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Paper short abstract

This study examines the intangible cultural heritage of Mappila navigators from India's Malabar coast, focusing on their Sea Songs. These oral traditions embody navigational knowledge, spiritual beliefs, and environmental consciousness, reflecting the community's identity and resilience.

Paper long abstract

This study investigates how the intangible cultural heritage of the Mappila sailors—a micro-community from the Malabar coast of India—provides a distinctive subaltern archive for understanding the maritime heritage, history and lived experiences. Focusing on their oral tradition of Sea Songs, the research highlights these living traditions as essential documents of the navigators' multifaceted, amphibious experiences and their profound connection to the maritime environment. The Sea Songs were composed and performed during the voyages aboard traditional wooden sailing vessels, Pattēmārs. Until the late 20th century, these sailors navigated their vessels along a historical trade network linking the Malabar region to the western coast of India, the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Aden, and the Swahili coast. These songs serve as a vital medium for transmitting traditional navigational wisdom, heavily relying on knowledge of nature and celestial bodies—a unique system of expertise distinguishing these seamen as adept navigators. The songs encapsulate spiritual beliefs, a cosmological worldview, and ecological awareness, reflecting how the community adapted to their marine environment and forged a distinct transregional identity. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the research integrates content analysis of the songs with ethnographic fieldwork, addressing a significant epistemological gap in understanding the Malabar maritime history. The findings reveal that the community's cultural memory is closely tied to their natural environment and the challenges they encounter, including the perils of the sea, climate-related issues, and the vibrant festivities and cultural hybridity that emerge from these experiences.

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The presentation studies environmental relationship depicted through the archipelago and waterways in a crime fiction case study. I ask, how the narrative challenges marginalization and presents the inhabitants of outermost regions as heroes of their own lives rather than bystanders.

Paper long abstract

In my presentation, I examine the relationships with nature and the environment that fictional representations reveal about so called heartlands. I read Finnish author Joona Keskitalo's crime novel Saari, joka upposi ("The Island That Sank"), part of the Takamailla (“On the Backcountry") series, by using a method that combines ecocritical literary study and environmental aesthetics. I explore, how the fictional environment narrated through archipelago and waterways actively shapes perceptions of nature and people, who live outside cities and town centers. I ask, how the narrative challenges marginalization and presents the inhabitants of the outermost regions as heroes of their own lives rather than bystanders. Furthermore, how do world events and official decisions affect to ways how people live in environments located somehow marginalized areas? My presentation is part of a Finnish multidisciplinary research project that takes an approach to studying how the heartlands are presented, defined, and imagined in different eras and from different perspectives. Through various narratives, research group examines who creates the current and future cultural heritage of the heartlands and how cultural heritage lives and changes in the everyday life of communities.

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In 1816 a mutiny rose in the middle of the Atlantic on the schooner "Plattsburg" from Baltimore. The ship ended up in a little harbour on the southern coast of Norway. In the paper the mutiny will be discussed from the perspective om liminality and the narrative as an example of local sealore.

Paper long abstract

In 1816 a motley crew set sail with the schooner "Plattsburg" from Baltimore. The ship was bound for Turkey to buy opium. For this purpose, the ship carried a huge amount of silver and gold coins, as well as a valuable load of coffee. In the middle of the Atlantic, a mutiny rose. The captain and two of the ship’s officers were thrown into the ocean. The ship ended up in the little harbour Kleven outside the town of Mandal in southern Norway. Wild rumours began to spread, as the merry sailors turned out to be big spenders. When an American consul arrived to check what was going on, most of the mutineers had already fled. The locals thought the pirates had hidden some of their silver booty, and in the tradition the ship was called «The Silver Schooner». In this paper I will discuss the mutiny on the "Plattsburg" from the perspective of liminality and the narrative as an example of local sealore.

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This paper examines how second-home users in coastal Finland narrate the sea as a culturally coded elemental space in the context of second-home life. Through interviews, I analyze how the vastness of the sea mediates human–elemental entanglements and expands the meaning of place.

Paper long abstract

Water is fundamental to all forms of life, and in many creation myths the cosmos is said to have originated from an infinite expanse of water—the Cosmic sea—from which all life emerged. In this sense, water, and by extension the sea, is conceived not only as a material necessity but also as an elemental origin, a medium through which existence itself becomes possible.

Drawing on interviews with second-home users and owners in Ostrobothnia, Southwest Finland, and Åland, this paper explores how the sea is culturally and symbolically charged with notions of freedom, imagination, mobility, and isolation. The analysis demonstrates that second-home users’ senses of place extends well beyond the physical boundaries of the cottage plot. Standing on the shoreline, they project dreams and imaginings across the horizon, linking the local with the global. These narratives resonate with Doreen Massey’s concept of a “global sense of place,” which emphasizes places as constituted through flows, connections, and imaginaries rather than through fixed rootedness. The sea thus emerges as an elemental medium through which the cottage, the self, and the world interrelate.

By examining how the sea is narrated as a culturally coded and symbolically charged element, the paper contributes to broader discussions of how humans experience and articulate entanglements with the elemental in the Anthropocene. Here, the sea appears not as a passive backdrop to human life but as an active presence shaping perceptions of freedom, belonging, and the possibilities beyond the horizon.

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The talk explores an elemental poetics of the calm at sea by focusing in particular on the entanglement of humans, animals, and the elemental dimensions of a sea voyage. To this end, I will close-read travelogues written by German-speaking naturalists Adelbert von Chamisso and Georg Forster.

Paper long abstract

At the beginning of the 19th century, author and naturalist Adelbert von Chamisso made a groundbreaking discovery: He was the first to describe the alternation of generations in the animal kingdom, a special model of reproduction. During a circumnavigation (1815–1818), the actual goal of which was the discovery of the Northwest Passage, the wind ceased, and the sailing ship came to a standstill. For the first time, Chamisso turned his gaze not to the horizon as usual, but downwards. There, at the bow of the resting ship, he discovered salps, tiny marine creatures, and also learned about their unusual reproductive habits. Apparently, the lack of wind and the therefore mirror-like water surface were the reasons why these small animals became visible to the naturalist in the first place. Similar to Chamisso, who published this encounter in his travelogue "Reise um die Welt" (1836), the German naturalist Georg Forster experienced a comparable situation, which can be read about in his travelogue, which he also entitled "Reise um die Welt" (eng. "A Voyage round the World"; 1777).

While there are already cultural-historical works on wind (cf. Cartier 2014; Decker 2023; Horn 2024), calm as a borderline experience at sea has not yet been examined in detail. The talk engages with the question of an elemental poetics of the calm by focusing in particular on the entanglement of humans, animals, and the elemental dimensions of a sea voyage.