Why Urgency, Now?

Abstract

The essays collected in this special issue of Social Anthropology ask questions about thxe status of claims to urgency. Such claims are a way of indexing a state of affairs; they qualify the ongoing stream of phenomena that we observe and take part in. They are, therefore, and as noted by the various contributions to this special issue, not self-evident. Such claims constitute the significance of events. The question for an anthropology of claims to urgency is: How and to what extent do such claims stabilise as truth claims? Or not.