Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism

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Is time out of joint For the past two centuries, the dominant Western time regime has been future-oriented and based on the linear, progressive and homogeneous concept of time. Over the last few decades, there has been a shift towards a new, present-oriented regime or presentism, made up of multiple and percolating temporalities. Rethinking Historical Time engages with this change of paradigm, providing a timely overview of cutting-edge interdisciplinary approaches to this new temporal condition. Marek Tamm and Laurent Olivier have brought together an international team of scholars working in history, anthropology, archaeology, geography, philosophy, literature and visual studies to rethink the epistemological consequences of presentism for the study of past and to discuss critically the traditional assumptions that underpin research on historical time. Beginning with an analysis of presentism, the contributors move on to explore in historical and critical terms the idea of multiple temporalities, before presenting a series of case studies on the variability of different forms of time in contemporary material culture.

Reviews

In the last generation, we have seen a major shift in attitudes to time - past, present and future - both among historians and in the wider world. Rethinking Historical Time offers an indispensable guide to this shift and to its different contexts: cultural, social and ecological. * Peter Burke, Emeritus Professor of Cultural History, University of Cambridge, UK *
At a time of great uncertainty, these essays on how societies have reflected on past, present and future, and on the duties those alive have to those who have been and those to come, is particularly welcome. Rethinking Historical Time is both global in its reach and human in scale. It is a lucid contribution that all those thinking and learning in the humanities will appreciate. * Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History, Queen Mary, University of London, UK *
Time in history is undoubtedly an intellectual impertinence but, as Tamms and Oliviers effort with the topic shows convincingly, it is worthy of note and deeper discussion as time ever was. * European History Quarterly *

Author Bio

Marek Tamm is Professor of Cultural History at Tallinn University, Estonia. His primary research fields are the cultural history of medieval Europe, theory of history and cultural memory studies. He has recently published Debating New Approaches to History (ed. with Peter Burke, 2018) and an edited volume, Afterlife of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory (2015). Laurent Olivier is Curator in Chief of the Celtic and Gallic Department at the French National Museum of Archaeology in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France. His main area of research is the archaeology of the European Iron Age, but he is also interested in the history of the archaeological discipline and its place in the building of collective identities. He has recently published Le Pays des Celtes. Mmoires de la Gaule (2018).