Cristián Simonetti - The Stratification of Time

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Article

The stratificationof time

Cristian SimonettiPontificia Universidad Catolica 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

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DOI: 10.1177/0961463X15587830

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Corresponding author:

Cristian Simonetti, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Av. Vicuna

Mackenna 4860, Macul, Santiago 7820436, Chile.

Email: [email protected]

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Introduction

Scientists that rely on excavation for understanding the past, such as geolo-gists and archaeologists, refer to the experience of encountering this pastdeep underneath the ground. This corresponds with a vertical understand-ing of the passage of time that coincides with the stratigraphic arrangementof soils. Such understanding is visible in how chronologies in these sciencestend to be depicted vertically with earlier events at the bottom and laterevents on top, which contrast with how chronologies tend to be illustratedin history as a horizontal sequence that moves from left to right. However,such vertical understanding of the passage of time is nowadays visible inmany other sciences that not necessarily excavate the past. Geology made ahuge impact on many other neighbouring disciplines, by providing a newunderstanding of the history of the earth and its inhabitants. This not onlyincluded an expansion with respect to the biblical temporal scale, enoughfor long time processes to be conceived (see Rudwick, 1999; Toulmin andGoodfield, 1965). It gave a particular view of the passage of time as avertical unfolding from bottom to top (Simonetti, 2013). Over the pasttwo centuries, there have been several ramifications of this view, some ofwhich are far from the original source, reaching beyond the naturalsciences.

In this article, I trace some of the ramifications of this vertical under-standing, by looking at the historical development of the visual languageof different disciplines such as biology, archaeology, linguistics, psych-ology, anthropology and history.1 The analysis shows that the verticalunderstanding of the passage of time inherited from geology is far frombeing universal and non-problematic. As it moves from one discipline tothe next, the vertical understanding of time has interacted with othertemporal trajectories imposing new conceptual challenges, most ofwhich tend to pass unperceived as a result of convention. These newtrajectories include the top to bottom and left to right temporality ofwritten text common in Germanic languages, the use of arboriculturaland hydraulic metaphors for illustrating the ascent and decent of evolu-tion, and the back and forth temporality of the mind common in thewest. Following these multiple trajectories within vertical understand-ings of time, I argue that disciplines are not bounded things, as thenotion of interdisciplinarity suggests, but rather open conversationsthat rely on concepts that are continuous with sentient experience. Theway knowledge about time evolves and circulates across the sciences andthe humanities, in disciplines that concentrate on studying the past andpredicting the future, including those analysed here, is not the result ofthe transmission of abstract ideas but depends on how scholars engage

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corporeally with their environments, in the footsteps of others.Following this argument, I look at some of the limitations of the wide-spread use of botanic metaphors for understanding conceptual change,including the history of vertical conceptions of time we are about toanalyse in this article.

It is worth noting that terms such as ‘vertical’, ‘verticality’, ‘horizontal’and ‘horizontality’ are used descriptively throughout the article to refer tothe dimensions along which time unfolds. As the article shows, from theviewpoint of an observer exploring his or her surroundings, understandingsof time can unfold in multiple directions (up, down, leftwards and right-wards), which often entwines with the ways scholars have historicallyappropriated their environments.

The stratification of the tree of life and its aquatic origin

One important discipline to acquire a stratigraphic understanding of time isevolutionary biology, particularly after the work of Darwin who mixed itwith other temporal trajectories. When Darwin wrote ‘The Origin ofSpecies’ his understanding of evolution was caught in an upward–down-ward tension, between a long established combination of arboricultural andhydraulic metaphors used in genealogical thinking. Following the remark-able work of Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (1991), the first metaphor is his-torically connected to an image of the upward growing Tree of Jesse, whilethe second is connected to the downward flowing image of the aristocrat’sbloodline. The tension in the temporal trajectories of these two analogies isstill visible in contemporary family trees, in which genealogies are depictedflowing downwards, along trees that grow and branch upwards. The lan-guage Darwin used for describing variations in species clearly reflects thistension, 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 Originof Species’ contained no sign of a downward movement but only branchesthat spread upwards and were numbered from bottom to top (seeFigure 1).2 Ingold (2007), in his recent work on lines, is probably right insuggesting the primacy of the arboricultural metaphor in the upward tra-jectory of the diagram. However, it is worth noting a fundamental differ-ence between the use of trees for depicting kinship relationships and theiruse for depicting evolution. In the first case, ancestors are placed in thebranches because the emphasis is on the confluence on a common descend-ant. In the second case, variations are placed on the branches because theemphasis 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

Simonetti 3




goes from one ancestor to many descendants. As a result, family trees –compared to the tree of life – are inherently paradoxical, as the line ofdescent has to flow in the opposite direction to that of the growth of thetree. Figure 2 summarizes the point.

