A Time to Every Purpose: Kinship, Privilege, and Succession on a Disappearing Island

Abstract

Tangier Island is a small, incorporated town, just over one square mile, of fewer than 430 inhabitants in the Chesapeake Bay, belonging to Accomack County in the Commonwealth of Virginia, USA. Its residents, called Tangiermen regardless of gender, are descendants of Bay watermen—mostly white; lower- and middle-income; politically conservative; fundamentalist, Protestant, and Zionist Christian; and skeptical of science and climate change. Settled in the 1770s, endogamous marriage has been preferred for inhabitants during the island's 250-year history, resulting in residents who are kin in multiple ways to each other, while also holding individuated roles defined by occupation, gender, and other modes of differentiation. Their island, three ridges connected by roads and bridges, is subsiding into the Bay. Physical scientists predict Tangier will be uninhabitable as early as 2040, due in part to anthropogenic sea-level rise. This investigation pursues an answer to the question: What are the effects of the long-term threat of imminent displacement, specifically severe risks posed by environmental climate change, on the socio-cultural processes of reproduction in this population? I understand socio-cultural reproduction as the continuous production of social order, both cause and effect of differentiating and cohesive forces among a group of people. The differentiating and cohesive forces under investigation in this case are: kinship relations and memory, roles and role succession, residence inheritance, practices of elder deference, and the profession of belief. The project draws upon ethnographic data collected during scoping trips in 2016 and 2017, during residential fieldwork on Tangier Island, 2017-2018, and from information collected at archives on Tangier and at libraries and collections in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The dissertation engages three subtopics in Environmental Socio-Cultural Anthropology: environmental threats to reproduction, risk perception, and the unprecedented crisis of climate change. The argument presented throughout the chapters is that there are significant effects of the long-term threat of imminent displacement for socio-cultural reproduction (differentiation and cohesion) on Tangier Island. Part I introduces the problem, its place in anthropological literature, research methods, background to the island's demographic situation, and consideration of the concept of generation for such a project. Part II offers evidence of findings for historical—ecological, economic, and social—factors. Part III provides evidence of findings for changes to differentiating forces, while Part IV provides evidence of findings for changes to cohesive forces. Part V presents the study's conclusion and findings. The key finding is that there are effects of the long-term threat of imminent displacement on the ways in which society and culture are reproduced on Tangier Island. Under particular historical circumstances (ecological, economic, and social), the changes wrought by the long-term threat of displacement are documented as changes to the depth of kin memorializing, the distribution of roles and purposes, the residential practices and inheritances of residences, the practices and meanings of elder deference, and professions of belief (creed) among islanders.