How, and how much, time is in an object raises sensitive questions of value and authenticity, as any participant or observer of antique shows knows. At the same time, ‘age’ and ‘ageing’ is not simply a natural process that can be dated with the help of a calendar or mark of origin. Commercial consumer culture plays an active role in creating new regimes of temporal value, as is evident in the market for vintage reproductions. Rather than seeing material objects as a distracting presence that injects stress and temporal frenzy into our lives, then, it is helpful to see them also as communicators and stabilizing devices which people employ to attain, reproduce and challenge temporal identities.
Themes and Methods
Inspired by these overarching challenges, contributors to this book provide ideas, resources and empirical research that help in understanding (a) how multiple temporalities co-evolve and intersect and (b) how patterns of time and space are reproduced in daily life, and (c) how material culture acts as a conduit in the production and consumption of time. This three-pronged approach allows us to capture and comment anew on how time is experienced, and on the emotions, politics and infrastructures of ordering and routine. There are a number of wa-ys we could organize the chapters in the volume, for they connect with one another along many dimensions; the next section describes some of the most important intersections.
Seasonal Cycles
As noted above, critiques of consumer society routinely presume a paradigmatic shift from natural, seasonal cycles to a commodified ‘unseasoned’ and more feverish rhythm. Marina Moskowitz’s discussion of the seed trade in the USA complicates and in effect confounds a sharp distinction between natural and commercial seasons. She demonstrates that these two rhythms interacted and evolved in tandem in the course of the nineteenth century. Seed catalogues were published in January so that plants could bloom later in the year, a strategy in which seasonality was commercialized rather than exterminated.
Inge Daniels’ chapter on the way that changing seasons are made and marked in contemporary Japanese homes provides further illustration of how material culture is enmeshed in an annual cycle of consumption. Mikko Jalas offers a case study of people renovating wooden boats, a pastime that attracts devoted followers in Scandinavian countries. Here natural processes like the rotting and decaying of timber intersect with the many social, cultural and material temporalities folded together in the practice of repairing and maintaining a wooden boat. The attraction of wooden boating arguably rests on its evocation of another time which was slower and based on the rhythms of seasons and hand labour, but the possession of an actual wooden boat drags the owner into deep time commitments and obligations which are far from the imagined leisure. Although the point is made in very different ways, these three chapters force readers to acknowledge specific relations between coexisting seasons and cycles of consumption and practice.
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Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann and Richard Wilk