This upward divergence of the tree of life, as opposed to the downwardconvergence of the family tree, becomes compatible with stratigraphy.Darwin himself suggested it explicitly when he stated an identity betweenthe horizontal lines in his diagram and strata. ‘In the diagram, each hori-zontal line has hitherto been supposed to represent a thousand generations;it may also represent a section of the successive strata of the earth’s crustincluding extinct remains’ (Darwin, 1917: 89, my emphasis). What this pas-sage suggests is an image of the Tree of Jesse growing inside the earth fromthe centre to the periphery. The tree of life no longer grows from a seedplaced on the ground, while top branches are not visible high in the sky butat the surface level, where current living organisms inhabit the horizontalityof the earth.

Such stratification of the tree of life is not entirely surprising, knowinghow Darwin relied on the fossil record. He had to see the tree embedded instrata. At the beginning of the 19th century there was no clear boundarybetween geology and zoology. Both depended on the fossil record and sci-entists had to be familiar with both. Darwin was one of them. Even though

Figure 1. Diagram illustrating variations under natural selection. Reproduced from

Darwin (1917: 84–85).





he is mainly known for his contribution to evolutionary theory, he alsorelied on, discussed and contributed to geology. At the same time, hisideas would have been impossible without some early works on earth his-tory. For example, during his expedition on the Beagle, one of the fewserious books he took with him was Lyell’s (1990) ‘Principles of Geology’.This work gave him a sufficiently extended timescale for conceiving largeevolutionary processes (Toulmin and Goodfield, 1965: 171). Even thoughhe was determined to challenge Lyell’s denial of direction in evolution,Darwin was happy to confess that his ‘books came half out of Lyell’sbrain’ (in Howard, 2001: 20).

The aboricultural image and the geological understanding of time sharefundamental 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 stron-ger. Similarly, in normal conditions of deposition, later soils are depositedon earlier ones, which have a more stable structure at the time of depos-ition. However, there are important aspects that the stratigraphic under-standing of time adds to the upward growth of the tree of life, particularlythe 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 pastand rely on stratigraphy. One important example is archaeology. In recentethnographic work conducted with land and underwater archaeologists,regarding their understandings of time and space, I have explored someof the assumptions related to this stratigraphic understanding of time.According to it, key concepts in the discipline refer to an experience of

Convergence(Family tree)

Divergence(Tree of life)

Earlier

EarlierLater

Later

Descendant Ancestor

Figure 2. The convergence of the family tree versus the divergence of the tree

of life.

Simonetti 5




the past as no longer behind but coming to the fore. Such temporal inver-sion is probably shared by most disciplines that turn around to study thepast. However, in the case of archaeology the exploration involves anencounter of the past under the feet, deep below the surface of theground. This downward trajectory is remarkably revealed in how archae-ologists gesture. For example, in using expression such as ‘time depth’ or‘going deeper in time’, archaeologists tend to point downward along theword ‘depth’. Although we might think of these expressions as being part ofa highly specialized academic culture, they become part of the everydaylanguage archaeologists use outside academia. As they use it, the complexrelationship that exists between ‘depth’ and a ‘past’ below reminds partiallybeyond their grasp (Simonetti, 2014, 2015).

This understanding of the past as being enclosed within surfaces is notonly common in disciplines that excavate the past under the ground but alsoof sciences that explore the past at the bottom of the sea. However, theencounter with a mysterious environment is added here. Following theremarkable work of Stephen Helmreich’s (2009) with marine biologists inCalifornia, there is a widespread tendency in the history of scientific explor-ations of the ocean to think of it as an alien environment. Compared toother forms of exploration of the past underwater, such as underwaterarchaeology, in contemporary marine biology this image is enhanced bythe connections scientists find between the retrospective understanding ofthe 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 onlydownwards in the depths of the oceans but also upwards in outer space,triggering feelings of alien encounters. Regarding the use of the arboricul-tural metaphor for understanding evolution, Helmreich’s work is notable indescribing how the roots of the tree extend down to the bottom of the seaand up into the sky. However, his analysis of the origin of genealogicalthinking in biology stops short of describing the systematic relationship inthe history of science between this arboreal understanding of time, stratig-raphy and the process of excavation.

