Laura Bear

Doubt, conflict, mediation: the anthropology of modern time

In this introduction, I argue that in spite of recent discussions of global and neoliberal time, the anthropology of modern time remains under-explored. Modern time here is understood to be a complex historical product. At its centre is the abstract time-reckoning of capitalism, which acts as a universal measure of value, but which always comes into conflict with concrete experiences of time. Its social disciplines emerge from Christian practice, but the ethics of these routines are marked as secular and universal. Its politics is founded on representations of the natural connections of communities through a homogeneous historical time. Its science and technology tightly link social, human time to external non-human rhythms. It is important for anthropologists to reflect on modern time because our discipline has been profoundly influenced by the discoveries of its depth, secularity, and relativity. The controversies that emerged in relation to Darwins and Einsteins insights still provide the framework for many of our theories, especially when we draw on phenomenological philosophy. In this introduction, I suggest that the key resources for overcoming this significant absence in anthropology lie in a rapprochement between Alfred Gells epistemology of time and the approaches of Marxist political philosophers. This combination, along with an emphasis on the labour in/of time, gives rise to new questions and reveals new aspects of modern time in the present.

Miscegenations of modernity: constructing european respectability and race in the Indian railway colony, 1857-1931

Abstract From 1857 Indian railways built railway colonies to inculcate a practical mastery of middle-class domesticity solely in their European employees. These were key sites for the construction and contestation of European identity. They marked Europe and India as separate locales bounded by distinct racial typologies and gender identities. The central distinction reinforced was that between European modernity and Indian tradition. This project was complicated by the hybrid identities of Domiciled European and Eurasian railway employees, nationalist protests, and contradictions in the colonial discourse of modernity. By 1931 the racial logic of the railway colony was under threat, but its rhetorics of respectability, modernity, gender, and race intensified in new forms. By tracing the historical construction of boundaries between Europe and India and the history of interstitial groups that destabilize these, we can question the transition narratives of nationalism and capitalism that usually structure ...

3 For labour: Ajeet's accident and the ethics of technological fixes in time

This paper uses an ethnography of river pilots who navigate container ships on the Hooghly to argue for a focus on labour as an act of mediation in the timespaces of global workplaces. A new approach to capitalist time is developed that seeks to combine recent emphasis on knowledge practices with an older Marxist emphasis on the mediating role of labour. Bureaucrats driven by the rhythms of repayment of public deficit have taken on an extractive role on the Hooghly, producing a declining infrastructure. Moreover, the contradictions produced by government policies are making it increasingly difficult to navigate the river, climaxing in frequent accidents. River pilots ‘fix’ these through technological interventions shaped by the ethics or ‘senses of workmanship’ that emerge from their acts of labour in specific timespaces. Capital on the Hooghly continues to circulate through these small, piecemeal moves in which time is an ethical, affective, and technical problem rather than through the large-scale temporal fixes described by Harvey and Castree. Therefore, we need radically to rethink our approaches to time in capitalism, moving beyond existing accounts of it as an abstract measure of value or source of time-discipline. Capitalist time is heterochronic and provokes attempts to reconcile diverse, recalcitrant rhythms and representations through our ethical and physical labour.

Capital and time: uncertainty and qualitative measures of inequality

This review compares Piketty and Marxs approaches to capital and time in order to argue for the importance of qualitative measures of inequality. These latter measures emphasize varying experiences across classes and through history of uncertainty and insecurity. They explore how the social rhythms of capital profoundly affect the ability to plan a life-course. Quantitative measures such as those used by Piketty that focus on the amount of capital that accrues through time cannot capture such important phenomenon. This is especially because their calculations rest on absolute amounts of capital recorded in formal state statistics. Their limits are particularly revealed if we consider issues of: informal labour, social reproduction, and changing institutional forms of public debt. If we are to build the inter-disciplinary rapprochement between social science and economics that Piketty calls for it must be through asserting the value of qualitative measures of insecurity and its effects on decision making. These are important to track both at the macro-level of institutions and at the micro-level scale of human lives. It is, therefore, through emphasizing the existing strengths of both anthropology and history that we can meet Pikettys important challenge to make our scholarship relevant to current political and social debates.

Alternatives to austerity

We are in the age of austerity. Across the globe, there have recently been calls from both the left and the right to rethink policies of austerity and to rein in the forces of globalization. Over the past two years, anti-austerity sentiment has been a major factor in public votes in Europe and the US. Anti-globalization, anti-debt and anti-PPP movements are gaining broad support. Claiming to speak for ordinary families hit by the effects of austerity, parties across the political spectrum are scrambling to improvise new policies. Some alternatives to austerity are simply old ideas repackaged or reappropriated and help to legitimize the current status quo, yet others seem to offer genuine respite from the established order, claiming new forms of social relations and redistribution. The authors argue that only through an analysis of the longer-term origins and multiple guises of austerity can we move towards proposals for social change. They challenge established understandings of austerity and ask readers to imagine seemingly utopian alternatives. Overall, they ask: how can we give a new critical meaning to the concept of the public good?

Attention to infrastructure offers a welcome reconfiguration of anthropological approaches to the political

This constitutes the edited proceedings of the 2015 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory held at Manchester.

Speculation: Futures and Capitalism in India

Speculation structures the unprecedented breadth and depth of contemporary global capitalism. We define it as an engagement with uncertainty that aims to materialize potential futures. Studies of economization and financialization have highlighted the production of value through transparent practices of calculation and have focused on the Global North. As an alternative, we use ethnographic and historical genealogical methods to explore predictive practices that are motivated by contingency and aim to make uncertainty productive. India, a celebrated emerging market and dense arena of capitalist promise and failure, provides the foundations for our approach. The speculative practices we focus on challenge the distinction between formal and informal, the licit and illicit, because they fuel rationalized market regimes, as well as worlds of precarity. Our approach reveals the governmentalities, public cultures, and market actions that are characteristic of the present pursuit of value for profit and survival.

Anthropological futures: for a critical political economy of capitalist time

This essay deploys two articles that Firth wrote on the future of anthropology in addition to his accounts of Tikopia dreams to reveal a hidden ethics of time characteristic of anthropology. Our discipline is grounded in a taken-for-granted secular humanism. This has led to rich reflection on contrasting values and theories of ethics. I will argue, however, that in order for our discipline to become an uncomfortable science in relation to conventional economics and to address issues of inequality we need to supplement this inheritance. We need to construct a critical political economy of capitalist time. This would explicitly engage with the material timescapes of inequality in which ethics, knowledges and techniques of capitalist time interact. I demonstrate how such an analysis of time works in my own research on austerity policy on the Hooghly River. I then turn this approach onto the current institutional conditions of anthropology in the UK – that of financialised universities governed by debt. I conclude by suggesting some of my own utopian futures for anthropology, which are guided by a social calculus drawn from the ethics of the precarious working poor.