Anthropology Of Time Research Articles

Bohemia at the Pacific seabed: Archiving the future of deep-sea mining with the Interoceanmetal Joint Organization.

This article uses historical and ethnographic methods to examine the primarily East-Central European Interoceanmetal Joint Organization (IOM). I ask how and why the IOM has survived as an institution since its inception in 1987, working especially with the personal archive of Vratislav Kubišta. Kubišta was a metallurgist and former Deputy Director General at IOM who after retirement sought to develop a local deep-sea mining museum. This is a story about the work that archives do, but even more about how institutions maintain archives. I draw on recent work in the history and anthropology of time and archival practice to situate IOM's history and Kubišta's collection in narratives of ruin, the unbuilt, and the experience of multiple temporalities within spaces of resource speculation and anticipation. I suggest that IOM's history highlights the contingencies of resources in the temporality of indefinite pause, their attendant data, and scientific labor and life under the shifting political, economic, and scientific circumstances of the ongoing not-yet. In broadening the history of what is once more a hotly contested potential resource, this account speaks to the claims of contemporary would-be seabed miners, who frequently frame the practice in terms of innovation, urgency, and novelty.

Negotiating Sustainabilities

Organic agriculture aims at enabling sustainable food economies. But agricultural temporalities and practices do not necessarily align with demands and schedules posed by packers, processors, or retailers – a detachment that complicates the actors’ pursuits of sustainability. This paper builds on participant observation during nine workshops with actors along the German organic food supply chain. Viewing these events through an ethnographic lens reveals the complex web of agricultural, political, and economic constraints that needs to be navigated from farm to supermarket. Situated at the intersection of more-than-human anthropology and anthropology of time, this article asks how actors involved in the production, distribution, and marketing of organic foods negotiate and (re)imagine sustainability. What obstacles do they see, and whose agencies and fates do they consider within their negotiations? How do these narrations and practices point to possible reconfigurations of sustainability? The analysis sheds light on sustainability’s emergent nature and its relations to prevailing (global) power imbalances and wealth gaps. Looking at the organic food supply chain through the lens of time frames and rhythms allows for a conceptualization of sustainability as a situated endeavor, variable across time and space and deeply dependent on nonhuman agencies and specific situational contexts. Following globalized connections further demonstrates how sustainability must include disadvantaged and exploited people within and across national borders.

Introduction to the Special Section, “The Ordinariness of Cross‐Time Relations: Anthropology, Literature, and the Science Fictional”

SUMMARYThis introduction orients the reader to the experiments with thinking inter‐disciplinarily in this special section of Anthropology and Humanism. A long history of shared conversation between science fiction and anthropology has both been shadowed by colonialism and offered promising resources for remaking the world. We invited anthropologists, film critics, and literary theorists into conversation without assuming in advance to know what constitutes a genre like science fiction. Instead, we focus on how science fiction emerges in diverse contexts. Science fiction gives us pleasure; it has insurgent qualities which are not yet captured. Our appreciation of it grows from its engagement with the ordinary and the quotidian. It may engage time in ways other than the past‐present‐future, making us realize the impossibilities we have internalized and naturalized in our account of things. Ultimately, the collective realization of the authors in this section is that science fictionality is a fugitive element in the world. We need it for fabulation, to generate new ways of telling stories to forge new impossibilities. [science fiction; anthropology of time; anthropology and literature; the ordinary; fabulation]

Sublimated products and other time management tools: transformations of Khanty reindeer herders' nutrition practices in the Polar Urals

