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- Convenors:
-
Louis Pille-Schneider
(University of Bergen)
Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme (University of Bergen)
Sadie Hale (University of Bergen)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Arts Lecture Room 3
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 8 April, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel approaches oceanic gear as moving, active, and dynamic agents that enable certain alignments between humans and their ocean ecologies while foreclosing others. Through the notion of ‘shifting gears’, we explore the affordances of gear for thinking an ocean anthropology on the move.
Long Abstract:
In ocean anthropology, gear remains primarily approached as a mere instrumental equipment deployed by humans in their everyday relations with the ocean and its lifeforms. This panel proposes to rethink gear as not inert, passive nor static devices, but as highly moving, active, and dynamic agents, which enable certain alignments between humans and their surrounding ocean ecologies while foreclosing others. We suggest that ethnographically foregrounding oceanic gear (digital or not) such as underwater cameras, hydrophones, lines, traps, and nets enables anthropologists to attend, in at times unexpected ways, to relations between humans and oceanic animals and their site-specific spatio-temporalities. To account for the moving, active, and dynamic nature of oceanic gear being deployed at a time when capitalist extractivism and climate change force oceanic lifeforms to move in often unpredictable ways, we advance the notion of ‘shifting gears’. Therewith, we explore the conceptual affordances of gear for thinking an ocean anthropology on the move. Specifically, we are interested in ethnographic contributions that speak to the following themes from, yet not limited to a multispecies perspective:
The relational affordances / hinderances of ocean gear between humans and oceanic nonhumans
Competition / conflicts / tensions / entanglements between oceanic gear and their users
The seasonality of oceanic gear
The past(s) / present(s) / (possible) future(s) of oceanic gear
The remains of oceanic gear
The behavior / misbehavior of oceanic gear
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 8 April, 2025, -Paper Short Abstract:
the paper explore the ways oceanic gears are created and conceived in artisanal fishing activities in the Comoros. The legacy of the «Japawa» allows us to think of oceanic gears as media “on-the-move” capable of structuring ecological relations, triggering social changes and feeding imaginaries.
Paper Abstract:
In this paper I explore the ways oceanic gears are created and conceived in artisanal fishing activities in the Comoros, examining how these gears shape and are shaped by labor contingencies. Specifically, I focus on the role played by specific boats, known as Japawa, in fostering trust in technical/technological equipment and restructuring relationships with the ocean and non-human actors.
During the 1980s, the economization of the Indian Ocean reached the Comoros archipelago, supported by Japanese cooperation. This led to the introduction of Japawa—9-meter motorboats designed to increase fishing efficiency. However, these boats unexpectedly became instrumental in establishing a new sea turtle trade. The intensive exploitation ensured by this new oceanic gear was at the basis of a rethinking of the ecological engagement with the ocean, from an economic and a socio-cultural perspective. Due to the conflicts arising from the overuse of marine resources, the increasing ecological attention, but especially the interruption of international aid, the Japawa were subsequently dismantled. Nevertheless, they traced a deep wake in the ways of perceiving, creating, and adapting technical gears; active and evolving agents in a more-than-human scenario.
In a context marked by material precariousness, oceanic gears emerge from the intertwining of maritime ecological knowledge and discarded materials from which “shifting” assemblages arise, ensuring access to the ocean world and fueling economic expectations.
The legacy of the Japawa allows us to think of oceanic gears as media “on-the-move” capable of structuring ecological relations, triggering social changes, and feeding future and past imaginaries.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper explains how digital tools such as cameras, biopsy darts and hydrophones are deployed in whale watching contexts to both find whales and support scientific research, considering some of the tensions and complexities this produces.
Paper Abstract:
Today, there is often significant overlap between whale watching, or ‘cetourism’ (Neves 2010) and scientific efforts to study cetaceans (the word for whales, dolphins, and porpoises). Research trips at sea are extremely costly, time-limited, and often scuppered by bad weather and sea conditions, whereas cetourism companies operate on a more regular schedule throughout the year. The sheer number of hours spent at sea yields good access to seasonal data on cetaceans’ precise locations, behaviours, and unique markings (e.g., dorsal fins of orcas and tail flukes of sperm and humpback whales, which are photographed for ID catalogues). Tours can even provide opportunities to collect samples, for instance of faeces and skin. Secondly, cetourism operators tend to preferentially employ biology graduates who are themselves interested in cetacean research. No matter how rough the sea conditions or how cold their hands were, guides I knew while conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the Azores (Portugal) and Northern Norway would dutifully write on clipboards, take ID photos, record audio clips into their phones, and occasionally fly drones to capture data. Finally, tour companies will make use of scientific technologies and instruments, such as sonar, radar, and hydrophones (underwater microphones) to find whales to watch. Focusing on the hydrophone in particular, this paper outlines how such gear mediates the slippage between research and tourism and discusses some of the tensions it produces, as the two do not always align.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper explores how discarded fishing nets and pirogues along Senegal’s coast persist beyond use - repurposed in protest, care, and art. Tracing their afterlives, it examines how oceanic materials “shift gear” and shape a politics of endurance amid ecological and economic change.
