The title of our book pays homage to a classic anthropological monograph: Time and the Other by Johannes Fabian (1983). That critical work – unfortunately lit-tle used in studies of the ancient or indigenous Americas – examined the way in which the dominant party in an intercultural encounter tends to situate (to construct and to interpret) ‘the Other’, i.e. colonised or otherwise marginalised peoples, in the past. Fabian shows how the study of the Other – in anthropol-ogy and related disciplines – has operated since its colonial origins within this conceptual framework and tends to reinforce a mental distance between the intellectual outsider, belonging to dominant society (Self ) and the ‘primitive’ or ‘traditional’ poor (i.e. dominated and exploited) peoples-as-objects. Fabian calls this distance, in study but also in social praxis and in policy, a denial of coevalness.