The key contribution of this article is bridging the perspectives of anthropology of food, mobility studies and anthropology of time, unfolding through an ethnographic study of the dietary practices of the Khanty reindeer herders in the Shuryshkar Region of the Yamal Peninsula in the beginning of the 21st c. We focus on freeze-dried foods, ‘Doshirak’ — the brand name which became genericized in this environment, and the dialogue of these foods with fish and venison, depending on the modes of mobility and the season. The Khanty herder's diet as recently as 20–25 years ago included reindeer and fish, processed and stored in various forms. In summer, dur-ing the nomadic period, raw foods are unfeasible, and dried venison and salted fish become key nutrients. Fresh foods and sophisticated cooking can only be afforded at campsite. Mobility periods reduce the diversity and set technological limits for food choice. The process of cooking and eating is integrated into the per-minute plan of the day during migration: one needs to find lightweight meal that regains weight and volume with addition of water. This is how soluble noodles and mashed potatoes are introduced in the reindeer herders' diet during the migration period. Nutrition type reflects the trend towards the “fragmentation” of food resources into small portions, suitable for single meal in a narrow family circle. A brigade of related tents has different diets. Previously, the problem of storing a deer slaughtered for “collec-tive nutrition” (“colpit”) was solved via distribution of meat to a wide social circle. Now whole reindeer is too large for a mo-bile and small family during migration. Thus, Doshirak has become a way to save and/or speed up time (a longer march during the day instead of boiling cereals), a way to autonomize the family/chum within the extended family and the reindeer herding brigade. At the same time, the phenomenon of Doshirak reflects the pattern of food alienation, unification of food trends. This trend also highlights the understudied discourse of the usefulness and danger of this food — not in terms of freshness/rotting, purity/pollution, but in terms of artificiality/naturalness of food, which raises the question of the “natural-ness” of the consuming subject itself.

АРХЕОЛОГИЯ СОВЕТСКОГО ВРЕМЕНИ: ИСТОРИЯ ОДНОГО ГОДА

The authors record a sharp rise of the present (from the routine of every day to the monumental and ideologically elaborated our era) in the discursive environments of 1934 and dedicate the article to the archaeology of our time. The analysis of the arrangement, becoming and conditions of possibility for extended and shared socialist present in 1934 is based on the archaeological method, dispositive analysis, the anthropology of time, and the experience of introducing one-year histories. The historical present is considered in the specifics of its eventfulness, connections of times, patterns, timescales, timescapes, time frames, modalities, positions, the art of navigation and existence in time. Daily newspapers, weekly magazines and diaries are used as sources of the present. The authors describe the becoming of the socialist present dispositive or timescape of our time through: a) its production in discourse; b) its technological objectification and inventory through measurement; c) the development of ethical standards for action in the present and the transformation of the present into an ethical criterion. The discursive opening of the present as a political resource, a stage for demonstrating the achievements of socialist construction, a priority area for updating the Soviet experience and identity are considered against the background of the mobilization temporality of the five-year plans and the shift from situational to total mobilization (discipline of the present). The extension and sharing of the present are realized through the formation of new relationships with the immediate past and future, the increase in the verbal mass of words-indicators of the current moment, the framing of Soviet identity through temporality, procedures for changing the temporal scale and the construction of a monumental present. Three patterns of extended and shared present are described. The actualization of interest in measuring time and technological access to the present, establishing control over it are recorded. The paper problematizes the formation of ethical standards and criteria that makes it possible to evaluate the actions of Soviet people in the extended present. A special role of the propaganda use of the Chelyuskin epic in the extension, sharing and political opening of our time is discussed.

THE CHALLENGE OF ANTHROPOLOGY AS HUMANITARIAN SCIENCE IN THE ETERNAL SEARCH OF ORIGINALITY BETWEEN THE CULTURAL DIFFERENCE AND THE SOCIETAL OTHERNESS

For a long time anthropology was defined by the exoticism of its subject matter and also by the distance (mostly cultural than geographic) separating the researcher from the researched group. However, after the coming of the new Millennium many things have been changed radically and many anthropologists imply their old professional ethnographic techniques to study their own cultures using terms as otherness instead of exoticism and reflexivity instead of objectivity. The term of cosmopolitanism also has been too much applied instead of multiculturalism, charged with political connotations of what could be ‘politically correct’ under the western values. In the same time, anthropology is exercised now also by the representatives of these ‘ different cultures’ who exercise by their original ways the inverse influence to the western values. Cultural difference has acquired its most complex meaning nowadays and the scope of this paper is to present through the example of tourism some cases of intercultural meetings under a paradigmatic assumption entailing not only anthropological self-criticism but also the consideration that this self-criticism anthropology prescribes is also morally and originally pointed. Social change has to be analysed objectively and in the same time from all points of view and this consists the challenge of anthropology in our era.

