A Rural Bureaucrat’s Time: Temporalities and Chronopolitics of Municipal Governance

Abstract

The article is focused on the temporality of two rural administration employees in southwestern Siberia: the structural grounds of two local officials’ temporal practices (“hastening” and “waiting out”) in their connection with perceived uncertainty are under analysis. The author claims that amid the Russian centralized municipal governance system in the 2020s the rural bureaucrats find themselves in a position of double dependence. Their temporality is being oppressed by the superior governors’ temporality through the chronopolitics of urgent requirements and being interdependent through the chronopolitics of care / non-attention with the rural settlers’ temporality. In these conditions rural bureaucrats acquire the shared practical sense of time, making them permanently anticipate the future in the present. Meanwhile, the very explicit reference on inability to plan their time, often made by rural officials, is not only a bureaucratic tool to evade the local residents’ request legitimately, but supposedly it also lets rural officials unmask the corporative metaphor of “teamwork” and restore the real boundaries between “superiors” and “subordinates” during their conversations with colleagues, along with it enabling rural bureaucrats to perceive themselves as wise administrators.