Temporalities at sea: Fast time and slow time onboard ocean-going merchant vessels

Abstract

There have been claims about how social acceleration affects us in different ways. However, such claims are mainly based on temporalities ashore. As such, we fail to grasp in their complexities the differentiated conflicted experiencing of temporalities in contemporary life. This article hopes to fill in this gap and in effect provides a more nuanced rendering of experiencing temporalities based on a particular social group who live and work in the fringes of our society and yet play a hugely important role in the global economy – the ocean-going merchant seafarers. Based on a fieldwork on board four merchant vessels, the experiencing of both fast time and slow time by seafarers is explicated here. It highlights how place (the ship and its work and living arrangements) and its available resources (or the paucity of them) and power relations with those ashore (shoreside personnel) shape the experiencing of time onboard.