Introduction

Summary

Ground that was once the floor of the sea; sea rising up and snatching away ground. Folding hills, coastlines shaped and reshaped. There is nothing static about the terrain upon which we live and on which we depend.

This book seeks to understand human life in relation to these deep-time movements. It sets out to explore the way in which social rhythms interact with ecological and geological rhythms. Yet in the course of such a task, dislocations become apparent – the tension between the short-term orientation of contemporary life and the vast span of the physical processes on which that present draws. What are the horizons of a society’s sense of time? This is a question of enormous significance for anthropological analysis, as I intend to show.