Time Work: Studies of Temporal Agency

by Michael G. Flaherty (Editor), Lotte Meinert (Editor), Anne Line Dalsgård (Editor)

Overview

Examining how people alter or customize various dimensions of their temporal experience, this volume discovers how we resist external sources of temporal constraint or structure. These ethnographic studies are international in scope and look at many different countries and continents. They come to the overall conclusion that people construct their own circumstances with the intention to modify their experience of time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789207057
Publisher:	Berghahn Books
Publication date:	06/09/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	234
File size:	650 KB

About the Author

Michael G. Flaherty is Professor of Sociology at Eckerd College and the University of South Florida. He is the author of The Textures of Time: Agency and Temporal Experience (Temple University Press, 2011). He was also the recipient of a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (2016-2017).

Lotte Meinert is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University. She is the author of Hopes in Friction: Schooling, Health, and Everyday Life in Uganda (Information Age Publishing, 2009) and is a co-editor of In the Event: The Anthropology of Generic Moments (Berghahn, 2015).

Anne Line Dalsgård is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University. She is the author of Matters of Life and Longing: Female Sterilisation in Northern Brazil (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004) and is a co-editor of Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality: Time Objectified (Temple University Press, 2014).

Table of Contents

PART I: BEGINNINGS, CONCEPTS, AND QUESTIONS

Introduction
Michael G. Flaherty, Anne Line Dalsgård, and Lotte Meinert

Chapter 1. The Lathe of Time: Some Principles of Temporal Agency
Michael G. Flaherty

PART II: TEMPORAL AFFLICTIONS

Chapter 2. Repetition Work: Healing Spirits and Trauma in the Churches of Northern Uganda
Lars Williams and Lotte Meinert

Chapter 3. ADHD and Temporal Experiences: Struggling for Synchronization
Mikka Nielsen

PART III: THE POLITICS OF TIME

Chapter 4. Hacking Time and Looping Temporalities in the Identification of the Adult “Living Disappeared” in Argentina
Noa Vaisman

Chapter 5. Temporal Front and Back Stages: Time Work as Resistance
Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott

PART IV: SPIRITUALITY AND ATHEISM AS TEMPORAL AGENCY

Chapter 6. Se Deus Quiser: Catholicism as Time Work among the Xukuru of Pernambuco
Clarissa Martins Lima

Chapter 7. “It Is Just Doing the Motion”: Atheist Time Work in Contemporary Kyrgyzstan
Maria Louw

PART V: REINVENTING THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

Chapter 8. Inventing New Time: Time Work in the Grief Practices of Bereaved Parents
Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Kjetil Sandvik

Chapter 9. Now Is Not: Future Anteriority and a Georgian in Russia
Martin Demant Frederiksen

PART VI: TIME AND DEPRIVATION

Chapter 10. The Work of Waiting: Boredom, Teatime, and Future-Making in Niger
Adeline Masquelier

Chapter 11. Balancing Blood Sugar: Fasting, Feeling, and Time Work During the Egyptian Ramadan
Mille Kjærgaard Thorsen and Anne Line Dalsgård

Afterword
Carmen Leccardi

Index

Editorial Reviews

“…an eclectic and enthralling collection of ethnographic studies…[that] is well structured and beautifully written. As the afterword notes, the book almost reads like a novel, with captivating ethnographic stories on themes ranging from the mundane to the spiritual. The variety of cultures covered—from Canada to Brazil to Kyrgyzstan—attests to an important aspect of time work: it’s universal. We all need time, and we all need to work on our time.” • Contemporary Sociology

“This book is a highly valuable and stimulating contribution to any social scientists interested in time. As any good scholarship, it certainly opens up conductive lines of inquiry to be further addressed in social studies of time. Furthermore, the chapters are very fluently written, well-presented, and highly readable, which, among other things, testify to the excellent work of the book’s editors.” • Symbolic Interaction

“Overall, the series of chapters constitutes a wide-ranging and provocative expansion of the initial framing of the concept of timework and details the bases in ethnographical evidence for its contemporary development. In the process, some highly relevant and nuanced insights emerge from this wider-scoped timework research, in terms of its relevance to and import for contemporary discourses about human agency in a wide range of settings. The editors weave these thematic sets of contributions into a compelling narrative of temporal agency as a deeply personal yet culturally situated and diverse family of activities with a universal relevance that is deserving of further social scientific inquiry.” • Kronoscope

“The central theme of this book is crucial to our understanding of the present. The conceptual themes of the chapters are very complementary and detailed … an inspiration for study and for readers’ own research. Each is well written, and warmly appreciative of local wisdom.” • Jane Guyer, Johns Hopkins University

“[This book] deals with issues of time, and particularly of people's attempts to manipulate temporal experience. In that way it speaks to a topic that has always been somewhat present in the social sciences, but that only relatively recently sees sustained and in-depth attention.” • Stef Jansen, University of Manchester

From the Publisher