Contribution short abstract:

Doing ethnography on board a research vessel condenses the ethnographic experience, quickly blurring the lines between the research and the personal. By understanding research vessels as locations of rupture, we can better understand the entanglements of epistemic and affective lifeworlds at sea.

Contribution long abstract:

Doing ethnography on board a research vessel condenses the ethnographic experience, quickly blurring the lines between the fieldsite and the private, the research and the personal.

Anthropologists have long debated the possibility of bounded physical fieldsites in ethnographic research, especially in the face of globalization and increasingly mobile ways of life (Metcalf 2001; Appadurai 1990). Research vessels are in many ways bounded physical fieldsites par excellence: once on the ship, there is no way off, whether in the event of serious injury or even death. Much of what is observed by the ethnographer is also experienced--arguments, fatigue, sickness, blurring of relational boundaries, and personal loss. The outer limits of the research vessel, imposed by the uninhabitable expanse of the ocean, simultaneously confine and generate new epistemic and affective constellations.

Research vessels can therefore be understood as locations of rupture (c.f. Holbraad, Kapferer & Sauma 2019). Research and personal life are both ruptured on ship, creating new constellations and temporalities of affect within epistemic life worlds of sea researchers and ethnographers alike. Routines, structures (both physical and social), and experiments themselves must be adapted and compressed onto the ship, which is constantly asking scientists to change plans and work together under pressure in order to adjust the course of their research according to the ever-changing conditions afforded by the vessel. Attention to the brief but highly intense moments which constitute life at sea highlight the ways in which epistemic and affective lifeworlds become intimately intertwined in the making of scientific knowledge.