Medical Anthropology in the Time of COVID-19.

Medical Anthropology in the Time of COVID-19.

“Nossos filhos não são cobaias”: objetificação dos sujeitos de pesquisa e saturação do campo durante a epidemia de Zika

Decidimos escrever esse artigo a quatro mãos por uma razão simples: apresentar dois lados da mesma história, a história dos desdobramentos da pesquisa durante a epidemia de Zika. Neste sentido, não somente expomos duas experiências como pesquisadoras em antropologia sobre a epidemia do vírus Zika, mas propomos mostrar como essas duas experiências e vivências revelam de alguma forma um sistema complexo atuando neste contexto específico e envolvendo descobertas científicas, financiamentos internacionais, concorrência de pesquisadores e de instituições, campo com mulheres, crianças vulneráveis e instituições de saúde, trajetórias de amostras biológicas, colaborações – as vezes assimétricas – entre científicos dos chamados ‘Sul e Norte’ do mundo. Esperamos dessa forma chegar a um retrato da Science in the making que proporcionará uma reflexividade a diferentes níveis sobre 1/ nossas práticas como pesquisadores em antropologia em tempos de crise e emergência, e 2/ os diversos significados da relação centro-periferia/pesquisador-pessoas no campo nas ciências que tratam da saúde.

The Habitual Past in Amele, Papua New Guinea

This study attempts to clarify the tense systems in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea; particularly, the past tense and habitual past forms in the sample three languages in the area: Amele, Waskia, and Kobon. This study thus investigates past tense and habitual features, and discusses how the people in the area interpret past events. The study then discusses how these people map their temporal frames in their grammars (“anthropology of time,” Gell 1996). To aid analysis, I have collected data through observing descriptive grammars and fieldwork, finding that Amele exhibits three types of past tense and habitual tense forms, as in (1). Kobon has two distinct simple and remote past tenses, as in (2). Kobon has habitual aspect with the help of the verb “to be.” Waskia, in contrast, has a distinction between realis and irrealis meanings, and the realis forms can indicate past and habitual meanings (two habitual forms: one is include in realis, another is with the help of the verb “stay”), as shown in (3). Amele: Today’s past: Ija hu-ga. “I came (today).” Yesterday’s past: Ija hu-gan. “I came (yesterday).” Remote past: Ija ho-om. “I came (before yesterday).” Habitual past (by adding the habitual form “l”): Ija ho-lig. “I used to come.” (2) Kobon (Davies 1989): Simple past: Yad au-ɨn. “I have come.” Remote past: Nöŋ-be. “You saw” Habitual aspect (by using the verb “mid” to be): Yad nel nipe pu-mid-in. “I used to break his firewood.” (3) Waskia (Ross and Paol 1978): Realis: Ane ikelako yu naem. “I drank some water yesterday.” (simple past) Realis: Ane girako yu no-kisam “In the past I used to drink water” (habitual past) Habitual (by using the verb “bager“ (stay)): Ane girako yu nala bager-em. “In the past I used to drink water.“ We claim that Amele and Kobon have remoteness distinctions; near and remote past, but no such distinction appears in Waskia. The observed habitual usages differ to each other. Nevertheless, the three languages have a grammatical viewpoint of habitual past mapping.

Рец. на: Ssorin-Chaikov N. Two Lenins: A Brief Anthropology of Time. Chicago, 2017.

