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Paper short abstract

This paper builds upon fieldwork undertaken on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. It considers the notion of "Skye time" to describe the seemingly incommensurable chronotopes practised by those inhabiting the island. "Skye time" can exist as a temporal resource to navigate the contemporary polycrisis.

Paper long abstract

The Isle of Skye is a spatial repository of polarised imaginaries. It is a zone of escape: from neoliberal productivity; from the pollutant aesthetics of the “urban”; and from both communal fragmentation and oppressive social ties. It is also a meeting point for seemingly incommensurable arts of living. New Age spiritualists meet austere Presbyterians. Nature lovers meet fish farm apologists. Researchers and fieldworkers scan for vestiges of a lost ethnological past formulated as “tradition”. At the heart of this is the sticky phenomenon of “time”. How do chronotopes intersect, jostle, reconstitute one another on this island? Many of my interlocutors spoke of “Skye time”. In one sense, “Skye time” articulates the kind of slowness frequently associated with “island living”, whereby supermarket checkouts are held up by phatic conversations about the weather. But there is also another sense to “Skye time”, something more ineffable, tectonic, cosmic, perhaps. In this paper I consider the multiple intersecting temporalities that emerged over and shaped the course of my doctoral fieldwork. I consider walking rhythms, chronicities, “salvage paradigms” (MacDonald 2011), spiritual conflicts and environmentalist debates to unpack this notion of “Skye time”. I also touch upon the temporal incursions of fatigue, mental illness and chronic uncertainty as they foreclosed certain possibilities and opened up others for me as an anthropologist. Overall, I am interested in how “Skye time” can articulate a temporal politics that both resists the unrelenting drive of capitalist time and reckons with the subjunctive threat of climate catastrophe.