Time, Chronologies, and Progress: Peripheral Temporalities in Eurasia

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Despite the different ways time is understood across cultures and even across academic disciplines, it is a human universal. Along with space, it sets the coordinates by which we understand the world and our place in it. Time is part of knowledge – that is, it is a category that helps one discourse dominate others. Like knowledge, time is connected with power. The papers of our panel will examine how people who lived on the periphery of Russia, the Soviet Union and Russia Imperia from the from 18 to 21st centuries used time to make sense of their lives and the reality in which they found themselves. In examining the “temporal regimes,” both static and evolving, of the Vologda oblast, Yaroslavl, and Kazakh steppe, these papers shed new light on how citizens interpreted their place in time and employed conceptualizations of temporality to effect changes in time and construct their local identity. We will show the plurality of temporal regimes in Eurasia and how geographical, social, ideological, and economic factors influenced their formation. We demonstrate that people conceptualized time in different ways, often by tying it not to politics, but to other meaningful aspects of their lives. We also show how time, chronology and progress make hierarchies social groups

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Elena I Campbell, U of Washington

Papers

• A 'Bright Future' for Rural Aria: Political Education and the Idea of Progress for Vologda's Village - Tatiana Voronina, Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research

• Regional Identity through Distorted Temporality: Museum of New Chronology of Fomenko in Yaroslavl - Valery Kossov, U of Grenoble-Alpes (France)

• Competing Temporalities of Power on the Qazaq Steppe, 1748-1786 - Eric W Johnson, U of Washington

Discussants

• Olga Shub

• Dmitrii Blyshko, U of Houston