The Stratification of Time

Article The stratification of time Time & Society 2015, Vol. 24(2) 139–162 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0961463X15587830 tas.sagepub.com Cristián Simonetti Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile; University of Aberdeen, UK Abstract Scientists that rely on excavation for studying the past tend to conceptualize the passage of time vertically, as a movement from bottom to top. In the history of knowledge, this has not been an exclusive property of sciences that excavate the past. Geological time had an impact on many other disciplines, some of which are far from the original source, with the result that various temporal processes became stratified, such as the evolution and growth of life, the mind, language, sociality and knowledge. By looking at the visual language of different disciplines, including evolutionary biology, linguistics, psychology, anthropology and history, I trace some key ramifications of the stratigraphic understanding of time. In doing so, I reveal important tensions that emerge as the stratigraphic view of time mixes with other temporal trajectories, such as the horizontality of the text, the verticality of hydraulic and arboricultural metaphors in genealogical thinking, as well as the sagittal temporality of the mind common in the west. The analysis provides insights into the corporeal and historical nature of disciplinary knowledge, across the sciences and the humanities, by suggesting that the way concepts of time evolve and circulate in academia is never independent of how scholars appropriate their environments corporeally. Keywords Concepts, time, stratigraphy, writing, genealogies, trees, life, mind, language, kinship, history of ideas, interdisciplinarity Corresponding author: Cristián Simonetti, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Av. Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Macul, Santiago 7820436, Chile. Email: csimonetti@uc.cl Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 140 Time & Society 24(2) Introduction Scientists that rely on excavation for understanding the past, such as geologists and archaeologists, refer to the experience of encountering this past deep underneath the ground. This corresponds with a vertical understanding of the passage of time that coincides with the stratigraphic arrangement of soils. Such understanding is visible in how chronologies in these sciences tend to be depicted vertically with earlier events at the bottom and later events on top, which contrast with how chronologies tend to be illustrated in history as a horizontal sequence that moves from left to right. However, such vertical understanding of the passage of time is nowadays visible in many other sciences that not necessarily excavate the past. Geology made a huge impact on many other neighbouring disciplines, by providing a new understanding of the history of the earth and its inhabitants. This not only included an expansion with respect to the biblical temporal scale, enough for long time processes to be conceived (see Rudwick, 1999; Toulmin and Goodfield, 1965). It gave a particular view of the passage of time as a vertical unfolding from bottom to top (Simonetti, 2013). Over the past two centuries, there have been several ramifications of this view, some of which are far from the original source, reaching beyond the natural sciences. In this article, I trace some of the ramifications of this vertical understanding, by looking at the historical development of the visual language of different disciplines such as biology, archaeology, linguistics, psychology, anthropology and history.1 The analysis shows that the vertical understanding of the passage of time inherited from geology is far from being universal and non-problematic. As it moves from one discipline to the next, the vertical understanding of time has interacted with other temporal trajectories imposing new conceptual challenges, most of which tend to pass unperceived as a result of convention. These new trajectories include the top to bottom and left to right temporality of written text common in Germanic languages, the use of arboricultural and hydraulic metaphors for illustrating the ascent and decent of evolution, and the back and forth temporality of the mind common in the west. Following these multiple trajectories within vertical understandings of time, I argue that disciplines are not bounded things, as the notion of interdisciplinarity suggests, but rather open conversations that rely on concepts that are continuous with sentient experience. The way knowledge about time evolves and circulates across the sciences and the humanities, in disciplines that concentrate on studying the past and predicting the future, including those analysed here, is not the result of the transmission of abstract ideas but depends on how scholars engage Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 141 Simonetti corporeally with their environments, in the footsteps of others. Following this argument, I look at some of the limitations of the widespread use of botanic metaphors for understanding conceptual change, including the history of vertical conceptions of time we are about to analyse in this article. It is worth noting that terms such as ‘vertical’, ‘verticality’, ‘horizontal’ and ‘horizontality’ are used descriptively throughout the article to refer to the dimensions along which time unfolds. As the article shows, from the viewpoint of an observer exploring his or her surroundings, understandings of time can unfold in multiple directions (up, down, leftwards and rightwards), which often entwines with the ways scholars have historically appropriated their environments. The stratification of the tree of life and its aquatic origin One important discipline to acquire a stratigraphic understanding of time is evolutionary biology, particularly after the work of Darwin who mixed it with other temporal trajectories. When Darwin wrote ‘The Origin of Species’ his understanding of evolution was caught in an upward–downward tension, between a long established combination of arboricultural and hydraulic metaphors used in genealogical thinking. Following the remarkable work of Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (1991), the first metaphor is historically connected to an image of the upward growing Tree of Jesse, while the second is connected to the downward flowing image of the aristocrat’s bloodline. The tension in the temporal trajectories of these two analogies is still visible in