Рец. на: Ssorin-Chaikov N. Two Lenins: A Brief Anthropology of Time. Chicago, 2017.

Распределение рабочих времязатрат современных православных священников

В статье приводятся результаты исследования времязатрат современных российских православных священников. Проведя наблюдение и составив списки повседневных занятий 27 священников из разных регионов и типов городов России, мы проанализировали, на что тратится их рабочее время. На базе одного полевого материала были применены два разных подхода к исследованию рабочего времени: антропология времени (подробное качественное наблюдение за информантом, внимание к его внутренним мотивациям выстраивать свой рабочий день так или иначе, влияние дополнительных факторов среды и других людей на особенности рабочего времени) и изучение бюджетов времени (количественные исследования, направленные на подсчет времязатрат разных слоев населения по разным направлениям деятельности). Время священников интересно тем, что в их случае грань между оплачиваемой и неоплачиваемой работой провести почти невозможно. По результатам анализа данных оказалось, что священники с одинаковым стартовым «багажом» и социально-демографическими условиями могут иметь разное соотношение основных показателей. При этом крайние точки средней продолжительности рабочего дня напрямую зависят от прихода: наименьшая в приходах на закрытых территориях или учреждениях и наибольшая в храмах, ориентированных на культурную и социальную работу в своем населенном пункте. Важным наблюдением оказалось и то, что у большинства священников дополнительная деятельность занимает больше половины рабочего времени, то есть они занимаются тем, чему не обучались и что никак не прописано в их обязанностях.

Brazilian Anthropology in times of intolerance: The challenges of confronting neoconservatism

Abstract The present article analyzes the challenges Brazilian anthropology faces in the current political context, marked by setbacks, intolerance, repression, and censorship relative to previously achieved democratic advances. Here, we reflect upon different dynamics in the field of anthropology in diverse political conjunctures in Brazil over the last five decades. The first section of the article analyzes the historical context in which Brazilian anthropology became institutionalized, during the military dictatorship. We then highlight the social engagement of anthropologists in the struggle for human rights during the re-democratization of Brazil in the 1980s and anthropologists’ participation (together with the groups they study) in the gradual implementation of “identity policies”. The second section evaluates the impact of these changes in the field of anthropology and the dilemmas experienced by anthropologists in the new context of political confrontation. The concluding section analyzes and interprets the neoconservative movement and the strategies and challenges anthropology faces in contemporary Brazil.

“Esperando justicia”. Trauma psíquico, temporalidad y movilización política en la argentina actual

En el mundo contemporáneo la condición de víctima ha cobrado centralidad como vector de identificación colectiva, y el trauma psíquico se ha constituido en un lenguaje razonable para comunicar el sufrimiento. Las víctimas de conflictos bélicos, violencia de género, catástrofes, etc., ponen en juego categorías como trauma o estrés postraumático para exigir derechos. Este es el caso de las víctimas de un incendio ocurrido en Buenos Aires, que durante años se movilizaron exigiendo que se realice el juicio penal para castigar a los responsables del hecho. Como sujetos de la política pública de atención en salud mental, se vincularon con los psicólogos y psiquiatras de un servicio estatal de estrés postraumático. A su vez, un grupo de profesionales psi con reconocidas trayectorias de compromiso con los derechos humanos apoyaron su causa. Apelando a la conexión entre trauma e impunidad, denunciaron al Estado por sumir a las víctimas en una larga y penosa espera por la realización del juicio. Al hacerlo, dejaron expuesta una relación entre el proceso psíquico y el proceso penal. Aquí retomo la “antropología del tiempo” para analizar esta coordinación que se dio durante la espera entre procesos de diferente naturaleza. Para ello, me apoyo en los materiales producidos durante un trabajo de campo etnográfico de tres años con las víctimas. Concluyo que los profesionales psi y el Estado tuvieron un rol central en la definición del hecho como traumático y en la certificación de la veracidad del sufrimiento de las víctimas que, al mismo tiempo, lo confrontaban