The stratigraphic view of time emerged from the need to understand themutual connection between land and sea. In the case of Steno (1916), thefirst to formulate the principles of superposition, the question that triggeredhis analysis of the history of Tuscany was related to the need to understandthe origin of marine fossils excavated on land. Originally interested in anat-omy, he started to think on the history of the earth after being commissionedby the Duke of Tuscany to study the head of a shark, whose teeth resembledfossils that at the time were believed to grow on the ground. He was one ofthe first to realize that the areas where these fossils were found were oncecovered in water. This attention to the sea and its role in the understanding





of geological time remained constant throughout the 19th century in theprogressive expansion of earth’s history and the creatures that live on it.3

From the perspective of evolutionary biology, the attention to the sea asa means for studying the past expanded as scientists realized the limitationsand imperfections of the fossil record on land. Darwin thought that itwould be possible to find in the sea what he called living fossils, like theornithorhynchus, which ‘have endured to the present day, from havinginhabited a confined area, and from having been exposed to less varied,and therefore less severe competition’ (Darwin, 1917: 78). The vast spaceunder the seas seemed perfect to fulfil these conditions. The missing links inthe history of evolution that would make it possible to fill the gaps of thetree of life on land were conceived as being still alive under the surface ofthe seas. Connecting the dots was a crucial task for early scientific voyageslike those of HMS Challenger, which were foundational for what is now-adays known as oceanography and marine geology. The ocean became aperfect testing ground for emerging theories of evolution like those pro-posed by Darwin (see Corfield, 2004: 2–7). The origin of life was envisionedas lying not just at the base of a tree or below the ground but also at thebottom of the sea. Having the evolution of life, at an effortless glance,required squeezing all these elements into a single diagram, with theresult that tracing the genealogy back in time, involved not justclimbing down the tree, leaving non-human primates ‘behind’, but alsosearching 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 diagramliving organisms have suffered from a process of abstraction. In the dia-gram, lives are compressed into dots and the relationship between lives isrepresented using lines for connecting the dots. Here, any horizontal move-ment is within the same stratum and therefore occurs without the passage oftime. It constitutes a line of transport. To the contrary, each vertical move-ment involves temporal changes, constituting a line of transmission.Evolution moves vertically but not horizontally. Only the former involvesthe passage of time. As a result, in the a-temporal line of transport livingorganisms are everywhere at once, while in the a-spatial line of transmissionthe dots are connected while erasing the specificities of each life. Theseconnections reflect a very peculiar identity relationship between the dots.In the context of Darwin’s theory, under natural selection specificities aretransmitted from one generation to the next before the organism encountersits environment (see also Oyama et al., 2001). Organisms respond to atension between vertical and horizontal movements, respectively, acrosstime and space.4

Simonetti 7




Outside genealogy and evolution, similar processes of abstraction arecommon in other uses of botanic images for understanding processes ofchange. One important example, related to disciplines such as archaeology,design and architecture, is their use for understanding the history of arte-facts and technology. This view of the historical transformations of objectsbelongs to a long tradition that goes back to the work of Edward B. Tylorand relates to analogical understandings of cultural traits as biological spe-cies (Ingold, 1986: 33). Materials, like the specimens contained in the fossilrecord, are sometimes conceptualized following the branching of trees. Andjust 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 andsideways

The vertical view common in sciences that rely on trees and stratigraphycontrasts with other scientific understandings of the passage of time, par-ticularly with history where time tends to be conceptualized horizontally.Compared to the experience of excavation, historians spend most of theirtime reading and writing as they explore the past. Accordingly, followingthe way Germanic scripts unfold, chronologies tend to be depicted mainlyfrom left to right and occasionally from top to bottom, which contrasts withthe upward accumulation of soils and the growth of trees. However, thetemporality of written texts has influenced not only historical chronologiesbut also the upward directionality of both arboricultural metaphors andstratigraphic sequences.

Examples, this time not from evolutionary biology but from linguisticsand the study of kinship in anthropology, illustrate the point. They showthat both converging and diverging trees can unfold not just from bottom totop but also in directions that coincide with the temporality of text, whilesome of them relate to the use of metaphoric expressions that speak of anencounter of depths across surfaces. As in the previous sections, these con-trasting directionalities illustrate that, ultimately, time depends on how aca-demics attune their bodies to their surroundings. Saussure, the founder ofstructuralism, set up a temporal distinction according to which the study of