contemporary family trees, in which genealogies are depicted flowing downwards, along trees that grow and branch upwards. The language Darwin used for describing variations in species clearly reflects this tension, for example in the idea of ‘branching lines of descent’ (Darwin, 1917: 89). In spite of this tension, the only diagram Darwin provided in ‘The Origin of Species’ contained no sign of a downward movement but only branches that spread upwards and were numbered from bottom to top (see Figure 1).2 Ingold (2007), in his recent work on lines, is probably right in suggesting the primacy of the arboricultural metaphor in the upward trajectory of the diagram. However, it is worth noting a fundamental difference between the use of trees for depicting kinship relationships and their use for depicting evolution. In the first case, ancestors are placed in the branches because the emphasis is on the confluence on a common descendant. In the second case, variations are placed on the branches because the emphasis is on the divergence from a common ancestor. In other words, family trees go from many ancestors to one descendant while the tree of life Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 142 Time & Society 24(2) Figure 1. Diagram illustrating variations under natural selection. Reproduced from Darwin (1917: 84–85). goes from one ancestor to many descendants. As a result, family trees – compared to the tree of life – are inherently paradoxical, as the line of descent has to flow in the opposite direction to that of the growth of the tree. Figure 2 summarizes the point. This upward divergence of the tree of life, as opposed to the downward convergence of the family tree, becomes compatible with stratigraphy. Darwin himself suggested it explicitly when he stated an identity between the horizontal lines in his diagram and strata. ‘In the diagram, each horizontal line has hitherto been supposed to represent a thousand generations; it may also represent a section of the successive strata of the earth’s crust including extinct remains’ (Darwin, 1917: 89, my emphasis). What this passage suggests is an image of the Tree of Jesse growing inside the earth from the centre to the periphery. The tree of life no longer grows from a seed placed on the ground, while top branches are not visible high in the sky but at the surface level, where current living organisms inhabit the horizontality of the earth. Such stratification of the tree of life is not entirely surprising, knowing how Darwin relied on the fossil record. He had to see the tree embedded in strata. At the beginning of the 19th century there was no clear boundary between geology and zoology. Both depended on the fossil record and scientists had to be familiar with both. Darwin was one of them. Even though Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 143 Simonetti Convergence Divergence (Family tree) (Tree of life) Earlier Later Later Descendant Earlier Ancestor Figure 2. The convergence of the family tree versus the divergence of the tree of life. he is mainly known for his contribution to evolutionary theory, he also relied on, discussed and contributed to geology. At the same time, his ideas would have been impossible without some early works on earth history. For example, during his expedition on the Beagle, one of the few serious books he took with him was Lyell’s (1990) ‘Principles of Geology’. This work gave him a sufficiently extended timescale for conceiving large evolutionary processes (Toulmin and Goodfield, 1965: 171). Even though he was determined to challenge Lyell’s denial of direction in evolution, Darwin was happy to confess that his ‘books came half out of Lyell’s brain’ (in Howard, 2001: 20). The aboricultural image and the geological understanding of time share fundamental aspects that make the stratification of the tree of life possible. In both cases, time moves from bottom to top. In the case of the tree of life, new ramifications grow on top of earlier ones, which are thicker and stronger. Similarly, in normal conditions of deposition, later soils are deposited on earlier ones, which have a more stable structure at the time of deposition. However, there are important aspects that the stratigraphic understanding of time adds to the upward growth of the tree of life, particularly the fact that history is not visible at the surface but needs to be excavated. Such understanding is shared by many other disciplines that study the past and rely on stratigraphy. One important example is archaeology. In recent ethnographic work conducted with land and underwater archaeologists, regarding their understandings of time and space, I have explored some of the assumptions related to this stratigraphic understanding of time. According to it, key concepts in the discipline refer to an experience of Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 144 Time & Society 24(2) the past as no longer behind but coming to the fore. Such temporal inversion is probably shared by most disciplines that turn around to study the past. However, in the case of archaeology the exploration involves an encounter of the past under the feet, deep below the surface of the ground. This downward trajectory is remarkably revealed in how archaeologists gesture. For example, in using expression such as ‘time depth’ or ‘going deeper in time’, archaeologists tend to point downward along the word ‘depth’. Although we might think of these expressions as being part of a highly specialized academic culture, they become part of the everyday language archaeologists use outside academia. As they use it, the complex relationship that exists between ‘depth’ and a ‘past’ below reminds partially beyond their grasp (Simonetti, 2014, 2015). This understanding of the past as being enclosed within surfaces is not only common in disciplines that excavate the past under the ground but also of sciences that explore the past at the bottom of the sea. However, the encounter with a mysterious environment is added here. Following the remarkable work of Stephen Helmreich’s (2009) with marine biologists in California, there is a widespread tendency in the history of scientific explorations of the ocean to think of it as an alien environment. Compared to other forms of exploration of the past underwater, such as underwater archaeology, in contemporary marine biology this image is enhanced by the connections scientists find between the retrospective understanding of the origin of life in the deep sea and the conditions for life in other planets. The scientific