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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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Bengal’s waterways, spanning the Ganga delta and the Bay of Bengal, have shaped centuries of cultural exchange and colonial power. Drawing on oral lore, myths, history, and literature, this paper examines sacred and secular meanings of navigation, trade, and hydrology.

Paper long abstract

Bengal (West Bengal, part of India, and Bangladesh) occupies a strategic geographical position in terms of hydrological connections, constituting the Ganga-delta, world’s largest delta, and the Bay of Bengal in the south. The waterways have not only provided for sustenance but have witnessed, through time and tide, the endless episodes of ‘cultural osmosis’, wherein tales, beliefs, and customs were seamlessly exchanged and adapted, and ‘colonial geopolitics’, both of which are efficaciously recorded in postcolonial historiography as well as oral narratives. While oral “hydro-lore”, like those dealing with merchants’ navigations and underwater voyages, are a microcosmic representation of a macrocosmic geo-political world, written discourses, both in fiction and non-fiction, capture the ever-changing dynamics of waterways through histories (past explorations), networks (crossroads), and empires (colonial settlements). Such narratives, though seldom explored, encompass aquatic connections from historical navigations to multiple trade links to colonial hydrology. With respect to this, the paper attempts to examine, through myths, histories and narratives, the sacred (religious and cultural) and the secular (political and economic) purposes associated with Bengal’s maritime exchanges and influences. Further, it also aims to bring forth the politics of hegemony through the colonizer and the colonized, of exploitation as in trade and slave trade, of economic gains, of exploration and cultural diffusion, through the past and present times in the context of Bengal. Finally, this paper tries to make some deliberations on how the Bengal water-system continues to be of great geo-strategic importance in contemporary times.

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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.