THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF WAITING ROOMS: TEMPORAL HIERARCHIES AND EMBODIED PATIENCE IN PUBLIC HEALTHCARE INSTITUTIONS OF SOUTHEAST EUROPE
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF WAITING ROOMS: TEMPORAL HIERARCHIES AND EMBODIED PATIENCE IN PUBLIC HEALTHCARE INSTITUTIONS OF SOUTHEAST EUROPE

Summary/Abstract: The anthropological literature on waiting has developed along two tracks. One treats waiting as an exercise of institutional power, in which the imposition of delay produces subordinated subjects; the other treats the waiting room as an atmospheric and spatial condition with its own affective properties. Neither track has examined how waiting rooms stratify internally, nor what difference it makes whether that stratification is visible to those it disadvantages. This article addresses that gap. Drawing on the published ethnographic and health-services literature, it proposes a distinction among three regimes of temporal stratification, differentiated by where the conversion of social advantage into temporal priority occurs relative to the sight-lines of those waiting: sequestered conversion, in which advantage is exercised outside the room; codified conversion, in which it is exercised inside the room under published criteria; and exposed conversion, in which it is exercised inside the room through unpublished, particularistic means. The article's original contribution is the claim that public healthcare waiting rooms in Southeast Europe are characterised by exposed conversion, and that this produces a distinctive attentional posture I term surveillant waiting: attention directed laterally at co-waiters and at the staff-door threshold rather than forward at one's own turn, because the operative uncertainty concerns not when one will be seen but who will be seen first and on what basis. The consequence for the article's second key term is that embodied patience in such settings is better understood as vigilance held in a still body than as resignation or discipline. Three falsifiable predictions follow, of which the sharpest is that reducing waiting duration should not reduce dissatisfaction under exposed conversion, whereas rendering the conversion either invisible or codified should. The study is conceptual and comparative and rests on no new fieldwork; the conclusion specifies the observational design that would test the predictions.

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