Anthropologists understand time as telic, with a defined start and end, as per research ebbs and flows ( Crapanzano 2010).
To address this issue, what may be called for here is a reconfiguration of routine and a modified understanding of time, a task for which anthropologists are excellently well placed to tackle. Unlike previous epidemics, then, Quarantime, with its distinctive relationship of intensification to time-space compression and resulting lack of creativity, may be more of an unproductive epidemic than its forebearers. Yet, as David Harvey notes, time-space compression's insistence on instantaneity has resulted in an ‘accelerating turnover time and the rapid write-off of traditional and historically acquired values’, including ‘novel writing and philosophizing’ (1989: 104–105). Indeed, these three epidemics are mentioned specifically for the great works of literature produced when their authors had moments of quiet: Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, Samuel Pepys's Plague Diary and Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse Pale Rider. Their minds were in quarantine as much as their physical bodies. However, they were not able to continue working from their computers, receive instant news updates on the disease, or video call loved ones. For example, during the 1348 Black Death, the Bubonic Plague of 1665 and the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic, people might have been locked down at home and nursing concerns over health, just like us. Second, this quarantine is distinct from historical epidemics in the way that time-space compression has played a key role. The Internet was flooded with sarcastic memes about the futility of changing the clocks when one would not be going anywhere anyway, perhaps a tentative preclusion to a mass realisation that clock time itself is both deeply connected to labour and profit, as well as potentially exerting an unnecessary hold over our lives, interrogating our very intimacies with clock time and routine as we know it. Nowadays, it is somewhat defunct as an influential concept in post-industrial societies however, its appearance during a time when a population was suddenly forced to stay indoors did not go unnoticed.
Introduced in 1919, daylight savings were originally concerned with extending the hours of sunlight available to work in the fields it was fundamentally about increasing and extracting as much labour as possible from agriculturalists. This fact was highlighted perhaps most satirically with the passing of daylight savings time at the start of UK lockdown. The first novelty is that intimacies with routine and clock time in post-industrial society have become disrupted, opening the possibility to question notions of time discipline and time reckoning that may have been approached uncritically up until now, formed as they were largely alongside the Industrial Revolution. However, the COVID-19 quarantine is unique in a number of ways, making it something other and worthy of anthropological reflection. This article seeks to address this issue as it pertains to the COVID-19 pandemic and the social phenomenon of global lockdown through introducing the concept of Quarantime.Īs highlighted, both global infectious disease epidemics and imposed quarantine during them are not new to humanity. Within anthropology, Nancy Munn argues that a problem with ‘time’ is that it is notoriously ‘difficult to find a meta-language to conceptualize something so ordinary and transparent in everyday life’ (1992: 116). Importantly, this enforced restructuring of time may incite us to revisit the relationship that we have with it – a kind of intimacy that in ‘normal’ times may uncritically permeate reality. Quarantime moves differently than our daily lived temporalities of routine and order, and forces us to question the intimate relationship that we may have with how we structure our daily lives around a clock and a timesheet. In this article, it will be proposed that, far from advocating that we completely scrap the exacerbated and historically incorrect phrase, instead the intonation be changed and that we do away with the determiner ‘an’: we are living through ‘unprecedented time’: Quarantime, a specific phenomenon of time that has not been experienced before in history. Yet, as Marian Krawczyk (2020) notes, in widening our perspectives through time and space, we see that this is not the case at all: infectious disease epidemics have been co-habiting with human-kind for millennia. Over the past few months, the notion that we are living through an ‘unprecedented time’ has been re-hashed to exhaustion.
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