11. Ilongot Visiting: Social Grace and the Rhythms of Everyday Life

Abstract

Why do rituals never begin on time? In casual conversation an anthropologist colleague half-seriously, half-jokingly elevated this fieldwork anxiety into a pressing theoretical issue . Ethnography's ma­ jor puzzle, she said, is to understand how natives can figure out when their own rituals are about to begin. When anthropologists speak informally about the pleasures and hardships of fieldwork, they often reflect on the liberation and baffie­ ment of abandoning clock-time for quite different tempos of life . In some versions the people are habitually late . In others, they have a different sense of time. In yet others, they have no sense of time at all . Yet, for all the work on the cultural construction of time, little has been written on the tempo of everyday life in other cultures. Evi­ dently, a paramount reality of other people's daily lives has eluded the ethnographer' s grasp. Ethnographers' sentiments probably echo feelings learned closer to home. The English labor historian E . P. Thompson has described the sense of "time-discipline" that appears so natural in Anglo-American society as the outcome of a protracted historical struggle. Thompson succinctly states his argument as follows : "In all these ways-by the division of labour; the supervision of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives ; preaching and schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports-new labour habits were formed, and a new time-discipline