SOAS Research Online

Abstract

As an orientational aid, time seems to be a matter par excellence of worlding: we sense time, we habituate and structure it, but it habituates and structures us just the same. Time suggests that we are in/past/against/toward something/someone/somewhere. As it worlds, time is (a referent) of positionality, subjectivity and sensation. It may make multifarious alliances with space, ideologies and bodily processes. Yet, 'time' is not necessarily something in and of itself. Delving into the plurality of time, anthropologists are increasingly recognising 'time' as a heuristic. So, if we accept that time and temporality are far from clear universals, then they can also be extrinsic to (temporal) worlds: they may come and operate from the outside of specific ontological bearings. The 'external' can restructure, reorient, unstructure, violate, merge with, or speak to existing ontological temporalities. It may insist on leaps from one time to another and on the obliteration of the 'former' time so that the 'new' could truly thrive. Ideological projects seek to be constituted in the ontological – they map themselves into, or rather onto the 'world'. In so doing, they grapple with time. In this panel, we seek to understand what happens to time-as-worlding when 'worlds' are suddenly or slowly temporally reoriented. Do the structures and senses of time break, suspend, retreat, resist, merge with new temporal orders? Do different times strive to forget each other? Are they subversive of one another? Or, do they smooth out each other's edges? We think of distemporalisation as a project of denial of time – a denial of historicity, futurity, or change, which is a noticeable element of various constructions of Otherness. We also take distemporality to signify a refusal of, and intervention into, qualitatively-specific temporal worlds. Such projects usually include a demand for a retemporalisation into another 'world'. Potential contributions could, for example, think revolution, statehood and nationalism, colonialism and Empire, archives and their temporal violence, distemporalisation of subjectivity, gender regimes and their alterities, or worlding of economies of time.