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Paper short abstract

This contribution questions the premises and promises of locating the ethnographic gaze in specific locations to conduct fieldwork on seafarers and argues that sea-blindness should be understood in relation with the surveillance of seafarers.

Paper long abstract

While sea-blindness does not have a proper entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, it is a pervasive expression that I often came across in my research on seafarers’ labour rights in international commercial shipping. For shipowners, social workers, labour inspectors or trade unionists I job-shadowed and interacted with in northern German ports, “sea-blindness” is one of these rare issues that brings about a consensus: they all agree that people on land are “sea-blind” towards the critical role of seafarers, while at the same time highly depending on their labour for the maintenance of supply chains and critical delivery of commodities. Additionally, sea-blindness is a concept that is also widely used by critical scholars of logistics in order to shed light on the entrapment of seafarers: they convincingly argue that shipping thrives on hiding their unsightly exploitation. The puzzle that I explore in this paper is the common narrative that actors from the shipping industry, and academic debates about them share concerning sea-blindness: by invoking this notion, they do not only assume it is possible to reverse it, or to mitigate its effects. Much more, overcoming sea-blindness is an urgent impact they all want to achieve. In order to enquire why and how these different positions may align, my paper is a critical reflection on the notion of sea-blindness. My goal is to tease out the epistemological tensions existing between seeing and knowing at the core of the anthropological scientific endeavour.