berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: In the Meantime
Adeline Masquelier and Deborah Durham

Chapter 1. “Just Waiting”: Korean Chinese Mobility and Immobility in Transnational Migration
June Hee Kwon

Chapter 2. In the Meanplace: Traversing Boom and Bust in China’s High Growth/Ghost Town
Michael Alexander Ulfstjerne

Entretemps: “A Lot of Standing Around in the Dark”: Specters of Waiting in Paranormal Research
Misty L. Bastian

Chapter 3. Raising Consciousness in the Costa Rican Seasonal Low
Sabia McCoy-Torres

Chapter 4. Stranded in Decolonization: The Attritional Temporality of Sahrawi Activism in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara
Mark Drury

Entretemps: Machine-Made Time: Dialysis and the Complexities of Waiting and Planning
Janelle S. Taylor and Ann M. O’Hare

Chapter 5. Waiting for Thieves: Nighttime Capital and the Labor of Sitting in Niger
Adeline Masquelier

Chapter 6. Waiting to Heal in “Crip Time”: Temporalities of Chronic Skin Wounds amongst Gunshot Survivors in New Orleans
Daniella Santoro

Entretemps: Urgency, Boredom and Pandemic Mean/Time(s)
Martin Demant Frederiksen

Chapter 7. African Time,Waiting, and Deadlines in Botswana
Deborah Durham

Chapter 8. Waiting Out the Rush: On the Durability of Wealth in Kenya’s Coastal Sex Economies
George Paul Meiu

Afterword: In Slow Time
Thomas Hylland Eriksen

In the Meantime

Toward an Anthropology of the Possible

Edited by Adeline Masquelier and Deborah Durham

Afterword by Thomas Hylland Eriksen

240 pages, bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-80073-886-7 Hb Published (March 2023)

eISBN 978-1-80073-887-4 eBook

Details

“[This volume] curates an extraordinary conversation about what it means to wait, seemingly without end, in a moment that is supposedly defined by instantaneity. The book’s timing and its framing could not be better.” • Bruce O'Neill, Saint Louis University

“This is a superb volume, on the subject of a particular temporal mode—what the editors call “the meantime”… this book is top-notch scholarship, on a cutting-edge subject that will make a significant contribution to not only anthropology but cognate fields.” • Anne Allison, Duke University

The “meantime” represents the gap between what is past and the unknown future. When considered as waiting, the meantime is defined as a period of suspension to be endured. By contrast, the contributors of this volume understand it as a space of “the possible” where calculation coexists with uncertainty, promises with disappointment, and imminence with deferral. Attending to the temporalities of emerging rather than settled facts, they put the stress on the temporal tactics, social commitments, material connections, dispositional orientations, and affective circuits that emerge in the meantime even in the most desperate times.

Adeline Masquelier is Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University. She is author of Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town (Indiana, 2009) and Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger (Chicago, 2019). She is a former executive editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa and past president of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion.

Deborah Durham teaches at the University of Virginia. She conducts research in Botswana and Turkey and is the co-editor of Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy (Indiana, 2007) and Elusive Adulthoods: The Anthropology of New Maturities (Indiana, 2017). She is an Editor at Hau Books and is Deputy Editor for Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.

Subject: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)

Area:

LC: HM656 .I6 2023

BL: DRT ELD.DS.765695

BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC026040 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology/Social Theory; SOC041000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Essays