The Confines of Time – On the Ebbing Away of Futures in Sierra Leone and Palestine

Abstract

This article contributes to an understanding of the existential character of confinement by directing attention to the interlinked concepts of tiredness and foreboding. Through juxtaposition and analysis of material gathered among people whose lives are lived under compromised circumstances in Sierra Leone and Palestine we illuminate the way time-not only space-confines. Our analytical concern is with the way in which futures are anticipated by people confined in space and time, where conditions of possibility are materially and sometimes corporeally suffocating. To anticipate fragile futures, or to mourn futures terminated early is exhausting. Tiredness, from this perspective, is a ubiquitous and overwhelming sentiment suffusing what it means to live in confining sites. It is an expression of foreboding understood as a 'being towards death' (Stevenson 2014).

Coloniality of Waithood: Africa’s Wait for COVID-19 Vaccines amid COVAX and TRIPS

“…Waithood has characterized African experiences throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in which young people have waited for futures that have yet to arrive (Ferguson 1999;Piot 2010;Stasik, Hänsch, & Mains 2020). Regarding African migrants waiting for opportunities to move, time itself threatens to trap migrants within perpetual waithood, just as much as it promises a better life in the future (Jefferson & Segal 2019). Vaccine colonialism has demonstrated the usefulness of applying the concept of waithood on a national scale, because waithood here describes the existential situation of Africa within this pandemic and within the global regime of colonial relations.…”

"Jeg troede, jeg havde valgt friheden, men her det regler, regler og regler"

“…På samme måde som rum er tid også en social praksis. Tid er ikke bare fortløbende og progressiv, det er også noget, vi gør, og som samtidig rammesaetter, hvad der kan og ikke kan ske (Munn 1992;Jefferson & Segal 2019). Émile Durk heim var i antropologien en af de første til at lancere et begreb om social tid og en pointe om, at vores opfattelse af tid udspringer af vores sociale liv, som ofte er tidsinddelt i temporale skemaer og udspaendt mellem begivenheder (Durk heim 1953; se også Gell 1999).…”

Civil war and the non‐linearity of time: approaching a Mozambican politics of irreconciliation

“…Resonating with Ghassan Hage's (2015) notion of ‘stuckness’ to describe a precarious, profound, and existential sense of immobility, as well as some recent work in anthropology on the ‘ebbing away of futures’ in contexts which are suffused with conflict and grief (Jefferson & Segal 2019), both Helder and Ernesto underline not only the ‘un‐pastness’ of war and violence but also its continuity as futures are politically eclipsed. Such horizons of continuous, muddled war and violence were indicated also by other long‐term interlocutors – including those who seasonally join the sporadic fighting and looting undertaken by armed Renamo men in Sofala province.…”

“…He was particularly concerned with the operation of groups of armed men (allegedly belonging to a faction of Renamo) that were commonly believed to have been orchestrating waves of attacks since the early 2010s in central Mozambique (see Pearce 2020). Taking the last sip of his beer and looking across the makeshift stalls, he told me: Resonating with Ghassan Hage's (2015) notion of 'stuckness' to describe a precarious, profound, and existential sense of immobility, as well as some recent work in anthropology on the 'ebbing away of futures' in contexts which are suffused with conflict and grief (Jefferson & Segal 2019), both Helder and Ernesto underline not only the 'un-pastness' of war and violence but also its continuity as futures are politically eclipsed. Such horizons of continuous, muddled war and violence were indicated also by other long-term interlocutors -including those who seasonally join the sporadic fighting and looting undertaken by armed Renamo men in Sofala province.…”