Paper short abstract:

Projects of ethical self-fashioning are dependent on their ability to unfold throughout time. Pushing against this are the fragmentary pressures of globalization. I examine how modern Londoners strive to ‘trap’, ‘grab’ and ‘keep’ time in order to enable such projects of self-fashioning to develop

Paper long abstract:

Within the recent anthropological focus on ethics, there has been a vital - if underdeveloped recognition - of how ethical projects are grounded in a mode of unfolding time that allows for understandings of self and of others to be developed and articulated. Ethical subjects become so through striving to act more-or-less consistently through changing circumstances, and this requires a mode of time that is neither too closed and controlled, nor too open-ended and uncertain. Against this, globalization has generated pressures both towards the carefully accounted control of time, through the spread of capitalist modes of exchange on one hand, and towards the over-fragmentation of time on the other, as people, ideas and images from across the globe all converge on 'local' space to infuse it with a host of competing temporalities.

In this context, I look at how citizens of London imagine ideas of the good, in tenuous and often cynical ways, but also at how they then deploy particular practices of time management to 'trap' 'make' and 'keep' in order to keep these fragile projects of self-fashioning unfolding over time. I focus in particular on an exercise group meant to deter youth from gang involvement. Commitments to body-building, in this context, become commitments to a particularly disciplined self with wider horizons of capabilities and aspirations. However, in the wider world, these disciplines slip or contend with other pressures. I argue that, in this context, youth and trainers both focus on developing ways to manage time to allow space for ethics to unfold.