When the World Comes to an End: An Ethnography of Temporal Partialities

• In Event: Doing and Making Times II: Speeds

Abstract

When hearing stories about the past and anticipations of the future, we tend to think about narrations that are self-contained; in other words, tales that are sustained through a coherent presentation of the temporal moments they want to depict. But these narrations are never complete; instead, they are commonly portrayed as fragments of a major history. This tension between the whole and the part, i.e. the duration that makes sense of a moment and the instant that brings duration into life, has been the center of vigorous debates about the ontological condition of time – from Bergson's notion of duration and Bachelard's revindication of the instant to current discussions of anthropological presentism and historicism.
In this paper, I overcome the duration-instant dichotomy and move from an essentializing to an assemblage-oriented understanding of time. Reflecting on Strathern's Partial Connections and Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, I explore how connections among different versions of the past and future occur, even after the worlds that make sense of those temporal stages have been destroyed. I take as a case study my ethnographic work in Ancash, a region in Peru that has faced several extreme events in the last century – including the 1970 earthquake that annihilated cities like Yungay and Huaraz, forcing their inhabitants to start from scratch. By focusing on their survival stories and narrations about the worlds that disappeared, I invert Strathern's proposal to explore the partialities that, beyond connecting, can also detach when dealing with narrations of destroyed pasts, cracked presents, and uncertain futures.

Author

• Tomás José Usón Pizarro, Humboldt University of Berlin