Seasons as Rhythms on the Kemi River in Finnish Lapland

Attending to grape vines: perceptual practices, planty agencies and multiple temporalities in Australian viticulture

“…It thus risks encouraging a disengagement from the political tensions and ecological problems which practitioners of 'conventional' agriculture must negotiate (Head and Atchison 2009). I will therefore turn instead to a growing body of empirical research arguing that the use of calendars and clocks remains supplemented in contemporary western societies by a varied cast of other timereckoning practices (Bastian 2009;Jones 2011;Krause 2013). Such works question the narrative of an overarching temporal modernisation driven by clocks (Glennie and Thrift 2009), arguing instead that 'social time is not singular or stable' (Greenhouse 1996: 87) and that multiple ways of enacting time and agency often coexist.…”

“…For viticultural practitioners, like other cultivators, these entanglements of human labour and crop growth compose a specialist calendar of working seasons, each of which groups several human activities together with changes in the vines to compose a qualitatively distinct period (Gell 1992;Harris 1998). Seasonal change therefore comprises multiple intermingled transformations in human -vine interactions, so that seasons overlap in gradual, messy transitions or 'liminal periods' (Krause 2013;Olwig 2005), as Figure 1 illustrates.…”

“…This contention that ecological time regimes ensure that social activities conform to a natural temporal order defined by uncontrollable environmental events and forces has precipitated both accusations of environmental determinism (Gell 1992;Krause 2013;Munn 1992) and rather epochal analyses of their relationship to clock-time (May and Thrift 2001). These are typically depicted as 'pre-industrial' modes of time-consciousness, gradually supplanted or marginalised in the western world by the use of mechanical clocks (Adam 1990(Adam , 1998.…”

“…This striving after coordination is often argued to render the rhythms of agricultural life so thoroughly contingent upon crop growth that changes in plants, and other environmental processes, become 'time-givers' (Adam 1990), which set the pace not only of labour in the field but also of social and economic activity more generally (Evans-Pritchard 1969;Gell 1992). Such accounts thus figure the temporalities of agricultural social life as being co-fabricated among humans, plants, animals and landscapes through a process of mutual attunement and response (Harris 1998;Krause 2013). …”

Introduction to Special Issue

“…Thus when conservationists lobbied for the opening of weirs or for the building of fish ladders, they were not only struggling to reconstitute a watercourse, but also to restore more democratic human engagements with it. Several contributions to this volume demonstrate that "living water" often comes in rhythmic patterns (Harris 1998, Krause 2013). Water's abundance, temperature, biological activity, and whether it is solid, liquid or gaseous generally varies in time and space.…”