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- Convenors:
-
Paula Uimonen
(Stockholm University)
Edyta Roszko (Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Online
- Sessions:
- Thursday 18 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
Doing anthropology with ocean creatures? The ocean world affects all life on our planet, so caring relations with the Ocean and its Creatures are critical for planetary coexistence—especially in today’s world of rising sea levels, depleted stocks from overfishing, and escalating marine pollution.
Long Abstract:
This panel expands anthropological studies of care into the ocean. The ocean world affects all life on our planet, therefore caring relations with the Ocean and its Creatures are critical for planetary coexistence—especially in today’s world of rising sea levels, depleted stocks from overfishing, and escalating marine pollution. The panel focuses on care for ocean creatures while thinking with seawater (Helmreich 2011, 2023), thus engaging other species as ethnographic subjects (Hartigan 2019, Pálsson 2023), while emphasizing the importance of telling other stories than human ones (Rees 2019). With this understanding, this panel seeks to explore how and why ocean creatures are cared for. Inspired by the anthropology of ocean and water, political ecology, and multispecies studies, it explores human engagements with ocean creatures, in different underwater environments as well as their terrestrial linkages. As has been shown in the literature, the practices and politics of care take different forms as people engage with non-human life for a variety of reasons (cf. Haraway 2016, Ingold 2022, Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, Scaramelli 2021, Schroer et al. 2021, Sharp 2019, Tsing et al. 2017). This panel explores practices and politics of care, paying attention to both ocean creatures and their ocean environment. The panel ask questions such as: How and why do people take care of ocean creatures? What are the politics of human care practices? How can the needs of human self-care be balanced with the needs of the ocean and its creatures?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 18 July, 2024, -Annet Pauwelussen (Wageningen University)
Paper short abstract:
A surge of restoration initiatives aims to bring oyster reefs back from brink of extinction, thereby shaping new kinds of marine nature for an uncertain future. Through the lens of care, I explore how restoration enacts in-/exclusions in knowing and caring for oysters across the Northern Atlantic.
Paper long abstract:
A surge of marine restoration initiatives promises to bring reefs back from the brink of extinction. Yet, in current times of ecological precarity, there is no ‘natural condition’ to go back to. Instead, restoration shapes new kinds of marine nature for an uncertain future. Applying the feminist theoretical lens of ‘care' I re-conceptualize the politics involved in reef restoration. Despite its moral association of ‘doing good’, care is political. It is underpinned by different assumptions of what is a good and healthy reef, and what knowledge should guide intervention. How do such politics of care shape the conditions for including different kinds of knowledge and values in marine restoration? Addressing this question, I explore how restoration enacts specific inclusions and exclusions in knowing and caring for marine reef-building creatures. While corals receive growing attention in marine anthropology, a silent revolution is taking place in colder waters. Here, a proliferation of projects enacts oyster as a rising matter of concern and care in the restoration of marine biodiversity. I draw from multi-sited anthropological research, connecting case studies in the United States, Netherlands and United Kingdom. Here, oyster reefs are uniquely entangled with transatlantic cultural history and industrialization. An ethnographic focus on oyster care practices sheds light on the current re-imagining and re-shaping of human-nature connections in (post)industrial degraded marine environments in the North.
Laura Otto (Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg) Ramona Haegele (Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg)
Paper short abstract:
The Riviera Maya faces climate challenges, with Sargassum algae threatening seagrasses. Scientists turn this into an opportunity, advocating seagrass care through multi-species interactions, highlighting their dedication to addressing climate change and enriching discussions on Anthropocene ethics.
Paper long abstract:
The Mexican Riviera Maya is known throughout the world for its beaches and crystal-clear waters. Since the 1970s the area has strategically been transformed into ‘tourist paradise’, yearly attracting millions of travelers. What most people – both, locals and tourists – do not know is how important seagrasses are for sustaining 'paradise'. Currently, the region is experiencing escalating climate change challenges, of which the most prominent one is the arrival of Sargassum algae in atypical amounts. The algae contribute to destroying seagrasses and put the local ecosystem to the test. At the same time, Sargassum – thinking with a multi-species approach – generates new human-seagrass relations. The paper explores these dynamics by examining these emerging relations of diverse ocean creatures with a focus on the role natural scientists play here. While these actors interpret Sargassum as a pressing, and indeed threatening, change along the coast, they yet make use of the algae arrival to promote seagrasses, and the care for them. They do so, we argue, through interactions with other species, restoration, and the generation of attention for a supposedly uncharismatic ocean creature. By sharing their love and enthusiasm for seagrasses, natural scientists in Mexico have developed new practices of care for the coast, assume responsibility for anthropogenic climate change in their everyday work and life, and help us understand ethics in the Anthropocene beyond normative answers, instead looking at how different actors negotiate between conflicting opinions and practices on what may be good for the future of the region.
rasmus rodineliussen (Stockholm University)
Paper short abstract:
The backdrop to this paper is a story about the human-induced slow violence of microplastics on the ocean environment and the beings within the ocean. The plot centers on the idea of care—human attempts to remove microplastics from the water with the help of jellyfish bodies.
