Temporality: Implications of the demands of a society.

Abstract

This anthropological study based on fieldwork in California USA, addresses what the implications are of a notion of temporality on a society. How unstable structures provide options and threats for the many; but request adaptability and self-reliance of all. An ethnography on where work meets poverty and where temporary phases of homelessness provide an unstable structure in which a society becomes a construct which is based on situationalist choices and temporary ethics. This against a background of postmodernist relativism makes people highly perceptible to the structuring qualities of their direct surroundings. Such direct surroundings are the present consumerist structures which have come to be ever more important. But these direct surroundings also see a diminishing role of the influence of family-structures, and an increase in the individualization of remedies when people cannot cope with what is asked of them to do in terms of labor. As institutionalized individualization eradicates social cohesion, individuals are less and less bound together through family structure and tradition, and are more and more asked to work on a basis of reciprocal individualization.