Time Work - by Michael G Flaherty & Lotte Meinert & Anne Line Dalsgård (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Examining how people alter or customize various dimensions of their temporal experience, this volume discovers how we resist external sources of temporal constraint or structure. These ethnographic studies are international in scope and look at many different countries and continents. They come to the overall conclusion that people construct their own circumstances with the intention to modify their experience of time.

Review Quotes

"...an eclectic and enthralling collection of ethnographic studies...[that] is well structured and beautifully written. As the afterword notes, the book almost reads like a novel, with captivating ethnographic stories on themes ranging from the mundane to the spiritual. The variety of cultures covered--from Canada to Brazil to Kyrgyzstan--attests to an important aspect of time work: it's universal. We all need time, and we all need to work on our time." - Contemporary Sociology

"This book is a highly valuable and stimulating contribution to any social scientists interested in time. As any good scholarship, it certainly opens up conductive lines of inquiry to be further addressed in social studies of time. Furthermore, the chapters are very fluently written, well-presented, and highly readable, which, among other things, testify to the excellent work of the book's editors." - Symbolic Interaction

"Overall, the series of chapters constitutes a wide-ranging and provocative expansion of the initial framing of the concept of timework and details the bases in ethnographical evidence for its contemporary development. In the process, some highly relevant and nuanced insights emerge from this wider-scoped timework research, in terms of its relevance to and import for contemporary discourses about human agency in a wide range of settings. The editors weave these thematic sets of contributions into a compelling narrative of temporal agency as a deeply personal yet culturally situated and diverse family of activities with a universal relevance that is deserving of further social scientific inquiry." - Kronoscope

"The central theme of this book is crucial to our understanding of the present. The conceptual themes of the chapters are very complementary and detailed ... an inspiration for study and for readers' own research. Each is well written, and warmly appreciative of local wisdom." - Jane Guyer, Johns Hopkins University

"[This book] deals with issues of time, and particularly of people's attempts to manipulate temporal experience. In that way it speaks to a topic that has always been somewhat present in the social sciences, but that only relatively recently sees sustained and in-depth attention." - Stef Jansen, University of Manchester

About the Author

Anne Line Dalsgård is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University. She is the author of Matters of Life and Longing: Female Sterilisation in Northern Brazil (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004) and is a co-editor of Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality: Time Objectified (Temple University Press, 2014).