Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork in Beirut, Lebanon, on a campaign for 'oceanic literacy' by a nascent environmental NGO, this paper asks how should anthropology take into consideration the connection between city and the sea, and what does it imply for our conceptualization of the politics of urban space.

Paper long abstract:

This paper ethnographically traces a campaign for 'oceanic literacy' by a nascent environmental NGO in Beirut, and examines how this pursuit of making the sea knowable for the Lebanese public partakes in an attempt at refiguring the relationship between land and sea.

I argue that in order to reconceptualize politics of urban space, it is essential to consider the relationship between city and the sea and how our interlocutors engage with this connection. In Lebanon, the sea has risen to the forefront of political imagination in recent years. Spurred on by developments in ill governance, such as the 2015 trash crisis and the resulting coastal pollution and environmental concern among residents, worries about the state of the sea have become a staple summertime discussion among residents of Beirut. Simultaneously to these sea-related health and environmental concerns, a tangential discussion on privatization of coastal spaces has clarified for many a sense of disconnection from the Mediterranean.

By comparing the campaign of the NGO with other local marine politics related to privatization of the coastline, I show how engagement with the sea is a modality of a critique of governance. I argue that ways of relating to the sea become tied in to an understanding of the sectarian-neoliberal state as the root-cause for separating the city from the sea. Finally, I put forward a suggestion for the conceptualization of space: in a place like Beirut, the urban can only be understood in it's connection and disconnection with the sea.

Paper short abstract:

From a situated case study, I analyze multiple tensions between different ways to take into account the sea element: how to regulate fragile coastal areas, between scientific analysis, control necessities, economic activities and locations iconic functions?

Paper long abstract:

Departing from a situated case study, my phd research analyzes how a public policy – the Italian law on parks, natural areas, and sustainable economic development - comes to life in the everyday reality of a territory. After a fieldwork based in La Maddalena’s archipelago (Sardinia), I observe how different actors and institutions give shape to a National Park and to environmental local policies. The complexity characterizing environmental issues demands a multiscalar institutional and bureaucratic organization, as well as a considerable participation of multiple local actors. Relations, or difficult relations, become the very place of existence of this kind of institutions. In those compositions, the local context, with its configurations, connections, and conflicts, is never a blank sheet on which transcribe protocols and procedures, and local state agents are never mechanical translators of orders. Furthermore, scientific knowledge and scientists come to add complex analysis and unpredictable phenomena's descriptions. It is in this dense web of relations that the case of coastal erosion and loss of sand here illustrated had to be approached, in a mediterranean archipelago at the core of a touristic and pleasure-sailing district. The observed case reveals multiple tensions between different social and economic ways to take into account the sea element: how to regulate access to fragile coastal areas when scientific survey outlines plural erosion causes, control authorities seek to define univocal norms and perimeters, economic actors construct their activities on possibly damaging practices and marine locations assume iconic and symbolic functions?

Paper short abstract:

Vulnerable to the ocean, Azorean populations have long been guided and assuaged by Catholicism. Yet now, the teachings of marine science are dethroning the teachings of Catholicism. I approach how the "scientific" ocean is disrupting the established social and political orders in the Azores.

Paper long abstract:

Catholic saints and priests have long aided the Azorean populations in understanding and accepting the risks of a life with the ocean. Uncertain, unpredictable and risky, the ocean cultivated religious faith in the Azorean land, and "divine protection" has been a major social means of safeguard. In the last decade, the unsteady ontology of the ocean has continued dictating the theological system in the Azores, but the main actors have changed. Along with the recent conversion of the surrounding ocean from a site of local (fishing, whaling) extraction to a site of global environmental sustainability came a new type of priest and, associated with that, a new type of social "protection." Marine scientists and their science dethroned the social and political influence that Catholic saints and priests previously monopolized in the Azores. And life with the ocean is no longer in the hands of the Catholic God but managed and predicted by the marine scientists who came to live on the islands. Drawing on my fieldwork in the Azorean island of Faial in 2018, I address the social and political repercussions of converting the ocean into a scientific object in the Azores.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on popular outlooks on humanity and its relationship to the sea, I navigate the current nautical imagination of the nation in Greece, as its cosmos comprises of cosmopolitans, citizens, and non-citizens, and non-human actors, such as pipelines, platforms, and permanent infrastructures.

Paper long abstract:

In 2021 the Greek state will celebrate two centuries of national independence. The 1821 uprising had unmistakable maritime marks. Ιts material backbone was a merchant fleet that turned military overnight, and the decisive moment a sea-battle between the west and the Ottomans. In these centuries, the Greek merchant fleet became the largest in the world, with state support. State schools prepare staff for the maritime industry, while shipowners control the powerful football clubs and media. Nationalist historiography attributes the rise of the nautical nation to the "demonion" of its sea people, a combination of skills and cosmopolitan dexterity. For some, the "demonion" encapsulated the ability to treat dangerous and illicit flows of materials, which began with the iconic blowing up of an Ottoman flagship by the ship merchant Kanaris.

