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THE PLAY OF TIME: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History, and Exchange. By Janet Hoskins. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1993. xx, 414 pp. (Maps, photos, tabs.) US$42.00, cloth. ISBN 0-520-08003-3.
THIS RICH, complex book is about time and social life in an Eastern Indonesian society. Grounded in more than three years of ethnographic research in the Kodi districts of western Sumba, The Play of Time offers a sustained and painstakingly argued analysis of the shifting temporalities that inform Kodi culture and society. How time is sensed and culturally "made" varies, of course, from place to place. The architecture of time in Kodi is not a simple one, but Janet Hoskins' patient study gives us a convincing and clear account of its intricacies and turns. With respect to the ethnographic literature on Indonesian societies, the book's scope and fineness make it the most important statement on temporality since Clifford Geertz's Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali: An Essay in...