Paper Abstract:
This paper explores the multiple - and afterlives - of oceanic gear, specifically fishing nets and artisanal pirogues, along Senegal’s Atlantic coast, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Bargny and Dakar (2024–2025). Even in broken or discarded form, these materials remain present and active: reappearing in everyday practices, protest actions, and artistic interventions.
Monofilament nets, though officially banned, are widely used and continually repurposed - as washing tools, makeshift sea barriers, or activist costumes. Pirogue fragments, by contrast, are more often left behind: as markers of overfishing, disrupted livelihoods, or failed migration, yet also taken up as playgrounds on the beach or reworked into art installations in galleries. These divergent trajectories reveal a coastal politics of persistence shaped by environmental degradation, material improvisation, and memory.
Drawing on theories of endurance and duress (Stoler 2016), vibrant matter (Bennett 2010), and oceanic excess (Peters and Steinberg 2019), I examine how these materials persist beyond their intended use. Taking up the notion of shifting gear, I suggest that discarded tools and infrastructures do not simply cease to matter - they shift direction, acquiring new meanings and functions as they move between sea and land. In tracing these transformations, the paper contributes to an ocean anthropology attuned to residue, reassembly, and the material politics of coastal change.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper approaches the purse seine net in the context of Senegalese artisanal fisheries as a post-colonial developmentalist legacy with a promising past, a tumultuous present, and an uncertain future.
Paper Abstract:
Part of a rich repertoire of oceanic gears used in Senegalese artisanal fisheries and currently the one with which most catches are recorded on the shoreline, the purse seine net was introduced in the 1970s by the FAO and the state; introduced at a time when it had become evident that artisanal fisheries could not be replaced by industrial fisheries and should therefore be 'developed' instead. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Senegal’s largest artisanal fisheries town with fishers who have been mastering purse seines for three generations, I approach the net as a post-colonial developmentalist legacy with a promising past, a tumultuous present, and an uncertain future. The purse seine is indeed a legacy about which a Senegalese fisheries technician declared, reviewing the net’s past against the current fisheries predicament in the country, ‘the purse seine has not enabled to develop artisanal fisheries but to overexploit fisheries resources’; a legacy envied between fishers, given that this net remains the most socio-economically stratifying one within artisanal fisheries; a legacy whose days are momentarily numbered given the dwindling fish stocks and the considerable number of fishers migrating to Europe as a result, effectively reducing the workforce available to haul in the net.
Paper Short Abstract:
Through the ethnographic research of the mud sledge, specifically in tidal southeast China, in this paper I aim to reflect on and navigate the embodied temporality of the fishing gear and the entanglements between the ocean gear and their users through the paradigm of materials, sensory and skill.
Paper Abstract:
Based on the ethnographic research of the mud sledge in the coastal area (especially intertidal zones) of northeastern Fujian, southeast China, in this paper, I aim to reflect on and navigate the embodied temporality of the fishing gear and the entanglements between the ocean gear and their users. As the traditional device used by the coastal fishermen when they collect from nets, pots and traps which they set out in tidal waters, with a flat wooden base and propelled by scooting with one or two legs, the mud sledge (locally called ‘nima’) is an essential agent on the mudflat which links the fishermen, the oceanic creatures (e.g. oysters and clams), the surrounding water areas and their site-specific spatial-temporalities. It is moving, active and dynamic. In this paper I aim to trace the spatio-temporal movement of the mud sledge (daily and seasonally) in relation to specific creatures, regarding it as an additional vehicle for navigating and timing, and unfold the materiality and the embodied sensoriness of the fishing gear in detail. It affords the enskilment (‘gaining the sea leg’), material and sensory perceptions, and the relational temporalities and attachment of the fishermen dwelling in the intertidal zones. Rooted in the dynamic context of moving ashore and the changing livelihood, this paper also indicates what such ocean gear is ‘disabled’, but also remains and maintains.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper explores the ways in which lobster traps are more than mere instruments for capturing lobsters but rather infrastructures that allow for a range of different relations between humans and marine life to unfold.
Paper Abstract:
In Maine, US, local lobstermen face the challenge from environmental organizations and fishery authorities to transition into ropeless fishing to minimize whale entanglement. In this paper, I use this gear controversy and its centering around an instrumental understanding of lobster traps as starting point for exploring fishing gear otherwise. Asking what fishing gear is to fishermen, I show how a range of other-than-predatory human-marine relationalities are interwoven in lobster traps, ropes and buoys. Moving beyond approaching fishing gear as a technology of extraction, I attend to the ways in which traps enable encounters between humans and lobsters that allow them to keep them alive and thus enact themselves as responsible and sustainable fishermen, but also to how traps become points of attachment for other life forms, such as the increasingly prevalent sea squirts. Allowing thus traps to become sites for more-than-human relationalities, I connect this further to explore the close relations lobstermen have with their gear and how gear work in maintenance and at critical events such as the death of a fisherman, are ways in which traps become imbricated in the moral economies and materialized ethics of these fishing communities. Drawing on work (Swanson 2019) that attends to how the affordances of traps are related to more than the trap design itself, the paper shows the fluid and multiple ways in which oceanic gear exceeds a techno-scientific instrumental understanding.