The chapter examines some of the multiple and intriguing ways in which Pindar configures and shapes experiences of time, in an attempt to provide a sketch of what we could call ‘Pindaric temporality’. The discussion revolves around the principal temporalities that feature in Pindar’s epinician corpus (human, divine, Hyperborean), laying particular emphasis on their interrelationship and Pindar’s ‘obsession’ with, and positive portrayal of, time. Even though the focus of the chapter is mainly on the victory odes, it also touches on the distinctive temporality of his cult songs.

A career-long project for Emerson was the attempt to understand and seize upon the historical moment, or what he often called “the present hour,” in which he lived. But Emerson’s interest in “the Times” was also, fundamentally, an interest in time. This chapter examines “Emerson’s times” in this dual sense: his abiding investments, philosophical, social, and political, in the historical present – the time of now – and in its temporalities – the time of now. Emerson’s commitment to the present as the bedrock of historical experience and the sphere of ethical action was shaped by the new conceptions of time and the new temporal experiences afforded by the technological, scientific, and political developments of his era. Thus, if the “practical question” with regard to “the times” was, as Emerson states it in “Fate,” an immediate one – “how shall I live?” – that question was complicated by the heterochronicity of the times.

This chapter argues that the decade of the 1810s, especially when understood as ‘the Regency’, reflects a vision of time as static and repetitive, resistant to what Walter Benjamin famously called ‘homogenous, empty time’. To this end, this chapter looks at an unusual textual archive, nineteenth-century flagellation pornography. Two works are analysed with differing connections to the decade: Venus School-Mistress, probably published in 1810, and The Rodiad, written in 1871 but masquerading as a text of the 1810s. Comparing these two texts – one an authentic product of the period, the other an erotic antiquarian hoax – reveals not just the consistent temporal multiplicity of nineteenth-century pornography. It also demonstrates how the 1810s take on a paradoxical historiographical role as a specific example of the repetitive sameness of time. In so doing, the chapter aims to recast the idea of ‘the 1810s’ as a node of reactionary resistance to the temporality of liberal progress.

Just as Elizabeth Bowen’s life was shaped by monumental and international conflicts, so war fundamentally shaped her short stories and novels. The First World War haunts Bowen’s debut novel, The Hotel; the Irish War of Independence transforms the very landscape of Ireland in The Last September; and the Second World War draws up numerous conflicts of allegiance and communication in The Heat of the Day and short stories such as ‘Mysterious Kôr’. Throughout these instances, war creates complicated feelings of simultaneity, where the past and future collapse into an inarticulable present, as can be felt in the futile performance of polite society among the Anglo-Irish in The Last September. As much as that suspension of time crushes any sense of futurity, it also opens the opportunity for reimagining the existing orders of the world; hence, war can constrain expression, as with the hedged communication in the short story ‘Careless Talk’, and afford sexual liberation for characters in ‘Mysterious Kôr’ and ‘Summer Night’. For Bowen, the tensions thrown up in war offer not a dialectic but a series of ruptures that can only be experienced, not resolved.

Accelerating sustainability transitions is crucial for addressing complex challenges and meeting the 2015 Paris Agreement’s climate targets. This chapter examines the role of time in sociotechnical change, emphasizing the urgency of action across energy, agriculture, and manufacturing to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. While acceleration drives innovation, social equity, and economic resilience, it also risks unequal resource distribution and marginalising vulnerable populations. The chapter explores how stakeholders advocate for different timescales and technologies, highlighting the political nature of transitions. It introduces timescapes to capture the dynamic interplay of temporal dimensions shaping transition processes. Historical energy transitions illustrate the complexities of speed, duration, and acceleration, underscoring the need for interdisciplinary approaches. By addressing political and social dynamics, the chapter promotes transparency, equity, and justice in climate action. Future research should integrate diverse methodologies and critically examine temporal frameworks to support more effective and inclusive sustainability policies

This chapter provides an analysis of the structure of love in Kierkegaard’s thought, which takes its most developed shape in Works of Love. This analysis will help us understand the four key elements of Kierkegaardian love that constitute it in its proper sense. The four elements of love are: repetition, time, commitment, and the good of the other. The overall argument in this chapter is that for Kierkegaard love necessitates a repeated, hence time-oriented, commitment to the good of the other. The object of this commitment is the other and that which is truly their good, which is their “abiding in love.”