language was divided into two sub-disciplines, namely static and evolution-ary linguistics. For him, the first corresponded to a synchronic while thesecond to a diachronic understanding of signs systems. Interestingly, like ingenealogy, Saussure used botanic metaphors for understanding the differ-ences between these two approaches to linguistics. For him diachrony cor-responds to the longitudinal fibres of the stem of a plant that grow verticallywith respect to the ground, while synchrony corresponds to a transversal(horizontal) cut of those fibres.5 Saussure confirms this vertical understand-ing of diachrony when he refers to how innovations emerge in language. ‘Inthe history of any innovation there are always two distinct moments: Whenit sprang up in individual usage . . . [and] . . .when it becomes a fact of lan-guage outwardly identical but adopted by the community’ (Saussure, 1974:98, my emphasis). Hence a double movement is conceived: first an upwardemergence and then probably a horizontal promulgation. Surprisingly,knowing Saussure’s analogy, the illustration he used to explain the con-trast between synchrony and diachrony contradicts the bottom to top direc-tionality of the tree. Figure 3 depicts diachrony as an arrow that pointsdownward rather than upwards, which is congruent with the temporality ofthe text.

In linguistics, as in biology, the image of the tree for explaining temporalprocesses has also been mixed with geological understandings of time, par-ticularly with the idea of a past buried deep underneath the ground. Oneexample is Noam Chomsky’s work on grammar. Figure 4 is an example.Again, congruent with the temporality of writing, the tree grows down-wards 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

A B

C

D

Figure 3. Synchrony and diachrony. Reproduced from Saussure (1974: 80).

Simonetti 9




in which the grounding structure of a sentence is placed at the branchesrather than the trunk. This image matches Chomsky’s famous distinctionbetween surface and deep structure fundamental to his generative theory ofgrammar. According to this theory, a limited number of syntactic rules hideunderneath the surface of the everyday uses of a language, that allow for theproduction 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 wherethe 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 isinnately stored in people’s minds. In Chomsky’s work, both the creation ofcorrect sentences and the development of a grammar with ‘explanatorypower’ require paying attention to cognitive processes that unfold inwardand outwardly in time.6

Moving now onto more contemporary studies of the evolution of lan-guages, other influences from the temporality of text can be observed, par-ticularly in trees that grow horizontally from left to right rather thanvertically. Figure 5, describing the evolution of the Indo-European languagefamily, is an example. In this case the length of each branch, which reflectsthe antiquity of a particular language, is again qualified by its ‘depth’,which, according to the diagram, is no longer at the bottom of the pagebut rather on the left, matching the left to right growing of the tree and theleft to right unfolding of the text (Dunn et al., 2011: 79).

This alignment contrasts with others in kinship studies, like Figure 6reproduced from Barnes (1967), in which trees grow from right to left butfamily connections move from left to right. Once more the word ‘depth’ is

S

NP Aux

N M V

N

The Boy

VP

NP

DetSincerity May Frighten

Figure 4. Tree branching downwards. Reproduced from Chomsky (1965: 65).





used to qualify the antiquity of such connections. And again this depth isplaced on the left, following the directionality of the text. However, as a resultof the inversion of the tree, matching the paradoxical location of ancestorsdescribed above common in family trees, depth is closer to the branchesrather than the other way around. The horizontal unfolding of this diagramemerges in tension with the original ascending verticality of the arboricul-tural analogy and its overlapping notion of decent. According to Barnes, theexploration of kinship relationships requires ethnographers to move left orright ‘in any particular line, ascending or descending’ (1967: 110).

Indo-EuropeanHittite

Tocharian ATocharian B

Armenian ModAlbanian G

Ancient GreekGreek Mod

LatinRumanian List

Sardinian CCatalanPortuguese ST

SpanishItalian

LadinWalloonProvencalFrench

GothicOld NorseSwedish ListDanishRiksmalIcelandic STFaroese

Old EnglishEnglish ST

German STDutch ListAfrikaansFlemish

FrisianIrish BScots Gaelic

Welsh NComish

Breton STLithuanian ST

LatvianOld church slavonic

Polish

CzechSlovak

Lusatian LLusatian U

SlavenianSerbocroatian

BulgarianMacedonian

RussianByelorussianUkrainian

LuxembourgishPennsylvania Dutch

Figure 5. Language families branching to the right. Reproduced from Dunn et al.

(2011: 80).

Simonetti 11




The stratification of memory and knowledge

But let us continue tracing other ramifications of the stratigraphic under-standing of time. Jumping a few decades to the early days of psychology weencounter a very interesting branch of geological time in a more distant fieldthat shares connections with some of the ramifications analysed above.Freud, for many the founder of clinical psychology, certainly aware ofDarwin’s work, was also very interested in archaeology. He was obsessedwith antiquity and many of his ideas about the way our minds work camefrom it. His theories were full of references to old texts, particularly myths,which were constantly enriched with knowledge from archaeology. Duringhis lifetime, Freud confessed to reading more archaeology than any othersubject. In addition, over the years he built a large collection of archaeo-logical objects, many of which he kept in his office. One of his patientsdescribed his first impression of Freud’s office as closer to the workplaceof an archaeologist (the Wolf-Man, 1972: 139).

