Paper short abstract:

In grappling with contemporary anthropological discussions of value, this paper explores the varieties of temporal experience and the moral dilemmas characteristic of unplanned pregnancy in Manila, the Philippines.

Paper long abstract:

For young, unmarried Manileñan women, the cessation of menstruation is often the earliest indication of pregnancy. This disruption of regular bodily temporality sparks a moral crisis characterised by shame, ambiguity, joy, and uncertainty. By examining womens' narrative accounts of this continually unfolding temporal drama, this paper engages with Michael Lambek's (2013) sketch of an anthropological theory of value which proposes action (doing) and production (making) as two modes of the human generation of value. Not so much as a provocation but rather as a further probing of this theory, I suggest that the generation of human life, that which is of ultimate value in the Manileñan lifeworld, does not necessarily fall neatly into either category. I demonstrate this by exploring women's descriptions of bodily temporal experience, with reference to various phenomenological accounts of pregnancy, but primarily Iris Marion Young's (1990) treatise on pregnant embodiment. The main thrust of this argument lies in the assertion that pregnancy is in part characterised by a split temporality; women are caught in what Young calls "a dialectic of waiting and doing". Here, pregnancy is an ambiguous affair, something the woman is doing, and which is simultaneously happening to her. I will attempt to show this through ethnographic descriptions of my interlocutors' coming to terms with and embracing their pregnancies, moving out of the crisis of values which defined their early pregnancy.

Paper short abstract:

How do hierarchies of value de-value certain experiences of temporality? We will use the experiences of Dalit women who use spirit possession to re-negotiate the stigma of infertility to reflect on ways in which possession and mediumship might illuminate some features of pregnant embodiment.

Paper long abstract:

We all inhabit ‘time knots’, the term Chakrabarty employs to describe C.V Raman, Nobel Prize winning scientist from the 1930s, who took a ritual bath ahead of a solar eclipse. Chakrabarty would encourage us to similarly embrace the time knot and jettison the need to apply totalising principles such as rationalism and progress to every aspect of our existence. The example has particular salience for the global south where the title of ‘being modern’ places vast regions of the world in the temporal and ontological limbo of forever ‘being-developed’. But this scientist was able to comfortably respond to the question, saying “The Nobel prize? That was science, a solar eclipse is personal” (Provincialising Europe 2000:254). Such a comfort speaks of diverse and unequal sources of cultural capital within the so-called ‘developing world’. Brahman male scientists in the early twentieth century had both caste and gender advantages to draw on – a caste habitus as ‘traditional intellectuals’, in the Gramscian sense, supported by the invisible labour of lower castes as well as Brahman women to prepare their ritual bath and pure vegetarian, elaborate meals. These questions of labour, power and visibility are therefore, simultaneously, forms of value that hierarchise forms of bodily engagement with the world. This comes into clear contrast if we compare it with the temporalities of two forms of bodily engagement that struggle to receive recognition within the values of a patriarchal and caste/class order. Both possession and pregnancy strain at the limits of received discourses, whether of temporality, or indeed, of experience itself. Yet both are frequently interconnected in Tamil country (south India), as a diagnosis for the inability of a woman to successfully establish herself as the mother of children, whether due to spontaneous abortions, failure to conceive, or even when it takes the form of the death of children in early infancy. Possession makes a woman something other than a woman, and as such can offer some relief from the alternative in such circumstances– the stigma of being less than a woman. For yet other women, possession offers a potential pathway into cultivating this affliction into a form of mediumship where they become goddesses dispensing existential justice. The paper attends not only to the ethnographic specificities of these forms of negotiation, but to ways in which the rarer phenomenon of possession and mediumship could illuminate more widely shared features of temporality in pregnant embodiment.

Paper short abstract:

Scientific efforts to clone extinct species through extracting DNA from remnant museum specimens raise a number of ethical issues underscored by competing questions of value. Using the thylacine as a case study, this paper considers the intersection of time and value in the context of de-extinction.

Paper long abstract:

Scientific efforts to clone extinct animals through the extraction of DNA from remnant museum specimens raise a number of ethical issues involving competing questions of value. What is being prioritized in such efforts - is it the animal or the species, the scientific or the economic, or is it the idea of de-extinction as a uniquely human capacity to subvert linear and genetic notions of time? Drawing on scientific efforts to clone the thylacine, this paper considers the notion of de-extinction through cloning as a particular form of exchange: one that involves the transfer of body parts, and that has the potential to extend species in time and space. This invites a conceptual analysis that links questions of time and value with anthropological discussions about partibility and personhood and activities that, in other contexts, might be described as 'sorcery' or 'magic'.

