Across the Scales of Time' It takes a village I want to conclude with some observations about the research process itself. At some very high level of abstraction perhaps they are, but we should now become more interested in the potential differences. He has a particular interest in the emergence of sustainable institutions that persist over times longer than the participation of any one individual in them.
People move around.
Ethnographic studies of small village societies of a few to several dozen members normally collect data over a yearly seasonal cycle. Biographers take the human lifetime as their timescale unit, and otherwise historians and archivists are about the only scholars who concern themselves with social projects or activities that occur on timescales from decades to longer than a single human lifetime. We can no doubt learn a great deal from each of these fields about the kinds of projects and activities that occupy the longer timescale spaces on our chart, from those that extend through significant portions of the life of an individual, to those which are undertaken by the members of an institution or of a smaller or larger community. The original logic of Leontiev s Activity Theory defined the continuity or unity of extended activity by the maintenance of a goal or object-of activity. When the timescale of a project or activity exceeds a single human lifetime, we clearly should be seeking for alternative principles to define their unity and continuity.