This interest in archaeology provided Freud with a very particular per-spective on time, based on an appreciation of material culture, which heapplied this time not to the understanding of human history but to the pastof a person. Several times in his work, Freud exploited archaeological meta-phors for understanding the human mind and the process of analysis. Forhim there was a close similarity between the work of an archaeologist and atherapists, as he described to one of his patients: ‘Freud himself explained

FIGURE I EGO AND HIS ANCESTORS TO FOUR GENERATIONS DEPTH

FFFFFFFM

FFMFFFMM

FMFFFMFMFMMFFMMM

MFFFMFFM

MFMFMFMMMMFFMMFM

MMMFMMMM MMM

MMF

MFM

MFF

FMM

FMF

FFM

FFF5(31)

5(29)

7(26)

11(22)

14(19)

19(14)

22(11)

26(7)

29(4)

3(25)

10(18)

18(10)

25(3)MM

MF

FM

FF

F 2(17)

Ego1(1)

M17(2)

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)31(5)

The Numbers indicate the order in which ancestors are taken as apical points od referencewith patrilateral (or matrilateral) preference.

Figure 6. Kinship tree branching to the left with time depth also on the left.

Reproduced from Barnes (1967: 110).





his love for archaeology in that the psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist,must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche, before coming to thedeepest, most valuable treasures’ (the Wolf-Man, 1972: 139; my emphasis).These analogies can be traced back to the beginning of Freud’s carrier, evenbefore the psychoanalytic method was fully established. For example, in hisearly 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, thedeeper we penetrate into the stratified psychical structure . . . ’ (Freud, 1955:298–299, my emphases). This corresponds with the directionality of mostdiagrams used by Freud to illustrate his understanding of the psyche and itsstratigraphic 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 lookupon an individual as a psychical id, unknown and unconscious, upon whosesurface rests the ego, developed from its nucleus Pcpt. [perceptual] system’(Freud, 1961: 24). Here the Ego is attached to the perceptual system thatgrows on top of the ID, where unconscious memories of the past and theirdriving impulses are contained, which make fantasy, imagination anddreaming possible. The perceptual-conscious apparatus is now facingupwards rather than forwards, as when patients lie down on the analyst’scouch to free associate with their eyes looking towards the ceiling and theirbrains lying underneath. This is consistent with how Freud conceived mentallife and memories as being stored inside the brain. At the same time, repres-sion, which pushes the unconscious downward, is drawn as a pair of fairlyhorizontal 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.

Pcpt.-Cs.

Pcs.

ID

EGO

Acoust.

Repressed

Figure 7. Visuo-spatial representation of the psyche. Reproduced from Freud

(1961: 24).

Simonetti 13




Here, the present is built on top of the past, close to our perception ofreality. Like soils, experiences are deposited on top of one another belowthe projected surface of the ego. By asking patients to lie down and faceupwards, memories could be stored both at the back and at the bottom ofthe psyche, with the result that earlier experiences are below later ones. Andthe analysis involves a journey of both analyst and patient deep downwardsinto a past, starting from what is known at the surface.7 Following Hacking(1994), Freud’s influential work transformed our understanding of the mindby developing a science of memory that focused on the study of forgetting,allowing for its politicization. I believe that the stratification of the minddescribed here was fundamental to the constitution of this mnemonic-pol-itics in psychology and in other sciences that later on adopted this view.Such an understanding of the psyche was probably the most characteristicfeature of psychoanalysis. Not for nothing was it baptized as ‘depth psych-ology’, by its own members (see Freud, 1957: 173). This was not just anydepth, like the depth of a forest that opens in front of a viewer. It was theburied depth inherited from archaeology. Probably, this temporal align-ment of the psyche made possible the particular connection that Freudenvisioned between human evolution and the development of a person.For him, universal memories and conflicts were passed from one generationto the next (Bowdler, 1996: 424). The individual psyche was just another setof layers on top of the vertical arrangement of the material archaeologicalrecord.8

