This article asks how people come to interpret themselves and others as autonomous given their multiple dependencies. We draw on a cross-case comparison of ethnographic studies with two populations for whom autonomy is both central and problematic: elderly patients in post-acute care, and young adults with disabilities in an independent living program. Analyzing the institutional efforts to make their clients “as independent as possible,” we find that staff members at each organization formulate autonomy as a temporal project through an ongoing calibration of open futures, ideal pasts, and situational competence. Constantly adjusting and fine-tuning where in time autonomy “really” is, workers arrange present dependence so that the contours of the future remain open for their clients. In other words, they make use of temporal markers to produce recognizable autonomous subjects whose dependencies are momentary. Theorizing this temporal project enables us to see more clearly how all of us engage in the constant business of “doing” autonomy, and to better understand the role of institutions in producing autonomous selves.

本文提出了人们如何鉴于多重依赖而将自己和他人解释为自主的。我们对人种学研究与两个具有自主性且有问题的人群进行了跨案例比较，这两个人群是：急性护理后的老年患者和独立生活计划中的残疾年轻成年人。通过分析为使客户“尽可能独立”而进行的制度努力，我们发现每个组织的工作人员都通过对开放的期货，理想的过去和情境能力进行持续的校准，将自主权作为临时项目制定出来。不断地调整和微调时间自主权的“真正”位置，工人安排当前的依存关系，以便将来的轮廓对他们的客户开放。换一种说法，他们利用时间标记来产生可识别的自主主体，其依赖关系是瞬时的。对这个临时项目进行理论化处理，使我们能够更清楚地看到我们所有人如何从事“做”自治的持续业务，并更好地理解机构在产生自治中的作用。