This chapter explores time, death, and memory, analyzing material cultures of death in relation to deceased bodies, their material and visual representation, in historical contexts. It discusses anthropological perspectives on memory and time as articulated through material object domains, examining related issues of: temporal stasis (e.g., memorial effigies); process (e.g., transi tombs); temporal dimensions of memento mori; the interplay of preservation and decomposition in memory objects; aspects of fragmentation and display; and the imagery of darkness, light, and instruments used in the measurement of time. Each of these – significant in Western material cultures of death and memory – is examined in terms of how it materializes or visualizes bodies in transformation. Even when deceased bodies are represented as static, they tend to be animated through their relation to death, figured or evoked as moving presence. Bodies after death exist in time, perhaps most forcefully represented as decaying, disintegrating, or disappearing. Tracing aspects of death’s temporalities, as conveyed in memory objects and images, this chapter shows how varied and changing effects of time are registered by bodies rendered in paper, ivory, wood, wax, and other materials for memorial purposes and as means to reflect on acts of remembering.

Our final part of the volume addresses what we have loosely framed as reflections on an anthropology of death “beyond death.” It opens with Aja M. Lans’s powerful critique of the ways in which the material afterlife of death in the form of human skeletal collections has historically worked to erased life – specifically Black lives and the biographies of living people whose remains have become objects of display or tools of bioarchaeological pedagogy. In exploring her own encounters with the violence inherent in producing and maintaining those collections, she invites us to consider the “corporeality of the body and its exploitation both during life and after death.” Her chapter sets the scene for the chapters to follow, each in its own way wrestling with questions that extend from the phenomenon and experiences of death. The framing of “beyond death” that binds these particular chapters urges reflection not only on death’s afterlife of mourning and memory but also some of the radical innovations and ruptures introduced by the pandemic that have both methodological and theoretical consequences for the field going forward.

This chapter advances the premise that one way in which racism impacts health and developmental outcomes is through the experiences of the finite resource of time. Although all humans experience the same twenty-four hours in a given day, how those hours are allocated, how much agency over how those hours are spent, and the lived experiences of that time are stratified by structural systems such as racism. Taking a lifecourse perspective, we describe how human development is shaped as much by social factors as biological influences, using time as an example. Ultimately, stratified experiences of time set the stage for racism to shape even the most fundamental of human experiences. We call upon the field to deepen our study of the connections between time, racism, and health inequities, and offer a few recommendations for future research.

In foundational African narratives, time, decolonization, and modernity are bound together. This chapter looks at how, at its moment of emergence in the second half of the twentieth century, modern African fiction, whose aim was to rationalize African notions of time and account for both colonial history and what appeared to be failing projects of decolonization, was motivated by the desire to account for a temporal impasse: the fact that the old colonial order had disappeared but the future promised by the political class was yet to come. This temporal impasse explains the confluence of realism and modernism in postcolonial African fiction. In their themes, forms, and tone, the novels published in the 1960s set out to negotiate the empty space of a stalled decoloniality. Using Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God as a case study, the chapter reflects on the novel as a mode of mediating historical time conceived as both past and present, simultaneously preoccupied with the teleology of the temporality ushered in by colonialism even after decolonization.

The Introduction combines a contextual introduction to disability in Kinshasa with an outline of the research problem as the tension between exceptionality and normality in a city that has long defined itself as in ‘crisis’. The interlocutors, their city, the times in which they lived, and their livelihood activities were all subject to ambiguous judgements as to whether they stood out as a negative or positive example, or if they were better viewed as simply part of the general experience of life in the wider community. The Introduction thus outlines the focus on mobility-impaired people in the grey area between work and welfare, where ‘crisis’ (mpiaka) opens a discursive space for experimentation, critique, and evaluation. The unpredictability that marks life in Kinshasa, in this respect, leads people to constantly reckon their social and economic value projects in relation to time. The Introduction introduces how crisis confronts people with choices of realising the short-term values of ‘fending for yourself’ or the long-term values of cultivating dependent relationships.

