ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the islands might have something distinctive to teach people about the ways in which time and matter are implicated both in relations between the living and the dead and in the shaping of humanly significant cultural worlds. Anthropologists have often written about islands, whether as the paradigmatic setting for Malinowskian participant-observation fieldwork or as spaces of intercultural contact and exchange. The chapter draws on the research in Orkney, along with a range of archival and documentary sources, it considers the material specificity of islands as settings for a variety of encounters of a rather different kind. They are between the living and the dead, between solid and liquid modalities of matter, between humans and a range of other-than-human materialities and, not least, between human-centered, culturally calibrated time and the more definitionally elusive, impersonal and non-linear time of becoming. The chapter suggests that the expressions of the living regarding the dead-verbal, visual, performative, architectonic-are most suggestively understood.
