Why should anthropologists care about different experiences of time? Studying temporality through lived experience challenges and counterbalances pre-existing systemically created inequities. This panel examines temporality at multiple levels, from individual experience to societal transitions.
Long Abstract:
This panel seeks to destabilize assumptions about temporality by returning to a focus on lived experience. Personal reckonings of both shared and individual experiences are deeply shaped by the organization of time, or temporality. Yet, the ways psychological anthropologists have investigated time, temporality, and its lived experience are often limited by the institutions in which we conduct research as well as our own cultural conceptualizations.
Peeling back generalized cultural frameworks of time allows researchers to examine a fuller range of its experience. This task is important because it permits a broader perspective of reality to emerge without being limited by institutionally or societally privileged perspectives. Doing so can challenge the biases or power structures present in said institutions and societies; in this way, psychological anthropology can work to both challenge and counterbalance systemic and everyday inequity.
Papers in this panel will interrogate the inequalities of lived experience through the framework of temporality. Papers may explore examples of persons, groups, organizations, or societies that critique the temporal structures and confines of contemporary existence. Some topics may include, but are not limited to, the lived experience of mental illness, the asylum process, living through significant historical moments (e.g. colonization, COVID-19, war, economic turmoil, etc.), or personal experiences (e.g. religious healing, personal enlightenment; life transitions, etc.).
I examine several case studies of women’s plans and possible futures before and after they left one of Tijuana’s community-based drug rehabilitation centers. I investigate how our ability to hope and heal is shaped by our social world, both its broader structures and our intimate relationships.
Paper long abstract:
Narcotics Anonymous, a peer-led form of substance use treatment, understands defining an individual’s personal addiction to be an important part of the recovery process. Yet, cultural understandings of addiction, how it should be treated, and what should be expected from persons during and after residential treatment can vary dramatically from person to person and between institutions. These different conceptions may radically alter the life and experience of those who encounter them. For example, community-based, residential addiction treatment centers in Tijuana, MX all have distinct formulations of what recovery should like within their particular therapeutic model. However, this does not always match inpatient conceptions of recovery, either while in treatment at the center or once they leave it. In this paper, I present several case studies of the plans, hopes, and possible futures women discussed with me in the days before they left one of Tijuana’s community-based residential rehabilitation centers. In juxtaposing their dreams with my follow-up interviews with them, I grapple with Zigon’s (2009) notion of hope as a temporal experience and attitude toward being-in-the-world. It is the temporal experience of opening and foreclosing futures that I examine in terms of stigma, relapse, and recovery in relation to women’s substance use. In examining this, I seek to investigate how the human ability to hope and heal is shaped by our social world, both its broader structures and our intimate relationships.
In this paper, I will explore how concepts of time and the future inform processes of resilience among Indigenous adolescents within an urban Canadian context.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I will explore how concepts of time and the future inform processes of resilience among Indigenous adolescents within an urban Canadian context. This study employed a modified grounded theory methodology by conducting 38 qualitative interviews with 28 Indigenous youth (ages 15-25) over the course of 1 year. The analysis revealed complex processes of and navigations between moments of distress and strategies for resilience. The distressing contexts in which Indigenous youth often find themselves can impact the development of their concepts of time and limit their abilities to conceptualize a future. A future time orientation (FTO) emerged as central to processes of resilience and was supported by (a) nurturing a sense of belonging, (b) developing self-mastery, and (c) fostering cultural continuity.
In this paper, I draw on 24 months of fieldwork with 30 patients in a psychiatric hospital in Yaoundé, Cameroon, to argue for an ethnographic and theoretical association between patients’ experiences of wellbeing and their ability to manipulate the tempo of their lives.