voyages in microbial seas look for the origin of life not only downwards in the depths of the oceans but also upwards in outer space, triggering feelings of alien encounters. Regarding the use of the arboricultural metaphor for understanding evolution, Helmreich’s work is notable in describing how the roots of the tree extend down to the bottom of the sea and up into the sky. However, his analysis of the origin of genealogical thinking in biology stops short of describing the systematic relationship in the history of science between this arboreal understanding of time, stratigraphy and the process of excavation. The stratigraphic view of time emerged from the need to understand the mutual connection between land and sea. In the case of Steno (1916), the first to formulate the principles of superposition, the question that triggered his analysis of the history of Tuscany was related to the need to understand the origin of marine fossils excavated on land. Originally interested in anatomy, he started to think on the history of the earth after being commissioned by the Duke of Tuscany to study the head of a shark, whose teeth resembled fossils that at the time were believed to grow on the ground. He was one of the first to realize that the areas where these fossils were found were once covered in water. This attention to the sea and its role in the understanding Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 145 Simonetti of geological time remained constant throughout the 19th century in the progressive expansion of earth’s history and the creatures that live on it.3 From the perspective of evolutionary biology, the attention to the sea as a means for studying the past expanded as scientists realized the limitations and imperfections of the fossil record on land. Darwin thought that it would be possible to find in the sea what he called living fossils, like the ornithorhynchus, which ‘have endured to the present day, from having inhabited a confined area, and from having been exposed to less varied, and therefore less severe competition’ (Darwin, 1917: 78). The vast space under the seas seemed perfect to fulfil these conditions. The missing links in the history of evolution that would make it possible to fill the gaps of the tree of life on land were conceived as being still alive under the surface of the seas. Connecting the dots was a crucial task for early scientific voyages like those of HMS Challenger, which were foundational for what is nowadays known as oceanography and marine geology. The ocean became a perfect testing ground for emerging theories of evolution like those proposed by Darwin (see Corfield, 2004: 2–7). The origin of life was envisioned as lying not just at the base of a tree or below the ground but also at the bottom of the sea. Having the evolution of life, at an effortless glance, required squeezing all these elements into a single diagram, with the result that tracing the genealogy back in time, involved not just climbing down the tree, leaving non-human primates ‘behind’, but also searching for hidden depths underneath the surfaces of the land and sea. Understanding evolution involved descending, digging and diving the past, all at once. It is worth noting, following Ingold (2007), that in Darwin’s diagram living organisms have suffered from a process of abstraction. In the diagram, lives are compressed into dots and the relationship between lives is represented using lines for connecting the dots. Here, any horizontal movement is within the same stratum and therefore occurs without the passage of time. It constitutes a line of transport. To the contrary, each vertical movement involves temporal changes, constituting a line of transmission. Evolution moves vertically but not horizontally. Only the former involves the passage of time. As a result, in the a-temporal line of transport living organisms are everywhere at once, while in the a-spatial line of transmission the dots are connected while erasing the specificities of each life. These connections reflect a very peculiar identity relationship between the dots. In the context of Darwin’s theory, under natural selection specificities are transmitted from one generation to the next before the organism encounters its environment (see also Oyama et al., 2001). Organisms respond to a tension between vertical and horizontal movements, respectively, across time and space.4 Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 146 Time & Society 24(2) Outside genealogy and evolution, similar processes of abstraction are common in other uses of botanic images for understanding processes of change. One important example, related to disciplines such as archaeology, design and architecture, is their use for understanding the history of artefacts and technology. This view of the historical transformations of objects belongs to a long tradition that goes back to the work of Edward B. Tylor and relates to analogical understandings of cultural traits as biological species (Ingold, 1986: 33). Materials, like the specimens contained in the fossil record, are sometimes conceptualized following the branching of trees. And just like species, objects are abstracted into dots. But as Ingold insists, which applies to the design and manufacture of materials as well, Individuals can no more be everywhere at once than they can receive the specifications for life in advance of living it . . . Creatures of all kinds, human and non-human, are wayfarers, and . . . wayfaring is a movement of self-renewal or becoming rather than the transport of already constituted beings from one location to another. (Ingold, 2007: 116) Stratified trees branching upwards, downwards and sideways The vertical view common in sciences that rely on trees and stratigraphy contrasts with other scientific understandings of the passage of time, particularly with history where time tends to be conceptualized horizontally. Compared to the experience of excavation, historians spend most of their time reading and writing as they explore the past. Accordingly, following the way Germanic scripts unfold, chronologies tend to be depicted mainly from left to right and occasionally from top to bottom, which contrasts with the upward accumulation of soils and the growth of trees. However, the temporality of written texts has influenced not only historical chronologies but also the upward directionality of both arboricultural metaphors and stratigraphic sequences. Examples, this time not from evolutionary biology but from linguistics and the study of