Crisis as a Social Experience of Time

The uncertainty produced by the crisis opens a time in which the outcome is unknown or unthinkable, due to the temporary impossibility of building a new predictability: this occurs in many situations, linked to disasters, catastrophes, situations of armed conflict and obviously to epidemics and pandemics. The crisis, a parenthesis. If the beginning of the crisis is determined by an alteration of routines, the end should be in the restoration of a stable time, which would mark the end of that parenthesis of uncertainty. But from the point of view of our social experiences of temporality, the concept is useful insofar as it detects ruptures and discontinuities between what was and what is, and at the same time inaugurates questions about the future,” it is indicated. “There are general aspects that make up crises, which have to do with the alteration of an order, of predictability and the inauguration of a time of radical, strong, prolonged uncertainty. Crisis can be so many things and none, or it can be understood from a different perspective. The word crisis is heard a lot in the media and is something that experts use to characterize political or economic situations, but I prefer to use it in a more restricted way: as a rather special form of socially experiencing time,” begins to explain Sergio Visacovsky, principal researcher of CONICET at the Center for Social Research (CIS) and author of the article “The gaze of Lot's wife or what anthropology has helped to understand the COVID-19 pandemic”, published in the journal Cuadernos de Antropología Social. Dedicated to studying the crisis from an anthropological point of view, in different works Visacovsky based himself on methods such as observation, urban walks, interviews, questionnaires and surveys in the media to investigate that “singular social experimentation with time” that he associates with the word crisis. The crisis, this uncertainty. How do we socially experience time in situations of crisis? Image of the crisis taken from Google. By Romina Kippes (Página 12, Argentina). A different look at the concept of crisis proposes to understand it as a break with a temporal order, with social routines that are strongly interrupted, giving rise to a kind of “frozen time”. We can also find that balance by comparing the present with other scenarios that we have lived or that have been told to us, finding similarities that allow us to imagine possible ways out of the crises. As an example, Visacovsky recounts that as soon as the ASPO began, the people he spoke with “speculated on the time the pandemic and confinement would last, based on their own and collective experience regarding the relationship between cold and respiratory diseases,” trying to anticipate the end. But at the same time, this implies an effort on the part of those who go through the crisis in different conditions to try to reconstitute what they consider “normality” and, consequently, predictability in their daily lives,” he concludes. According to Visacovsky, “the crisis necessarily implies that radical discontinuity in temporality, and uncertainty is the result: in the face of discontinuity, social groups must face the challenge of producing a new flow of temporality assumed as normality, that gives predictability to our actions in daily life,” he adds. A recent example of that temporal rupture, which was studied by Visacovsky through in-depth interviews and periodic surveys to a network of people, occurred during the Social, Preventive and Compulsory Isolation (ASPO), in the middle of a health emergency due to COVID 19. That profound alteration of the temporal flow that leads to uncertainty about the future is a crisis,” explains the researcher. Uncertainty becomes the new key word that connects us with this way of understanding the crisis, the other side of the same coin. The contribution of anthropological studies to a word that serves for almost everything. Googling the word “crisis” throws up in 0.32 seconds nearly 2,350,000,000 results, in an eclectic list that contains everything from economics and international conflicts to self-help advice and seven definitions from the Royal Spanish Academy. What is interesting about this is that it begins to create scenarios for action,” he adds. A multiple wait. Are we in crisis, if we conceive of it as “a time socially altered”? “We are in a kind of multiple wait,” reflects Visacovsky, in relation to resolutions that must be made at different levels. “For economists, the crisis is something inherent to the phases of economic systems. However, the pandemic could continue beyond that “common sense” fed by the experience of lived situations. “As the months went by and we saw that confinement was being renewed, that feeling of uncertainty intensified even more: there was no way to imagine a day after,” indicates Visacovsky, at the same time as the need to build predictability from creating a “new normality” prevailed. “People tend to resort to past analogies all the time: this has already happened to us and we got out of it this way. Meanwhile, and until that end arrives, we resort to things that attenuate the imbalance — as happened in the pandemic with Zoom birthdays, home working, and meetings through the screen — or anticipate the longed-for end. “A strong dislocation of life, which produces effects on the use of time in daily life and that we cannot control. A practical way to understand it can start from detecting alterations in our social routines, that escape our control.