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Accepted Paper:

Exploring the Manx seascape: materialities and understandings of space at sea  
Rachel Crellin (Newcastle University)

Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on anthropological fieldwork with those who spend time at sea to consider the nature of the seascape. The paper presents a shifting, unpredictable 'scape lacking a built materiality and asks how this effects human experience questioning the dominance of landscape tropes.

Paper long abstract:

This paper questions the utility of landscape approaches when considering the seascape. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork on the Isle of Man over the summer of 2010 the paper looks at how people understand space at sea and experience the seascape today. It is argued that landscape concepts of space are too static and fixed when considering the seascape. Rather, the shifting and changing nature of the seascape forces an engagement with space that cannot be a detached visual experience but rather demands corporeal involvement. This changing and unpredictable nature of the seascape, it is argued, leads to an elaboration of material systems around practices of boat maintenance. These complex material elaborations stand in contrast to the inability of informants to build within the seascape. This lack of built materiality is discussed in relation to concepts of space and place, and it is suggested, results in a very different and far looser sense of place than is considered the norm within Ingold's "congealed taskscape". The seascape emerges from the research as a highly textured 'scape, experienced corpothetically by those who dwell at sea. However it is also a 'scape that refuses to be shaped in the same way as the landscape. This ethnographic study of the seascape therefore highlights problems with the dominance of the traditional landscape approach arguing for a fresh approach to the seascape in both anthropology and archaeology and offers an alternative kind of 'scape for consideration as a foil to more traditional landscape approaches.

Panel S34
Escaping-scapes: the value of -scapes to understanding past practices?
  Session 1