An exploration of chronotypes, the models or patterns through which time assumes practical or conceptual significance. Chronotypes are themselves temporal and plural, constantly being made and remade at multiple individual, social and cultural levels. histories.

This book - an interdisciplinary collaboration of philosophers, historians, literary critics, and anthropologists - examines the ways individuals, societies, and cultures make sense of time by constructing it in diverse patterns. Its title intentionally echoes a concept of narrative theory, Mikhail Bakhtin's 'chronotype', because narrative recurs as a chief form within which we build temporality. The topics treated by these essays range from story-telling to cross-cultural communication, from epistemological debates to concepts of historical periodization, from the construction of life stories to the stratification of social time.<

Acknowledgments
introduction
Part I. Thinking Time: 1. time in physical and narrative structure Bastiaan C. Van Fraassen
2. Time and creation Cornelius Castoriadis
Part II. Temporal Frames of Inquiry: 3. A slip in time saves nine: prestigious origins again Jonathan Z. Smith
4. The time of telling and the telling of time in written and oral cultures Jack Goody
Part III. Time and the Politics of Criticism: 5. Time and timing: law and history Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
6. The temporality of rhetoric Dominick Lacapra
Part IV. The Temporal Order of Social Life: 7. The constitution of human life in time Thomas Luckmann
8. Synchronizing individual time, family time, and historical time Tamara K. Hareven
Part V. Time, Narrative, and Cultural Contact: 9. Of dogs alive, birds dead, and time to tell a story Johannes Fabian
10. La Fontaine and Wamimbi: the anthropology of 'time-present' as the substructure of historical oration David William Cohen
Notes
Index.