Paper short abstract:

When did ‘late socialism’ end? When did post-socialism start? These questions are important for periodisation of Soviet-type societies. How do they look from the point of view of the anthropology of time? What does this temporalisation of state socialism tell us about the histories of the ‘social’?

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I focus on the analytical distinctions of late- and post-socialism in dialogue, and in continuum with Soviet distinctions of ‘before’ and ‘now’. In doing so, my goal is to propose a language of description that may be called ‘post-social history’ of Soviet society. My case in point is ethnography of work in Evenki reindeer brigade that I conducted in 1988. I argue that labour and discipline relations in this brigade reveal a peculiar temporality that includes several endpoints visible in quarrels over how much and how hard reindeer herders were to work, and what was the social (obshestvennaia) significance of their labour itself. If collective farm and reindeer brigade organisation can be considered as ‘modernity as time’ (Ssorin-Chaikov 2017), how did it temporalise work? If labour time was, for Marx, a basis as well as a way to measure ‘definite social relation between men’ that under socialism were to substitute ‘relations between things’ in commodity exchange, what temporal endpoints did this socialist ‘social’ assume in theory and (collective farm) practice? What kind of an ‘end of the social’ was constituted by an empty workplace of a reindeer herder who has gone hunting instead? The ‘social’ here is not as an analytical frame as in Durkheimean anthropology and social history but a Soviet category. I chart how it was assembled and what temporal endpoints it entailed. As labour was the main means of this assemblage, what was assembled when this ‘social’ itself stopped labouring?

Paper short abstract:

This paper frames utopia as an ‘end of time’ timespace, exploring the ways in which political utopias are conceived as temporal endings that we may one day achieve.

Paper long abstract:

Utopia has always belonged to the realm of political endings. From its theoretical conception in Tomas More’s Utopia to contemporary social dystopias, the utopian imagination has sought to open up the realm of the possible, driven by the imagination of a flawless future to which society might one day arrive. In recent years however, contemporary utopian scholars have sought to overcome authoritative critiques of utopias by re-defining them as an indeterminate, unfixed future that is in a continuous state of self-improvement. This paper seeks to challenge this abstract framing by re-grounding utopian studies in the everyday ethnographic practices of political actors, who conceive of their imagined political utopias as temporal and political endings. Drawing form ethnographic work amongst Scottish National Party activists I show how the utopian dream of Scottish independence is perceived to be a finite end goal, a telos in which change, progress and the future itself cease to exist. Activists find themselves incapable of imagining a future beyond independence in which they will have achieved all the hopes and potentialities that they could have possibly concieved. Instead, a post-independence future is imagined as a space of perpetual durational time in which multiplicity and memory transpire, but no momentum towards the future exists. In this way, Scotland’s independent future emerges as an ‘end of time’ timespace which political activists orient themselves towards, driven by the hope that this utopian end inspires.

Paper short abstract:

I discuss how, in a context of dementia, people live toward the end of life, demonstrating that this is a future-oriented temporal project. I argue that future-making is not necessarily open-ended, but also works to define endings. In this finitude-as-future, potentiality is sought in a ‘good’ end.

Paper long abstract:

Dying takes time—it has duration and a temporal shape. Through ethnographic research in nursing homes in the Netherlands, I explore how people with dementia, their family members and professional caregivers live toward the end of life, and demonstrate that managing the end of life is a future-oriented, temporal project. From when death is still considered distant until the last moment when it has drawn nearest, death figures as future and as a marker of finitude. Dying was often seen as “heading downward,” “stepwise,” “gradual,” or “fluctuating,” and death itself described as “timely,” “lingering,” or “unexpected.” These endings are diffuse; they are lived in the present through experiences of gradual loss and involve constant expectation and anticipation. I show that future-making is not necessarily ongoing and open-ended, but also works to define endings.

Further, I demonstrate that this future-making particularly involved striving towards a ‘good’ death. This process of attributing value and meaning to the end of life—the extent to which death may be considered ‘good’—is dependent on a moral evaluation of life and on the value ascribed to experiences and projections of time. Taking the ending of life as object of ethnographic inquiry, and rather than focusing on the potentiality in continuation or renewal, I explore how, in this finitude-as-future, potentiality is sought precisely in a ‘good’ end.

Paper short abstract:

We discuss a pilot project initiated by the Estonian state to scale down shrinking towns and study how the demolition of housing and relocation of residents in Ida-Virumaa is meant to retemporalise this region towards the future, after a century of modern mono-functional industrialism & extractivism

Paper long abstract:

For anyone born in Eastern-Estonia after the Soviet collapse, decline is all they have known; a decline that is durable and contagious, generating negative affect, leading to disurbanisation, disinvestment, unemployment, emigration and industries closing down. Along with increasing regional disparities and a spatial stigma, Ida-Virumaa faces a scenario of partial loss of key services (schools, hospitals, businesses). The politics of the present and the infrastructures inherited from the past intensively meet here, showing multiple endings but few new beginnings. In this context of negative capability, whereby future-making is no longer a possible outcome without dealing with the leftovers of Soviet modernity, the sacrifice of half-empty housing appears as part of constructing the promise of a new, desirable future and better life.

We critically investigate multi-scalar strategies to cope with decline and the epistemic dimensions of the half-empty phenomenon. Over a year, we have been meeting with the state, regional and municipal expert groups involved in the down-scaling strategy; we have also carried dozens of face-to-face and phone interviews with local neighbours, attended information meetings to explain the relocation process, and visited the apartments where the residents are supposed to move in. Half-empty khruschyovkas and Stalinistic ensembles have become sadly iconic, forming the (negative) social imagination of how the region is conceived and referred. Demolition and relocation, in turn, put the emphasis on management of decreasing resources; financial efforts are not oriented towards growth or progress anymore, but to how make the urbanity of this place last in time.