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Accepted Paper:
Phenomenologies of "killing time" in a Zambezian village
Joachim Knab
(University of Cologne)
This paper explores distinct temporal experiences of "killing time" and "owning time" at the rural-urban nexus, highlighting the nuanced view needed when discussing boredom in the supposedly modern periphery.
Paper long abstract:
In a village in the Zambezi region of Namibia, I met several young men who told me they were just "killing time" while waiting to "get a job". They had studied in the city, but had only returned to their "home village" because life was cheap there and waiting was affordable. They were typically easy to identify, as it was important for them to maintain a certain habitus that marked them as "urbanites", based on fashion and consumption. But I also met another group of young men who sometimes talked about "killing time". But, as I argue, their notion of "killing time" was of a structurally different quality. Their "boredom" was rather situational than existential and it was rather an impulse than a blockade for new activity. These young men had actively chosen "village life" over "city life", owned land and ran businesses. They killed time that they considered their own, waiting for the next customer, for example, sometimes resulting in new ideas for their business.
In this paper I draw out different temporal phenomenologies of "killing time" associated with different kinds of work at the rural-urban nexus. I show that a nuanced view is important when talking about the experience of boredom in the supposedly rural periphery of a globalised modernity with unequal access to the "jobs" that promise citizenship in globalised capitalism.