Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality

Abstract

In the years following the 2005 hurricanes and floods in New Orleans, many of the city's residents found themselves explaining the disaster to people in the rest of the country. The destruction of New Orleans was a result of failed engineering, bad planning, cronyism, and corruption. This was true not only of the floods but also of the way in which the rescue and recovery were handled. We wandered the country warning people: this can happen to you. Your city or state may be next. The government will neither prevent this nor save you after it happens. Your insurance may not work. The people who do come may not have your best interests in mind. Those were dark times.Vincanne Adams's Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith is a very readable and timely explanation of what all those wandering oracles meant. The focus is not on the events of 2005 but, rather, on the struggles that residents of New Orleans faced in their attempts to rebuild and recover. It is worth recalling that 80 percent of the city was flooded and that the floodwaters did not recede for weeks. This left a moldy, waterlogged mess behind. Every building in the flood zone had to be gutted and rebuilt. Residents had to replace nearly everything they owned. Insurance companies were often slow to provide the resources people needed. This is where government could have stepped in to help but did not. Programs with names like "Road Home" were created to make people "whole" again, enabling them to restart businesses, rebuild homes, and bring communities back to life. The programs, along with much else, were run by private contractors. The programs did not, however, work well. Stories about denied assistance were common in the years after the floods. Often, the private contractors and government agencies assigned to help were attempting to impose impossible regulations on disaster victims, demanding documentation that may never have existed, refusing to adapt to the circumstances people confronted. Yet behind this failure, as Adams shows, there were enormous profits being made by private contractors.

A Right Time to Give: Beyond Saving Time in Automated Conditional Donations

“…[24,31,51,60,61,62]). We often assume determinism in the way technologies disconnect people from 'natural' lifestyles [99], however, we have also honed skills to coordinate our activities with different measures and tempos [36,63] and often only notice incongruence when one set of temporal registers intrude on other obligations and desires in our lives [9]. Certainly, our experience of "digital time", as we interact with technology, differs from chronological time and the social and biological rhythms of everyday life (e.g.…”

Islands of Hope: Indigenous Resource Management in a Changing Pacific

“…Calendars can be defined as inscribed condensations of knowledge about cycles (Birth 2012) and are organised by logics that adopt certain ideas over others. For example, the foundation for the Gregorian calendar-the internationally accepted civil calendar-is the solar year, while many other calendrical forms follow the lunar cycle (see, for example, Lefale 2010; Roberts et al 2006).…”

“…For example, the foundation for the Gregorian calendar-the internationally accepted civil calendar-is the solar year, while many other calendrical forms follow the lunar cycle (see, for example, Lefale 2010; Roberts et al 2006). Environmental cycles work independently of the Gregorian calendar, and those who intimately depend on the environment for their livelihoods look for local environmental signs to guide their activities, rather than set dates (Birth 2012). There are well-documented ethnographic cases of both environmental and astronomical cues being important in marking cycles (Clarke 2009;Lefale 2010;Roberts et al 2006).…”