Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture

While consumers enjoy diverse choices in tea drinking, there is a different story at the political economy level. Lipton has been selling loose leaf tea with the package label ‘Rize tea, Turkish tea from the Black Sea’, in addition to their popular teabags. Recently Coca Cola bought 50% of Dogadan (literally, ‘from nature’), a herbal teabag manufacturer. Reportedly, Coca Cola will invest \$40 million in this business. After the acquisition, the firm started producing loose leaf black tea and advertising it as ‘nature comes to you’. With Coca Cola’s financial muscle, there are new factories at the Black Sea region and a very intensive advertising campaign. The television advertising depicts bright green leaves flying in from recognizably Karadeniz tea plantations to a very urban high-rise skyline, then into several open kitchen-living room areas. The ince belli and çaydanlık on the stove are as prominent as the people, young and old, drinking tea while laughing, talking and having a good time. We wonder if Lipton and Coke will eventually drive out various local firms and dominate the tea market within which tea moves, along with the movement between ordinary and special times.

References

Special and Ordinary Times

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Güliz Ger and Olga Kravets

Making Time Reciprocal Object Relations and the Self-legitimizing Time of Wooden Boating Mikko Jalas

Introduction

This chapter develops and substantiates the argument that material, stuff and objects have temporalities. In particular, I want to explore the idea that such temporalities are not located in or properties of the material itself, but rather that the temporality of stuff is a relational phenomenon situated in between human actors and the material world. I will argue that human action around materials and objects results in reciprocal relations. With this notion of reciprocity I aim to capture the dual role of materials in configuring human temporalities. On the one hand, materials and objects constitute media through which humans articulate and enact different aspects of temporalities such as pace, rhythm and changing temporal horizons. On the other hand, reciprocity implies that materials and objects are indeed able to configure time, establish horizons and reproduce rhythms.

Wooden boating represents a good case with which to illustrate reciprocal object relations through which the practitioners of wooden boating anchor themselves in the material world. This world is populated with wooden vessels of various kinds that appear to be unique, priceless and entitled to good care. Equally, the boating fabric includes visual representations and narrative boat-histories. While some of these objects are officially labelled and registered as instances of maritime heritage, other boats spell out their unique position in more subtle ways. This world of boating also includes the dedicated human practitioners who strive to excel in the skills of maintaining and using such boats. Moreover, humans also figure as dedicated stewards who assume responsibilities and duties towards the material world. Wooden boating is hence a constellation of physical material, cultural meanings and human agents that is, as a whole, able to convince and capture practitioners, absorb human labour, demonstrate skill and craftsmanship, and request various resources such as dedicated time and money.

Wooden boating affords different temporalities and entails multiple ways of establishing them. This chapter, which approaches wooden boating as a practice, explores the notion that there might be a self-referential and autotelic time of wooden boating. During such time, the question of how to do wooden boating overwhelms everything else. In other words, the chapter describes a timeless time of humans working with wooden boats and the moral, aesthetic and practical understandings of wooden boats that permeate this self-referential temporality.

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Before continuing to the world of varnish, dust and decay, let me first establish some leeway for writing, and a particular bearing on wooden boating. The focus of this chapter is in the meshing of the individual human subject with the external world in ways that allow that rationalities are multiple, context-specific and weaker than we might be comfortable with or than we might wish politically. In the same vein, the meshing also brings about context-specific temporalities instead of a universalizing idea that time is a money-like resource. Such theorizing is a conceptual tool for seeing the world differently, radicalizing social thought and opening up new political spaces. As such, the most relevant question for such an analysis is not how accurately, universally or objectively one is able to describe the mutual constitution of humans and the material world. Rather, it is evident that writings on object relations reach a point and take forms that are alien to everyday life. The job of describing how people live and act with objects, and feel, understand and appreciate them therefore represents a research task that involves a deliberate reinterpretation of everyday life.

Such accounts frequently deal with elusive phenomena that easily fall apart and vanish once spoken aloud or written down. They also encounter resistance, because they challenge and ridicule dominant rationalities and expose the fragmentation of individual reasoning. In this chapter I will put forward a few such fragile moments of wooden boating. Apart from being hard to seize, the phenomenon is also apparently marginal from the point of view of mass consumption. However, it is my understanding that the obscure ways in which wooden boats establish and carry meanings, organize time and capture people may represent a pattern that is more common than one might at first suppose.

The Emergence of Wooden Boating

Wooden boating is a distinct yet versatile phenomenon, which includes a variety of old objects, new materials, skills of performing wooden boating, images of boats and boating as well the cultural processes of reading and writing the meanings and the ‘text’ of the practice. The type of objects and the practices and relations that appear in wooden boating are bound to vary from one context to the next. The following excerpts are based on a study of the phenomenon in Finland in the late twentieth century (see Jalas 2005, 2006a), in which I have documented the re-emergence of wood as a boat-building material following the rapid introduction of fibre-glass as the dominant material for constructing leisure boats. The other relevant parallel process has been the aestheticization of a fleet of vintage yachts and the respective valorization of their owners.