Paper short abstract:

The paper looks into certain absurd applications of clock time in Finland, where time is taken either too literally, or too figuratively, or frequently both.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws attention to the formation of the units of time used in establishing equivalences in Finland. More precisely, I look into the role of abstract clock time as "the quantitative aspect of labour as well as its inherent measure" (Marx 1859), but at the same time also as a malleable thing which can be bought, sold, or exchanged in various forms and measures. My ethnographic data comes from two case studies that concern time as a measure of value in Finland. The first one concerns a mutual help network known as the Helsinki Timebank, which continues to contest the Finnish Tax Administration's ruling over the taxation value of "banked" time. The second case concerns the neoliberal time accounting systems employed by the University of Helsinki; an accountants' "fiction" which nonetheless resembles the university employees' factual work times just closely enough to be a cause for upset, even worry for many. In both of these cases, time is used as the basis of very different types of "exchanges" or trades, assumedly because of its precise measurability, but ultimately also because the abstract nature of time allows its deployment towards complete equivalence. Looking into such balance-driven employment of time, this paper takes inspiration from Bill Maurer's (2005) call to engage with the "mathematical form of the equivalence function as a moral form".

Paper short abstract:

In 2018 there was a Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 outbreak in my fieldsite in Laos. I was one of the "chicken farmers" most affected. In this paper, I examine the values and temporalities of my response to the outbreak as compared to those of local government officials and my neighbours.

Paper long abstract:

Outbreaks of infectious disease often provoke questions of "who/what is to blame?" and "what can be done?" Dominant liberal-democratic and biomedical answers frequently involve voluntarist models of human agency which imply a forward-looking temporal link between intent and act. In 2018, I was involved as a "chicken farmer" in an outbreak of H5N1 in Lao PDR while living in a rural village as part of my anthropological fieldwork. Reflecting on this experience shows how voluntarist models of agency structured my reactions to the outbreak, but were also motivated by sometimes inchoate fears and fantasies. Furthermore, my voluntarist model was not shared by important local government figures or my neighbours. My neighbours acted out what I call a relational-reparative approach. This approach was retrospective, taking outbreak as a demand to investigate how we had been relating to one another, to animals and to things. It conceived of agents as responsibilized by networks of entanglement. I suggest that the reparative-relational approach be considered as an inspiration for improved responses to infectious disease. The role for anthropology in outbreak situations that I demonstrate and argue for here is one where the anthropologist helps herself and others to learn from, rather than about, different world views.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the mental distress, or 'tension', experienced by adolescent girls in rural North India through the heuristic of time in order to probe the value-conflict between Pan-Indian modern future and eternal domestic present that frames their lives.

Paper long abstract:

The present, for adolescents girls living in the Gaddi-speaking communities of the Indian Western Himalaya, is particularly fraught. The rapid advent of female literacy, internet connectivity and new forms of waged employment opens girls up to a future-focused form of time reckoning, oriented toward a Pan-Indian national imaginary. However, the eternal present of domestic labour in the Gaddi household, and strict expectations of propriety, leaves this future just beyond their reach. The temporal dissonance between hopeful future and eternal present maps onto a moral dissonance for adolescent girls between the productive values of modernity on one hand, and the reproductive values of community on the other. The social experience of such dissonance is marked by a great deal of frustration and mental distress, expressed through the idiom of 'tension', and often manifest in somatic illness, sexually deviant behaviour or spirit possession. This paper traces the stories of a number of adolescent girls who reckon with this dissonance. It explores their labour in/of time (Bear 2015) necessary to suture together divergent temporalities, and to strategically keep them apart. In examining their stories, I contend that time is hence an important heuristic for anthropologically framing mental distress, as it allows one to link a materialist analysis of changing political economy, with an ethical analysis of changing constellations of value.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the different temporal registers that young Karen Buddhists inhabit in their attempts to live virtuous lives. I argue that value is best understood as a set of contradictory and ambiguous ideals which individuals seek to cultivate and enact within multiple temporalities.

Paper long abstract:

In Karen communities in southeastern Myanmar, children learn from a very young age that filial respect and gratitude are considered the highest moral values. For many people it is believed that children incur a debt of gratitude to their parents when they are born, a debt which is vital to understanding the basis of parent-child relationships. While all children are born indebted to their parents, daughters in particular bear a material responsibility to provide for the family unit and failure to fulfil this duty is considered demeritorious or immoral.

