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Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time
Author(s) -
GUYER JANE I.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.2007.34.3.409
Subject(s) - temporality , punctuated equilibrium , rhetoric , perspective (graphical) , debt , trace (psycholinguistics) , horizon , time perspective , positive economics , sociology , time horizon , focus (optics) , epistemology , economics , philosophy , social psychology , psychology , macroeconomics , linguistics , computer science , paleontology , physics , finance , astronomy , artificial intelligence , optics , biology
A view from 1950s and 1960s Britain suggests that the public culture of temporality in the United States has shifted from a consequential focus on reasoning toward the near future to a combination of response to immediate situations and orientation to a very long‐term horizon. This temporal perspective is most marked in the public rhetoric of macroeconomics, but it also corresponds in remarkable ways to evangelicals' views of time. In this article, I trace the optionality and consonance of this shift toward the relative evacuation of the near future in religion and economics by examining different theoretical positions within each domain. In conclusion, I suggest that the near future is being reinhabited by forms of punctuated time, such as the dated schedules of debt and other specific event‐driven temporal frames.