Geography as eschatology: moral freedom and prophecy fulfilment on land and at sea

By reflecting upon fieldwork among Brethren deep sea fishermen in Gamrie, NE Scotland, this chapter explores how two sources of authority—biblical apocalyptic prophecy and the agentive acts of individual Christians—came to be located within and constituted by their experience of geography. More specifically, by using the term “eschatological agency,” this chapter considers how local Christian fishermen placed themselves at the center of “end-times” events by first reading and then fulfilling such prophecy within the materiality of different landscapes and seascapes. How, in this context, are we to understand what it means to be a moral actor or a free agent? These questions are made more complex still by attending to the ways in which Gamrie’s Christian fisher-families obfuscated their own agency by attributing all human actions to either God or the devil, while at the same time working tirelessly to identify and enact various “signs of the times” that collectively evidenced the nearness of the end of the world. Here, “self-fulfilling prophecy” is given a new double meaning; not only does it create the semiotic conditions necessary for its own apocalyptic realization, but it also creates the geographical conditions necessary for the apocalyptic realization of the Brethren self and community, for example, in stormy seas, or in religiously inspired construction projects. This chapter offers an ethnographic sketch of that self and community in relation to material place and space, and, in so doing, attempts to query anthropological pairings of freedom and morality through a re-examination of the notion of authorship...