“Time/Money/God/Nature: Christian timescapes on a barrier island,” Anthropological Quarterly, forthcoming 2026.
The Outer Banks is a set of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina where land is always in motion. The islands migrate and erode. Infrastructure is precarious and overdevelopment is having a profound impact, exacerbated by frequent storms and sea-level rise. The Banks is also a broadly Christian place, especially among inter-generational families. Drawing on fieldwork in the villages of Hatteras Island, this article explores how time is experienced amid ecological instability. Time serves as a framing device because of its capacity to bridge the anthropology of ecology/environment and the anthropology of Christianity. The fit seems awkward at first: Christianity rarely factors into anthropological work about ecological and climate change and, when it does, its temporality is often characterized as a problem. Inspired by the turn to “climate change reception studies” (de Wit and Haines 2022) that trace how local communities address ecological risk by reviving older traditions, I argue that Outer Bankers, as White Protestants, also have traditional resources upon which to draw, in which their Christianity is a key component. More specifically, I argue that timescapes are a form of knowledge that could be reclaimed, at least in part. My analysis suggests that Outer Bankers live within two major temporalities, which I call intermittent and linear time, each of which is entangled with morally resonant ideas about progress and modernity. Intermittent time, the older of the two, is also shaped by Bankers’ experiential engagements with the environment around them. It is a timescape anchored in relations with God and shaped by the destructive and recreative aspects of living on a volatile coast. This traditional form of future-thinking is not anti-capitalist, but it does capitalism differently, and therefore offers a speculative possibility for redressing unsustainable development.
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The Outer Banks is a set of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina where land is always in motion. The islands migrate and erode. Infrastructure is precarious and overdevelopment is having a profound impact, exacerbated by frequent storms and sea-level rise. The Banks is also a broadly Christian place, especially among inter-generational families. Drawing on fieldwork in the villages of Hatteras Island, this article explores how time is experienced amid ecological instability. Time serves as a framing device because of its capacity to bridge the anthropology of ecology/environment and the anthropology of Christianity. The fit seems awkward at first: Christianity rarely factors into anthropological work about ecological and climate change and, when it does, its temporality is often characterized as a problem. Inspired by the turn to “climate change reception studies” (de Wit and Haines 2022) that trace how local communities address ecological risk by reviving older traditions, I argue that Outer Bankers, as White Protestants, also have traditional resources upon which to draw, in which their Christianity is a key component. More specifically, I argue that timescapes are a form of knowledge that could be reclaimed, at least in part. My analysis suggests that Outer Bankers live within two major temporalities, which I call intermittent and linear time, each of which is entangled with morally resonant ideas about progress and modernity. Intermittent time, the older of the two, is also shaped by Bankers’ experiential engagements with the environment around them. It is a timescape anchored in relations with God and shaped by the destructive and recreative aspects of living on a volatile coast. This traditional form of future-thinking is not anti-capitalist, but it does capitalism differently, and therefore offers a speculative possibility for redressing unsustainable development.
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