Contenu du sommaire : Attendre

In this introduction Christian Bromberger analyses the different meanings and codes of waiting in a hurried world where one should be synchronous with other people's precipitation. This unusual interaction with time is experienced differently in cases of waiting “situationally” or waiting “existentially”. The time and space of waiting are differentially codified according to specific socio-cultural contexts.

This is an article published in 1943 in the unfinished Précis d'un traité de sociologie. The author examines the morphological diversity of queues or lines of people waiting. He considers the phenomenon of social interactions which develop within them, the hierarchies which, in some cases get created and the anger which, from time to time, occurs (“queues caused by scarcity and despair”).

The life of the asylum seekers Klara Golounova and Aké Koné housed in residential centres (cada) is characterised by the dilation of time and the shrinking of space. The paper explores the reality created by their daily waiting. Of course, there is not one single and unique way of experiencing waiting and this experience is neither homogenous nor continuous. However three sequences seem to follow each other in the experience of those men and women met during field work carried out between 2003 and 2008, mainly in residential centres in the Paris region: 1. the halt created by the beginning of the waiting period and the arrival in the centre, 2. the boredom which ensues and the need to fill up the time, 3. the ways of avoiding waiting.

The strengthening of the political control of migration in Europe has led to the development of pockets of places of waiting created at different stages of the journeys of those attempting migration. At the same time the tightening of the conditions under which foreigners already present in the country can legally obtain rights of residence has lengthened these waiting times. While waiting for much desired and necessary papers the illegal migrants are forced to live in an eternal present composed of numerous fresh starts. Yet, even if obtaining papers opens up a new temporality and profitable time use the now legalised foreigners soon discover the contradictions of life as an immigrant.

The time of military service, which ended in 2001, has anchored in popular representations the idea that the daily life of soldiers is one of waiting and boredom. These are wasted times which the soldiers attempt to fill as best they can. The legally based availability of soldiers has also very concrete implications for the organisation of their work and their relation to time as they prepare for combat. Waiting is part of the “job”. It is at the same time a means of the exercise of power and an effect which follows from the organisation of the military work. The purpose of the paper is not to examine the time of engagement with work and its relation to the social temporalities of individual biographies but, instead, to analyse that very time of engagement when the soldiers are actually engaged in such work. As they prepare for military combat and are taking up their positions the soldiers share their expectations and anticipations as what the fighting will be like. In this way a military ethos is created. Waiting creates ideas about waiting and military maxims concerning waiting times reveal the relation of soldier's expectations and the objective realities of combat.

As well as the evocation by writers and the analyses of philosophers and socio-logists the photographic approach of the author (refusal of scene setting, panoramic formats, etc.) enables us to capture a variety of forms of “waiting together” in different situations (under a bus shelter, outside a shop), in different cultural contexts (in different countries). One of the aims of such an enterprise is to produce “a powerful image of the banal” following in the line set by the motto of the author Gustave Flaubert (“Writing well about the mediocre”).

While prison is often studied from the point of view of those who are imprisoned, this paper considers the point of view of prison staff whether these are warders or those empowered to take decisions concerning the length of time to be served by the prisoners. It considers the significance of the waiting that occurs in prison. How do these people attempt to make the waiting in prison be a time when the power of the institution is experienced by the prisoner as well as a time when the prisoner is transformed according to the intentions of the penitential institution? In what ways are these employees constrained and forced to face the realities of the contradictions of contemporary French prison institutions characterised, as they are, by overcrowding and the enforced inactivity of those held in them.

This article concerns forms of millenarian Christianity found in both north Atlantic societies (Iceland, Faroes) and the south Atlantic (Cape Verde). These islands had different established religions, cultures and history and all became independent during the twentieth century. Within the independence movements new religions had a major role by proposing various destinies after death or more immediate millenniums. These religious manifestations have been little studied by social science and, when they have, they have not been fully appreciated as phenomena for themselves but rather as simple examples of diffusions originating in Europe or America. These forms of Christianity, whether Adventist, Pentecostalist, Methodist, Calvinist or Lutheran, all reveal the distinct character of these indigenous social utopias. Having had to deal with impatience and too delayed expectations they manifest a distinctive relation to time which is concerned both with the perennial and the imminence of a prophesised end.

The paper focuses on a Vietnamo-Australian woman's reaction and feelings on hearing about a spectacular attack in which seve-ral Vietnamese young men killed other Vietnamese. The sensational reporting of the event made her feel ashamed of her Vietnamese identity and body. The paper reflects on the feelings of shame created by the experience of waiting for inclusion in the self-declared multicultural society of Anglo-Celtic Australia. It highlights the feeling of shame that this waiting creates and the passivity or occasional aggressivity it leads to.

The waves occurring in different coastal locations can be seen as “natural materiality”. These are likely to attract interest when they are considered as of high quality for surfers. This study of the different ways such waves are appropriated offers a good way of understanding these processes. Three types of appropriation procedures are identified all linked to different ways of benefiting from them. These are political, economic, or having to do with identity politics. Thus, by taking into account varying geographical characteristics, the wishes of those who practice surfing, and the attempts at regularisation, we find that the waves used for surfing can be made a part of “heritage” (this is the main concern here), or they can be monopolised in order to restrict access for particular people or they can simply be privatised for commercial purposes. These three types of uses show how an identical phenomenon, in this case waves, can, because of different types of appropriation, serve different ends. Three episodes of field work furnish the data for these cases.