Paper short abstract:

The history of sharks and humans in the Western world is inflected by myth and legend. Examining the histories of shark-human interactions in coastal communities, this paper disentangles sharks from the stories that have been woven around them, moving from the mythological to the material.

Paper long abstract:

The history of sharks and humans in the Western world is deeply inflected by myth and legend. Popular narratives surrounding sharks are highly dichotomous; caught between wonder and terror, fascination and fear, love and hatred, fact and fiction, the real and the imagined. Yet, as this paper will show, this myth-making has also been extended to the presentation of human perceptions regarding sharks. Often presented as timeworn, intimacies between sharks and humans have their roots in much more recent 20th-century cultural, scientific, and technological shifts. Likewise, the current preoccupation with sharks dates to this period —not just to the "Jaws" phenomenon, but to real encounters with swimmers, surfers, and divers that occurred from the midcentury on. This work examines case studies of shark-human interactions in the U.S. and South Africa, presenting histories of coastal communities that have dealt with sharks not merely in the abstract, but in the flesh. In doing so, it seeks to disentangle sharks from the stories that have been woven around them, to present examples of real people, dealing with real sharks. It argues that only by moving away from the mythological and metaphorical and towards the material, can we understand our outsized feelings towards sharks, and to uncover how and why our attitudes and interactions with them have changed over time, and continue to change to this day.