Global Futures and Government Towns: Phosphates and the Production of Western Sahara as a Space of Contention

The study of natural resources lends itself to theorizing the politics of nature and the politics of time. The space of Western Sahara, where both remain highly contested, provides an opportunity to consider the ramifications of resources in political conflict at different historical moments. Drawing from environmental histories of North Africa and the Sahara, as well as the anthropology of time, the author focuses on two historical moments. The first, from 1945 to 1976, concerns the discovery of phosphate deposits during the Spanish colonial period and the implications of this discovery for political authority in the Sahara more broadly. The second, contemporary moment is characterized by intensifying interest in plotting the future use and reserves of phosphates, with potential implications for the political futures of Western Sahara. These two moments are considered in three parts: the first situates the discovery of phosphates in Western Sahara within the regional process of decolonization; the second...

Beyond temporality: Notes on the anthropology of time from a shrinking fieldsite

With the help of ethnographic material from Germany’s fastest shrinking city, I critically engage in this paper with the term ‘temporality’. By bringing together recent insights from the anthropology of time and the future, the literature on post-socialism, and contemporary philosophical debates on the problem of presentism, I pursue a thorough re-conceptualization of time as a matter of knowledge practices. I thereby question the idea of temporality as an inherent quality of anthropology’s objects of inquiry. Beyond temporality, I urge for abandoning such temporal attributions altogether whilst scrutinizing the temporal underpinnings of our own theories and analytics, as manifested in the term post-socialism. I claim that if anthropologists, and other social scientists, want to avoid determinists’ fallacies they should acknowledge that there is, indeed, no need for temporality in their analyses.

Антропология времени в художественных произведениях С.Т. Аксакова в контексте философии Н.А. Бердяева

Антропология времени в художественных произведениях С.Т. Аксакова в контексте философии Н.А. Бердяева

In the Name of God: Managing Risk in Islamic Finance

In Against the gods: the remarkable story of risk (1996), Peter L. Bernstein illustrates how the mastery of risk has driven modern Western society into converting ‘the future from an enemy into an opportunity’. Far from being an antagonist, as the unpredictable whim of gods or mysterious fate, this story has transformed the future into a human prospect, where risk is quantified, measured and managed to mitigate the perils of the unexpected, and where risk-taking, -transfer and -pooling have become per se sources of legitimate profit. Commenting on Bernstein’s work while moving from the Western ‘risk’ to the Arabic رزق rizq, ‘(God’s) sustenance’, this paper dares looking at human hazard, زهر zahr, the ‘dice’ of future chances, through a comparative and inter-cultural perspective. More precisely, it aims to show how specific anthropological assumptions result in an alternative theory and practice of risk management in a market whose peculiarity is to operate not ‘against’ but ‘in the Name of God’: the market of Islamic finance. To this end, Islamic finance is depicted within an anthropology of time where not only the future, but also the present are a divine (rather than human) creation, and where, consequently, risk is deeply re-framed both as a concept and as a source of legitimate profit. In fact, to the extent to which the future remains an economic opportunity in Islam (Q. II:275: ‘Allah has permitted trade’), it is not conceived as a human product but as a part of man’s responsibility to perform Shari‘ah, as God’s agent in the ‘real’/‘right’ (haqq). Thus, while any legitimate profit follows liability (al-kharaj bi-l-daman), risk management coherently endorses the primacy of the real economy, exchange equilibrium (with any unlawful increase from riba, gharar or maysir being prohibited), and profit-loss sharing. In other terms, if risk continues to hold an economic value in Islamic finance, this value exists only as legitimate profit (kharaj) through liability (daman), and remains linked to asset-based and commercial activities. As a result, the logic underpinning Islamic banking and insurance (takaful), as well as securities (sukuk) trade, becomes hardly comparable to the conventional one, and rejects financial products, such as derivatives, that are deemed lacking in any commercial value since nothing ‘real’ is actually traded. To conclude, the paper remarks on how this alternative history of risk in Islam requires further consideration in financial theory and regulation, for the benefit of a level playing field where both conventional and Islamic finance are able to co-exist and prosper under the same (God’s) sky.

