Embodied apocalypse: or the native cosmology of late modern social theory

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Brethren communities of Scotland’s northeast coast inhabit a world that is both modern and enchanted; a state of affairs made possible due to the ways in which life as a deep sea fishermen relate to life as a millenarian Protestant. This article argues that the connection between a life at sea and life in the Brethren is a search for ‘signs of the times’ – in storms, hauls of prawns, EU fisheries legislation, and so on – which, when taken together, collectively evidence to the Brethren the fact that the end of the world is near. More than this, by extending the eschatological observations of my informants, I want to suggest that this kind of apocalyptic sign searching can also be seen as a feature of what some social theorists – most prominent among them, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash, and Zygmunt Bauman – refer to as ‘late’ or ‘liquid’ modernity, whereby, in its most radical formulation, the cosmos is effectively reduced to the size of the individual.