Freud’s ideas did not remain limited to psychology. His work had wide-spread influences in the arts and humanities. Particularly relevant foranthropology was his influence among the students of Franz Boas.Through them, and authors from other parts of the world, the analogyspread within anthropology. Particularly relevant was the early influencein understanding of meaning, which determined the development of bothstructural and symbolic anthropology. Levi-Strauss supported the idea thatanthropology was about the study of ‘the unconscious elements of sociallife’ (Levi-Strauss, 1963: 23). And like Freud, he used stratigraphic meta-phors for understanding memory and the relationship between the con-scious and the unconscious. This emerged not only from psychoanalysisbut also from other sciences, some of which we have described here thatprivileged a stratigraphic view of time. In Tristes Tropiques, Levi-Strauss(1973: 55–57) enumerated three sources of inspiration, namely psychoanaly-sis, Marxism and quite surprisingly geology.9 For him they all shared acommon understanding of exploration ‘not so much as the covering ofsurface distances but as a study in depth’ (1973: 47–48). The same wastrue of Turner, who was very much informed by Freud’s influence on Sapir(1985), and had a more pragmatic understanding of meaning. According to





him, the study of ritual symbols requires becoming ‘aware that a complexrelationship exists between the overt and the submerged, and the manifestand latent patterns of meaning’ (1967: 46). Both in Levi-Strauss and inTurner, the object of study of anthropology lies underneath the surfaceof the skin and social life, an idea still alive in current anthropology (seee.g. Paxon, 2005: 24).10

Attending now to a field closer to the analysis carried out here, anotherramification emerges. I am thinking of the history of knowledge and thework of Foucault, who was again influenced both by psychoanalysis andstructuralism. Like Freud, Foucault used archaeological metaphors tounderstand the history of science and western discourse, for example,when he talks about historians who ‘descend to the deepest levels’ inorder to understand the past (Foucault, 2002: 3). Again we are talkinghere 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 impersonaldiscourse of a collective. Understanding that discourse is to move deepdownward into its past.11

It is relevant to mention that in the case of Darwin, Freud, Saussure andFoucault we are of course dealing with analogical thinking that has notnecessarily been systematized. They were explicitly using analogies forbetter understanding their own fields of inquiry. However, only a thinline divides the use of analogies from the exploitation of conventionalizedmetaphorical expressions by member of an academic community. Forexample, many psychoanalysts nowadays would say that the advantageof their work is that it goes far deeper in trying to understand the past ofa person, while humanist and existential approaches in clinical psychologywould stay only on the surface. But as when archaeologists differentiatetheir work from that of historians, psychoanalysts are probably not fullyconscious of the complex history ‘behind’ the word ‘depth’ as they use it(see also Simonetti, 2014).

Conclusion: Disciplinary knowledge, corporealparticipation and hybridization

The ramifications of geological time analysed here show how stratigraphicthinking spread way beyond the sciences that excavate the earth to discip-lines such as biology, psychology, linguistics, anthropology and history. Inthis process other temporal trajectories have been identified that intertwinewith geological time. Interestingly, in each ramification a particular visual-ization of the original upward directionality of stratigraphy emerges thattends to respect the practices of the disciplines involved. Following excava-tion, we have seen the history of life, minds and knowledge becoming

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stratified, while the original upward directionality of the stratigraphicsequence and the location of important temporal events, such as deeppast, have been constantly refashioned to meet the particularities of eachnew discipline. In this the things academics encounter have been crucial. Wehave seen soils, trees, rivers, couches, tables, books and images taking partin the development of different temporal trajectories. Overall, this suggeststhat the way concepts circulate and evolve in academia is never independentof how scholars engage corporeally with their gravitational environments,where the tendency is for soils to accumulate and for trees to grow verti-cally, for writing and walking to unfold horizontally, respectively, acrossthe surface of the page and the land, as well as for couches to afford bothlying down and upward looking. Such conceptual ecology has been over-looked by traditional approaches to time in sociology, particularly thosethat align with the classical literature on time reckoning, which starts bydividing social time from the rhythms of nature (see, e.g. Zerubavel, 1982,2003; also Durkheim, 1915; Evans-Pritchard, 1940). By emphasizing theidea that time reckoning allowed humans to progressively ‘master’ nature,these theories often miss the subtle corporeal aspects involved in the meas-urement of time, in that perhaps all forms of chronological thinking dependsomehow on what it feels like moving in a particular environment.

