Time and space in the work of Katherine Verdery

Abstract

Katherine Verdery is often thought of as a theorist of time and temporality. In “The ‘etatization’ of time in Ceauşescu’s Romania,” Verdery looked at how the socialist regime placed time itself in shortage. Yet, it is Verdery’s often critical geography and her attention to space—as well as time—that has allowed her to reconsider socialism, postsocialism, and capitalism. Although she often argues that property (her key concept) is not about the relations between people and things but the relations among persons, her foundational innovation, in fact, is to see property as a relation between people and space—or, more accurately, a relationship among persons forged spatially. In this article, I show how the way she has placed the social construction of spatial orders is at the heart of the problem of value.