kinship in anthropology, illustrate the point. They show that both converging and diverging trees can unfold not just from bottom to top but also in directions that coincide with the temporality of text, while some of them relate to the use of metaphoric expressions that speak of an encounter of depths across surfaces. As in the previous sections, these contrasting directionalities illustrate that, ultimately, time depends on how academics attune their bodies to their surroundings. Saussure, the founder of structuralism, set up a temporal distinction according to which the study of Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 147 Simonetti language was divided into two sub-disciplines, namely static and evolutionary linguistics. For him, the first corresponded to a synchronic while the second to a diachronic understanding of signs systems. Interestingly, like in genealogy, Saussure used botanic metaphors for understanding the differences between these two approaches to linguistics. For him diachrony corresponds to the longitudinal fibres of the stem of a plant that grow vertically with respect to the ground, while synchrony corresponds to a transversal (horizontal) cut of those fibres.5 Saussure confirms this vertical understanding of diachrony when he refers to how innovations emerge in language. ‘In the history of any innovation there are always two distinct moments: When it sprang up in individual usage . . . [and] . . . when it becomes a fact of language outwardly identical but adopted by the community’ (Saussure, 1974: 98, my emphasis). Hence a double movement is conceived: first an upward emergence and then probably a horizontal promulgation. Surprisingly, knowing Saussure’s analogy, the illustration he used to explain the contrast between synchrony and diachrony contradicts the bottom to top directionality of the tree. Figure 3 depicts diachrony as an arrow that points downward rather than upwards, which is congruent with the temporality of the text. In linguistics, as in biology, the image of the tree for explaining temporal processes has also been mixed with geological understandings of time, particularly with the idea of a past buried deep underneath the ground. One example is Noam Chomsky’s work on grammar. Figure 4 is an example. Again, congruent with the temporality of writing, the tree grows downwards starting at the top of the page rather than the other way around. This leads to a paradox similar to those found in contemporary family trees C A B D Figure 3. Synchrony and diachrony. Reproduced from Saussure (1974: 80). Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 148 Time & Society 24(2) S VP NP Aux N M V Sincerity May Frighten NP Det N The Boy Figure 4. Tree branching downwards. Reproduced from Chomsky (1965: 65). in which the grounding structure of a sentence is placed at the branches rather than the trunk. This image matches Chomsky’s famous distinction between surface and deep structure fundamental to his generative theory of grammar. According to this theory, a limited number of syntactic rules hide underneath the surface of the everyday uses of a language, that allow for the production of an infinite number of grammatically correct sentences. Largely innate, such rules would be stored inside people’s mind. Accordingly, speaking a language competently involves a process where the person reaches deep into his mind as he outwardly produces a sentence. Similarly, recording these rules linguistically, exploring their ramifications, requires going deep below the surface of everyday language use, into what is innately stored in people’s minds. In Chomsky’s work, both the creation of correct sentences and the development of a grammar with ‘explanatory power’ require paying attention to cognitive processes that unfold inward and outwardly in time.6 Moving now onto more contemporary studies of the evolution of languages, other influences from the temporality of text can be observed, particularly in trees that grow horizontally from left to right rather than vertically. Figure 5, describing the evolution of the Indo-European language family, is an example. In this case the length of each branch, which reflects the antiquity of a particular language, is again qualified by its ‘depth’, which, according to the diagram, is no longer at the bottom of the page but rather on the left, matching the left to right growing of the tree and the left to right unfolding of the text (Dunn et al., 2011: 79). This alignment contrasts with others in kinship studies, like Figure 6 reproduced from Barnes (1967), in which trees grow from right to left but family connections move from left to right. Once more the word ‘depth’ is Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 149 Simonetti Indo-European Hittite Tocharian A Tocharian B Armenian Mod Albanian G Ancient Greek Greek Mod Latin Rumanian List Sardinian C Catalan Portuguese ST Spanish Italian Ladin Walloon Provencal French Gothic Old Norse Swedish List Danish Riksmal Icelandic ST Faroese Old English English ST Luxembourgish Pennsylvania Dutch German ST Dutch List Afrikaans Flemish Frisian Irish B Scots Gaelic Welsh N Comish Breton ST Lithuanian ST Latvian Old church slavonic Polish Russian Byelorussian Ukrainian Czech Slovak Lusatian L Lusatian U Slavenian Serbocroatian Bulgarian Macedonian Figure 5. Language families branching to the right. Reproduced from Dunn et al. (2011: 80). used to qualify the antiquity of such connections. And again this depth is placed on the left, following the directionality of the text. However, as a result of the inversion of the tree, matching the paradoxical location of ancestors described above common in family trees, depth is closer to the branches rather than the other way around. The horizontal unfolding of this diagram emerges in tension with the original ascending verticality of the arboricultural analogy and its overlapping notion of decent. According to Barnes, the exploration of kinship relationships requires ethnographers to move left or right ‘in any particular line, ascending or descending’ (1967: 110). Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 150 Time & Society 24(2) FIGURE I EGO AND HIS ANCESTORS TO FOUR GENERATIONS DEPTH FFFF FFFM FFMF FFMM FMFF FMFM FMMF FMMM 5(31) 6(30) 8(28) 9(27) 12(24) 13(23) 15(21) 16(20) 20(16) 21(15) 23(13) 24(12) 27(9) 28(8) 30(6) MMMF MMMM 31(5) MFFF MFFM MFMF MFMM MMFF MMFM FFF 5(29) FFM 7(26) FMF 11(22) FF 3(25) F 2(17) FM 10(18) FMM 14(19) Ego1(1) MFF 19(14) MF 18(10) MFM 22(11) M17(2) MMF 26(7) MMM 29(4) MM 25(3) The Numbers indicate the order in which ancestors are taken as apical points od reference with patrilateral (or matrilateral) preference. Figure 6. Kinship tree branching to the left with time depth also on the left. Reproduced from Barnes (1967: 110). The stratification of memory and knowledge But let us continue tracing other ramifications of the stratigraphic understanding of time. Jumping a few decades to the early days of psychology we encounter a very interesting branch of geological time in a more distant field that shares connections with some of the ramifications analysed above. Freud, for many the founder of clinical psychology, certainly aware of Darwin’s work, was also very interested in archaeology. He was obsessed with antiquity and many of his ideas about the way our minds work came from it. His theories were full of references to old texts, particularly myths, which were constantly enriched with knowledge from archaeology. During his lifetime, Freud confessed to reading more archaeology than any other subject. In addition, over the years he built a large collection of archaeological objects, many of which he kept in his office. One of his patients described his first impression of Freud’s office as closer to the workplace of an archaeologist (the Wolf-Man, 1972: 139). This interest in archaeology provided Freud with a very particular perspective on time, based on an appreciation of material culture, which he applied this time not to the understanding of human history but to the past of a person. Several times in his work, Freud exploited archaeological metaphors for understanding the human mind and the process of analysis. For him there was a close similarity between the work of an archaeologist and a therapists, as he described to one of his patients: ‘Freud himself explained Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 151 Simonetti Pcpt.-Cs. t. us o Ac Pcs. EGO ed ss ID e pr Re Figure 7. Visuo-spatial representation of the psyche. Reproduced from Freud (1961: 24). his love for archaeology in that the psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist, must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche, before coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures’ (the Wolf-Man, 1972: 139; my emphasis). These analogies can be traced back to the beginning of Freud’s carrier, even before the psychoanalytic method was fully established. For example, in his early studies in hysteria, when referring to the process of analysis, he stated: ‘To begin with, the work becomes more obscure and difficult as a rule, the deeper we penetrate into the stratified psychical structure . . . ’ (Freud, 1955: 298–299, my emphases). This corresponds with the directionality of most diagrams used by Freud to illustrate his understanding of the psyche and its stratigraphic development. Figure 7, reproduced from The Ego and the ID (1923), is a well-known example. According to Freud, and with regards to this image, ‘we shall now look upon an individual as a psychical id, unknown and unconscious, upon whose surface rests the ego, developed from its nucleus Pcpt. [perceptual] system’ (Freud, 1961: 24). Here the Ego is attached to the perceptual system that grows on top of the ID, where unconscious memories of the past and their driving impulses are contained, which make fantasy, imagination and dreaming possible. The perceptual-conscious apparatus is now facing upwards rather than forwards, as when patients lie down on the analyst’s couch to free associate with their eyes looking towards the ceiling and their brains lying underneath. This is consistent with how Freud conceived mental life and memories as being stored inside the brain. At the same time, repression, which pushes the unconscious downward, is drawn as a pair of fairly horizontal lines that mark in fuzzy ways different layers of the psyche. Taken together, this diagram, like others Freud used earlier in his career (see, e.g. Freud, 1953, 1957), respects a vertical understanding of time. Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 152 Time & Society 24(2) Here, the present is built on top of the past, close to our perception of reality. Like soils, experiences are deposited on top of one another below the projected surface of the ego. By asking patients to lie down and face upwards, memories could be stored both at the back and at the bottom of the psyche, with the result that earlier experiences are below later ones. And the analysis involves a journey of both analyst and patient deep downwards into a past, starting from what is known at the surface.7 Following Hacking (1994), Freud’s influential work transformed our understanding of the mind by developing a science of memory that focused on the study of forgetting, allowing for its politicization. I believe that the stratification of the mind described here was fundamental to the constitution of this mnemonic-politics in psychology and in other sciences that later on adopted this view. Such an understanding of the psyche was probably the most characteristic feature of psychoanalysis. Not for nothing was it baptized as ‘depth psychology’, by its own members (see Freud, 1957: 173). This was not just any depth, like the depth of a forest that opens in front of a viewer. It was the buried depth inherited from archaeology. Probably, this temporal alignment of the psyche made possible the particular connection that Freud envisioned between human evolution and the development of a person. For him, universal memories and conflicts were passed from one generation to the next (Bowdler, 1996: 424). The individual psyche was just another set of layers on top of the vertical arrangement of the material archaeological record.8 Freud’s ideas did not remain limited to psychology. His work had widespread influences in the arts and humanities. Particularly relevant for anthropology was his influence among the students of Franz Boas. Through them, and authors from other parts of the world, the analogy spread within anthropology. Particularly relevant was the early influence in understanding of meaning, which determined the development of both structural and symbolic anthropology. Lévi-Strauss supported the idea that anthropology was about the study of ‘the unconscious elements of social life’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1963: 23). And like Freud, he used stratigraphic metaphors for understanding memory and the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious. This emerged not only from psychoanalysis but also from other