Time poetics and ageing in the Ik mountains: seeing time disappear

Abstract

In the Ik mountains in Uganda, only few old people still have the skills to ‘see time’ with sundials. Common ways of knowing time and age now include phones and ID cards in digital registers. I follow the elder seer Komol to explore how changing the measures of time influences the experience of time and age. How do being a ‘time being’ and ideas about ‘the good life’ change with age, technology, and history? What (dis)appears when ways of tracking time and age (dis)appear? With the expression bas, Komol points to times that are over and readiness for the new. The value of the expression bas challenges stereotypes of elders as nostalgic and emphasizes their pragmatic natality and value pluralism. The introduction of ID cards with estimated age gave access to a cash transfer programme for elders. Rather than being critical of this ‘chronocracy’, elders saw new possibilities in subject positions as ‘elderly citizens’, which added layers of being ‘time beings’. Ik old age is not a life phase following a linear timeline, but better conceptualized as a carrier bag of embodied tempi and cumulative ages. With the term ‘time poetics’, I draw attention to the aesthetic, political, and ethical creations of ‘time beings’.