Waiting
Waiting

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Chapter Synopsis

 

Preliminary page

Containining Preface by Ghassan Hage, table of contents, and introduction by Ghassan Hage

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End of the book

Containing Bibliography and Book's Index.

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Part 1 - Between Social and Existential Waiting

 

Chapter 1: Worlds of Waiting
Peter D Dwyer

Waiting may be expressed either in ways that entail active, or passive, engagement with environment or as an embodied, existential experience of uncertainty that is ineffable and lacks hope or direction. The argument is illustrated with ethnographic fragments gleaned from hunter-horticulturalists in Papua New Guinea and commercial fishermen in Australia.

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Chapter 2: Waiting for Sociality: The (Re)birth, astride a Grave, of the Social
John Cash

Focusing on Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Beck's account of 'freedom's children', this essay explores the dilemmas and potentials of the 'risk society'. Godot enacts the mess of Western culture and its radically debilitated capacity to support the gift of sociality, while revealing the unconscious ground of desire, destructiveness and repetition that sociality both incorporates and represses. Can 'freedom's children' renovate the gift of sociality under such unpropitious conditions?

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Chapter 3: Temporal Horizons of Modernity and Modalities of Waiting
John Rundell

Once the modern conception of time was no longer reliant on religious worldviews, it became dynamic, pushing beyond the present into a secular and uncertain future. Time becomes conceptualised as contingently open and relativised. Waiting for the future also becomes contingent and, as such, different modalities of waiting emerge.

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Chapter 4: Waiting for Imam Mahdi and Development: The Case of Pakistan
Nadeem Malik

This essay argues that marginalized citizens in Pakistan perpetually await Imam Mahdi because top-down modern development instead of bringing the desired results has created mega social chaos due to which the citizens feel helpless to set things right and hence have opted to wait for a messiah.

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Chapter 5: Senses of Waiting among Tibetan Nomads
Gillian G Tan

Ethnographic vignettes on how Tibetan nomads move describe a modality of waiting that is attuned to the rhythms and syncopations of movement through pastures and the life-cycle. Such waiting complements moving and is in time. How waiting is experienced reveals an important facet of one's synchronicity with time and place.

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Chapter 6: Waiting for Rain in the Goulburn Valley
Rosemary Robins

This essay examines the experiences of people in the Goulburn Valley as they endure one of the worst droughts in living memory. It describes waiting for rain as a transformation from cyclic time to biding time and anxieties that emerge with the prospect of a future altered by climate change.

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Part 2 - Waiting, Agency, Politics

 

Chapter 7: The Time Is Right - Waiting, Reciprocity and Sociality
Monica Minnegal

This essay examines the relationship between 'waiting on' and 'waiting for' others. Through analysis of how attending to the other shapes patterns of seasonal activity in Papua New Guinean communities, it shows how the structures and rhythms of social life are produced by, and transform, these distinct modes of waiting.

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Chapter 8: Waiting Out the Crisis: On Stuckedness and Governmentality
Ghassan Hage

The unwillingness to wait and the idea that one 'cannot take it anymore' have always been associated with the desire for social change. This essay examines the way such impatience has become increasing devalued, and instead, an essentially conservative disposition towards enduring and waiting out difficult conditions is diffused throughout society.

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Chapter 9: Out of 'Turn', Out of Sync: Waiting for Marriage in Macedonia
Violeta Duklevska Schubert

In Macedonia, the increasing number of individuals who are not married by the socially appropriate age is challenging the premise of 'being'. This prolonged waiting for marriage compels individuals (mothers and sons in this case) to reconsider what it is that makes them a person beyond marriage, family and kinship.

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Chapter 10: Waiting to Return Home: Modes of Immigrant Waiting
Salim Lakha

This essay considers the predicament of migrants who are waiting to return home, a phenomenon that is widely experienced amongst many, including those from South Asia. It discusses how stable and meaningful 'home' is in the context of contemporary globalization and whether 'waiting to return home' represents a form of resistance. It identifies the markers and discourses of such resistance.

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Chapter 11: Waiting for Global Warming: Climate Politics in Australia:Perspectives from Above and Below
Hans A Baer

Despite ratification of the Kyoto Protocol and advocacy of an emissions trading scheme on the part of the Rudd government, some Australians have organised themselves into a climate movement which is not merely waiting for but demanding the implementation of stronger climate policies in responding to global warming.

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Chapter 12: Serbian National Resurrection: Myths of Waiting and Being
Andrew Dawson

This essay explores the myth of 'Heavenly Serbia'. Critiquing conventional interpretations of the myth and contributing to ritual theory, I play with a classic Heideggerian distinction. Heavenly Serbia's emphasis on resurrection is as much a statement of national being as of waiting, a key dynamic within national myths more generally.

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Part 3 - Waiting Affects

 

Chapter 13: Waiting, Patience and Love
Christopher Cordner

A certain mode of waiting-on the world, or another human being, involves both receptiveness to, and affirmation of, the other. In its purest form the loving patience of such waiting-on is unconditional. I argue that anyone who experiences herself as so loved finds the deepest possible sense of herself affirmed.

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Chapter 14: Waiting To Be Loved - The European Union's Hope To Be the Loved Object
Senka Bozic-Vrbancic

This essay explores various cultural strategies deployed by European politicians to encourage "Europeans to fall in love with Europe”. To date, it appears that European citizens have failed to sufficiently return the love. This failure of the creation of a "European people” has worked to increase European institutional investment in it, which is analysed as a form of waiting.

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Chapter 15: The Shame of Waiting
Maree Pardy

This essay illustrates how the multicultural subject is brought into being through an entanglement of waiting and shame. Multiculturalism promises belonging. Yet, as explored here, when the waiting to belong is unduly prolonged, the immigrant begins to experience the shame of not fitting in. This shame in turn generates a disposition of 'waiting in shame'.

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Chapter 16: Waiting for the Baby
Emma Kowal

Pregnancy is experienced differently by every woman, but to all, it is a time of waiting. This paper explores how women wait for their babies in contemporary Australia. It argues that Jacques Lacan's concepts of anticipation and retroaction offer a novel and productive way to understand the temporality of pregnancy.

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Chapter 17: Waiting on Death Row
Tamara Kohn

Drawing from my correspondence with two California Death Row inmates in the years leading up to their executions, this essay explores the reframing of 'self' that waiting for an unnatural death over many years may foster. Waiting is not passive, powerless suspension but a space for potentially transforming, creative activity.

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