The creation of coevalness and the danger of homochronism

Johannes Fabian's Time and the Other criticized anthropology for creating representations that placed the Other outside the flow of time. Fabian offered the ethnographic portrayal of coevalness as a solution to this problem. This article explores four challenges to the representation of coevalness: the split temporalities of the ethnographer; the multiple temporalities of different histories; the culturally influenced phenomenological present; and the complicated relationship between culturally variable concepts of being and becoming and cultural concepts of time. Based on these challenges, this article argues that some attempts at ethnographic coevalness have fostered a temporal framework of homochronism which subsumes the Other into academic discourses of history. To achieve coevalness and to avoid homochronism and allochronism, it is necessary to represent the temporal frameworks that research subjects use to forge coevalness with ethnographers, and to place these frameworks in relationship to commonly used academic representations of time and history.