ASA Anthropology of Time Network

Aims and objectives

The aim of the network is to provide a space that brings together researchers interested in the study of time and temporality, facilitating links between scholars from diverse ethnographic and intellectual backgrounds at any stages of their career to cultivate research collaboration, knowledge-exchange and circulation of ideas. Its immediate objectives are:

• To provide a space of contact, collaboration and networking for scholars who engage with the anthropology of time.
• To create a database of anthropologists working with time and temporality.
• To promote and support ethnographic and theoretical innovation in the anthropology of time.
• To foment the study of time and temporality in anthropology more generally across all career levels.
• To support postgraduates engaging with the anthropology of time by creating networking and publishing opportunities as well as creating new contemporary resources on the anthropology of time.

Inaugural lecture at network opening event

Dr Chloe Ahmann (Cornell University)
Time Bomb: Toxic Disavowal in the Shadow of Apocalypse.
Time is political, and honing a sharp analysis of time can mean wielding political power. Honing an analysis tuned to the exigencies of a moment can mean wielding more, but this accommodation has its costs. This talk unfolds on Baltimore’s industrial edge during a moment on the edge—the late Cold War—considering how residents made sick over years of toxic exposure and anxious for a buyout of their homes learned not to politicize slow violence. They chose instead to dramatize their imminent demise in the event of an industrial disaster: a studied response to the Cold War US state’s fixation on apocalypse.

In the sense that they eventually secured a buyout, this argument was a success. But it hinged on an agreement to limit charges to the hypothetical. It proceeded as if the gravest obstacles to life lay then, in the devastating future, and not now, ambient and tedious. Examining how residents came to strike this painful bargain and the bleak conditions that made it seem like their best choice, I consider what it means to privilege an analysis that works over an analysis that speaks to life as lived—especially when the analysis that works holds that a hypothetical death carries more political value than a real one.