Special Issue: Ethnographies of austerity : temporality, crisis and affect in Southern Europe
Abstract
This article focuses on how the economic crisis in Southern Europe has stimulated temporal thought (temporality), whether tilted in the direction of historicizing, presentifying, or futural thought, provoking people to rethink their relationship to time. The argument is developed with particular reference to the ethnographies of living with austerity inside the eurozone contained in this special issue. The studies identify the ways the past may be activated, lived, embodied, and re-fashioned under contracting economic horizons. We argue for the empirical study of crisis that captures the decisions or non-decisions that people make, and the actual temporal processes by which they judge responses. We conclude that modern linear historicism is often overridden in such moments by other historicities, showing that in crises, not only time, but history itself as an organizing structure and set of expectations, is up for grabs.
Citation
Knight , D M & Stewart , C (eds) 2016 , ' Special Issue: Ethnographies of austerity : temporality, crisis and affect in Southern Europe ' , History and Anthropology , vol. 27 , no. 1 . < http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ghan20/27/1 >
Publication
History and Anthropology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0275-7206Type
Journal item
Rights
© 2015 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
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