Paper long abstract:
The backdrop to this paper is a story about the human-induced slow violence of microplastics on the ocean environment and the beings within the ocean (Nixon 2011). The plot centers on the idea of care—human attempts to remove microplastics from the water with the help of jellyfish bodies. Here it is important to ask: who is cared for, and who pays the price for this care? Toward answering these questions, we begin by looking at the impact plastics have on the marine environment as a starting point to understand how the Oceans of today are increasingly affected by human societies. This human impact has led to a situation wherein jellyfish thrive, and their growing numbers have started to become a nuisance for many humans—jellyfish interfere with human infrastructure and fisheries. Meanwhile, it has recently come to light that jellyfish bodies have properties that can be utilized by humans to catch microplastics. This has led to an initiative to create filters for wastewater treatment plants that will use jellyfish bodies to catch microplastics from wastewater in order to mitigate the effects of human pollution. However, in the process of becoming products for various human uses (membrane filters for wastewater plants, nutrients for agriculture, part of human cosmetics, and even food) the jellyfish are killed. Humans thus seek to provide care for the underwater world through the removal of plastics, but in doing so they are (ab)using the bodies of jellies.
Edyta Roszko (Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen)
Paper short abstract:
This essay documents how fossilized giant clamshells challenge the binaries between life and non-life and how the process of turning them in their afterlife into artwork becomes a post-mortem care. It reflects on fossilization as the potentiality for marine death and marine life in varied forms.
Paper long abstract:
In the South China Sea, where subsidized and militarized Chinese fishers were mobilized to support China’s construction of artificial islands on coral reefs, the extraction of fossilized giant clam shells from living coral in the disputed territories served as an aesthetic claim to contested territory, property and to ‘ecological civilization.’ This essay documents how fossilized giant clamshells in the disputed Paracel and Spratly archipelagos challenge the binaries between life and non-life and how local fishers perceive the process of turning them in their afterlife into artwork as a form of post-mortem care. Engaging with existing concepts of ruination (Stoler 2013, Meskell 2018) and animal remains (Bezan and McKay 2022), the essay critically reflects on fossilization as the potentiality for marine death and marine life in multiple and varied forms. Conceptualizing fossilization as a non-human variation of ruination, I argue that the categorization of giant clamshell fossils as ‘(non-) creatures’ relies on the human classificatory gaze and on the Chinese state’s territorializing vision of the coral reefs as ‘oceanic oases.’
Xuefei Shi (Chr. Michelsen Institute)
Paper short abstract:
This study examines the trade of mud crabs from Madagascar to China, focusing on cultural practices, logistics, and the impact on ecosystems, species sustainability, and human-animal relations.
Paper long abstract:
In controlled environments, how long can a crab sustain its life? What cultural nuances and intricate practices ensure the biological value of such a delicate creature in the global seafood trade? Since 2014, an annual capture of 5,000 tons of mud crabs (Scylla serrata) has journeyed from the mangroves of Madagascar to the bustling seafood market of Guangzhou, South China. These crabs are then disseminated alive across China’s expansive territory, catering to the specific gustatory desires of its population. This essay delves into the cultural and technical intricacies underpinning this transnational trade, focusing on the meticulous nursing, logistical, and slaughter strategies devised by humans to ensure these Malagasy crabs remain gastronomically vibrant. It explores the multifaceted relationships in the business: from Malagasy fishers to the crabs they capture, from Chinese traders to their prized inventory, and finally, to the end consumers who savor them. This analysis illuminates a precarious dimension of global seafood commerce that purses to heighten human culinary pleasure by treating these ocean animals with increased humanity—thus extending their transient livability. It also reveals a paradox that can distort the natural (indigenous) human-animal relations, potentially culminating in the endangerment of the species and the fragile ecosystems they inhabit.