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All these practices share a common ground. By the end of the 1970s the gradual substitution of fibre-glass had virtually abolished wood as a material for boatbuilding. On the basis of data from annual sales catalogues, one could argue that this situation has not changed: wooden boats remain outside the mainstream commercial catalogues. However, since the 1970s there has been an increase in the number of active sites for performing wooden boating: magazines, fairs, associations, races, web-pages and blogs are all ‘locations’ in which boats, owners and crews meet and enact wooden boating. New practices have evolved around the old boats, old designs and, in general, around wood as a distinctive material.

Despite this shared background, the Finnish case is itself fragmented. The various genres of wooden boating revolve around wooden vessels of different age and type. There are those who sail replicas of vernacular boats or attempt to catch the mood of the Vikings on the sea, there are those who restore and embellish the forgotten glory of vintage yachts, and yet those who seek to produce modern designs using modern materials of wooden boat-building. The genres link with diverse developments in other geographical areas: whereas the Swedish fleet of vintage boats has long been envied and admired in Finland, the modernization of boat-building with epoxy resins make use of techniques and practices of the northeast United States.

Wooden boating draws on particular ideas and skills. Hence, the practices of wooden boating include (the learning of) cognitive and practical skills of maintaining boats in boatyards and of using them on water. Equally, they include the skills of representing boats on web-sites, speaking and writing about them, and strolling around specialist exhibitions and fairs. The variety of orientations or genres and the degree of exposure, involvement and skill create a mosaic of unique ways of doing wooden boating.

Vernacular Replicas as Reconstructed History

Vernacular traditions form the basis of one particular and prevalent way of doing wooden boating in Finland. The first association dedicated to wooden boating was set up in the late 1960s to document and reconstruct small vernacular models of fishing boats. Since then, numerous new associations have been established, and vernacular replicas now fill the order books of many contemporary boat-builders. This activity is most obviously about remaking history (Laurier 1998). The boats are replicated in detail, and modern materials such as Dacron cloth for sails and epoxy resins for gluing are frequently excluded. At local events these vessels are matched with humans who clothe and decorate themselves in keeping with their boats. Tar, cotton for sails, linen for the seams and ornamented wool for the clothing make much of this practice.

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However, these gatherings do not only consist of the materials and designs of a particular age. Actually using the boats calls for much more detailed replication. On the minute level, tacking moves and manoeuvres with these clumsy vernacular hulls and rigs differ from those of modern yachting. Furthermore, special events imitate or reconstruct particular routes like the mail-carriage between Finland and Sweden, the summer journeys for following stocks of Baltic herring, or journeys to and from markets and cities. The enacting of particular uses and of particular routes results in apparent authenticity.

Vintage Glamour

Aestheticized racing yachts represent another class of objects around which many practitioners orbit and perform acts of wooden boating. This genre builds on the glamour of sailing as a sport and on the celebrities who feature in the narrative of boat histories. Story-telling, aesthetic judgement and visually representing boats are key skills in this field. What results is a view that the core objects of this practice are unique, priceless and prestigious. Accordingly, boat-classes such as the International Rule boats and the square-metre boats receive much publicity, despite the fact that they are now few in number.

Races are the sites in which these boats perform their role in staging human passion to compete and excel. Ironically, the priceless objects are exposed to the hardship of racing: collisions, stress and strain. The racing context implies a merger between outdated and new technology. In the time of their design, commissioning and building, these boats involved and required the most advanced designs and best available technology. In the same vein, their life as competitive boats on the race course was short. This genre of wooden boating now merges dated technological advances with new innovations. Hence, boats with old-fashioned hulls receive modern rigs, and are operated and trimmed with the aid of advanced carbon-fibre technologies of Spectra and Dynema. The combination of dated high-tech and contemporary high-tech presents endless very concrete problems for the practitioners. These may be solved by simple statements like ‘above the deck everything is modern but below the deck we aim for originality’. Responding to these and similar dilemmas also calls for and enables one to practise and demonstrate the more sophisticated skills of a restoration professional. As a boat-owner and a museum-chief explains: ‘Converting a canvas deck to a teak deck is perhaps a matter of maintenance. But is it a good enough reason to alter the weight balance and radically change the overall appearance of the yacht? The pious yacht-owner of course chooses to stay with the original solution’ (Nordlund, 2004, translation from Swedish by the author).

