How do intimate relations develop? Novelties such as new cars are subject to aesthetic judgements of look and feel, and, as Campbell (1987) suggests, sensory relationships with objects may involve elaborate dreaming, often strongest when not (yet) possessing the objects in question. One could thus argue that practices like wooden boating recruit practitioners by means of particularly vivid and tempting images. However, once captured, practising is self-reinforcing. Intimacy may not be a result of a sensory encounter, but might rather stem from continuous engagement. For example, Ilmonen (2004) suggests that we gradually develop attachment towards our possessions. This may take place through increasing personalization of the object, or as the marks and memories of past occasions (and uses) accumulate (McCracken 1988). Equally, it may be the result of acquiring relevant skills.
Objects that bear marks of social history and human engagement can be significant in other ways as well. For example, Ahuvia (2005) describes a category of ‘loved objects’ which includes collections, gifts and inherited family objects. Family belongings appear important to us because they remind us of other important people, establish links between people and bring together senses of community. On the other hand, the patina of objects represents continued human effort on the part of other, often more distant actors. One can push these ideas further and identify situations in which objects come to be valuable, unique and special in their own right, as the persons involved become more distant and less particular.
Obligations, Duties and the Stewardship of Wooden Boats
Solidarity with and dutifulness towards objects implies a particular kind of emotional and moral link between the object-world and human practitioners. Boats provide a vivid illustration of such co-determination. Wooden boating includes processes through which boats enter the category of heritage. Once established as such, they are able to argue for rights and call for human stewards. This is one example of how objects in general manage to convey and place requirements on human practitioners. There are others. If boats are regarded as family members, pets or even persons, they may also have rights regardless of whether they are registered as national heritage or not. In all such cases, the humans involved identify duties and moral obligations to boats. In considering these relations I start by commenting on the more objective qualities of uniqueness and right-claiming, and then return to the mystic and spiritual ways that boats are made alive.
Some sections and tons of the material of wooden boating are regarded as unique parts of common maritime heritage due to their rarity or status as being representative of a wider class of objects, and are protected like nationally important buildings. In 1994 in Finland, the National Board of Antiquities established a register of existing large historical vessels and a fund for their restoration. These national efforts paralleled an international focus on maritime history. The first European Maritime Heritage Conference was held in 1992 and the fourth congress issued the so-called ‘Barcelona Charter’ in 2002, which ‘set out a Code of Good Practice for owners and operators of traditional vessels along the lines of the Athens Charter drafted by architects and museum technicians in 1931 (as amended in Venice in 1964) to give guidance on the restoration of historic monuments’ (http://www. heritageafloat.org.uk/Barcelona.htm). Even if the scope of the charter is limited, and the text hardly known among boat-owners, popular magazines and books on wooden boating rephrase and broaden the overall argument: the owners of wooden boats are in the trusted position of taking care of a unique and priceless fleet of boats and of reproducing a pool of related skills.
Making Time
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