Paper short abstract:

I analyse the materials I gathered during extended fieldwork aboard tall ships, which are old traditional rigged ships. I focus in particular on ‘taskship’ on board. Taskship is both a place and a bundle of correspondences in which boat, environment and crew become entangled.

Paper long abstract:

Taskship is the dialogue between lines of task and the non-human participation of the environment. The only form continually performed at sea is the setting of sails or the shaping of the boat at each moment. To navigate efficiently crew members need to become one with the ship, the sea and the wind (Papadopoulou 2019: 5). The ship acts as a place in which relationships are continuously in movement, thus shaping the boat and its crew members.

They learn through skilled practices and correspondences when tensions between humans and non-humans try to find the best set of sails. Such correspondences include the shared rhythms of the boat with the sea and the adjustments the crew members make to generate the precise tension in the lines for the boat to keep sailing.

Initially, crew members experience arrhythmia—loss of body control—when the extended movement of the boat in their bodies results in vomiting and seasickness. The ship acts as a transductor of the dialogue between the oceanic environment and crew members. By experiencing this dialogue, crew member’s responsiveness to this oceanic environment is at its peak entailing a moral commitment with all on board to set the best form of the sails at any moment. Skilled adjustments contain a beautiful path toward differentiation, a creative process of learning by finding a particular response to every adjustment. In this way, a feeling of mutual attention and memory—that is to say, harmony—can be reached by learning maritime skills aboard tall ships.