Mind the Gap: The Tempo Rubato of Dwelling in Lineups

Abstract

Despite their prominence in everyday life lineups are of peripheral concern to mobility scholars. Aiming to contribute to our existing knowledge on lineups and the transitory places of everyday life writ large, this paper attempts investigates lineups at small island ferry terminals. Drawing upon fieldwork including travel to, on and from ferry boats, for a total of about 250 journeys over three years, and about 400 qualitative interviews, this mobile ethnography focuses on practices of ferry mobility in coastal British Columbia. Lineups are portrayed as complex orchestrations of rest and movement weaved through relational performances of mobility and relative immobility. As neither a place in the sedentarist nor nomadic sense, lineups defeat facile, dichotomous conceptualizations of spatialities and temporalities. Neither still nor flowing, neither public nor private, lineups are animated by idiosyncratic practices of dwelling whereby multiple and unique forms of livelihood are performed. Ferry lineups are ephemeral moorings: places where communities form and dissolve in temporary zones, as if suspended from the regular rhythms of the rest of the day and the week. On small islands lineups exist as stolen time‐spaces – an original concept that draws inspiration from the musical idea of tempo rubato and from Michel de Certeau’s (1984) treatment of tactics.

Key Words:

• Mobility
• dwelling
• waiting
• ethnography
• non‐representational theory
• ferries

Acknowledgments

This research was made possible through a Standard Grant provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I also wish to thank April Vannini for her research assistance.

Notes

1. A technical note on the creation of the vignettes contained in this paper is necessary. These vignettes are of three types: (1) re‐creations of events and interactions in which I have participated directly, and written field notes about; (2) re‐creations of events and interactions in which my informants have participated directly and narrated to me; (3) a montage emerging from a mix of the above. First person names utilized in all these vignettes are fictitious, though in some cases I actually knew the described persons’ names, and in some cases I did not.

2. Due to limited space in this paper I cannot sufficiently treat the role that ferry mobilities play in creating and exacerbating social inequalities and social problems. There are examined in a forthcoming book (Vannini, 2011).