This chapter deals with the narrative treatment of time in Alejo Carpentier’s “Historia de lunas,” “Oficio de tinieblas,” “Viaje a la semilla,” “Semejante a la noche” and El acoso. These fictions were marked by an epochal climate in which a sense of civilizational crisis prevailed, as can be seen in the proposals of Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee or Mircea Eliade, thinkers who left their mark on Carpentier’s historical thinking. The analyses of these narratives focus on the way in which their author deploys competing temporalities, a feature that shows how the historical dimension of his narrative was not limited to the recreation of past scenarios. Furthermore, in these works it is possible to trace a theory of historical becoming, a reflection on the teleology of its processes and the meaning of its occurrence.

Hipparchus realised that for calculation to be effective and useful it must proceed from good observational practice. Without accuracy in the latter, the former, however sophisticated, cannot provide usable answers. Accordingly, he would have made many observations of astronomical facts and phenomena for himself, and for this he would have needed instrumentation. Very little is known for sure about what tools he used. The Antikythera Mechanism, which is roughly contemporary with Hipparchus, demonstrates the engineering skills that were available in his time, and on the reasonable assumption that such skills did not advance much by the time of Ptolemy, the latter’s description of his own instruments provides a basis for discussion. Also important in this context are notions of accuracy, precision and units of measurement. Evidence is brought to bear on these issues in relation to Hipparchus, and how they should be interpreted in the context of his works, using information gleaned from both him and from Ptolemy.

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.

Characters curse storms, power blackouts and climate change sceptics in twenty-first century drama as the destructive force of climate change is theatrically represented across comic farce, realist tragedy and dystopian horror. While these theatrical forms differ in their affective and emotional impact, they commonly predict ecological disaster in the future. Disaster is broadly understood as the combination of historical and social determinants interacting with natural hazards and forces over time. Climate change disaster is framed in scenarios that range from humorous to terrifying and with a growing dramatic genre of futuristic climate fiction (cli-fi) about ecological collapse and political dystopia. Twenty-first century dramatisation presents both the absurdity of humanity’s inability to reduce carbon emissions and global warming and the tragedy of predicted disaster on a geological scale in the Anthropocene. At the same time, contemporary performance illuminates turning points in time turning points in time including a different outcome within the present including within the present.

Chapter 8 explores the ways in which mitigation has been politicised. Each of the four aspects of politics, set out in Chapter 3, is revisited to assess degrees and types of climate mitigation politicisation – partly to better understand the politics of acting to mitigate in this current phase and partly to identify important tensions and opportunities that need to be recognised when thinking politically about mitigation.

Across her fiction and non-fiction, Elizabeth Bowen is consistently intrigued by hotels. From the grand Italian Riviera establishment of her debut novel, The Hotel, to the series of dingy ‘back rooms in hotels … with no view’ occupied by Portia Quayne and her mother in The Death of the Heart, many of Bowen’s characters occupy, however briefly, the transitory, impermanent space of the hotel. Although characters move through hotel space, they are never left unmarked by it. Portia’s teacher observes her ‘hotel habits’, which she cannot shake. This chapter explores Bowen’s preoccupation with the space of the hotel in her writing, and demonstrates her acute sense not only of its unique spatiality, but also of the intricacies of hotel temporality. More specifically, I argue that Bowen is a writer who is profoundly sensitive to the relationship between people and the spaces they occupy, and this sensitivity comes to the fore in the hotel phenomenologies of her characters.

The introduction critically examines current understandings of climate mitigation politics and makes a case for thinking politically and proactively about mitigation. This is contrasted with approaches that explicitly seek to draw narrow boundaries around mitigation politics and/or to avoid it. It sets out the overall approach to the book, how it relates to existing research on mitigation politics, and introduces the four ‘phases’ of climate politics that form the historical analysis in the book.