Time Work: Studies of Temporal Agency

Examining how people alter or customize various dimensions of their temporal experience, this volume discovers how we resist external sources of temporal constraint or structure. These ethnographic studies are international in scope and look at many different countries and continents. They come to the overall conclusion that people construct their own circumstances with the intention to modify their experience of time.

Table of Contents:
PART I: BEGINNINGS, CONCEPTS, AND QUESTIONS Introduction Michael G. Flaherty, Anne Line Dalsgård, and Lotte Meinert Chapter 1. The Lathe of Time: Some Principles of Temporal Agency Michael G. Flaherty PART II: TEMPORAL AFFLICTIONS Chapter 2. Repetition Work: Healing Spirits and Trauma in the Churches of Northern Uganda Lars Williams and Lotte Meinert Chapter 3. ADHD and Temporal Experiences: Struggling for Synchronization Mikka Nielsen PART III: THE POLITICS OF TIME Chapter 4. Hacking Time and Looping Temporalities in the Identification of the Adult “Living Disappeared” in Argentina Noa Vaisman Chapter 5. Temporal Front and Back Stages: Time Work as Resistance Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott PART IV: SPIRITUALITY AND ATHEISM AS TEMPORAL AGENCY Chapter 6. Se Deus Quiser: Catholicism as Time Work among the Xukuru of Pernambuco Clarissa Martins Lima Chapter 7. “It Is Just Doing the Motion”: Atheist Time Work in Contemporary Kyrgyzstan Maria Louw PART V: REINVENTING THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE Chapter 8. Inventing New Time: Time Work in the Grief Practices of Bereaved Parents Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Kjetil Sandvik Chapter 9. Now Is Not: Future Anteriority and a Georgian in Russia Martin Demant Frederiksen PART VI: TIME AND DEPRIVATION Chapter 10. The Work of Waiting: Boredom, Teatime, and Future-Making in Niger Adeline Masquelier Chapter 11. Balancing Blood Sugar: Fasting, Feeling, and Time Work During the Egyptian Ramadan Mille Kjærgaard Thorsen and Anne Line Dalsgård Afterword Carmen Leccardi Index

About the Author :
Michael G. Flaherty is Professor of Sociology at Eckerd College and the University of South Florida. He is the author of The Textures of Time: Agency and Temporal Experience (Temple University Press, 2011). He was also the recipient of a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (2016-2017).

Review :
“…an eclectic and enthralling collection of ethnographic studies…[that] is well structured and beautifully written. As the afterword notes, the book almost reads like a novel, with captivating ethnographic stories on themes ranging from the mundane to the spiritual. The variety of cultures covered—from Canada to Brazil to Kyrgyzstan—attests to an important aspect of time work: it’s universal. We all need time, and we all need to work on our time.” • Contemporary Sociology “This book is a highly valuable and stimulating contribution to any social scientists interested in time. As any good scholarship, it certainly opens up conductive lines of inquiry to be further addressed in social studies of time. Furthermore, the chapters are very fluently written, well-presented, and highly readable, which, among other things, testify to the excellent work of the book’s editors.” • Symbolic Interaction “Overall, the series of chapters constitutes a wide-ranging and provocative expansion of the initial framing of the concept of timework and details the bases in ethnographical evidence for its contemporary development. In the process, some highly relevant and nuanced insights emerge from this wider-scoped timework research, in terms of its relevance to and import for contemporary discourses about human agency in a wide range of settings. The editors weave these thematic sets of contributions into a compelling narrative of temporal agency as a deeply personal yet culturally situated and diverse family of activities with a universal relevance that is deserving of further social scientific inquiry.” • Kronoscope “The central theme of this book is crucial to our understanding of the present. The conceptual themes of the chapters are very complementary and detailed … an inspiration for study and for readers’ own research. Each is well written, and warmly appreciative of local wisdom.” • Jane Guyer, Johns Hopkins University “[This book] deals with issues of time, and particularly of people's attempts to manipulate temporal experience. In that way it speaks to a topic that has always been somewhat present in the social sciences, but that only relatively recently sees sustained and in-depth attention.” • Stef Jansen, University of Manchester