and the Two Sides of the Brain
7. Immediate-Participatory and Episodic-Futural Time and the Brain
8. The Two and the Four, and Possibly More: Social Duality and the Four Elementary Forms of Sociality
9. Natural and Rational Experiences of Time
10. Communal Sharing and Patterned-Cyclical Time Consciousness
11. Equality Matching and Immediate-Participatory Time Consciousness
12. Authority Ranking and Episodic-Futural Time Consciousness
13. Market Pricing and Ordinary-Linear Time Consciousness
14. Text and Temporality
15. An Empirical Test of the Theory
16. Discussion

Appendix
Notes
References
Name Index
Subject Index