Introduction: Worth the Wait

Abstract

We all wait - in traffic jams, passport offices, school meal queues, for a response, for better weather, the holidays, an end to fighting, peace. Time spent waiting produces hope, boredom, anxiety, doubt, or uncertainty. Ethnographies of Waiting explores the social phenomenon of waiting and its centrality in human society. Using waiting as a central analytical category, the book investigates how waiting is negotiated in myriad ways and provides a new perspective on waiting as the uncertain interplay between doubting and hoping. Featuring eight detailed ethnographies covering areas such as India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Tajikistan, South Africa, Russia, and the UK, it examines both the political and existential dimensions of waiting to ask this central question: when is time worth the wait? With contributions from scholars in the UK, Europe, Australia, and the United States - as well as an afterword by Ghassan Hage - this is a vital contribution to the field of anthropology of time and essential reading for students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and philosophy. Great expectations? : between boredom and sincerity in Jewish ritual 'attendance' / Simon Coleman -- Hope and waiting in post-Soviet Moscow / Jarrett Zigon -- Time and the other : waiting and hope among irregular migrants / Synnøve Bendixsen, Thomas Hylland Eriksen -- Waiting for God in Ghana : the chronotopes of a prayer mountain / Bruno Reinhardt -- Providence and publicity in waiting for a creationist theme park / James S. Bielo -- Waiting for nothing : nihilism, doubt and difference without difference in post-revolutionary Georgia / Martin Demant Frederiksen -- Not-waiting to die badly : facing the precarity of dying alone in Japan / Anne Allison -- Afterword / Ghassan Hage .