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.