This chapter examines the ‘peculiar’ utopian temporality of the contemporary moment as expressed in the fictional works of three Black British female writers: Queenie (2019), by Candace Carty-Williams, Swing Time (2016) by Zadie Smith, and Girl, Woman, Other (2019) by Bernadine Evaristo. The chapter argues that these novels represent a particular incarnation of utopian realism. This names a strong commitment in contemporary British fiction to articulating post-racial futures. In utopian realist texts, writers use realism not to convey mimetic depictions of the present here and now but, rather, to convince readers of the viability of alternative, transformed futures. Utopian realists such as Candace Carty-Williams, Zadie Smith, Bernadine Evaristo, Monica Ali, and Diana Evans foreground a relationship between utopian thinking and models drawn from personal and historic experience. Like design fictions, the term given for fictional narratives used by designers of prototype products and technologies to help imagine their future use, these texts offer readers identifiable utopian alternatives to contemporary Britain. Shaped in relation to the long history of Black experience in the United Kingdom, as well as gender and queerness, these novels reveal the need to consider the future not as a speculative possibility but a realisable plan for how we might live.

The conclusion draws together the themes of the chapters, returning to the analogy between marriage and anthropology as encounters with difference. Weaving together the stories of two protagonists encountered in the Introduction with the themes of ethical imagination and temporality, it draws out the broader significance of the everyday labour of moral imagination in kinship relations, and of marriage as a crucible of long-term social transformation. The discussion reflects on the importance of attending anthropologically to seemingly insignificant, everyday, domestic encounters and judgements, and to their cumulative effects.

This chapter looks at forms of uncertainty that occur at different stages of married life. A central question here is what does uncertainty produce? The chapter focuses partly on Malay protagonists and on two particularly fragile moments in Malay marriage: during betrothal and, counterintuitively, much later on, after several decades, when one might expect marriages to be highly stable. The former was a pattern familiar from earlier research. But some older Malay women spoke of a more recent trend – for husbands of many years to marry a younger woman polygamously. Meanwhile, other, non-Malay, couples have adopted unconventional living arrangements or have taken unusual paths to suit their particular circumstances. In considering how different kinds of marital uncertainty play out, the significance of expectations about marriage and the registers of temporality through which they are calibrated and recalibrated are illuminated. The force of unanticipated events stimulates the reflection of protagonists and their consociates – as readers may recognise from their own experiences – reformulating ideas of what is appropriate or acceptable behaviour, and precipitating new ethical stances.

In the conclusion, we weave together the themes of the volume. We trace three historically overlapping configurations corruption and colonialism, corruption and modernity, and neoliberalism and anti-corruptionism and suggest that we may be entering into a one (a fourth one) characterized by illiberalism. Additionally, we propose “deep analogies” that cross-cut the configurations, including corruption’s inevitable intertwining with power, institutional sedimentation, and processes of evaluation.

The arguments of the book are laid out, beginning with questions that probe the apparent obviousness of marriage as an institution. What does marriage do? How can we account for both its historical persistence and its cultural and historical variability as an institution? Rather than see it as an essentially conservative and normative institution, this book argues that marriage is, on the contrary, a crucible of transformation – of personal, familial and wider political relations. This is partly a result of the unique position it holds as an intimate relation but also a political, legal and religious one. The conventionality of marriage provides a deceptive cloak of conformity masking the elasticity of what may be acceptable to spouses, families and communities. The argument is grounded in an ethnography of marriage in contemporary Penang but draws on a range of comparative materials from anthropology, literature, films and other sources. The main themes of the book are introduced: marriage as continuity of patterns in earlier generations and, simultaneously, as divergence from these; an overview of the anthropology of marriage and its lacunae; marriage as ethical labour in and on time; and marriage as an everyday work of moral imagination. The chapters are outlined.

The substantive discussion begun in Chapter 2, particularly on interpretation, is continued in Chapter 3 through the prism of progress. Collective understandings of state violence, including torture, are understood to have changed over time, with what was historically conceived as permissible coming to be condemned as reprehensible. Changing understandings of pain and punishment, it is argued, are sociopolitically contingent, with legal assessments of torture too beholden to this broader context. On this register, the chapter charts the broader contours of the central shifts in prevailing social and scientific views, values and knowledge, as channelled or challenged through judges and taken to constitute torture’s sociality. This has culminated, it is argued, in a script of ‘progress’ driving the anti-torture field.

Chapter 4, on David Jones’ The Anathemata (1952), considers the poem in terms of the author’s own aspiration to preserve the past. Jones considers art to be a way of making its object present and active, as the Roman Catholic Mass is believed to make Christ’s body and blood present. This form of “re-presentation” (anamnēsis) makes the past actively present without literally reconstructing it, offering a middle way between Boym’s restorative and reflective nostalgia. In Jones’ view, poets in the twentieth century must assemble the fragments of the cultural past as a means of resisting the increasingly utilitarian nature of modern culture. Ultimately, Jones’ densely allusive poetry forces us to consider the limits of nostalgia. If art inevitably makes past present, is it always in some sense nostalgic?