An Introduction to the Special Issue

Introduction

In July 2020 the authors in this special issue assembled at a digital conference amidst a global pandemic—an experience that seemed in many ways to defy time. Instead of gathering in Lisbon at the European Association of Social Anthropologists meetings, we sat in front of computer screens, in homes and offices spread from Arizona to Germany. For some, the panel was mid-afternoon, following a full day of conferencing and work. For those farthest west it was early morning, a first coffee in hand. The COVID-19 pandemic had already drastically reshaped our daily lives, producing a sensation of temporal displacement and global pause as we shifted patterns of behavior to stay at home and physically apart. Despite what our bodies and minds told us, we were together in the panel—assembled at the same time and virtual place to talk about what it means to practice an anthropology that builds collaborative futures.

In work set from Windhoek to London, and from Louisville to Paris, the seven articles in this issue are the result of that out-of-time panel. Each piece explores what it means to link anthropological practices and queries through processes of acting and being together, discussing the outcomes of collaborations wrought across multiple temporal modes and scales. Authors draw from scholarship in the discipline on time and futurity (cf. Munn 1992; Bear 2016; Bryant and Knight 2019) as well as from sensory, participatory, and decolonial work remaking how we practice, learn, and vision the discipline in the world (cf. Austin 2004; Alonso Bejarano et al. 2019; Kohn and Ushigua 2020). Collaboration is examined as both a means and an end. It is an approach chosen for multiple purposes and temporalities: addressing the exclusions of the past, shifting possibility within the present, and working toward imagined futures.

Collectively, the articles in this issue explore what we call "collaborative timescapes," ways of thinking about anthropological praxis that center time and togetherness. This includes the nuance of methodological and interpersonal interactions within fieldwork, the patterning of experience in coursework, and the performance of life within our everyday settings. In focusing on anthropological and ethnographic work specifically, we consider how, why, and to what ends we act toward imagined futures together.

Two genres of collaborative timescapes can be seen in the articles included: those of reflection and of presence. Within the former, authors Orbach, Conte, and Weisskoeppel explore how shared spaces of looking backward provide ways to look forward. For the latter, authors Bayfield, Storey and co-authors, Rios Sandoval, and Sheehan and co-authors meditate on experiences of the now in order to articulate and imagine what is to come. For all, the focus is ultimately on the future—on what it means to think and do anthropology in a way that moves us into new futures, new disciplinary frameworks, and new collaborative worlds.

In this introduction to the special issue, we examine scholarship on time and futurity, discuss how this pairs with collaboration, and explore what it means for each of our authors to think temporally together.

Time and Futurity in Anthropology

Although the study of time is sometimes relegated to the realm of philosophy, the combination of time's ubiquity and everydayness, set in contrast with its seemingly incomprehensible scope, make it relevant to anthropology. In Munn's formative essay on the anthropology of time, she refers to the "diffuse, endlessly multiplying studies of sociocultural time" as reflecting "time's pervasiveness as an inescapable dimension of all aspects of social experience and practice" (Munn 1992, 93). Indeed, time has a slippery character; it is pervasive and yet easily forgotten.

Time and temporality—the relationship individuals have with time—have been present in anthropological inquiry since the inception of the discipline (e.g., Malinowski 1927; Evans-Pritchard 1939). Early approaches sought to delineate disparate cultural conceptions and experiences of time and placed these in "traditional" time (Fabian 1983, 31) set against a Western and presumed objective time (Birth 2012, 169). In addition to reproducing colonial hierarchies and processes of othering, this temporal split between tradition and...