If anthropologists criticize their own discipline by saying that in their fieldwork, in conversation with their informants, its practitioners acknowledge to their opposite number that the other' is located in the same time as the anthropologists, since only on this condition is communication possible, while the same anthropologists, in writing scientific texts, constitute the other' as an object who lives in another time, the time of 'tribal reality' - then this shows another problematic aspect of simultaneity.18 The existence of different and contradictory forms of consciousness in the same time, their temporal co-presence, can be denied, or established as distance. Distance is something the forces of progress need so that it can be overcome with time.'But can all dating in an imaginary or conventional chronology of development be avoided by recognizing temporal co-presence, even if this chronology is not conceived in deterministic and evolutionary terms? Is the village scribe whom Jean-Jacques Salomon comes across in the French central Alps when he is preparing to write his book about the computer age an anachronism, or is his existence part of the everyday juxtaposition of times, even in a state which prides itself on its high technology?19 Is the unemployed 20-year-oldTiger’ temporally less 'behind’ if as an interview partner he is recognized in his spatio-temporal presence as co-temporal, as a contemporary? Who is making what ascriptions here, and how do things stand in social reality – really?
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The Illusion of Simultaneity