The historical combination of temporal trajectories described here iscertainly part of a long process in which practice and conceptualizationgo hand in hand. However, they do not belong to a dead past but to aprocess that carries on as scholars continue expanding the reach of theirconcepts. Let me provide an example. Anderson (2004) in his ‘Talking whilstwalking: a geographical archaeology of knowledge’ reveals an astonishingversatility in conceptual appropriation. He argues in favour of a newapproach in human geography that consists in excavating the history ofpeople’s mental constructions of space by talking while walking. In a singletitle, the horizontality from which geography has traditionally appropriatedthe surface of the earth becomes a task that fusses Freud’s understanding ofthe mind with Foucault’s understanding of history, in a vertical explorationof the past that excavates downwards while walking forwards. Interestingly,what looks like an astonishing combination of multiple temporal trajec-tories probably passes unperceived to Anderson’s readers. The meaningof the title comes not as a result of a detail analysis of the history of con-cepts, like the one we have been carrying out here, but mainly following aform of knowledge that is never fully declared and is continuous with anenvironmentally situated history of practice.12

This understanding of knowledge challenges the enclosed and cumulativeview of the mind described earlier and the understanding of memories asabstract entities hidden deep inside the head, below the surface of the skin.





It also challenges the idea of disciplines as enclosed fields, as the notions ofdisciplinary boundaries, cross-disciplinary research, and interdisciplinarity(as opposed to intradisciplinarity) suggest. As in many other domains ofwestern thinking, containment metaphors and set theory have been privi-leged in the understanding of disciplinary knowledge. According to Ingold(2012), this way of thinking has its origin in the way authors like Kantconceptualized fields of knowledge as rooms of a building. Rather thanthinking of disciplines as bounded fields that constrain the interactions ofindividuals, Ingold suggests we should think of them as open conversationsthat emerge as people follow common lines of interest. Following this argu-ment, disciplinary knowledge does not have real boundaries. It is not evenenclosed by porous membranes. It just subsists in the dialogues and insti-tutions that academics come up with. It is carried on in the trajectories ofpeople and their co-participation.

Learning a discipline is about appropriating concepts that are continu-ous with the experience of perceptual beings moving in particular envir-onments. Accordingly, academic knowledge depends on the body.Different modes of conceptualization involve the appropriation of par-ticular attitudes of the body, which necessarily change depending on theparticular form of practice. If there are anything like boundaries betweendisciplines, they are, expanding Mauss’s (1979) concept, those conceptualtechniques of the body that characterize their respective ways of thinking.Understanding another discipline depends both on the particular corpor-eal tendencies with which you approach it and on the corporeal stance ofthe other discipline. This is why it takes time to learn the concepts of adiscipline, which is also why doing anthropology of science is differentfrom doing history of science. Resulting from long processes of distilla-tion and condensation that are continuous with particular ways of feelingand moving in the world, concepts of time are still delivered, in conver-sation and text, as trajectories that unfold in movement. Accordingly,there is not a bridging concept of time, that could alleviate the difficultiesof interdisciplinary dialogue, as time cannot be defined regardless of thematerial circumstances in which each concept of time exists, that is inadvance of how people appropriate their worlds corporeally. Therefore,what academics exchange are not mere ideas but disciplinary ways offeeling in movement that are continuous with the environments theyinhabit. Disciplinary encounters always occur between what we can callsentient modes of conceptualization.

Before finishing, let me stop once more on the image of the tree forunderstanding processes of change, such as the history of the stratificationof time in science we have described here. The analysis above has funda-mentally challenged its supposedly homogeneous and non-problematic

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character. We have seen it stratified, extending to the depth of the oceansand caught in multiple trajectories as it emerges within other understand-ings of time. In this mixture of origins and trajectories, one is left with afeeling of hybridization in which it seems ultimately impossible to trace in asingle line what goes before and after in the history of ideas.

This feeling of hybridization in the attempt to trace conceptual traditionsis not completely foreign in anthropology. Years ago Alfred Kroeberdescribed something similar in his account of the evolution of the tree ofknowledge as opposed to the constant diversification of the tree of life (seeFigure 8). Traditionally, such hybridization has been difficult to conceive inthe case of the latter (see, e.g. Steward, 1955: 12). However in the lastdecades, the vertical image of evolutionary change, with species thatfollow clear cut lines of descent, is also starting to be challenged.According to Helmreich (2009: 68–105), in his analysis of contemporarymarine microbiologists, hyperthermophil organisms that live in high tem-perature deep waters present what is known as lateral transfer, in whichgenes are transmitted among organism that belong to different species. Thishas pushed microbiologists to rethink not only basic categories like generaand species but also the entire idea of evolutionary phylogeny as a branch-ing tree. At the same time, it has also pushed them to rethink the separationbetween time and space in evolution, particularly the idea that evolution isthe result of the vertical transmission of a genetic code that is defined inadvance, 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).





others. According to Helmreich, this conceptual movement resembles ashift towards an understanding of growth and change that follows therhizomatic forms described by Deleuze and Guattari, set in opposition tothe hierarchical differentiation of the tree (2009: 83).13

