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.