Social Anthropology

This issue hosts a special section on “Projects and Project Temporalities: Ethnographic Reflections on the Normative Power of the Project Form”. As Graan and Rommel underline in their introduction, projects grew historically as fundamental ways of organizing social life. The guest editors invite us to take a close ethnographic look at the projectification of time in neoliberal and (post)colonial contexts. The collection of papers attends to the logics of the project in diverse ethnographic contexts and temporal frameworks by offering historically informed ethnographies of what progress, failure and success mean to various people. Authors further attend to imaginaries of temporality and futurity, and technologies of time and control. Although Graan and Rommel pay attention to aspects that connect diverse types of projects, they also carefully present their linguistic and ethnographic specificities and unique temporal configurations, including the projects’ afterlives, contributing to anthropological discussions on time.

The project form – a goal-driven approach to resource allocation and task coordination – is one of the most widespread organisational technologies in the world today. Significantly, projects are pervasive organisers of time. They tether activity to schedules. They entail social synchronisations and disruptions. They presuppose particular temporal imaginaries – for example, time as partible and progressive – that mediate action. This introduction examines how the temporalities of the project form organise, animate, complicate and condition social dynamics. In surveying the contributions to this special issue, we highlight how the project form's figuration of time grounds three modalities of normative power: projects as a model of purposive human agency; projects as a form of temporal containment; and projects as an ideal of action and futurity that linger long after their ostensible completion.

It is said that for each year of armed conflict, a decade is needed to clean up the explosive remnants of war. What does it mean to imagine a project of such duration? In landmine removal, what is theoretically temporary work can start to look permanent. Tracking the efforts of a prominent humanitarian de-mining organisation, the British–American HALO Trust, in then-government-controlled eastern Ukraine, I show how clearance both follows project logic as well as upends two key assumptions of the project form: that projects have ends and that they have results. I demonstrate ethnographically how Ukrainians working for HALO approached de-mining as a project of unclear duration, finding both horror and promise in the protracted timeline. Nevertheless, I conclude that the idea of a project without end is a fallacy because the supportive structures that enable the project may evaporate at any moment.

In recent years Indian construction firms have come under increasing pressure to present their building projects as ‘time-bound’. In industry discourse, time-bound projects smoothly and sequentially hit project deadlines. While such an ideal is never realised in practice, I argue that the temporal politics of ‘time-bound’ projects lies not in their enactment of a smooth and progressive time but rather in the work of orchestration that binds together the heterogeneous temporalities of kinship, debt and migration that support work on the site. I demonstrate how these heterogeneous temporalities are erased in the image of the time-bound project, even as they support the project. Focusing on the implementation of the project-form itself elucidates the orchestration and contestation of diverse temporalities at stake in infrastructural development.

This article examines a British migration project – which sent select children to colonial Southern Rhodesia between 1946 and 1962 – in order to analyse dissonant temporalities in projects of social engineering. The article focuses on three of the several complex and at times incompatible temporalities animated and juxtaposed by the project. First, it discusses ‘imperial infinity’ as the political temporality that framed the project. As ‘imperial investments’, the children were a means to securing colonial continuity well beyond project time. Second, it considers how temporal logics of social projects presuppose a rupture with the past, foregrounding their rationale of futurity. Finally, the article examines the sense of time of the migrant child placed in an institution, highlighting its clockwork discipline and spatiotemporal standstill. Through this case, the article reflects on antagonistic temporalities within social projects, as well as their long-lasting political repercussions.

This article examines imaginaries of the social agency of the project form in contemporary Egypt. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with lower-middle class men in Cairo who contrive small-scale investment projects, it demonstrates how projects are envisioned to (1) create the world anew, (2) shape the ‘near future’ and (3) fashion platforms of relative stability amid unpredictability, hustling and making do. The article also illustrates how the project form's normative temporalities are often distorted, materialising in iterative sequences of never fully completed projects that nonetheless ‘make the world move’. In conclusion, I suggest that the same iterative temporality is recognisable in the Egyptian regime's current push for spectacular megaprojects, and that an imaginary of social and temporal agency undergirds the attraction to Egyptian projects across scales.

This article investigates kinship responsibilities in a Palestine ravaged by war and conflict. It is centred around Françoise Héritier's observation that having a ‘fixed’ position in a set of possible siblings is an unchangeable condition of life. That is, no known kinship system allows an ego to move temporally from the birth order. I explore how perpetual conflict interferes with responsibilities that come with being born in a fixed kinship order. How does biopolitics interrupt or undo generational roles? What happens to the subject of biopolitical instability who is unable to fulfil kinship obligations? I explore these questions through cases of Palestinian Romani families from Gaza who since 2007 have been migrating to the West Bank – migrations that sometimes cause relatives to disappear and later reappear, effectively remaking kinship responsibilities. A ‘minor’ register of perpetual war and conflict that is often neglected in favour of narratives of trauma.

Although anthropology has predominantly portrayed the phenomenon of precarity as a negative consequence of neoliberalism, it has long been romanticised as a constitutive element of the lives of cultural producers. This article explores the intersection of these two forms of precarity – the disruptive and the idealised – through an examination of Israel's young generation of filmmakers and their navigation of the country's increasingly neoliberal economic climate. The article particularly interrogates a common ‘housing solution’ adopted by many young filmmakers to continue their artistic pursuits, which involves living in low-rent buildings undergoing extensive renovation. I show how the filmmakers experience precarity as both a source of disruption and a generative force for their art, thus challenging the prevailing theoretical framework that views precarity as a predominantly disruptive state.

Grotti, Vanessa. 2022. Nurturing the Other. First Contacts and the Making of Christian Bodies in Amazonia. New York: Berghahn. 197 pp. Hb.: US$135.00. ISBN: 978-1-80073-458-6.

McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 2020. Words Matter: Meaning and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 320 pp. Hb.: £64.00. ISBN: 9781108427210.

Sokolíčková, Zdenka. 2023. The Paradox of Svalbard Climate Change and Globalisation in the Arctic. London: Pluto Press. 202 pp. Pb.: £24.99. ISBN: 9780745347400.

Sausdal, David. 2023. Globalizing Local Policing. An Ethnography of Change and Concern among Danish Detectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 254 pp. Hb.: £39.99. ISBN: 978-3-031-18918-0.