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Paper short abstract

Treating the Adriatic Sea as a medium and collaborator, blue anthropology is positioned at the intersection of spearfishers’ sensory knowledge and skilled labour practices, marine science, and embodied underwater ethnography, revealing how climate change is experienced, forecasted, and negotiated.

Paper long abstract

The waters of the relatively small Adriatic Sea reflect a myriad of condensed Anthropocene transformations—rising temperatures, salinity shifts, coastal erosion, intensified tourism, overfishing, the arrival of new species, and changing fishing practices. As a marginal Mediterranean sea with constrained circulation, the Adriatic absorbs and redistributes environmental change, mediating cultural meanings and reconfiguring human–marine relations in the region and beyond. This paper presents Croatian breath-holding spearfishers’ and the ethnographer’s body-transformation practices required to immerse into Adriatic depths—whether for fishing or to bear witness to change through participant observation—asking what the changing sea demands of human visitors and examining pressures on lungs, labour, and livelihoods. Drawing on underwater and coastal ethnography, blue anthropology is positioned between the sensory, embodied ecological knowledge of Croatian spearfishers and the formalized observations of marine scientists, treating the Adriatic as both medium and collaborator. These epistemological juxtapositions reveal not only what remains unknown about the Adriatic’s transformation, but also how climate uncertainty is felt, argued over, and lived, foregrounding the ethical stakes of environmental and cultural knowledge production and showing why anthropology matters for understanding how climate change intersects with care, precarity, and uneven exposure.