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- Convenors:
-
Marta Gentilucci
(Centre Universitaire de formation et de recherche de Mayotte)
Raffaele Maddaluno (University of Rome La Sapienza)
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- Discussant:
-
Georgeta Stoica
(Centre Universitaire de Recherche et Formation (CUFR) de Mayotte)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 6 College Park (6CP), 01/037
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
In the indeterminacy triggered by the current crises, does the sea have the transformative potentialities to spark the way to alternative hopeful futures? This panel invites theoretical and ethnographical contributions that reflect on the capacity of the sea to challenge the land-based perspectives.
Long Abstract:
The sea has always been a vehicle of transformation in a capitalist economy: an (un)common and radical space where the great challenges for hegemony take place. Recently, maritime trade ensured an acceleration in the exchange and transport of goods; activity that affects the way we perceive time and space and unifies historically dense and heterogeneous places. Devastation and exploitation of the maritime environment are the effects of anthropogenic “overheating” (Eriksen, 2018), at the same time, the signals highlighting the central role of the sea in processes of ecological, economic, and scientific transition, as reflected by the Blue Economy framework.
The indeterminacy of current crises force us to recalibrate our expectations for the future as communities and individuals (Bryant, Knight 2019). There is an urgent need for an ethnographic investigation of transformative practices starting from those spaces capable of triggering alternative thinking. The sea seems to us an ideal -scape to observe processes of uncertainty, resistance and unexpected imaginative drives, due to its intrinsic capacity to generate counter-narratives.
Going beyond an idea of maritime space as an arena of expansive capitalism, this panel invites reflections on the generative capacities of the sea as a "theory machine" (Helmreich, 2011).
-Is it possible to assume the sea as an ethnographic fieldwork from which to investigate issues of conservation, sustainability, climate change?
-How does the materiality of the sea affect the land-based temporalities and spatialities (Steinberg, Peters, 2015; 2019)?
-Does the sea have the transformative potentialities to spark the way to alternative hopeful futures?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Montse Pijoan (Independent Researcher)
Paper short abstract:
Engaged by the proposal of thinking the world from an ocean environment that can provide theoretical tools my research comes up by the experience of inhabiting the sea by sailing on board traditional rigged boats tackling issues such as sustainability and climate change.
Paper long abstract:
What I discuss in this paper is precisely that not only the ocean as an extension by its movement affords other perceptive experiences to its inhabitants but also the ocean puts human beings on board back to its inner constitution of being in mutuality with the environment. By the experiences of young trainees inhabiting the sea for a first time, together in dialogue with the permanent crew from different tall ships, and with the understanding of fluxes of flow in-between mediums as tensions in a more-than-surface at sea, the animated lines of life from Ingold light on a world of unceasing movement texturing creative social becomings as the basis of ontological humanity. By first-person experiences inhabiting the sea continuous sustainable measures or the impact of climate change are major themes to reflect upon. Consequently, the strikingly differentiated quality that characterizes an ocean environment is that whether we like it or not, we are ‘all at sea’ moving in concert like the smallest of the molecules within big masses of salty waves. To this respect, movement and social becomings at sea are an invitation to keep ongoing research in maritime anthropology within oceanic ontologies from which alternative hopeful futures can be developed.
Johanna Markkula (Central European University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork from a variety of maritime spaces and actors: with sailors onboard cargo ships, with the Coast Guard in the Philippines, and with maritime organizations, to think through the sea’s “transformative potential for alternative hopeful futures.”
Paper long abstract:
Thinking through the sea allows us to consider things differently. This paper draws on long-term multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork from a variety of maritime spaces, such as with sailors onboard cargo-ships, with the Coast Guard in the Philippines, and with maritime organizations such as the International Maritime Organization, in an attempt to think through the sea’s “transformative potential for alternative hopeful futures.” Maritime policymakers navigate multiple interests while maritime industry stakeholders speculate what technologies will become more profitable with zero-carbon emissions being an emerging industry goal. Seafarers onboard merchant ships have to find a balance with the new demands on their time and labor that new regulations and environmental requirements entail. Finally, coast guard personnel in the Philippines navigate the territorial waters and nautical highways of their archipelagic nation to straddle environmental enforcements with limited funds and technologies. Ethnographic insights from these different forms of sea-work allow me to explore how the sea as a space that is both a global “commons” and resource to be managed for the future of the planet and an “uncommon” space, different from land, is full of contradictions to be navigated and also full of potential for imagining more hopeful futures.
Erica Borg (King's College London) Amedeo Policante (HIFMB AWI)
Paper short abstract:
Projects aimed at geoengineering the ocean's biogeochemistry are currently underway. This emergent technoscientific imaginary transforms the ocean into a 'planetary carbon sink'. Yet, ocean-engineering is continuously thwarted not only by human resistance but by the materiality of the ocean itself.
Paper long abstract:
New attempts are underway to engineer the Anthropocene Ocean to withstand and even mitigate the conditions imposed on Earth by the 'Great Acceleration' in industrial impact. In this presentation we explore emergent modalities of marine geoengineering as they relate to an emergent global 'biopolitical economy'; a mode of governance aimed at securing the conditions for capital accumulation in the Anthropocene. By fertilising plankton - with the hope of triggering large-scale algal blooms - scientists hope to set off a "biological cascade" which can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In this emergent technoscientific imaginary, the ocean is morphed into cybernetic system which can be managed, rationalised, and engineered according to 'the principles of machine production'. Such proposals are beset by a profound contradiction; while ocean sciences are continually revealing universes of increasing complexity - exposing just how little we actually know of Earth's water worlds - technoscience increasingly aims to intervene in these processes. This colonial fantasy of total control is continuously thwarted not only by human resistance, but by the very 'wet ontology' of the ocean itself.
Daniel Yon (York University)
Paper short abstract:
St Helena’s airport generated nostalgia for a disappearing maritime past. This paper engages the island’s history as “ocean roadhouse” and place of exile and as both “cut off” and “deeply connected” since its inception as a place of settlement to facilitate English imperial interests in the East
Paper long abstract:
My paper draws from a larger project on an anthropology of the sea. While efforts at “thinking with the sea” work against bounded and static conceptions of place and space I choose to focus on the South Atlantic World with the Island of St Helena as its core. In contrast to the Atlantic’s north, the Indian Ocean Basin or the Pacific’s “sea of island”, the South Atlantic is often imagined as the wide watery unmarked space in which the island is “cut off” by the sea. A different imaginary emerges when we consider the historic oceanic networks that met at and cross-cut St Helena, that is the island as connected by the sea. Trevor Hearl, the noted historian of St Helena, likened the North Atlantic to a series of parallel clothes lines running East-West linking the two Atlantic seaboards, Europe, Africa and North America. He contrasts this imaginary with the South Atlantic and a vision of St Helena at the center of a spider’s web whose webs reach far and wide linking East, West, North and South in the mid-South Atlantic. The island, its people and the landscape itself, through its maritime history was at the nexus of these global journeys and voyages. It was made from, and is constituted by a maritime history of movements and flows.