Laura Brown: Kaikari circulations and community distinctions: talk about timescapes in maLigai kaDai
It is now commonplace for anthropologists to note that much of what people do with money involves attempts to exert control over time. Anyone who has kept pasaLikirai out on a warm afternoon should be aware of the possibility of a particularly strong relationship between time and the value assigned to vegetables. This paper examines the ways in which interactions in small grocery shops, located in Thanjavur, India, explicitly perform, and comment on, and mediate between a variety of temporalities and as well as the moral, religious, and political systems that produce them. I suggest that we can view maLigai kaDai as situated at the intersection of multiple completing timescales including: everyday rhythems of neighborhood life, religious and ritual time, and the timing of mass political actions such as bhunds and strikes. Coordination of action across, and the movement of food within, time are a significant means by which broad categories of social difference are made visible and salient parts of neighborhood life in small town India. Shops can serve as metronomes that help to synchronise the rhythms of household and neighborhood life with actions that happen at broader social and geographic scales. Yet they may also work as theaters for the display, definition, and management of competing timescapes, and through them, for the regimentation or realignment of the social distinctions that they embody.
Biographical Statement:
Laura Brown is a PhD Candidate in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include the anthropology of exchange, conversation, and obligation, especially in relation to everyday life in South India; street signs, small-scale printing, and Tamil typography. She is writing a dissertation that examines language use in and around small grocery shops in Tamil Nadu.