Following this challenge, a solution to this impasse could lie in erasing alltogether the pervasive verticality imposed in genealogical thinking bysimply collapsing the understanding of change into a horizontality thatdoes not produce hierarchies. Even though this presents an alternative, asit might modulate the influences of power involved in hierarchies within andbetween species, such a solution would be rather simplistic. There is a riskof erasing all the subtle trajectories experienced by those who move up anddown in life, including the scientists that excavate their knowledge. It alsohas the risk of erasing the constant influence of the forces of the environ-ment, particularly the vertical gravitational axis that most life has to dealwith, as we lie forward to excavate, down to rest or move across with ourpens to write. In any case, if an answer is to be reached, it would probablybe necessary to dissolve the absolute division between conceptual and bio-logical development with which most sciences of the past start. The image ofa branching tree becomes insufficient for describing both. Knowledgedepends on the particularities of each scientific practice and the environ-ment in which it takes place. But even more important would be to realizethat ultimately a tree is not a forest, that forests are not independent of allthe life that lives in them, and that life is not independent of the world thatsupports it.

Acknowledgements

Two earlier versions of this paper were presented, in September 2011 at theannual conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UKand the Commonwealth, and in July 2012 at the Annual Scottish Word and

Image Group conference, University of Dundee. More recent versions werepresented, in September 2014 at the Programa de Pos-Graduacao emAntropologia Social, Universidade de Brasılia and in October 2014 at

Design and Informatics, University of Edinburgh. I am grateful to thosewho organized these events and to those who attended them and gave mefeedback. I would also like to thank Tim Ingold, Chris Gosden, Jeff Oliver

and two anonymous reviewers for their very insightful comments on earlierversions 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) andthe College of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Aberdeen.

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Notes

1. It is likely that the ramifications of geological thinking extend beyond the dis-

ciplines and authors analysed in this article. The reasons for concentrating onthem 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 (seeSimonetti, 2014, 2015). The discoveries I made throughout the study subtletypushed me to follow the traces of geological thinking in disciplines that sharehistorical ties with archaeology. Anthropology, biology, geology, history, linguis-

tics 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, Strabopointed in his Geographica to the probable marine origin of fossils many yearsbefore Steno (see Steno, 1916: 210, footnote 1 of the translator).

4. Starting from a different point, namely the concept of race, Banton (2010) hasidentified two dimensions within this concept. He describes them as the verticaland the horizontal. These dimensions are related to a distinction set up by Kantbetween the description of nature (Naturbeschreibung) and natural history

(Naturgeschichte). The first emphasized a static view at a moment in time, anartificial system that divided things taxonomically, paying attention to horizontalsimilarities. This matched the Linnean schema of classification. The second, on

the contrary, paid attention to the relationship of species over time. This wasintermixed 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 harmonyare 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 vertical-ity 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 lan-

guage acquisition carefully resembles Freud’s understanding of the developmentof 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 sug-gested here, in that Freud also allowed for past and present to coexist partially inhis 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 bythe conscious, preconscious and unconscious systems (Freud, 1957) for a moresophisticated one where new concepts, such as the Ego and the Id, were intro-duced. In this new model of the mind, the Ego, and its defense mechanisms are

partially both conscious and unconscious. Nevertheless, a general stratigraphicview of the mind is foundational to Freud’s theory and practice, which explainsthe way his ideas spread out into popular culture.





8. Following Larsen (1987, 1996) the stratigraphic understanding of memory is

also at the foundations of cognitive psychology in a paleontological metaphorused by Ulric Neisser (1967: 285), which still survives in contemporary cognitivesciences, 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 hisapproach to the history of technological development with Darwin’s work. A

vertical understanding of history similar to Darwin’s genealogy of species wasprobably playing a role in Marx’s genealogy of technology, which also entwinedwith 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 ramifi-cations of geological thinking, while having to accommodate them within thelimited scopes of a journal article. Certainly, alternative paths could be fol-

lowed, 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, Geertzwas informed by Freud’s ideas.

11. Both Levi-Strauss and Foucault set their approaches in opposition to phenom-enology, accusing it of being superficial. Interestingly, even though phenomen-ology 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 geog-

raphy, see Lorimer and Spedding (2002). And for an example, this time on theethnographic study of archaeology, see Carman’s (2006: 96) invitation todevelop a social archaeology of archaeological practices. In applying the meta-

phor back to the original source, this suggestion leaves us with unimaginablelevel of recursivity.

13. For a similar tendency to horizontalize relations and eliminate hierarchies, thistime in the anthropological study of kinship see, e.g. Ingold (2000: 149), Leach

(2003: 31) and Palsson (2009).

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Cristián Simonetti - The Stratification of Time

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