Paper short abstract:

War is so forceful it often seems recent to its survivors regardless of when it occurred. The violent past is alive and lies in front. To understand the lived temporal experience of individual war survivors I develop a new transdisciplinary paradigm called the spatiotemporal self.

Paper long abstract:

War is so forceful it often seems recent to its survivors regardless of when it occurred. The violent past is alive and lies in front. Scholars often miss the significance of the violent past being alive, wrongly framing it as a byproduct of trauma. To better understand the lived temporal experience of war survivors I develop a new transdisciplinary paradigm called the spatiotemporal self.

The spatiotemporal self is a theoretically novel alliance of time and self, brought together by visual perspectives intrinsic to both. Time is conceived of using spatial construals of time — temporal span (T-span), sequence time (S-time), and most importantly, the internal and external variants of deictic time (D-time). The self is conceived of as having four levels that emerged in evolution: the protoself, core self, minimal self, and narrative self. The first three levels combine to use a pre-reflective mode of self-consciousness that emphasizes a phenomenological, experiential processing of events; these three levels use a first-person visual perspective of the self. The narrative self level uses a reflective mode of self-consciousness that emphasizes the conceptual meaning of events in the context of broader life and society; this level uses a third-person visual perspective of the self. As an alliance of cognitive processes, at the cognitive level the spatiotemporal self is a potential human universal.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tajikistan, my research examines the temporal experiences of a civil war that occurred 20 years before and a one-day battle that occurred during the fieldwork.

Paper short abstract:

Temporal markers of fear can determine if an asylum seeker's testimony is believable and if a case is considered reasonable in the eyes of the law. They also set the difference between "normal" and "pathological" fear, which is crucial to an asylum seekers' case.

Paper long abstract:

Recognizing fear, evaluating its plausibility and verifying its rationality has been at the core of asylum law ever since the United Nations established that refugee is a person with a "well-founded fear" of past and future persecution.

Drawing from ethnographic research in immigration courts in New York, I discuss how legal rationality prescribes temporal norms that are at odds with experiences of migration. I do so by looking at three elements of asylum law. First, I address the temporal markers that determine how fear is assessed in asylum seekers' testimonies. Then, I describe how time and rationality relate in gender-based immigration case law. Finally, I show how time plays an important role in drawing the limits between diagnoses of psychosis and "well-founded fear" in expert reports. I illustrate my arguments with the case of an asylum seeker from the Dominican Republic whose experience of fear escaped legal knowledge. By doing so, I hope to shed light on the relationship between emotions, ideas of time, and the making of law.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the organization of temporality in religious healing through dreams and visions of Kabyle immigrants in France, which prompted their conversion from Islam to Christianity. More broadly, the paper shows how memory works over time and space in processes of religious change.

Paper long abstract:

How do religious conversion testimonies featuring dreams and visions reveal different experiences of time, in particular, disruption, but also non-binary transformations? What do religious transformations and shifts in locality and lifestyle mean for memory in the organization of temporality? This proposed paper explores the organization of temporality in religious healing through dreams and visions of Kabyle immigrants in France, which prompted their conversion from Islam to Christianity, as conveyed in testimonies and life histories. Drawing on data from field research in and around Paris and its suburbs, there is analysis of the convert immigrants' lived experiences of transformation over time as shaped by entering new religious and psycho-social spaces. More broadly, the paper seeks to show ways remembering and forgetting work over time and space in processes of religious and psycho-social change in complex cases of both conversion and immigration, when there is, it is argued, an intertwining of disruption and continuity in both time and space. Remembering and forgetting, rather than mutually exclusive, together are part of how these immigrants forge new meanings in their temporal, spatial, and psycho-social religious healing from their experiences of tensions with the post-colonial state and political violence in Algeria and experiences of economic precarity and social discrimination in France. Visions and dreams illustrate the co-determination, co-constructedness, and multifunctionality of psycho-social conversion, space, and time.

Paper short abstract:

This essay applies Samuel Delany’s (2003 [1968]) post-structuralist notion of helical time, in which experience in subcultural settings can be seen as organized along a sequence of recurring yet changing events, to elucidate life-course and generational positionality in queer subcultures.

Paper long abstract:

Conventions of writing in an “ethnographic present” encounter particular challenges when applied to queer subcultures, which are often organized across a set of changing institutional settings both in-person and digitally mediated, and within a larger society with rapidly changing attitudes towards sexual minority individuals. Queer ethnographies have typically viewed queer institutions and social networks synchronically, centering the experience of young adults in their 20s and 30s who are thoroughly acculturated. Conversely, psychological studies have emphasized relatively ahistorical stage models. This essay takes inspiration from Samuel Delany’s (2003 [1968]) post-structuralist notion of helical time, in which experience in subcultural settings can be seen as organized along a sequence of recurring yet changing events. In a helical model, one may return to similar events or participate in the same spaces as another, but with a particular positionality informed by their prior experiences in those subcultural settings, as well as by their shifting age/life stage. Shared subcultural understandings and experiences are partly structured by the intersection of individuals’ age/life stage, age at which they began participating in particular queer subcultures (or “scenes”), and time acculturating in those subcultures (Hammack 2005). This paper draws on four years of ethnographic fieldwork since 1999 among gay and bisexual men in Czech Republic, examining their self-understandings and relationships, and the changing institutional setting of queer subcultures in Czech Republic (Hall 2009).

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how conversion to Christianity affects the experience of time among Pentecostal converts in Nepal. The miracles happening in their lives merge their present with the timeless reality of the Bible, inviting us to ponder what it might mean to ‘live in a book’.

Paper long abstract:

Pentecostal Christians in Sinja, Nepal, radically reinterpret fortuitous events in their lives as ‘miracles’. ‘A miracle’, I will argue, is not really ‘an event’ in itself, but a hermeneutic process in and through which the past is radically re-experienced differently in the present tense of the conversion narrative, allowing the coming into being of an alternative future. In so doing, miracles transfigure the world in a manifestation of the Word conveyed in the Bible. This allows Pentecostals to partake in the imaginary reality of the sacred text as real actors. Approaching miracles as specific technologies of the imagination that support the existential search of a better life, this presentation illustrates how the Bible acts upon Nepali Pentecostals, significantly reorienting the chrono-logics that structure their lifeworlds after conversion. Miracles actualise a hermeneutic fusion of horizons between the converts’ present here-and-now and the narrative reality of the scriptures. This interlacing of narrative elements of the Bible with everyday life poses a fundamental question about the relation between lived experience, narrative, and time. Grafting upon the eternal becoming of Hindu time, the temporal map of the Bible dissolves this narrative timeframe into the timeless time of a finite written plot which, at the same time, keeps happening here-and-now in the lives of Sinjali Christians. So, actualising in the world the timeless potential of a promise that has already been fulfilled in an ever-present scriptural ‘past’, Pentecostal miracles in Sinja invite us to ponder what it might mean to ‘live in a book’.