
































Microsoft Word - Final_Time and Temp.doc


 

 
 

1 

 

An anthropology of temporality:  

In search of lost time, or why time should never get lost. 

Review of Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality: Time Objectified (Global South). Eds. By 

Dalsgaard, A., Frederiksen, M.D., Højlund, S., Meinert, L. Temple University Press. 2014. 206 

pages.  

 

This collection of ethnographic essays outlines the anthropological possibilities of engaging time 

as an object of study. In proposing a reconsideration of time beyond a commonly assumed 

abstract linear progression, the contributors to this volume explore the intricacies arising from 

different social, malleable, and experiential considerations of temporality. Youth in particular, as 

a transitionary period from childhood to adulthood, distils a spectrum of experiences of time, 

which the ethnographers are describing and documenting around the world. “Ethnographies of 

Youth and Temporality: Time Objectified” sets out to map the ways time is reflectively and 

emotionally experienced through the perspective of youth, and in doing so, offers both an array 

of diverse ethnographic situations with a synthetic overview of their confluences.  

In introducing their collection of essays, two of the editors, Martin Frederiksen and Anne 

Dalsgard, explain the necessity of this volume: anthropological theorizing has until recently 

neglected the systematic and cross-culturally comparative analysis of time. Their approach to an 

anthropological objectification of time is multi-faceted, and includes an examination of how time 

and temporality frames social life, how actors reflect on discordant temporalities, and the 

different ways they cope with their (dis)ability to act on time – indeed, indeterminacy and 

uncertainty are core themes that permeate the ethnographic vignettes. ‘Boredom, waiting, 

inactivity, subjunctivity and inertia’ they argue, are central to an anthropological consideration of 



 

 2 

time, since during these moments the regularity of time flows is fragmented (p.4). The authors 

wonder then, what are the experiences of a ‘temporal impasse’, and what are the strategies youth 

employ to cope with these? They suggest that these temporal phases, previously thought as 

empty, are perhaps hosting a potpourri of phenomenological experiences that anthropology 

should be engaging with. Boredom and routine are therefore considered as sites of ‘meaning and 

agency’, as opportunities of imagination and, in certain cases, overwhelming existential struggle. 

They invite us to enrich the anthropological toolbox to engage with times of inactivity and 

passivity, and no less with ‘the easiness and casualness’ of the everyday. 

The subsequent chapters delve into ethnographic examples to elaborate field-based 

apprehensions of an anthropological theorizing of time. From comparatively looking at these 

chapters, the editors have synthetically identified three core themes of the volume. Firstly, ‘the 

time of times’ referring to conceptions and qualities of time shaped by the ideological, religious 

or other principles nested in specific historical contexts. ‘Being outside of time’ captures the 

situations where individual or particular group experiences of time are in discordance with 

societal time or the temporalities of dominant ideologies. Finally, ‘time work as relational’ 

assembles the instances where individuals are actively creating temporalities and managing time 

through social and intersubjective negotiations. The ethnographic contributions provide a rich 

cross-cultural framework within which time/temporality is implicitly or explicitly engaged with, 

thought, and performed by actors. 

Jennifer Johnson-Hanks comparatively looks at experiences of persistent temporariness among 

educated young women in Yaoundé, Cameroon and San Francisco, US. She describes the 

normalization of waiting in a state of suspended action, of an elongated interstitial pause, and 

asks how people make meaning during major life-course transitions such as finishing school or 

changing jobs (Chapter 1). Stephen Jensen addresses broken time, through the Filipino concept 

of buryong, which can be translated as boredom, or form of insanity, or even as waiting for 

nothing. His work with young men at Bagong Silang is geared towards understanding how 

young people cope with this, and he suggests that notions of brotherhood and employment 

become active modes of coping with buryong (Chapter 2). The question of ‘dead time’  interests 

Stine Kroijer when she deals with qualities of time among young left-radical activists in 

Copenhagen, Denmark. Through the experiences of a 24-year-old young activist, Kroijer 



 

 
 

3 

unravels how within a cultural environment that looks at young people as politically immature, 

dead time does not simply refer to an empty immediate presentism but is inherently linked to 

bleak perspectives of radical change in the future, a contemporary type of political pessimism 

(Chapter 3). Martin Demant Frederiksen describes states of boredom and depression in 

