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.
Thinking about projects and temporalities seems like a worthwhile endeavor for anthropology today, not only because timebound projects are found in a wide range of social arenas, but also because projectification has become a key element of current academic practices. Research funding schemes drive temporally defined projects, which shapes academic practices on all levels, from the design of fieldwork all the way to writing and publishing. Project cycles, funding periods, or career stage-specific eligibilities indicate how temporal measurements profoundly impact the organization of research as well as of work conditions and anxieties in academia today. How may ethnographic analysis help us to grapple with these developments?
The contributions to the special issue shed light on a broad range and scale of activities and practices that take the form of projects. Katja Uusihakala's historical ethnography looks at post-Second World War children migration from Britain to Rhodesia as a colonial project. Several levels of temporality and politics of time take place in Uusihakala's analysis. First, this type of mobility is characterized by rupture with the childrens’ family history and with ideological configurations of their lives futurity. Second, their new place is one of clockwise disciplinary mechanisms aimed at educating children to become efficient employees of the colonial state. Time and efficiency are central in Adam Sargent's ethnography of heterogeneous temporalities at a construction project in New Delhi. Valued ideas about efficiency, scheduling and control related to time-boundness, which draw from global managerial discourses, coexist with diverse work rhythms and organizational complexities, as subcontractors and diverse groups of people with piece-rate contracts converge at the site for limited periods of time. Carl Rommel's paper also looks at idealised temporalities of projects in Egypt along with their temporal heterogeneities, by focussing on small scale business projects and by drawing an analogy with large scale infrastructural and developmental ones. Finally, Deborah Jones’ looks at a landmine clearance at the Ukrainian-Russian border as a project without an end given that it takes a decade for each year of war to remove remnants of the explosives from the land, and reminds us how ethnography may reveal nuanced experiences of people who live in a precarious area filled with mines. Jones approaches demining as work that follows the logics of the project that simultaneously assumes a closure and involves long-term engagement that seems temporally unclear and endless. Although different in scale, the ethnographies in the special section underline the importance of looking at the ideological implications of the processes of projectification and the temporal heterogeneities, dynamics and contradictions of human actions that are goal-driven and task oriented in the logics of project form.
Time and temporality come to matter in the two individual papers rounding off this volume as well, albeit in a different sense. Both papers reached us before the current escalation in the Middle East culminating in the all-out war on Gaza, and they come out at a critical moment when anthropologists, among others, grapple with responses and responsibilities called forth by this war. In this context of emerging tensions on academic freedom and public engagement, anthropology's focus on everyday practices and how they come to be situated has a great deal to offer. One of the strengths of our journal is to serve as a platform for such accounts and inquiries. In his paper Roy provides ethnographic insights on how prolonged war and structural violence impacts the practice and relations of kinship among Romani dwelling between West Bank and Gaza. And Roichman engages with how young Israeli filmmakers experience housing precarity in a neoliberal and militarized present. Read alongside one another, they show how this armed conflict's perpetual violence seeps into the everyday under conditions of unequal vulnerability and risk.
We would like to take the publication of these two individual papers as an occasion for thanking our outgoing editor Isabelle Rivoal. She took care of editing these articles and countless others before. Her efforts and dedication are much appreciated.