Against this background, I will focus on recent transformations of the nautical imagi-nation caused by humanitarian, solidarity-oriented, and ecological movements. I explore emergent maritime grassroots mobilizations, -the ships to Gaza, the protest against the hydrolysis of Syrian chemical weapons, and the migrant rescue ships in the Mediterranean-, and analyze them as challenges to the nautical imagi-nation, and in particular to the idea of the controlled risky flows at its heart. Drawing on popular outlooks in regards to humanity and its relationship to the sea, I navigate the current undoing and re-making of the nautical imagination of the nation, as its cosmos comprises of cosmopolitans, citizens, and non-citizens, but also and mainly other non-human actors, such as pipelines, platforms, and permanent infrastructures.

Paper short abstract:

From the analyses of European and Portuguese policies and strategies for the Sea, this paper explores how surfers and fishermen in Ericeira resist or negotiate those governance plans, giving rise to local narratives shaped by seawater which moves between concepts of conservation and economic growth.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects the impact of sea heritagization in Ericeira - whose waves are a World Surfing Reserve since 2011 - and analyses how the idea of the sea as a common global patrimony interchanges with the local practices of surfing and fishing, reconfiguring discourses about materiality and daily activities (Daugbjerg e Fibiger 2011) in a consequent participation of the community in patrimonial management.

Once my investigation observes the existing continuities and ruptures generated by this heritagization process and considers that the globalizing practices and deliberations of the authorized discourse are not intrinsically more important than the local perspectives, in this paper it will be explored how the actions of all actors involved, by resisting or negotiating those global policies, create new narratives about sea heritage, nature preservation and economic growth which shapes daily activities of labour, sports and leisure in this fishing village and Portuguese surf mecca.

Also, because both surf and fishing, as practices constituted in the "lived experience" can create a challenge to the established categories, this proposal intends to consolidate an ontology of being surfer and fisherman that manifests itself through sea literacy. Furthermore, if we think about the relation between the man-sea encounter and the plurality of continuously recreating policies, maybe it can contribute to a sea epistemology (Ingersoll 2016) that echoes a transformative process where the natural environment converges with the human relations involved.

Paper short abstract:

Based on a long-term ethnographic research carried out with Goan artisanal fishermen, this communication explores their relation with the seaworld, through a focus on how they actively respond to an accelerated reconfiguration of their social spaces derived from mechanized fishing and tourism.

Paper long abstract:

India´s coastal populations, largely constituted by artisanal fishermen, have witnessed a deep transformation of the fishery sector. This change resulted from a post-independence fisheries policy, based on top-down development schemes. This industrial/development drive had distinct impacts on fishermen populations all over India (Subramanian 2009; Kurien 1985).

The immediate effects of mechanization in Goa came at a very high cost for fishing resources, ecosystems and artisanal fishermen, from which the Goan Pagi fishermen(a social disadvantaged and low caste population) are an example. This conjuncture has led them to a partial/total abandonment of artisanal fishing in favour of more profitable economic activities (i.e. tourism).

Tourism in Goa started with the arrival of the hippies in the late 1960s, but only in the 1980s was the industry considered a government priority sector. Since Goa fishermen live on the beach, tourism soon became one of their main subsistence activities, turning them into active participants in this sector Trichur 2013). This involvement in tourism allowed their economic survival but also meant a break with social stigmatization (Siqueira 1995).

Based on a long-term ethnographic research carried out with the Pagi in the coastal villages of Galgibaga and Agonda, this communication explores their inherent relation with the seaworld. Through a focus on "water as a principal configurative force [of their] society" (Hastrup and Rubow 2014: 20), I analyse the way these artisanal fishermen actively respond to an accelerated reconfiguration of their social spaces derived from two global industries: trawler fishing and tourism.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is an exercise in rethinking the relation between land and sea through the lenses of river and rain. This calls attention to entanglements engendered by pervasive flows as it serves as an invitation to reconsider the oceanic commons.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is an exercise in rethinking the relation between land and sea. Along the sea front of the Bengal delta, comprising much of Bangladesh and India's West Bengal, the sea is widely thought of as river. To fishermen and farmers alike, the proper sea is considered to begin only miles into what maps label as the Bay of Bengal. While this exemplifies local taxonomies of the waterscape, it also highlights the deep reach terrestrial formations (such as the river) have into the sea.

Architects Mathur and Cunha (2017), on the other hand, have recently proposed to think (South Asian) rivers as rain. This conceptual shift insists on the pervasive, highly transformative nature of the water cycle of which rivers are only one ephemeral articulation. It emphasizes the penetrative quality of water, soaking soil and evaporating into thin air.

In fundamentally differing ways, both these framings enlarge the reach of rivers, spilling the riverine far beyond its banks. This paper takes these articulations as an invitation to rethink the maritime. It argues that to think the sea through the lenses of river and rain familiarizes the sea. It also serves as cue to become attentive to the entanglements of land and sea engendered by flows reaching both ways and involving the registers of energy, materiality, practice and ideas. To think the sea as river and rain, then, helps to reach beyond land/sea binarities underpinning marine relations, while also serving as an invitation to reconsider the oceanic commons.