This book will be invaluable for cognitive anthropologists, scholars of material culture, and theorists interested in time historically and in our global age . . . All of us feel bound to our alarm clocks, wristwatches, and daily planners, but few of us have given thought to where these devices come from and how they have altered us as social ... Read moreand biological beings. In this engaging and intellectually far-reaching work, Birth has done much of the work for us. - American Anthropologist An important contribution to the anthropology of time and material culture studies, this volume takes as its primary point of departure that the mechanisms for 'telling' time (the author focuses on clocks and calendars) are engaged in shaping our experience and subsequent enactment of temporal realities as much as they are nominally thought of as representing them. - American Ethnologist An admirable attempt to ground the study of time within the empirical specificity of objects and culture. - Time and Society Show Less