Firstly, practices like wooden boating provide an arena in which social distinctions are reproduced and enacted. As a reflexive novice notices: ‘After sailing a week with a wooden boat, I understood wooden boating. Just because of the boat, everyone was looking at us when we entered harbours. We didn’t have to have a big and fancy boat to attract attention’ (U, female). Instead of mere possession, this distinctive display and identity construction revolves around skills and understandings of ways of using and being with the objects. On the other hand, wooden boaters seek to articulate identities and mutual relationships with objects in ways that counter forms of capitalistic power. For committed practitioners of wooden boating in Finland, the skilled performances, the tactile object relations and the roles of stewardship compensate for many of the ills of their working life. Equally, ‘strong’ objects that are placed high in the moral order of things contribute to understandings of ‘community and sense of a location in an increasingly global world. Yet the stress, the rolling demands and the lengthy lists of things-to-do that the boat-owners encounter reveal that the relatively powerful position of the wooden boat is a double-edged sword. While dedicated practitioners may be able to establish a sense of a community and tackle existential questions, they most often fail in trying to resist harriedness as a phenomenon of modern capitalist society.
To conclude, the temporalities that arise from reciprocal relations and actions around physical objects involve uncertainty and emergent qualities; they are not something that humans write with a firm hand and clear mind. Social distinction may be an unintended result of enthusiastic history-writing on a particular boat; the traditions evoked through replication may reflect modern anxieties on a preconscious bodily level; really working with your hands really does feel different compared to merely pushing paper around, and the smell of tar is inviting. What is also evident is that if wooden boats indeed play their role so well that practitioners and the publics around them are captured, convinced and moved, it important to recognize that boats themselves rewrite the temporalities of human action and that they make time.
References
Making Time •
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