The politics of emergence: Public–private partnerships and the conflictive timescapes of apomixis technology development

How are ‘conflicts in time’ in technoscientific practices effectively theorised from a social scientific perspective? What are the ramifications for critique of the complex relations between ‘public’ and ‘private’ sectors in the global bioeconomy? This article furnishes a case study drawn from frontier research in agricultural biotechnology development, as this field is confronted with the challenges of global food security and climate change. ‘Apomixis’, the capacity of certain plants to ‘self-clone’, would arguably comprise a revolutionary tool for agriculture. Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are a leading template for innovation, yet their hybrid character poses special challenges to stakeholders for the resource-poor. Through historical anthropological study of a PPP incorporating key players from the public sector and seed industry, I analyse the conflictive temporal politics of project planning and management, co-innovation, and frontier research; their impacts on technology development; and highlight implications for production of public goods. The article illustrates how such conflicts are illuminated by a temporal analysis informed by the anthropology of time, science and technology studies, and the philosophy of Deleuze. It presents a theoretical model for wider critique of how significant research and development trajectories go undeveloped or are impeded, which it terms ‘sideshadows’.

Generalized Representations of Musical Time and Periodic Structures

M God, what has sound got to do with music?” quoth Charles Ives ([1920] 2004:54). Music—and musical time—are embodied phenomena, but every musical utterance filters through perception, and is subject to diverse and sometimes contradictory audiations depending on production, reception, context, history, affinity, and many other known factors. That is all semiotics. Yet despite the flux, there is the possibility of a systematic typology of time structures built from elemental musical and cognitive facts and their logical hierarchical orderings. A strict logical approach to taxonomy stands in contrast to methods that regard entities’ features as in re (i.e., inherent properties of things in themselves) or nominal (e.g., as construed by their perceiver or as an artifact of language; see Molino 2009:233–40). I propose a sketch of some branches of such a logical typology, positing a set of platonic ideal types of time and surveying messy, subjective reality from some distance. Although even a cursory survey of the literature on the anthropology of time or the study of musical time would distract from the concision I seek here, comments with regard to my motivation may be of use. My interest in an integrated, holistic, quasi-neutral, and logical approach to musical time grew from a life thus far spent among diverse music traditions. Those I studied did not convey the sense of intrinsically different temporality that has often been considered axiomatic for culture-crossers, as evidenced in much of what is written and what we are taught. From Durkheim (1915) and through to Geertz (1973) and many others, the tenacious notion that other cultures have distinctive time senses has been built up. But Gell ([1992] 2001) is one anthropologist who convincingly shows that although different philosophies or metaphysics or ritual practices of time are legion, it is quite another thing to say that individuals (let alone cultures) have fundamentally different experiences of time—except, of course, insofar as all people do as a function of their era, age, experience, capacities, backgrounds, “

Christ and Time—Part Three: “Telling Time” in the Fourth Gospel

Telling time is more than calculating the meanings of day or hour in the Fourth Gospel. After considering the typical time markers (day, year, hour), we turn to the anthropology of time to learn more subtle ways of “telling time.” Of the many classifications in anthropological literature, we focus on four as the most useful for reading the Fourth Gospel: (1) past, present, forthcoming, and future; (2) eternal and contingent; (3) sequence and duration; and (4) before and after. Of particular significance is the description of forthcoming time as the later completion of a present action. Jesus truly enjoys eternal time: uncreated in the past and imperishable in the future. He is temporally “after” John but in fact he was “before” him in time and precedence. We learn, moreover, that no character can “tell time,” the exclusive preserve of Jesus; misunderstanding his “time” remarks is a unique feature of this narrative.