Biopolitics and Temporality in Arendt and Foucault

Drawing on comparative ethnographic fieldwork conducted in urban Mozambique, United States, and Sierra Leone, the article is broadly concerned with the globalization of temporal logics and how specific ideologies of time and temporality accompany health interventions like those for HIV/AIDS. More specifically, we explore how HIV-positive individuals have been increasingly encouraged to pursue healthier and more fulfilling lives through a set of moral, physical, and social practices called “positive living” since the advent of antiretroviral therapies. We describe how positive living, a feature of HIV/AIDS programs throughout the world, has taken root across varied political, social and economic contexts and how temporal rationalities, which have largely been under-examined in the HIV/AIDS literature, shape communities’ responses and interpretations of positive living. Our approach is ethnographic and comparative, with implications for how anthropologists might think about collaboration and its analytical possibilities.

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“…Time is a disciplinary technology—one of control, management, and subjectification (Braun 2007:11; Thompson 1967). It is also a moralizing one.…”

Section: Positive Living and The Uses Of Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Temporality and Positive Living in the Age of HIV/AIDS: A Multisited Ethnography

Benton

Sangaramoorthy

Kalofonos³

2017

Current Anthropology

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“…In discussions of power and the state, political theorists stress that time is an inherent aspect of a state's functioning. State power operates within temporal dimensions (Braun 2007;Casarino 2003;Gross 1985;Hutchings 2008) to perform a range of functions from producing knowledge on human life such as fertility, morbidity or mortality (Foucault 2003) to nation building based on shared temporality of the past or future (Anderson 1983;Massey 1995). Scholars adopting a life-course perspective have also highlighted that the state manages individual lives through institutionalizing time by determining qualifications for everything from marriage to driving, voting, working, or social services, to name just a few (Settersten and Mayer 1997).…”

Section: Structuring the 'Normal' Male Life Coursementioning

confidence: 99%

Between global dreams and national duties: the dilemma of conscription duty in the transnational lives of young Korean males

Song

2014

Global Networks

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In this study, I examine the dilemmas arising from the tension between citizen duties and youthful aspirations in a globalizing world. The state's requirement of military conscription structures the transnational lives of young Korean male migrants. More particularly, the timeline for serving the duty works as a primary temporal reference for the males' initial migration planning and future projections. Drawn from ethnographic fieldwork and in‐depth interviews among a community of young Koreans in New Jersey, USA, my research reveals that their life planning in accordance with this institutional schedule is vulnerable to unexpected changes. The consequences are potentially detrimental to their futures, which not only differ from their individual ideals but also contain a high risk of marginalization both in Korea and in the USA. Building on the transnational migration literature, which focuses predominantly on spatiality, individual rights/agency and the marginalization of women migrants, I am concerned with temporality, citizens' duties and the constraints of masculinity as important parts of unravelling the complexities of transnational life.

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“…It allowed her to argue for the value of the ‘time interval between birth and death’ that could act as an existential frame with which to structure the span of a meaningful human life (Arendt : 97; cf. Braun : 19‐21). Ultimately, it enabled her to produce a philosophical outlook that displaced ‘process’ from its symbolic and conceptual throne and conjure a world in which alternative idioms and practices might crowd into view, and ‘time’ itself take a differential form.…”

Section: Towards An Immanent Anthropologymentioning

confidence: 99%

1 Immanent anthropology: a comparative study of ‘process’ in contemporary France

Hodges

2014

Royal Anthropological Inst

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This paper presents a comparative critique of the ‘processual temporalities’ which infuse both social‐scientific theorizing and selected Western cultural practices. Through study of a public‐private partnership which emerged from a biotechnology project devised for producing ‘self‐cloning’ maize for resource‐poor farmers, I analyse how processual temporalities were central to re‐gearing knowledge practices towards market‐orientated solutions. In a study of characterizations of the ‘state of flux’ which affects life in a French peri‐urban village, I explore how processualism is identified as a component of a metropolitan hegemony which villagers ‘resist’ through idealizing ‘enduring temporalities’ of cultural practice. Drawing on Arendt and Deleuze, I analyse processualism as a dominant contemporary chronotope, mediating and disciplining conflictive temporalities and practices, underwriting economic projects of deterritorialization and restructuring – whose idiom is also prominent in social‐scientific paradigms. I substitute an ‘immanent anthropology’, which advocates a non‐transcendental ontology of cultural practice and analysis – displacing anthropological analysis onto a polychronic temporal foundation.

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Biopolitics and Temporality in Arendt and Foucault

Cited by 49 publications

References 11 publications

Temporality and Positive Living in the Age of HIV/AIDS: A Multisited Ethnography

Temporality and Positive Living in the Age of HIV/AIDS: A Multisited Ethnography

Between global dreams and national duties: the dilemma of conscription duty in the transnational lives of young Korean males

1 Immanent anthropology: a comparative study of ‘process’ in contemporary France

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