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Paper short abstract

In this paper, I present a reflection on generative autoethnographic research on bipolar chronotope and show how this experience can be used to rethink chronotopic instability as a reservoir for anthropological method and ethics.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I show how generative autoethnographic research on the lived experience of bipolar affective disorder can be used to explore how anthropology works within fragmented, intimate, and unstable time–space configurations. I do not treat bipolarity as a medicalised oscillation between opposed affective states, but approach it as an embodied condition of fractured and overlapping chronotopes, in which multiple temporalities and spatial orientations coexist, collide, and resist stabilisation. I situate these experiences within broader anthropological debates on polarisation as a dynamic and relational process and show how bipolar experience reflects polarisation as something felt, embodied, and lived in time.

I engage the concept of the chronotope to analyse how bipolar temporalities (marked by acceleration, suspension, excess, and temporal disjunction) intersect with other chronotopes. While institutional chronotopes of psychiatry and academia demand coherence, linear progression, and synchronisation, producing moments in which shared timespace becomes impossible, ethnographic situations may open up provisional spaces of alignment, where fractured temporalities are not resolved but sustained and held in relation.

I argue that chronotopic instability, while often experienced as disorienting or exhausting, can function as a generative reservoir for anthropological method and ethics. Working from within fractured chronotopes demands alternative modes of care, accountability, and future-making, and challenges anthropology’s reliance on a presumptively homogeneous ethnographic present. By staying with instability rather than resolving it, the paper contributes to rethinking how ethnography might be written, lived, and shared in a polarised world.