Anthropologists have long been concerned with the experience of crisis as a moment of heightened social action, set apart from the “imponderabilia of actual life” (Malinowski 1984, 20). But crisis is a privileged designation—a moment of rupture—that incites action and brings contradictions to light (cf. Roitman 2013; Masco 2017). In an attempt to describe scenes that dispossess without ever breaching thresholds of eventfulness, scholars have also begun to attune to sluggish temporalities of suffering. Rob Nixon’s (2011) “slow violence,” Lauren Berlant’s (2011, 95) “slow death,” and Elizabeth Povinelli’s (2011, 4) “quasi-events,” for example, depend on forms of delay, deferral, attrition, and accumulation whose ordinariness is their violence. As Nixon (2011, 4) explains: “Violence is customarily conceived as an event that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence . . . incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales.” Slow forms of violence are not only environmental. In the shift from taking life to letting die, even Michel Foucault (2003) recognized that not all deaths are events. Encompassing chronic health conditions alongside milieus of cruddiness (Povinelli 2011), infirmity (Cazdyn 2012), and ruination (Stoler 2013), slow violence refers to a general wearing out, to “deterioration as a defining condition of . . . historical existence” (Berlant 2011, 95). But it also invokes a particular set of challenges. Neither spectacular nor instantaneous, and often proceeding at a speed that decouples suffering from its original causes, slow violence can be difficult to represent, even to perceive. And though many have acknowledged the consequences of inattention and the anesthetizing effects of routine, fewer have shed light on how people mired in the experience of slow violence themselves use time to maneuver politically. In this essay, I focus on the deliberate manipulations of time that characterize responses to slow violence and argue that this condition need not incapacitate its victims. Instead, it can invite creative forms of temporal arrangement, orchestration, and a phenomenon I term moral punctuation: an explicit marking of time that condenses protracted suffering and demands an ethical response, eschewing the delays of political caution and the painstaking work of ensuring scientific certainty. My goal, in other words, is not only to draw attention to the insidious nature of slow or invisible suffering but also to emphasize how affected groups occasionally work time to emphasize their vulnerability. Moreover, I focus on the importance of sustained collective action in the adaptation of time as strategy. In doing so, I join others working on the politics of pollution (e.g., Bullard 1990; Checker 2005) while making temporal tactics a more explicit object of ethnographic scrutiny. This focus challenges the impression that time and perceptibility are chiefly mechanisms of oppression. Instead—like expertise (Brown 1992; Allen 2003) and access to information (Fortun 2001)—they are overt objects of contestation among historically disenfranchised groups (see also Liboiron 2015).

CHLOE AHMANN