The race yachts warp and condense time in another sense as well. These vintage boats cut through decades not only in terms of technological advances, but also in terms of social reality. It is very common for boat-owners to collect and publish the list of previous owners, and to catalogue the races and other gatherings in which the boat has been involved. Such boat-histories connect present and previous owners of the same yachts. While this is for many just a matter of documenting the history of the boat, it is also one particular way through which boats gather momentum and establish themselves as distinctive and special. For example, the sixtieth-anniversary publication of a 6 metre yacht called Maybe IV written in the early twenty-first century elaborates in detail on the acquaintances of the person who commissioned the boat in pre-Second World War Scandinavia, thereby establishing the uniqueness of this particular vessel and its owners.

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The Epoxy Bonds

Modernized wooden boating constitutes a third significant genre of wooden boating. Starting from the 1970s in the United States and in the early 1990s in Finland, it became commonplace to argue that modern materials and designs could re-establish the competitiveness of wood as a boat-building material. In Finland, these claims led wooden boats to be included in technology policy, and to the renewal and in many cases to the establishment of educational institutes for wooden boat-building both at vocational and at polytechnic level. Such institutions imported knowledge from the United States to Finland through the mobility and extended visits of staff in both directions. The results of this exchange were many. Composite structures of wood, fibre-glass and epoxy resins were the concrete outcomes of these efforts. Such outcomes blurred the boundary between fibre-glass and wood. Wooden boats could, when desired, be made to imitate the appearance of those made from fibre-glass. In addition, aspects like those of convenience and ease of maintenance have also begun to converge. In establishing a new discourse of modern boat-building, it was essential to argue that wooden boats are distinct and that they can nonetheless match fibre-glass in terms of convenience and maintenance.

Each of these genres could, of course, be divided into further categories. Yet these three selected types revolve around a handful of essential differences and distinguishing features. The vernacular boats draw on nostalgia, on the deliberate inconvenience of the objects, on the roughness of finishes, and on the presumed character of the working sailors whose style is imitated. On the other hand, the vintage fleet revolves around notions of elegance. The skills of appreciating and representing these boats as aesthetically superior objects are at the core of this practice. These boats consequently serve to construct and articulate social distinctions. Whereas the replication of vernacular boats is frequently driven by interests in maintaining the diversity of traditional boat-building skills, the practices of vintage yachting focus on particular objects per se, and on their qualities as priceless embodiments of very specific skills. Finally, the modernization of wooden boat-building represents a subtle attempt to merge craft production with capitalistic interests and to exploit the image of wooden boats as one-off hand-crafted items. Unlike forms associated with replicas and the vintage yachts, modernized wooden boat-building is positioned in direct relation to the mass-manufacturing of fibre-glass boats, and with comparable qualities like those of price and convenience.

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The Workings of Wooden Boating – Skills, Sensations and Obligations

Regardless of the genre or orientation of doing wooden boating, these practices require investments of time and money, skills on the part of the practitioners, and committed institutional constituencies such as schools of boat-building, associations and publishers of dedicated books and magazines. This observation, and the very simple question of why people engage in wooden boating, begs for a nuanced answer; one may wonder how wooden boats are useful and reasonable, or how they ‘make sense’.

Practitioners have multiple and elaborate ways of reasoning wooden boating. One needs to appreciate the ways that boats appear unique, beautiful and prestigious. One needs to account for fun and for the ability of boats to evoke craft sensibilities and feelings of locality. Equally, one needs to understand the story-telling and the workings of patina within wooden boating. In short, while recognizing that wooden boating is a culturally thick social activity in which the people involved invest various resources of time and money, it is relevant to ask that how it is that boats are able to require these resources and convince the humans actors to play along.

In the following section I consider three ways in which boats collect resources and capture human practitioners. Firstly, I will reflect on the accumulation of skills as a practical explanation of how it is that boat-owners face an always extending list of things-to-do and of how engagement with their boats becomes ever more complicated and resource-intensive. I then consider emotions as a second sphere of interaction between boats and practitioners. Here I highlight the ways that boats are able to evoke emotions in those who build, own, use and care for them. Finally, I consider the emergence of the boat as an entity that has moral rights and that places obligations on those with whom it interacts. This last possibility arises, in part, out of practical, emotional and aesthetic understandings of boats. Yet, it appears as a distinct and particularly strong outcome of mutual exchange between the boats and practitioners.

The Skills of Wooden Boating

Wooden boating is rich in details that can be discussed, learned and disputed. As such, the accumulation of relevant skills is vital. The knowledge that boaters acquire and the skills they develop encompass different aspects of boating. Some concern maintenance while others relate to using the boat on the water. I concentrate here on the former. In caring for a wooden boat, one encounters and accumulates knowledge of how boats were traditionally built, and of contemporary techniques both of building and of renovation. One develops knowledge of different raw materials – wood, screws, cloth or chemicals – and of their availability, suitability and use. One learns to judge whether suggested methods and materials are appropriate – to tell whether it is acceptable to, for example, colour your varnish, or to use epoxy resins to strengthen the seams of a hull from the 1930s. Judging also involves the naming of deviations and problems of quality such as the ‘orange-skin’ finish in varnishing.