Paula Uimonen (Stockholm University)
Paper short abstract:
Farming sea cucumbers entails all kinds of caring practices. In Tanzania, this emerging form of aquaculture is encouraged by the government’s Blue Economy development paradigm, which aims to raise income in fishing communities, while protecting the ocean. The sea cucumbers are exported to China.
Paper long abstract:
Farming sea cucumbers for export to China is an emerging form of artisanal aquaculture in Tanzania. It is encouraged by the government’s Blue Economy development paradigm, which aims to raise income in fishing communities, while protecting the ocean. This paper interrogates sea cucumber farming in coastal communities, where humans and sea cucumbers have coexisted for many years. Over time, the sea cucumber has become a priced product, collected by divers and sold for export to China. Due to a global depletion of stocks, collection has been banned for the last two decades. Instead, aquaculture is now being promoted, whereby the sea cucumber is grown in fenced areas in the ocean, as a commodity for the global seafood market. Approaching sea cucumbers as fellow creatures (Haraway 2016, Ingold 2022), the paper probes artisanal aquaculture in terms of practices of care and domestication, focusing on embodied engagement and relational forms of knowing (Lien 2015, 2022, Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, Singleton 2010). Thinking with seawater in amphibious environments (Helmreich 2011, Pauwelussen and Verschoor 2017), it also interrogates the politics of landscapes of domestication (Swanson 2018), arguing that caring for ocean creatures as export commodities can disorient people from caring for the oceanic ecosystem. Contrary to the rhetoric of Blue Economy, farming sea cucumbers has yet to improve local livelihoods, while it carries the risk of killing off these ocean creatures and destroying the delicate ecological balance of coastal environments.
Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme (University of Bergen)
Paper short abstract:
Aiming to elicit aspects of lobster fishing beyond extraction, this paper explores the variety of ways in which lobsters are enacted as matters of care. It shows how different scales of care entangle humans, lobsters, whales, and other ocean creatures in tricky and at times incompatible ways.
Paper long abstract:
How do you care for an animal which you primarily encounter when you capture it? For lobstermen in Maine (US) caring for and capturing lobsters are far from contrasting modes of multispecies engagement. It is rather through practices of capture that relations of care are enacted. For lobstermen, this capture/care relationality is seen as a core reason for the current abundance of lobsters in the Gulf of Maine. Extensive release of lobsters under and above size limits as well as egg-bearing females, together with a such a profuse use of bait fish that it amounts to a significant part of lobsters’ diet makes the trap-intensive fishery central to caring for the state’s lobster stock. Caring for lobsters is at the same time considered caring for both fishers’ own families and for fishing communities locally and statewide. These different scales of care have recently intersected in problematic ways with other forms of multispecies care, particularly in the political battle over the alleged threat that trap fishery poses to the endangered Right Whale. Government responses related to surveillance of fisheries to create data for potential new fishing practices aiming to protect whales have created a situation where care for whales entails digital forms of capture of lobstermen. Based on recent fieldwork with lobstermen in Down East Maine and drawing upon approaches in multispecies anthropology that problematize the sharp distinction between violence and care, this paper discusses how different scales of capture and care intersect in tricky and at times incompatible ways.
Sarah Mund (University of Cologne)
Paper short abstract:
While Indigenous peoples have practiced reciprocal care with Pacific salmon for millennia, colonial policies disrupted these practices and replaced them with efforts to control salmon. Current interactions with salmon are challenging dominant modes of caring and demand a different relationship.
Paper long abstract:
As a keystone species in decline, Pacific salmon has received plenty of care along the West Coast of Canada over the last decades. Most of this care emerges from a Western Scientific background trying to control salmon as well as their habitat through technological advances – hatcheries and habitat improvement. Many of these attempts to care for declining salmon populations have not shown any success or are even seen as causing negative effects on salmon stocks. These approaches to salmon enhancement are based on the colonial disruption of Indigenous peoples care relationship with salmon which emerged over millennia and constituted a reciprocal relationship between salmon and humans. Here, the needs of humans to eat, share and trade salmon were not in conflict with caring for salmon but an important part of this relationship. Working with an Indigenous community as well as non-Indigenous actors on the West Coast of Canada, I will explore what caring for salmon means for humans as well other non-human actors in the 21st century. What emerges is the argument that intimate interactions between salmon and humans are needed to constitute holistically caring for salmon. When people lose their relations and interactions with salmon, caring becomes an abstract matter of trying to control the unpredictable nature of salmon and bears the danger to reduce salmon to a commodified food source. Pacific salmon is irreplaceable for those who care and this paper will explore how different actors are trying to return to practices of reciprocal care.