Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the overlap of different zones of temporality and their associated frames of normativity in a Ghanaian marketplace.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the overlap of different zones of temporality and their associated frames of normativity in a Ghanaian marketplace. While processes of globalization and market liberalization have long been suspected of spreading ideas of order in addition to capital and labour across the globe, much less is known about the processes of translation, creative adaptation and eventual incorporation of these ideas of order into the canon of everyday claim-making. Rejecting the notion of monochronism, I argue that Ghanaian market traders are not in a situation of "time-lag" struggling to catch up along an ever escaping stream of homogenous time (Harootunian 2010) where normative orders centred around the concept of citizenship as a rights-bearing relationship between the state and autonomous individuals gradually replace supposedly "non-modern" forms of claim-making and their authorization. Instead, in their encounter with coeval, non-capitalist time zones, ideas of order associated with the temporality of a capitalist modern present are themselves disrupted and polluted. That said, when Ghanaian market traders interact with international organizations, e.g. for securing donor funding, the liberal notion of rights at first appears to be at the core of their everyday practices. Yet, in the daily affairs of the market, it is the notions of seniority, social relatedness, responsibility for others, among others - and the authorization of claims rooted in these normative principles - that syncretically fill the imported rights-talk with actual signification.