Paper short abstract:

Itinerant boat-dwellers in London experience time as slow and leading towards an unpredictable future. Time stretches, flows, and projects into an uncertain future in way incompatible with clock-time. This particular temporal experience shapes the Boaters as a community in relation to a sedentary ‘other’.

Paper long abstract:

Itinerant boat-dwellers (Boaters) on the waterways of London speak about their lives as occurring in a separate "time-zone" from the sedentary world around them. 'Boat time', as Boaters call it, is simultaneously slow and unpredictable. The slow aspect of 'boat time' is spoken of as providing a much needed contrast to the fast and highly choreographed movements of the city surrounding the towpaths. It further becomes part of the Boaters rhetoric of difference from and resistance to the State and other sedentary elements surrounding them as the Boater's pace of life is spoken of as natural, ideal, and fundamentally opposed to the clock-time of the sedentary world. 'Boat time' is unpredictable as almost all projects, journeys and meetings upon the waterways are contingent upon the coming together of many different factors and agents, many of which are beyond the Boaters' direct control. Things happen when they happen, that is to say when many disparate elements align in order to allow their completion. Thus boat-dwelling becomes a matter of waiting, of negotiating, and of becoming increasingly vague concerning the future. As a participant described, time is "like a soup"; it is viscous, opaque and slow to pour, ironically unlike the laminar flow of water. This paper shall show how such a particular temporal experience is a constitutive part of my participants identity, a strategic component of their resistance to the sedentary order, and a thread which links disparate aspects of their lives aboard.