Most contributors to this book share an emphasis on the ‘everyday’, but rather than viewing temporalities as outcomes of ongoing tensions between relatively ‘heroic’ individuals and oppressive systems, they seek to understand the many processes and practices involved in reproducing regimes and routines. Examples range from commuting to hobbies. In addition, we look at discontinuous challenges to rhythmic processes, as in periods of turmoil, stress and disruption. Building on but also going beyond Lefebvre and Certeau, the common challenge is one of understanding how temporalities of practice are produced, altered and disrupted and with what political, emotional and ethical implications.
- Materializing time
Many, perhaps even the majority, of the processes and practices implicated in making time – in the sense of giving it meaning, order and personal as well as collective qualities and characteristics – involve the use of things. Time is rich in material culture, and vice versa. We have already noted that rather than seeing consumption as a force that sucks time out of our lives, many practices and hence many interactions with material culture create temporal order (a topic only recently taken up by archaeologists like Murray [1999]). But the materiality of time goes further than this. Things age, and we and our memories and identities age with them. Objects can be signs of enduring or momentary experience (an heirloom that signifies family time; a present that triggers feelings of ‘growing up’ or ‘childhood’). Objects play a critical role as a kind of compass or clock across our lifecourse. But they also have temporal orientations associated with them, such as an appeal to novelty, different careers of obsolescence and recycling, and the various kinds of wear and patina which signify age and interactions with people (McCracken 1988).
Introduction
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