Temporality and Experience

Abstract

This article inquires as to the meaning of nervoso(nerves) among poor, working-class women from Salvador, Brazil. Our aim is to understand nerves as an experience that emerges from the background of a life trajectory and that, in many significant ways, disrupts the taken-for-granted character of that trajectory. From a phenomenological-hermeneutical tradition, we explore the links between experience, embodiment and temporality and then discuss the relevance of this approach for the understanding of women’s nervoso. In order to do so we present the life histories of three middle-aged women who have been afflicted with nerves. The accounts describe significant ways in which culturally inherited possibilities - grounded in a lived context of class and gender - are recovered and come to pre-figure a certain future. As we argue throughout the article, it is only when we situate the experience of nervoso within the temporal frame of life that we can truly understand it - that is, grasp it as part of a movement that involves both recovery and creation of meaning.