Another call to focus on political uses of time representations comes from Carol Greenhouse.7 For the American anthropologist, learn more social time is about “the vulnerability of political institutions to legitimacy crises of different kinds” (p 15). Facing these crises, social actors manipulate time representations,

either in order to defend or increase the legitimacy of the political institutions at stake, or to make them accountable. Greenhouse clearly opposes the notion of unitary time representations Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical that would originate from a society as a whole and be shared by all its members at all times; for her, representations of time are instruments of power used by some segments of a society in their struggle against others. About the linear model of time, she writes, for instance: “If linear time dominates public life in the West, then, it is because its primary efficacy is in the construction and management of dominant social institutions, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical not because it is the only ‘kind’

of time that is culturally available” (p 23). Other representations of time (as cyclical, for instance) are not made invalid by linear time; they coexist with Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical it, but only the latter is dominant, which is evident in the fact that it is proclaimed to be objectively real. According to Greenhouse, which representation of time dominates in a given society has everything to do with political discourse and nothing with bodily experience. Present times In this second section, I move away from anthropologists’ preoccupations with time and turn to two topics that have been treated mostly by, respectively, sociologists Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and historians. The first one is the “acceleration” of everyday life in the contemporary, technological world; the second one is the predominance of the present in contemporary Western societies’ temporal order. Both topics deal with representations of time, much like what precedes, but, in addition, they provide insights into common, present-day experiences of time. An accelerating world Since the 1990s, sociologists and social theorists have

been widely preoccupied with what they saw as an increase Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical in the pace of social life in so-called modern DNA ligase societies. Not only have the rhythms of life become faster, they argue, but social and cultural change has also speeded up. Some of them refer to this phenomenon as acceleration,11,12 others as time-space compression,13 instantaneous time,14 or timeless time,15 thereby alluding to the invention and spread of technologies (of transport, communication, etc) that radically shorten or even eliminate spatial and temporal distances. Information and communication technologies (ICTs), like mobile phones, personal computers, and the Internet, for instance, have revolutionized our lives by introducing simultaneity and instantaneity.16,17 ICTs, among other technological advances, are supposed to reduce the amount of time necessary to undertake certain actions.