Batumi, Georgia, as these are experienced by under/unemployed youth who struggle with having 

nothing to do. In a city with large reconstruction projects of revitalization as a major tourism 

center, Frederiksen chronicles the heterochronic atmosphere settling between multiple and 

contradicting temporalities (Chapter 4). Anne Line Dalsgard’s ethnographic contribution to the 

volume picks up in the similar topic of contemporary experiences of empty time, but through 

insecurity linked to a perceived or real lack of opportunities. In her fieldwork at the outskirts of a 

Recife neighborhood in Brazil she focuses on the willful projections of three young Brazilians, 

who try to conceive a future and distance themselves from an immediate current situation and a 

social environment that devours hopes and dreams (Chapter 5). Karen Valentin considers how 

interrelated temporalities can facilitate or constrain geographic mobility and shift our ideas of 

futurity and what is possible/impossible. Her fieldwork addresses temporality among Nepalese 

students who migrate to Denmark and explores how education becomes one more way of 

thinking about time as a linear-forward aspect of modernization (Chapter 6). Razvan Nicolescu’s 

account of boredom among Romanian teenagers, invites us to rethink the connotations and 

understanding of boredom. He describes how teenagers actively transform temporalities of 

boredom into intersubjective spaces using communication media, and how boredom is 

experienced in relation to the potentiality of excitement offered by their environment (Chapter 

7). At last but not least, Lotte Meinert and Nana Schneidermann explore naming practices 

among young male artists in northern Uganda as temporal and relational work. Self-naming 

among young artists is described as an active work on the future as it calls different potentialities 

into being, and the ethnographers detail the ways time work is involved in the process of creation 

of young musician’s names (Chapter 8). The afterword by Michael Flaherty concludes the 

edited volume by proposing an analytical fiction within which this anthropological theorizing of 

time can be considered. Flaherty considers time and temporal experience in the dialectical 

relationship of structure and agency. He argues time is a structural notion since it is everywhere, 

and it is a social institution. But it is also a concept of agency since the temporal experience 

within socio-historical contexts is constantly modified and negotiated, an enterprise he qualifies 



 

 4 

as ‘time work,’ or ‘temporal agency.’ He suggests that these two facets of time theorizing are not 

contradicting but instead are two faces of the same coin, if considered as forms of social 

interaction. Moving along he further develops this idea in considering enduring patterns of 

interaction within structure, and self-selected forms of interaction within agency. 

Among the many qualities of this volume, I will underline two that I consider to be relevant in 

any work attempting to anthropologize time, or simply, in any anthropological work. Firstly, the 

authors manage to provide both a synthetic theorizing on time, and a rich empirical evidence 

through concrete ethnographic accounts. As such they succeed in conveying how time and 

temporality are variable but always present. The experience, perception, organization and 

negotiation of time is immanently embedded within particular socio-cultural contexts, which 

leaves a creative space in all types of anthropological work to engage with time as an ever-

present entity, much like language. So, whether we’re focusing on immigration, or work, or 

education, or infrastructure, or health etc., time, its social organization and individual 

permutations are always present, and the authors invite us to acknowledge this constant 

regardless our thematic or area specializations. Secondly, in focusing on time as a mode of being 

and as an experiential technique of the self, the authors point out to a relative blind spot in 

contemporary anthropology. Anthropologists often consider and describe what people do, how 

they act and react. But what space does that leave in anthropological workings for considering 

inactivity, passivity, waiting, boredom, emptiness that so frequently but silently inhabit our lives? 

Focusing on these processual moments, instead of reducing them into empty spaces separating us 

from the preconfigured telos of our anthropological research, is not only critical for 

contemporary anthropology, but could possible add more nuances to the palette of our 

anthropological spectrum. In that sense, this collected volume on the object of time in 

anthropology, while providing multiple accounts situating the experiences of temporality among 

youth, inevitably also invites us to consider temporality beyond youth. In such an endeavor this 

volume of collected essays can certainly be pivotal, with concise and clear ideas on time 

objectification in anthropological theory and practice, in other words, an invaluable reference for 

anthropologists interested in, of course time and youth, but also researchers within psychological 

anthropology, the anthropology of ethics and morality, or any ethnographic endeavor. 

 



 

 
 

5 

Christos Panagiotopoulos is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Cornell University (US) 

and an invited French Government Scholar at EHESS/CNRS (France). He works at the 

intersections of psychological anthropology, the anthropology of ethics and morality, and the 

anthropology of religion, with a particular focus on psychotherapy, mental health and care 

regimes. For his doctoral thesis he studies conflicting models of care within the juvenile 

rehabilitation system in France. 

 

 

© Christos Panagiotopoulos 2019 