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However, simply knowing about wooden boating does not make the boater a capable practitioner. Crucially, boaters develop practical, bodily capabilities of performing wooden boating. To establish a glossy and evenly varnished surface or to fit in a piece of new wood are highly demanding practical tasks that require the training of the body. For planing, carving or cutting, this bodily learning entails sturdy hands and a tight grip,but the touch of the paint-brush is different. Varnish requires a correct sequence of application on different surfaces, and a human arm accustomed to the controlled dipping and applying of liquid in unhurried rounds of thousands. In sum, skills imply an increased ability to plan, perform and judge the acts of wooden boating.

The accumulation of such knowledge and bodily skill establishes boaters as parts of a network of things, skills and images. For, example a male practitioner ‘V’ states in an interview that: ‘There is nothing better than to be out with a boat, which is in good condition and which one has thoroughly renovated oneself … of course the best would be to have built the whole boat oneself.’ ‘V’ is thus a carrier of specific skills and has an identity that only becomes available once relevant objects and evaluative criteria are also present. His statement echoes ideas of ‘good condition’, of ‘renovation’, and an appreciation of boat-building as a craft. The complex that is formed by boats, and by relevant skills and understandings is strong enough to force ‘V’ to undertake hundred-kilometre journeys to acquire materials, draw on his friends and spend his holidays, unwillingly, repairing his boat.

Boat Sensations

Writing on car cultures, Mimi Sheller argues that feelings about driving provide insight into the relation between humans and the material objects of driving. She argues that such feelings merge aesthetic appreciation and kinaesthetic sensing of the object. In her words, ‘an emotional agent is a relational entity that instantiates particular aesthetic orientations and kinaesthetic dispositions toward driving. Movement and being moved together produce feelings of being in the car, for the car and with the car’ (Sheller 2004: 222).

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So it is with boats. ‘V’s experience already hints at the way that boats are not only worked on, but also approached and appreciated emotionally and sensually. But how do boats bring these experiences about? What are the mechanisms by which wooden boats evoke strong feelings? What is the agency of boats when they intrigue us, and capture and move us emotionally?

One obvious answer is that wooden boats have been collectively established as altogether superior in terms of aesthetic and tacit qualities. After fibre-glass became a dominant boat-building material in the late 1960s, it did not take long for boating discourse to suggest that the aesthetic qualities of wooden boats were quite simply distinctive. Wooden boats still enjoy such a distinguished position and receive ongoing support so that this status is maintained. Architects and industrial designers frequently practise wooden boating, and articulate its aesthetics in ways that make use of their professional skills. In such cases, wooden boating benefits from the design expertise of those who do it while at the same time providing materials for aesthetic play.

Aesthetic delineations and categorizations like ‘clinker-built hulls are ugly, but carvel-built hulls are beautiful’ represent feelings about boats. Contemporary practices also celebrate the tactile properties of wood and of wooden boating. As Skogström spells out, ‘the smell of wood, the looks and the warmness and the sounds of water touching it, emphasize the joy of building and owning wooden boats’ (1994: 47, translation from Finnish by the author). It is thus not only the boats themselves, but the very activity of wooden boating, and the feeling in the boat, that have been given an aesthetic quality. Furthermore, boats in general, like the cars in Sheller’s account, open up and offer kinaesthetic experiences: acceleration, the sensation of cutting smoothly and repeatedly through waves on a tack on open sea, the rolling sea and creeping sea-sickness. Likewise, boats establish their own soundscape of engines, howling wind and tight ropes, and of the hull squeaking and resonating under heavy stress. Moving, roaring and shivering things appear especially good at evoking feelings, and wooden boats are no exception.

Given such experiential and sensational qualities, it is no wonder that owners become attached to their boats, firmly tapping them after harbouring from a rough ride and turning back to give them a last quick look from a distance. It is also no wonder that ex-boat-owners frequently cry when parting for good and handing the boat over to a new and, they hope, good home.

The infrastructure of wooden boating reflects these intimate relations. As unique objects, boats, almost always, and often also by law, have names compared with the plain registration numbers of cars. On the other hand, the beauty contests of wooden boats are set up to both establish and evaluate their distinctive qualities. Personification is present also on the internet. For example, the web-pages for wooden boats under the auspices of the city of Kotka (a middle-size Finnish coastal town) initially adopted a rhetoric of pet-care: the site called the ‘The Clinic of Wooden Boats’ featured a ‘Doctor of Wooden Boats’ who disseminated expertise and suggested treatment for particular problems. Wooden boating is thick with various verbal and practical ways of treating the objects as worthy of good care. In the next section I explore the meaning of naming and personalization in greater detail.

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