Carol Greenhouse (Princeton University)

My interest in the themes of the workshop is ethnographic and comparative. My first book involved a community – strongly self-identified as such – in the southern USA, where the temporal idioms of progress and salvation played against each other as rationales for personal choice and community development. The intricate intertwining of secular and sacred discourses of time (and eternity) in that project became the theme of subsequent work -- a comparative ethnographic account of local ideas of community, in collaboration with David Engel and Barbara Yngvesson (Law and Community in Three American Towns [1994]), and in a book on the anthropology of time (A Moment’s Notice [1996]).  In the latter work, my focus was on what Emile Durkheim called social time – both as a sign of divergent constructions of agency (within social science), and as a repertoire of political symbols (in contested states). My interest in the relationship of ethnographic and political discourses of community and democracy has continued (in edited volumes:  Ethnography and Democracy [1998], Ethnography in Unstable Places [edited with E. Mertz and K. Warren, 2002], and Ethnographies of Neoliberalism [2009]).  And meanwhile, U.S. social policy highlights emergent stakes in the politics of time (mainly through markets and counter-terrorism) in relation to larger questions of solidarity and belonging (The Paradox of Relevance [2011]). My presentation for the workshop takes up some of those terms – drawn from legislation affecting civil rights, welfare, immigration and deportation.  The title for my remarks is:  Time In, Time Out, Time’s Up:  Regulating the Temporality of Inclusion and Exclusion. I very much look forward to the workshop.