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Paper short abstract:

This paper reconsiders anthropological approaches to time through a series of specific ethnographic encounters using a collaborative and cross-discplinary methodology. In conversation with mathematicians, this paper proffers a view of time as fractal.

Paper long abstract:

Fractality as an analytical tool in anthropology has often relied on the modeling of fractals to make sense of various socio-cultural phenomenon. Roy Wagner (2001) has used Indra's net, drawn from Chinese Buddhism. Ron Eglash (1999) has used the Koch Snowflake developed by mathematician Helge von Koch, and Marilyn Strathern (1991) has drawn from the Cantor Dust or the Cantor Set introduced by mathematician Georg Cantor. Consulting these models has aided anthropologists in mapping a variety of concepts from perspective to material culture to the ontological nature of human relationships. Drawing on fractal mathematics, this paper presents a fractal orientation for anthropological notions of time shifting towards a view of time that is infinite, irreducible, and recursive; an infinite complexity across any scale. What implications does this view have for an anthropology that analyses utopian futures and global challenges?

This paper presents as its ethnographic material the sustained intellectual meetings and engagements between a group of anthropologists and several groups of mathematicians from undergraduate students to professors of fractal mathematics. In these meetings the mathematicians described to the anthropologists various fractal models, and the anthropologists presented both ethnographic material and anthropological theories of time. Discussions about the perceived linearity of time in conjunction with a deeper reading of fractal modeling and mathematics invites a robust cross-disciplinary engagement as well as a prospective new methodology, and a unique ethnographic moment. Through this collaborative approach, ideas about the contributions of fractal mathematics to an anthropology of time emerge.