‘Time Is Like a Soup’

Boat Time and the Temporal Experience of London’s Liveaboard Boaters

in The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
Author:
Ben Bowles University of Roehampton benjamin.bowles@brunel.ac.uk

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DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3167/ca.2016.340110
Keywords:
boating; London; narrowboats; rhythm; tempo; time-maps; travellers; UK
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Itinerant boat-dwellers (‘boaters’) on the waterways of London speak about their lives as occurring in a time zone that is separate from the sedentary world around them. ‘Boat time’, as boaters call it, is simultaneously slow and unpredictable. The slow aspect of boat time is said to provide a much-needed contrast to the fast and highly choreographed movements of the city surrounding the towpaths. It becomes part of the boaters’ rhetoric of difference from, and resistance to, the state and other sedentary elements surrounding them. This article suggests that temporal experiences are a constitutive part of identity, a strategic component of resistance to the sedentary order, and a thread that links the disparate aspects of boaters’ own lives aboard.

Contributor Notes

Ben Bowles studied Social Anthropology at Durham and Brunel Universities, UK, completing his PhD in 2015. He is currently Visiting Lecturer at the University of Roehampton.

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Cover The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
Article Category:
Research Article
Page Count:
13
Keywords:
boating; London; narrowboats; rhythm; tempo; time-maps; travellers; UK
Print Publication Date:
01 Mar 2016
Online Publication Date:
01 Mar 2016
Copyright:
© The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 2016
Editorial
General Article
Special Section - Time-Tricking: Reconsidering Temporal Agency in Troubled Times
Part I. Time-Tricking in Moments of Crisis: Political and Economic Manipulations of Time
Part II. Maintaining Other Times: Technologies for Being Out-of-Time
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