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Office:
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Powdermaker Hall 313C
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Phone:
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(718) 997-5518
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Fax: |
(718) 997-2885 |
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E-mail: |
Kevin.Birth@qc.cuny.edu |
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| Interests: | Courses Taught: |
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Social anthropology
Psychological anthropology Time Festivals Ethnicity Caribbean |
Intro to Cultural Anthropology (101)
History of Anthropology (200) Peoples of the Caribbean (219) Psychological Anthropology (309) Seminar in Contemporary Anthropological Theory (320) |
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Having determined in high school that I was a mediocre fiddle-player and tobacco chewer, I left Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to pursue anthropology. In graduate school at the University of California at San Diego, I was trained in social and psychological anthropology. In 1989, I began my research on cultural concepts of time, and conducted ethnographic field research in rural Trinidad. In 1993, one of my esteemed professors said, "You know too much about this place, you better leave." Soon after, I left California in my old Mazda with my pregnant wife and new Ph.D. to seek my fortune at Queens College, where I had been hired on the basis of wearing purple pants during my interview. Since then, I have continued to do research on time, but have expanded my interests to include the experience of Carnival and music, chronobiology, social rhythms, political economy, and even a bit of theology and liturgical studies. |
PUBLICATIONS 2014. The
Remarkable Clocks of the Magdalen Chapel" which is about some old
clocks in a metalworkers' guild chapel in Edinburgh was just published in The
Bulwark: The Magazine of the Scottish Reformation Society 4(4):14-17. ˇ
2014. Non-clocklike
Features of Psychological Timing and Alternatives to the Clock Metaphor. Timing and Time Perception
2(3):312-324. ˇ
2014. "The
Vindolanda Timepiece: Time and Calendar Reckoning in Roman Britain" was
recently published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology 33(4):395-411.[link to abstract] ˇ
2014. Breguet’s Decimal Clock: A Masterpiece from the
Enlightenment. Frick Collection Members’
Magazine, Winter, 10-11. ˇ
2013. The Princess and the Pea: Research Strategies for the
Study of the Mediation of Timescales by Artifacts. In Requirements for UTC and Civil
Timekeeping on Earth, American Astronautical Society, Science and
Technology Series, volume 115, pp.
191-204. ˇ
2013. Zmanim, Salat,
Jyotish and UTC: The Articulation of Religious Times and the Global Timescale.
In Requirements for UTC and Civil Timekeeping on Earth, American Astronautical
Society, Science and Technology Series, volume 115, pp. 209-228. ˇ
2013 Calendars:
Representational Homogeneity and Heterogeneous Temporality. Time and Society 22(2): 216-236. ˇ
2011. The Regular Sound of the Cock: Context-Dependent Time
Reckoning in the Middle Ages. Kronoscope 11(1-2): 125-144. ˇ
2011. “Signs and Wonders: The Uncanny Verum and the Anthropological Illusion” in David Lipset and Paul Roscoe (eds.) Echoes of the Tambaran:
Masculinity, History and the Subject in the Work of Donald F. Tuzin. Pp.
117-136. Canberra: Australian National
University Press. ˇ
2008. The
Creation of Coevalness and the Danger of Homochronism, Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14(1): 3-20. Also, “Reply to Fabian,” Journal
of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14(3): 665. ˇ
2006. Time and the Biological Consequences of
Globalization. Current Anthropology 48(2): 215-236. [Download PDF] ˇ
2006. What is Your
Mission Here? A Trinidadian Perspective on Visits from the “Church of Disneyworld.”
Missiology 34(4): 497-508. ˇ
2006. Més que una
pura succession: les alters dimensions del Temps [More than Pure Succession:
the other dimensions of time]. Revista d’etnologia de Catalunya 28: 20-27. ˇ
2006. The Immanent
Past: Culture and Psyche at the Juncture of Memory and History. Introduction to
the special issue “The Immanent Past.” Ethos 34(2): 169-191. ˇ
2006. Past Times: Temporal Structure of
History and Memory. Ethos 34(2): 192-210. ˇ
2005. Time and
Consciousness. IN A Companion to Psychological Anthropology . Robert Edgerton
and Conerly Casey, eds. Pp. 17-29. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers ˇ
2004. Finding
Time. Field Methods 16(1): 70-84. ˇ
2001. Sitting There:
Discourses of the Embodiment of Agency, Belonging, and Deference in the
Classroom. Journal of Mundane Behavior 2(2). ˇ
1999. Any Time is
Trinidad Time. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. ˇ
1997. Most of Us are
Family Some of the Time: Inter-racial unions and Trans-racial kinship in
Eastern Trinidad. American Ethnologist 24(3):585-601. ˇ
1996. Trinidadian
Times: Temporal Dependency and Temporal Flexibility on the Margins of
Industrial Capitalism. Anthropological Quarterly 69(2):79-89. ˇ
1995. Putting Romance
into Systems of Sexuality: Changing Smart Rules in a Trinidadian Village (with
Morris Freilich). In Romantic Love. William R. Jankowiak, ed. Pp.
262-276. New York: Columbia University Press. ˇ
1995. The Ethnic
Ambiguities of Getting Married: The Official Pronouncements, Local
Interpretations, and Personal Experiences of Trinidadian Hindu Indians.
International Journal of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies 2(2):80-91. ˇ
1994. British
Anthropology and Psychoanalysis Before World War II: The Evolution of Asserted
Irrelevance. Canberra Anthropology 17(1):53-69. ˇ
1994 Bakrnal: Coup,
Carnival, and Calypso in Trinidad. Ethnology 33(2):165-177. ˇ 1990. Reading and the Righting of Writing Ethnography. American Ethnologist 17(3): 549-557.
ˇ 2012. Objects of
Time: How Things Shape Temporality. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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2014. Failed,
Forgotten, Discarded, or Marginalized.
United States Naval Observatory, Washington, D.C. ˇ
2014. Sediments of Timekeeping: A Walkshop on Recognizing Past
Time Reckoning Techniques in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Temporal Design Workshop, School of
Design Infomatics, University of Edinburgh. Publications: |
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| Kevin Birth Associate Professor Ph.D. UCSD 1993 |
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