Time/Space Panel: “Space for Time/Time for Space”

TIME/SPACE PANEL: “Space for Time/Time for Space”

Keynote Speaker: Professor Andrew Abbott, University of Chicago

Abstracts:

Producing Spatial Pluralism: town-planning, house-building and everyday practices in a South African township
Lisa Wiesenthal       
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna

Considering the enduring importance of spaces in South Africa, this paper examines how everyday practices and spaces produced by inhabitants of a township relate to spaces shaped by town planning, subsidized housing, and corresponding regulations. Spaces are conceptualized here as processes of simultaneously performing spatial practices, fabricating spatial imaginaries, as well as constantly negotiating the relations between these two aspects that are both inextricably linked to dynamic socio-spatial networks. Perceived this way, time is an inherent essence of spaces, although spatial imaginaries and their representations often picture spaces as static, thereby implying e.g. rootedness, stability, or clear-cut and thus recordable facts. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I will discuss how government planning institutions connote imaginaries of stasis and order by regulating construction and usage of subsidized buildings. In contrast, lived practices of township dwellers are thoroughly characterized by dynamic change. This concerns the continuous material modification of the urban fabric due to self-construction, equally as the frequent relocation of people between houses. Furthermore, perceived accessibility, usability, and appearance of the townscape are subject to daily rhythms and strong seasonal alterations. While providing millions of urgently needed houses, planning institutions produce spaces that are often contradictory to the realities of daily urban life. By figuring a fixed and orderly result rather than a starting point of a process, I argue that the temporal essence of spaces is misapprehended. As the inhabitants of eMjindini township fashion their lives and meaningful environments at the encounter of various differing, overlapping, or contradicting spaces, I am proposing here the notion of spatial pluralism, envisioning the potential employment, opportunities and constraints of this multiplicity of spaces.


Neoliberalizing Resistance: Working Time and Overtime Pressure
Alina Petrovici
Department of Sociology, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca

Using an ethnographic study of a large Romanian-owned company offering services to multinationals, I analyzed forms of demanding and resisting overtime pressures. I show that, in the case of the Romanian postsocialist context and its particular discursive constellation, the neoliberal parlance in the emerging local firms opposes capitalist virtues to socialist downfalls; there are two types of employees, those adapted to the new conditions and those still bearing the socialist imprint. The most visible effect, that of obsessively controlling time and assuming time waste from employees, could be traced to socialist inefficient working-time, which implied spending time in factories, not necessarily working, and flooding the factory gates when program ended. The negative visual impact of dozens of employees leaving the factories at 4 o'clock sharp still burdens the new capitalist working time. Management reconstructs the capitalist ‘adequate’ employee as one who does not leave when program ends as if he/she waited impatiently the hour of departure, as it happened in communist factories. There is a whole set of techniques used by the managers to control and extend working time: manipulating time breaks (i.e. lunch time), promoting and paying better salaries to those who usually put in the hours, assigning tasks towards the end of the program, setting the stage for a permanent competition to find the most promising employees. The new neoliberal manager discourages and disparages discontent because
negotiation or compromise is not an option. On the contrary, the self-interested employee is encouraged and empowered to choose between two rational options, either to leave an environment that proves inadequate to his/her desires, or to put in the hours. My point is that the employee is undergoing a significant transformation toward a neoliberal self-made person, committing to work in a pragmatic and self-interested fashion, leading to resisting by eluding resistance. Company environment is not changeable or negotiable for this employee type, he/she either accepts the norms imposed by management or decides to leave. As time is regarded, these autonomous individualists decide to work long hours where demanded and construct an adaptive logic that reconciles conflicting life priorities. I use the governmentality literature to argue that resistance is becoming obsolete despite work environment’s pressure for unpaid overtime, excessive hours, and lack of “flexibility”.


Constructing the ‘Field’ in Time and Space: Dealing with Multiple Sites, Multiple Scapes and Multiple Temporalities
Tereza Kuldova
Museum of Cultural History, Department of Ethnography

The paper draws attention to the challenges faced by an anthropologist doing a multi-sited and - in multiple meanings of the word also - multi-temporal fieldwork. It begins with a reflexive meditation on the active construction of the ‘field’ by the anthropologist, focusing on the inevitable processes of selecting and bounding of a particular spatiotemporal segment of the ever changing and ever escaping reality. Drawing on the related discussion of the disruption of the space-time paths of yesterday in what is popularly labeled as ‘globalized world’, it further invites us to rethink the spatial metaphors of anthropology, the idea of ‘field’ and the authority derived from ‘being there’. This discussion then naturally leads to the question of evidence, authority and depth, which is often imagined as significantly weakened in the projects of multi-sited ethnography. The paper therefore addresses this charge of the lack of ‘depth’ by dealing with both the spatial and temporal aspects of multi-sited fieldwork. It assesses our possibilities of representing and grasping both the simultaneity of processes at different places and our own temporality in ethnographic writing, as well as the diverse and varying embodied experiences of temporality by our informants in the field. In addition, it considers the use of cinematic ‘montage’ in ethnographic writing as a means to grasp simultaneity and temporality. The paper is based on a fieldwork experience in North India and is motivated by the challenges posed by the upcoming multi-sited project stemming from the previous research.


Archeology of a Tension: Diverging narrations about the American Embassy of Skopje
Fabio Mattioli
Visiting researcher, University Ss Cyril and Methodius, Skopje

This paper deals with issues concerning the new American Embassy in Skopje. The embassy’s physical presence is indeed imposing. It is built in front of the old Ottoman Fortress on a hill that dominates the city, and its visibility from almost every vantage point gives it a profound visual impact. In discussing the embassy, my informants were positioning themselves in the social landscape. Each story had a different perspective, and placed the embassy in a different timeline compared to the others: they reflected ethnic tension as well as personal feelings, embedding the structure in a variety of different histories.