FUTURES FULL OF PROMISE, FUTURES OF DESPAIR. CONTRASTING TEMPORALITIES IN THE LIFE NARRATIVE OF YOUNG CZECHS

• Authors: Haukanes Haldis
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

On the backdrop of increasing anxieties about the state of the world and its future found among by scholars and grassroots alike, this article explores young people’s narratives of the future, paying particular attention to dominant temporal structures through which the young people frame their expectations and imagine their lives to come. The article builds on research with young Czechs in three different regions of the country, carried out in the years 2007–2009 and 2014–2016. In addition it incorporates elements from the author ś former work on post-socialist transformations in rural Czech Republic. Drawing on anthropological debates about time, agency and social change and on recent scholarship on nostalgia, he argues for the necessity of a diversified understanding of temporality when analysing narrations of both lived lives and future visions; linear and reproductive temporalities appear to co-exist with conceptions of time as accelerated, incoherent and unpredictable. Further, he argues that time or temporality is not just something which people are subject to; it also involves agency. This implies that well-established temporal frameworks can be used to narrate expectations for the future, or that different temporal frameworks can be strategically combined to manage both the present and the future.

Keywords

EN

YOUTH; CZECH REPUBLIC; TEMPORALITIES; NARRATIVES; FUTURE

• Publisher: Institute of Ethnology, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Slovenský národopis (Slovak Ethnology)
• Year: 2017
• Volume: 65
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 120 – 134

Contributors

author

Haukanes Haldis

• Department of Health Promotion and Development, University of Bergen, P.O.Box 7080, 5020 Bergen, Norway