Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork onboard cargo-ships with mixed national crews, the paper considers the co-shaping of these multicultural communities and the sea as a political and social space. It also discusses how seafarers navigate the complex intersecting categories of difference in the social world onboard.

Paper long abstract:

The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork onboard cargo-ships with mixed national crews. It is concerned with the co-shaping of maritime multicultural communities onboard ships and the sea as a particular, and particularly ambiguous, political and social space.

The notion of the sea as a "fluid canvas", as per the panel abstract, is reminiscent of notions of the sea as a space for potentiality, for social mobility, and for transcending the social limits and boundaries that exist for humans ashore. At the same time however, the sea is also a space of exceptionality and vulnerability, which allows for disproportionate power of some people over other people's lives.

Shipboard communities are complex miniature societies that contain many contradictions. On the one hand they are unusually homogeneous, consisting of mostly male individuals in working age. On the other hand they are unusually diverse in terms of the cultural, national, socioeconomic background of crewmembers. This diversity intersects with categories of difference particular to the onboard social structure and hierarchy.

This paper discusses how people in such small-scale global communities navigate the complex intersecting categories of difference in the social environment onboard. I explore how crewmembers of different ethnicities and generations draw on specific narratives of national collective memories of maritime connections and histories in order to claim authenticity as sailors, and how these claims often undermine the authenticity, skill and even masculinity of shipmates of other ethnicities, thus reproducing political and economic relationships that reflect global inequalities beyond the locality of the ship.