Time and Modernity in the Mediterranean: a Case Study from Languedoc

This article develops a critical perspective on ‘modernity’, derived from an interest in the anthropology of time. Drawing on social scientific and philosophical work on time and temporality, I seek to unravel the temporal dimension of this term, both through an initial theoretical analysis and subsequent ethnographic interrogation. The ethnographic component of the article draws on a year’s fieldwork in Monadières, a village near Narbonne, in Languedoc, France. Through a number of studies highlighting the changing temporalities of people’s lives, the concept’s utility is examined, and its relevance for discussion of the wider Mediterranean basin, and elsewhere, is brought out. The article concludes that for the notion of ‘modernity’ to retain critical utility, it must encompass a more precise appreciation of the temporal and contingent ethnographic features of social life.