This talk identifies the indeterminate nature of political activist time, as activists must assess any action both for what it does (relatively) immediately, and for what it might produce in the (relatively) longer term: provisional failures can be resources for future victories, while erstwhile successes can become sundered after their moment of apparent achievement. Activists engage the ever-presence of potential defeat by engaging two divergent temporalities divided by their respective orientations towards failure: in one, activists inoculate themselves against the possibility of ultimate failure by embedding themselves in perpetual struggles that efface ends through an embrace of means; in the other, activists embrace a contingent and open-ended temporality, in which victory is only one of several potential outcomes and absolute failure remains a perpetual potential conclusion. The talk uses these experiences to consider broader considerations of human understanding of temporality and causality - whether in development work or daily life. 

Elliott Prasse-Freeman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at NUS, has conducted long-term fieldwork in Myanmar and it environs. His first book (Rights Refused, Stanford University Press) focuses on political activism in Burma, while his current book project examines Rohingya ethnogenesis amidst dislocation and mass violence. His work has appeared in American Ethnologist, Current Anthropology, Journal of Peasant Studies, Public Culture, and Comparative Studies in Society and History, and he's the co-editor of Anthropological Theory Commons, a place where you should consider submitting your short-form anthro theory writings!