Drawing from Ssorin-Chaikov's (2017) understanding of modernity as made up of multiple temporalities, this paper explores the relations between different temporal registers that young Karen women inhabit in their attempts to live virtuous lives. MacIntyre's (1981) theory of virtue ethics implies a degree of coherence in eudaimonic conceptions of the self, virtue and conceptions of human flourishing. However, to focus on a singular and coherent narrative of eudaimonic selfhood, overlooks the variety of everyday temporalities that people draw upon in their deliberations about how to pursue a virtuous life and indeed morality. Drawing from the lives of two young Plong Karen women, I argue that the ability to pursue a virtuous life cannot be reduced to singular understanding of time or indeed virtue. Directing our attention to the fragility embedded within young people's efforts to transform themselves and the social and material spaces within which they live, I argue that pursuing virtuous lives depends crucially on traversing circumstances and temporalities that are often fraught, uncertain and can also lead to failure.

Paper short abstract:

This paper juxtaposes neoliberal conceptualisations of time, value, labour, and health against the experiences of older blue collar workers, illustrating that health is one of the most potent time constraints for older workers, yet remains unaccounted for in Australian labour policy.

Paper long abstract:

Assumptions about time, value, labour, and health coalesce in the policy decision to extend the pension eligibility age in Australia from 65 to 67 years. These additional two years in the labour force reflect a morally-laden neoliberal approach to time, which values time spent working over other uses of time. The extended pension eligibility age also reflects a neoliberal valuing of the individual, dependent on extended labour participation and economic productivity. Acknowledging the multiple, often incompatible ways in which time is conceptualised and experienced, we question the expectation of extending Australians' working lives. Drawing on interviews with 19 bus drivers in Western Australia, we illustrate that older workers in blue collar occupations experience chronic health conditions that not only limit their ability to maintain the "strict time-discipline" (May and Thrift 2001) required to remain in the workforce as they approach retirement, but also introduce demands on their time not accounted for in labour policy (including those required for the management of chronic health conditions). Poor health, and the multiple ways in which it constrains labour and time, fosters diverse, unequal, and uneven experiences of the final years of work for these blue collar workers, which may not allow them to meet the policy expectation to work until the age of 67. We further argue that by failing to allow for the long-term health effects of blue collar work, raising the pension age devalues industrial work histories and time spent in manual labour by ignoring its work-limiting effects on the body.

Paper short abstract:

This paper sets out on a bus journey through Yangon to discuss the spatiotemporal dissonance thrown up by Myanmar's fraught democratic transition.

Paper long abstract:

Pentecostal believers in Yangon, like their Buddhist neighbours, spend a lot of time on the bus, often stuck in traffic. Many of these buses are second-hand imports from South Korea, which frequently display route maps not for Yangon, but for Seoul. This paper sets off on one such journey with Pentecostals amidst Myanmar's fraught democratic transition, attending to the spatiotemporal dissonance between Yangon's congested streets and the sleek but faded renderings of Seoul's public transport network. To traverse these actual and imagined infrastructures simultaneously is to commute across the complex timescapes thrown up by Myanmar's promised transition - timescapes upon which Pentecostals seek to act, in consort with God, through a combination of voting and prayer that intertwines secular with messianic time. I discuss how, for these minority Christians, contrasting visions of modernity and progress are evaluated through a soteriology that maps personal onto national salvation, one in which the figure of a hyper-modern South Korea - as an apparent Christian nation - looms large. Recalling Weber's classic thesis, this figure stands in contrast to a not-yet-arrived Myanmar whose intransigent Buddhism, even in the face of two centuries of missionary effort, continues, for now, to hold it at an impasse, stuck like a bus idling in Yangon traffic.

Paper short abstract:

What can a consideration of the relationship between money and time tell us about the politics of wear vis a vis particular money objects and the cultural concepts and conventions of value which render them interpretable?

Paper long abstract:

In her recent novel, The Psychology of Time Travel, Kate Mascarenhas describes an alternate history in which time travel was discovered by a team of female scientists in the late 1960s and rapidly thereafter turned into a practice supported by an immense and secretive quasi-governmental bureaucracy. In the context of this state institution, time travelers were issued with money in the form of what Mascarenhas terms the "achronic pound" or "achron" for short, a form of money worth the same amount in whatever year a time traveller might visit. The figure of the achron highlights a central paradox concerning money's relationship to time: namely, while money is presented as timeless, in practice the value of currency is bound up intimately with particular temporalities. My proposed essay juxtaposes Mascarenhas' notion of the achron with so-called historical currency convertors (which express the value of past currencies in "today's money") as a means of opening up a discussion of the relationship between money and time, with particular relevance to divergent modes of monetary signification in which the condition of notes alternately does or does not affect their ability to retain value. What in other words, can a consideration of the relationship between money and time tell us about the politics of wear vis a vis particular money objects and the cultural concepts and conventions of value which render them interpretable?