ABSTRACT
This chapter compares the way in which time is experienced and transformed within the changing social settings and circumstances of people's lives, by considering how the temporality and imagery of people's bodies becomes radically destabilized during and after illness. It begins with two extended 'ethnographic portraits' of people living with HIV/AIDS; the first a photographer from New York who finds himself blind; the second a mother from Kampala who 'digs' the land to feed her family. By comparing each person's attempt to maintain bodily continuity within different social settings author aim to consider the temporality of 'everyday life' in ways that displace the polarities of universality and difference. Ordinarily an habitual unity of mind, body and world is forged through the skills and practices of ‘everyday life’, whereby a continuity of person, body and action is maintained over time and within specific environments through a combination of culturally defined tasks and desires.
