Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses Matera, European Capital of Culture (ECoC) 2019 as an ethnographic example of heterochronic temporality and frictions. In this "vernacular timespace" (Bryant and Knight 2019), local aspirations are not always in synch with futures ensuing from this late-capitalist mega event.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the ethnographic example of the city of Matera, Italy, which recently concluded its tenure as European Capital of Culture (ECoC) 2019. The Matera 2019 ECoC mega event revealed itself to be a site of conflicting tensions or "frictions" (Tsing 2005) featuring a heterochronic articulation of temporality. Drawing from the work of Bryant and Knight (2019), the author sees a Time of Matera 2019 as a form of "vernacular timespace" among the Materani. After providing a contextualization of local aspirations by reviewing past futures in Matera, the paper describes more recent futures in the Time of Matera 2019, in which official horizons of a cosmopolitan, hypertechonological future coincide with tensions resulting from transformations of the city under late capitalism and the rise of touristic commodification. The discussion considers how the adoption of the "Open Future" logo and slogan for Matera 2019 ECoC, with an ensuing conflict, encapsulates a heterochronic tension existing between Matera 2019 as a mega event and the general population. The analysis also seeks to return anew to Italy's long-standing Southern Question with a reflection on strident temporalities: the frictions produced through the unfolding of touristic and high-tech development in the Time of Matera 2019 and the promotion of Matera, but also Southern Italy more broadly, as a celebrated site of "slowness", following Franco Cassano's influential notion of pensiero meridiano [Southern thought] (Cassano 1996).

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents an ethnographic account of the temporal experience of a family of Irish Travellers in London. It demonstrates that while Travellers’ temporal experience is fluid and multifaceted, it is their dreaded expectations of what the future portends that shapes their sense of time.

Paper long abstract:

Irish Travellers are one of the most marginalized groups in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Influential work focusing on the time-making activities of marginalized groups, suggests that they purposefully orient their temporal horizons to the present. This paper sets out to destabilize this approach through examining how the threat and implementation of eviction by a borough council shaped the sense of time of an extended family of Irish Travellers living in an extra-legal camp in London. To do this the paper presents an ethnographic account demonstrating that, though Travellers’ temporal experience is fluid and multifaceted, it is their dreaded expectations of what the future portends that shapes their sense of time. Therefore, Travellers’, temporal horizons are not present-oriented but are shaped by the state’s ability to impose spatial and temporal regimes on them, through implementing eviction proceedings.

The paper ends by examining how this eviction is part of the council’s attempts to implement their new masterplan to redevelop the area that encompasses the Travellers’ encampment. In this scheme, Travellers are excluded from the council’s futurist vision of fabricating, what the advertising hoardings that litter the area term, ‘a new part of the city’. Therefore, while the council shaped the Travellers’ sense of time through threatening their future in the camp; the future envisioned by the council, redevelopers, and the broader field of actors involved in regenerating the late-liberal city, had no place, and more crucially, no time, for these Travellers.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the shifting temporal and spatial frameworks of contemporary Brazilian economic policies through a description of the difficulties antitrust regulators faced when dealing with other branches of government, which limited the usefulness of their knowledge practices.

Paper long abstract:

Based on a 18-month ethnographic fieldwork at the Brazilian federal antitrust agency, this paper describes the difficulties antitrust regulators faced when a different branch of the federal government decided to implement an industrial policy which made their work less relevant or even useless. Taking as a theoretical background the literature of anthropology of bureaucracy, economic anthropology and the anthropology of time and future, the paper focuses on the impact the 'national champions' industrial policy - implemented by the National Development Bank during the Worker's Party administrations (2002-2016) - had for the federal antitrust agency and its professionals, taking into account the different temporal and spatial frameworks these two different policies (antitrust policy and industrial policy) implied.

Industrial policy makers, preoccupied with the long-term future strength of the 'national economy' were less inclined to pay attention to antitrust's particular focus on the short-term consequences of building large corporate conglomerates. Antitrust knowledge practices, aimed particularly to identify and prevent possible (and probable) future corporate practices, were considered as less relevant to economic policy as a whole. As antitrust policy's prospective engagement with future market scenarios seemed to be shifting to a retrospective engagement with past illegal corporate conducts, this paper also traces the different temporalities that were being transformed from the point of view of bureaucratic practices and lives. It analyses how some administrative proceedings and artifacts became less urgent, and how personal career projects were being compromised in this process, as regulators became uncertain about the future of antitrust itself.

Paper short abstract:

Maintaining life insurance is a financial practice oriented towards future death that can conflict with the need to sustain life in the present. This paper explores how home service insurance agents in New Orleans perform temporal work to ensure coverage in economically precarious neighborhoods.

Paper long abstract:

Buying and maintaining life insurance policies is a financial practice oriented towards future death that can conflict with the need to sustain life in the present. This is especially the case with home service life insurance, the door-to-door sale and monthly collection of premiums towards small policies that is popular among working-class black Americans. In this paper, I analyze the everyday work that insurance agents do in the operations of the home service market of the life insurance industry in New Orleans, USA, where I conducted ten months of ethnographic fieldwork (2017-2018). I focus on the ways that insurance agents attempt to time their collections in the low-income neighborhoods they service. They use strategies that include the anticipation of exact moments in which individual policyholders obtain money and practices of time-tricking (Moroşanu and Ringel 2016) that bring future money into the present (e.g., using post-dated checks). I argue that insurance agents thus perform temporal labor to make sure their customers mobilize scarce money in the present to pay their insurance, which protects them from the financial costs incurred at death whenever it may strike. The paper contributes to the growing scholarship in the social studies of finance that explores how financial technologies shape conceptions of temporality. Moving away from a focus on financial elites that characterizes this body of literature (Kar 2018), I analyze the intimate and mundane temporal labor of insurance agents necessary for the functioning of life insurance under conditions of economic precarity.