Thirteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

This paper explores the concept and practice of time in three unorthodox arenas of conduct as they bear on international relations: indigeneity, migration, and religiosity. In each of these arenas, time figures differently both as a concept and a practice where political ideas have fundamentally dramatic interventions in the ordinary understanding of time as that which always relentlessly moves forward. Contrary to this chronological take, in indigenous indigenous cultures, migratory experiences and religious movements, particularly fo Islamist orientation, time takes on transversal characteristics. For example, in indigenous cosmologies, time is closely linked to memory as “re-membering” of ancestral customs as contemporary agents in social and political orders. Similarly, in migrant circles, time is conceptualized not as that which moves forward and leaves people behind, but as radical temporality that enables people to start life anew in a completely fresh, albeit uncertain, ways. How can one otherwise explain the vitally of a family who spent two years in flight from Iraq to England? Last, today’s jihadists who refer to the times of the Mohammed as the “rightly guided” time clearly interact with or relate to temporality through dissonant, if devastatingly regressive, ways. In all these areas, this paper works to show how people experience the same material world through different and often competing temporalities with real political consequences in everyday socio-political orders.