‘Waiting for chronic’: Time, cannabis and counterculture in Hawai‘i

Abstract

What does it mean not to wait? It is possible to live in ways which do not entail waiting? Through close examination of time and its articulations among a group of US 1960s-generation 'hippies' and younger 'drop outs' in a rural backwater of Hawai'i, I argue in this paper that it is possible to live without waiting. Drawing on Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953) and Baba Ram Dass' countercultural invocation to 'remember, be here now', I explore unexpected interruptions to anticipated temporal flows. Structured around three vignettes on failing to hitchhike, learning to do ethnographic fieldwork through stopping trying to do ethnographic fieldwork and an unexpected interruption in the supermarket, this paper builds up a picture of nonwaiting in action. Located against a backdrop of waiting as temporal interruption and affective mode, I argue that this group sought to collectively disrupt the affective modes of indifference and/or frustration they grew up with in urban mainland America. Through new forms of affective engagement they became able to collectively reframe temporal interruption as existing within rather than without local temporal flows, interruptions ceased to be ruptures to temporal textures but part of their very fabric. Located within temporal flows, they did not force individuals out of a moral community of (time is money) efficient, productive citizens but reframed productivity itself in terms of producing sociality, positive affective experience and communitas. Out of a multitude of moments of not waiting, a temporal texture of American counterculture emerges.

Rethinking waiting

“…Numerous studies have ontologically conceived waiting processes from a physical perspective when considering them as a temporality (Crespo Díaz, 2017;Dwyer, 2009;Schweizer, 2008). According to Lucie Pickering (2016), that is situated in what " Gordon (2011) terms 'cosmic time' or 'mechanical time of life, aging, anddeath'" (2016, p. 454). Due to its characteristics, this perspective separates time from any socio-cultural construction, although these may exist.…”

“…As a result, waiting has been described as an "inactive activity, " a "temporal deviation" (Crapanzano, 1986;Schweizer, 2008), a "desynchronization of time" (Bendixsen & Eriksen, 2020;Brun, 2015), a time that fills the voids of our time (Gasparini, 1995) and a "temporal aberration" (Schweizer, 2002). It is commonly associated with "liminal" temporal situations, such as "intervals in-betweentimes" or more directly, with moments of timelessness, rupture, death, emptiness, and temporal suspension (Pickering, 2016).…”

Time-rich: 1960s counterculture and time as affluence in a dropout community in Hawai‘i

“…I could give examples of spending twenty minutes buying homemade incense from Sandy who sold it on the street, detailing the process of unwrapping each foilwrapped bundle, sniffing it, commenting on it, moving on to the next before finally selecting one, accompanied by the interruptions of his saying hello to people passing by, relaying messages, and starting again because a new prospective buyer had arrived. I could also describe the slow movement of check-out lines at the health-food store, when conversations between staff and patrons would extend beyond the time required to process and pay for items bought (see Pickering 2016). Or the greetings that turned into chance encounters that turned into adventures.…”

Waiting as a site of subject formation: examining collective prayers by Ethiopian asylum seekers in Germany

“…One of the critical misgivings about the notion of waiting is associated with the risk of depicting the waiting subjects as passive as pointed out by Rotter (2015) and Pickering (2016). To depict waiting time as empty and subjects as passive, as suggested by Crapanzano (1986) and Haas (2017), emanates from the capitalist notion of productivity that ascribes monetary value to time (Schweizer 2005(Schweizer , 2008Bissell 2009;Rotter 2015).…”

“…To depict waiting time as empty and subjects as passive, as suggested by Crapanzano (1986) and Haas (2017), emanates from the capitalist notion of productivity that ascribes monetary value to time (Schweizer 2005(Schweizer , 2008Bissell 2009;Rotter 2015). Pickering (2016) and Rotter (2015) insist on exploring the agency of those in wait by focusing on the 'while waiting' and in so doing they interrogate the notion of waiting as passivising. In her research conducted among asylum seekers in Glasgow, UK, Rotter further states that waiting is an integral part of the quotidian practices of the everyday, which is among other things marked by certain activities that fill the waiting time.…”