Paper long abstract:
What is wellbeing? In this paper, I scale this vast-but-crucial question through an ethnographic focus on the medicalization of wellness as “mental health” at a psychiatric hospital in Cameroon. This hospital, called Jamot, is located in the capital city of Yaoundé and is the country’s chief public psychiatric institution. In this capacity, Jamot recently began an education program that seeks to teach patients and their families about biomedical frameworks and therapeutics of “mental illness” and “mental health.” Drawing on 24 months of fieldwork with 30 patients, I argue that this program presented patients with a view of mental health as a project of temporal responsibility: that is, as a long-term project of making a stable, sustainable everyday life through short-term, indeed daily, extraclinical choices and practices of what Jamot called “mental hygiene.” I then move with these 30 patients upon discharge back to their homes and communities within Yaoundé to ask: how did patients think with, against, or otherwise in relation to these hospital experiences of medicalization and education in their post-asylum projects of a life worth living? How did these life projects interpellate broader sociopolitical circumstances in Cameroon, including the rapid rise of Pentecostalism as well as the country’s unfolding secessionist conflict? I detail how patients navigated competing frameworks and timeframes of wellness in clinical, religious, and political settings in Yaoundé; then draw on this ethnographic detail to theorize that the ability to manipulate time is vital to medicalized and non-medicalized possibilities of “wellbeing” itself.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, distorted temporality is the foundation of mental suffering. Through precariousness, people experience anxiety or despair because they lose intersubjective reference of time. Such disturbance is exacerbated by trauma, isolation, and disconnection through the pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I exam a few case studies both in Wuhan and overseas during the Covid-19 Pandemic. From a phenomenological perspective, I pay special attention to people's bodily and emotional experience. I analyzed their lived experience and found that the pattern of emotional melt-down by anchoring people's altered experience of time. Three characters stood out across case studies and interweavingly influenced people's mental status. First, transgenerational trauma caused great difficulties for these people to focus on the here and now. Instead, because of their past traumatic experience, they could not help but overwhelmed by obsessive thoughts about the future. Second, when people perceived their solidary situation and could not make real-life interactions or connections, they lose the reference of time and space, which result in a distorted sense of intersubjectivity. This perceived isolation and lacking effective social support causes somatic reactions such as suffocating, pain, cramps, insomnia or lethargy; as well as psychological reactions such as fear, panic, and despair. Third, one underlying emotion behind the distress and suffering people experienced during the pandemic was a sense of helplessness. This would cause people to have a strong sense of helplessness, which in turn exacerbated the previous two conditions, perceived isolation and obsessive orientation towards the future. Based on these observation and co-experiences, I found the most helpful way to go through distorted temporality is to establish meaningful social relations, re-create intersubjectivity and intercorporeality.
Exploring the hermeneutic suspicion of trauma-related working through and attachment theory regarding troubled pasts/attachments, ethnographic vignettes from Cambodia and Israel illustrate alternative temporalities incommensurable with foundational and inequitable psychodynamic perspectives.
Paper long abstract:
Despite major strides toward the cultural competency of global and 'local' Euro-Western mental health care, taken for granted foundational psychological assumptions regarding the temporality of wellness and distress continue to constitute and/or sustain inequity. This paper will present two distinctly different psychological perspectives - trauma related working through and attachment theory which if taken together point to psychoanalytic hermeneutic suspicion regarding the past and its lingering traces continues to call upon the distressed to either work through and liberate the self from the traumatic/repressed past or detach from potentially pathological relations with loved ones. In both cases wellness is achieved by means of shifting temporal perspectives first regressively and therapeutically back toward the troubled past and progressively toward the present and future. Findings from two ethnographic studies are presented illustrating the above hermeneutics of suspicion: Cambodian genocide survivors' self-perceptions of Euro-Western psychological working through as incommensurable with present and future focused Buddhist-Khmer worldviews that valorize 'forgetting'; Bereaved Israeli parents who continue bonds with deceased children articulating the incommensurability of attachment/bereavement theory. In both psychodynamic perspectives aim to disclose, analyze and re-narrate the self's relationship with the past and with significant others with whom one shared the past ultimately engendering an altered present and future. The talk concludes considering the way contemporary approaches have or have not 'come to terms with [the field's historic relationship] the troubled past and implications for mental health care that continues to circulate hermeneutics of suspicion refashioning alternative temporalities in the global south and 'at home'.
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