sciences, some of which we have described here that privileged a stratigraphic view of time. In Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss (1973: 55–57) enumerated three sources of inspiration, namely psychoanalysis, Marxism and quite surprisingly geology.9 For him they all shared a common understanding of exploration ‘not so much as the covering of surface distances but as a study in depth’ (1973: 47–48). The same was true of Turner, who was very much informed by Freud’s influence on Sapir (1985), and had a more pragmatic understanding of meaning. According to Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 153 Simonetti him, the study of ritual symbols requires becoming ‘aware that a complex relationship exists between the overt and the submerged, and the manifest and latent patterns of meaning’ (1967: 46). Both in Lévi-Strauss and in Turner, the object of study of anthropology lies underneath the surface of the skin and social life, an idea still alive in current anthropology (see e.g. Paxon, 2005: 24).10 Attending now to a field closer to the analysis carried out here, another ramification emerges. I am thinking of the history of knowledge and the work of Foucault, who was again influenced both by psychoanalysis and structuralism. Like Freud, Foucault used archaeological metaphors to understand the history of science and western discourse, for example, when he talks about historians who ‘descend to the deepest levels’ in order to understand the past (Foucault, 2002: 3). Again we are talking here of a journey to the past that moves from top to bottom. However, this time we are not referring to an individual psyche but to the impersonal discourse of a collective. Understanding that discourse is to move deep downward into its past.11 It is relevant to mention that in the case of Darwin, Freud, Saussure and Foucault we are of course dealing with analogical thinking that has not necessarily been systematized. They were explicitly using analogies for better understanding their own fields of inquiry. However, only a thin line divides the use of analogies from the exploitation of conventionalized metaphorical expressions by member of an academic community. For example, many psychoanalysts nowadays would say that the advantage of their work is that it goes far deeper in trying to understand the past of a person, while humanist and existential approaches in clinical psychology would stay only on the surface. But as when archaeologists differentiate their work from that of historians, psychoanalysts are probably not fully conscious of the complex history ‘behind’ the word ‘depth’ as they use it (see also Simonetti, 2014). Conclusion: Disciplinary knowledge, corporeal participation and hybridization The ramifications of geological time analysed here show how stratigraphic thinking spread way beyond the sciences that excavate the earth to disciplines such as biology, psychology, linguistics, anthropology and history. In this process other temporal trajectories have been identified that intertwine with geological time. Interestingly, in each ramification a particular visualization of the original upward directionality of stratigraphy emerges that tends to respect the practices of the disciplines involved. Following excavation, we have seen the history of life, minds and knowledge becoming Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 154 Time & Society 24(2) stratified, while the original upward directionality of the stratigraphic sequence and the location of important temporal events, such as deep past, have been constantly refashioned to meet the particularities of each new discipline. In this the things academics encounter have been crucial. We have seen soils, trees, rivers, couches, tables, books and images taking part in the development of different temporal trajectories. Overall, this suggests that the way concepts circulate and evolve in academia is never independent of how scholars engage corporeally with their gravitational environments, where the tendency is for soils to accumulate and for trees to grow vertically, for writing and walking to unfold horizontally, respectively, across the surface of the page and the land, as well as for couches to afford both lying down and upward looking. Such conceptual ecology has been overlooked by traditional approaches to time in sociology, particularly those that align with the classical literature on time reckoning, which starts by dividing social time from the rhythms of nature (see, e.g. Zerubavel, 1982, 2003; also Durkheim, 1915; Evans-Pritchard, 1940). By emphasizing the idea that time reckoning allowed humans to progressively ‘master’ nature, these theories often miss the subtle corporeal aspects involved in the measurement of time, in that perhaps all forms of chronological thinking depend somehow on what it feels like moving in a particular environment. The historical combination of temporal trajectories described here is certainly part of a long process in which practice and conceptualization go hand in hand. However, they do not belong to a dead past but to a process that carries on as scholars continue expanding the reach of their concepts. Let me provide an example. Anderson (2004) in his ‘Talking whilst walking: a geographical archaeology of knowledge’ reveals an astonishing versatility in conceptual appropriation. He argues in favour of a new approach in human geography that consists in excavating the history of people’s mental constructions of space by talking while walking. In a single title, the horizontality from which geography has traditionally appropriated the surface of the earth becomes a task that fusses Freud’s understanding of the mind with Foucault’s understanding of history, in a vertical exploration of the past that excavates downwards while walking forwards. Interestingly, what looks like an astonishing combination of multiple temporal trajectories probably passes unperceived to Anderson’s readers. The meaning of the title comes not as a result of a detail analysis of the history of concepts, like the one we have been carrying out here, but mainly following a form of knowledge that is never fully declared and is continuous with an environmentally situated history of practice.12 This understanding of knowledge challenges the enclosed and cumulative view of the mind described earlier and the understanding of memories as abstract entities hidden deep inside the head, below the surface of the skin. Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 155 Simonetti It also challenges the idea of disciplines as enclosed fields, as the notions of disciplinary boundaries, cross-disciplinary research, and interdisciplinarity (as opposed to intradisciplinarity) suggest. As in many other domains of western thinking, containment metaphors and set theory have been privileged in the understanding of disciplinary knowledge. According to Ingold (2012), this way of thinking has its origin in the way authors like Kant conceptualized fields of knowledge as rooms of a building. Rather than thinking of disciplines as bounded fields that constrain the interactions of individuals, Ingold suggests we should think of them as open conversations that emerge as people follow common lines of interest. Following this argument, disciplinary knowledge does not have real boundaries. It is not even enclosed by porous membranes. It just subsists in the dialogues and institutions that academics come up with. It is carried on in the trajectories of people and their co-participation. Learning a discipline is about appropriating concepts that are continuous with the experience of perceptual beings moving in particular environments. Accordingly, academic knowledge depends on the body. Different modes of conceptualization involve the appropriation of particular attitudes of the body, which necessarily change depending on the particular form of practice. If there are anything like boundaries between disciplines, they are, expanding Mauss’s (1979) concept, those conceptual techniques of the body that characterize their respective ways of thinking. Understanding another discipline depends both on the particular corporeal tendencies with which you approach it and on the corporeal stance of the other discipline. This is why it takes time to learn the concepts of a discipline, which is also why doing anthropology of science is different from doing history of science. Resulting from long processes of distillation and condensation that are continuous with particular ways of feeling and moving in the world, concepts of time are still delivered, in conversation and text, as trajectories that unfold in movement. Accordingly, there is not a bridging concept of time, that could alleviate the difficulties of interdisciplinary dialogue, as time cannot be defined regardless of the material circumstances in which each concept of time exists, that is in advance of how people appropriate their worlds corporeally. Therefore, what academics exchange are not mere ideas but disciplinary ways of feeling in movement that are continuous with the environments they inhabit. Disciplinary encounters always occur between what we can call sentient modes of conceptualization. Before finishing, let me stop once more on the image of the tree for understanding processes of change, such as the history of the stratification of time in science we have described here. The analysis above has fundamentally challenged its supposedly homogeneous and non-problematic Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 156 Time & Society 24(2) character. We have seen it stratified, extending to the depth of the oceans and caught in multiple trajectories as it emerges within other understandings of time. In this mixture of origins and trajectories, one is left with a feeling of hybridization in which it seems ultimately impossible to trace in a single line what goes before and after in the history of ideas. This feeling of hybridization in the attempt to trace conceptual traditions is not completely foreign in anthropology. Years ago Alfred Kroeber described something similar in his account of the evolution of the tree of knowledge as opposed to the constant diversification of the tree of life (see Figure 8). Traditionally, such hybridization has been difficult to conceive in the case of the latter (see, e.g. Steward, 1955: 12). However in the last decades, the vertical image of evolutionary change, with species that follow clear cut lines of descent, is also starting to be challenged. According to Helmreich (2009: 68–105), in his analysis of contemporary marine microbiologists, hyperthermophil organisms that live in high temperature deep waters present what is known as lateral transfer, in which genes are transmitted among organism that belong to different species. This has pushed microbiologists to rethink not only basic categories like genera and species but also the entire idea of evolutionary phylogeny as a branching tree. At the same time, it has also pushed them to rethink the separation between time and space in evolution, particularly the idea that evolution is the result of the vertical transmission of a genetic code that is defined in advance, before organisms encounter their environments in the company of Figure 8. Organic diversification in the tree of life versus cultural hybridization in the tree of knowledge. Reproduced from Kroeber (1963: 68). Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 157 Simonetti others. According to Helmreich, this conceptual movement resembles a shift towards an understanding of growth and change that follows the rhizomatic forms described by Deleuze and Guattari, set in opposition to the hierarchical differentiation of the tree (2009: 83).13 Following this challenge, a solution to this impasse could lie in erasing all together the pervasive verticality imposed in genealogical thinking by simply collapsing the understanding of change into a horizontality that does not produce hierarchies. Even though this presents an alternative, as it might modulate the influences of power involved in hierarchies within and between species, such a solution would be rather simplistic. There is a risk of erasing all the subtle trajectories experienced by those who move up and down in life, including the scientists that excavate their knowledge. It also has the risk of erasing the constant influence of the forces of the environment, particularly the vertical gravitational axis that most life has to deal with, as we lie forward to excavate, down to rest or move across with our pens to write. In any case, if an answer is to be reached, it would probably be necessary to dissolve the absolute division between conceptual and biological development with which most sciences of the past start. The image of a branching tree becomes insufficient for describing both. Knowledge depends on the particularities of each scientific practice and the environment in which it takes place. But even more important would be to realize that ultimately a tree is not a forest, that forests are not independent of all the life