Introduction: living between the already fulfilled and the not yet completed

In the social sciences, investigations of human experiences of time lead into a thicket of questions about culture and language, mind, and memory. Although in European grammars time is conventionally divided into past, present, and future, and metaphorically made thing-like—which led Benjamin Lee Whorf to describe this understanding of time as “an evenly scaled limitless tape measure”—anthropologists know well that members of different societies have numerous ways of framing, expressing, and reflecting on temporality (Whorf, 1956, p. 154). One of the aims of this book is to make a further point: that during the course of their lives people also live in multiple, overlapping temporalities, which are layered upon each other and often deployed in ways that pose no contradiction for those who experience and enact them (compare Ballard, 2018). Clarice Lispector’s (2012) reflection on the future highlights how the subject actualizes herself through various layers of lived experiences of being-in-time, and in her case, of being a woman writing in time. They also suggest that to “simply” exist is never simple, and raise complex questions about who we are, where we come from, and where we are going.