Heterotemporal convergences: travelling significations of order and their adaptations in the claims-making strategies of accra's makola market traders

Studies on market trader activism in Africa routinely approach traders' claims-making practices from the perspective of the state's regime of signifying order, in relation to which opposition simply seeks to render itself “legible” (Scott 1998). In contrast, this dissertation contends that one must pay close attention to the multiple significations of order and disorder that exist in any social situation and which, through their continuous permeation, fuel transformations of normative plausibilities and, by extension, of the grounds for claims. With a grounding in the theory of the social and political quality of time, I show how the idea of coeval temporalities sensitises observers to the multiple sources of significations of order and disorder – particularly, with regard to subjects' relation to authority – and their creative adaptation in the moment of temporal convergence. The central marketplace of Accra, the capital of Ghana, provides the context for this study. My empirical analysis of this social arena that is closely connected to global flows of people, capital, consumer items and, inevitably, ideas, including those related to order and associated grounds of entitlement adds to the underappreciated theoretical strand the actor-centred process of translation that engenders creative adaptations between converging coeval temporalities.