that lives in them, and that life is not independent of the world that supports it. Acknowledgements Two earlier versions of this paper were presented, in September 2011 at the annual conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth, and in July 2012 at the Annual Scottish Word and Image Group conference, University of Dundee. More recent versions were presented, in September 2014 at the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social, Universidade de Brası́lia and in October 2014 at Design and Informatics, University of Edinburgh. I am grateful to those who organized these events and to those who attended them and gave me feedback. I would also like to thank Tim Ingold, Chris Gosden, Jeff Oliver and two anonymous reviewers for their very insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Funding This work was conducted thanks to two PhD studentships awarded by the Chilean National Commission of Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) and the College of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Aberdeen. Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 158 Time & Society 24(2) Notes 1. It is likely that the ramifications of geological thinking extend beyond the disciplines and authors analysed in this article. The reasons for concentrating on them result from the particular path I followed as I conducted this research, whose initial motivation included the development of an ethnographic study of how time concepts and corporeal movement relate in archaeological practices (see Simonetti, 2014, 2015). The discoveries I made throughout the study subtlety pushed me to follow the traces of geological thinking in disciplines that share historical ties with archaeology. Anthropology, biology, geology, history, linguistics and psychology are all examples. 2. This did not prevent Darwin from referring to new species in the new branches as descending from the original 11 species (see e.g. Darwin, 1917: 88). 3. It is worth noting that the Greek philosopher, geographer and historian, Strabo pointed in his Geographica to the probable marine origin of fossils many years before Steno (see Steno, 1916: 210, footnote 1 of the translator). 4. Starting from a different point, namely the concept of race, Banton (2010) has identified two dimensions within this concept. He describes them as the vertical and the horizontal. These dimensions are related to a distinction set up by Kant between the description of nature (Naturbeschreibung) and natural history (Naturgeschichte). The first emphasized a static view at a moment in time, an artificial system that divided things taxonomically, paying attention to horizontal similarities. This matched the Linnean schema of classification. The second, on the contrary, paid attention to the relationship of species over time. This was intermixed with notions of decent. 5. There are other ways of conceptualizing events that co-occur in time as opposed to events that unfold in a sequence. An example is the way melody and harmony are notated in western music, which is written from left to right. Lefebvre (2004: 58) refers to them as the horizontality and verticality of the spatial representation of music, both of which specify time. Interestingly the horizontality and verticality of music is opposed to the verticality and horizontality of Saussure’s diagram, in which two events co-occur horizontally rather than vertically. 6. Please note how despite being against psychoanalysis, Chomsky’s view of language acquisition carefully resembles Freud’s understanding of the development of the mind, which I review in the next section. 7. Freud’s understanding of the psyche as vertically stratified and the process of analysis as a downward exploration are slightly more complex than I have suggested here, in that Freud also allowed for past and present to coexist partially in his model of the mind. The diagram discussed here constitutes a step in that direction, in that Freud changed his earlier model of the psyche, composed by the conscious, preconscious and unconscious systems (Freud, 1957) for a more sophisticated one where new concepts, such as the Ego and the Id, were introduced. In this new model of the mind, the Ego, and its defense mechanisms are partially both conscious and unconscious. Nevertheless, a general stratigraphic view of the mind is foundational to Freud’s theory and practice, which explains the way his ideas spread out into popular culture. Downloaded from tas.sagepub.com by guest on July 29, 2015 159 Simonetti 8. Following Larsen (1987, 1996) the stratigraphic understanding of memory is also at the foundations of cognitive psychology in a paleontological metaphor used by Ulric Neisser (1967: 285), which still survives in contemporary cognitive sciences, without much historical awareness, for example in how Hofstadter and Sander understand analogical thinking in their most recent book (2013: 344–345). 9. In a famous footnote in Capital, Marx (1930: 392–393, footnote 2) compared his approach to the history of technological development with Darwin’s work. A vertical understanding of history similar to Darwin’s genealogy of species was probably playing a role in Marx’s genealogy of technology, which also entwined with notions of social stratification. As I explained in footnote 1, this analysis is limited to the particular paths I followed as I discovered some of these ramifications of geological thinking, while having to accommodate them within the limited scopes of a journal article. Certainly, alternative paths could be followed, including how stratigraphy influenced social theories of economics. 10. Clifford Geertz (1973: 412), in his interpretation of the Balinese cockfight, used a similar analogy for understanding cultural symbols. And like Turner, Geertz was informed by Freud’s ideas. 11. Both Lévi-Strauss and Foucault set their approaches in opposition to phenomenology, accusing it of being superficial. Interestingly, even though phenomenology has been characterized by a horizontal understanding of time based on the experience of walking towards an expanding horizon, Merleau-Ponty (1964: 5) also used stratigraphic analogies to understand phenomenology. 12. For a similar example of the versatile appropriation of concepts, again in geography, see Lorimer and Spedding (2002). And for an example, this time on the ethnographic study of archaeology, see Carman’s (2006: 96) invitation to develop a social archaeology of archaeological practices. 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