Paper short abstract:

This paper uncovers the traces of the seas in the transnational trade of Sri Lankan sapphires, now transported by air. It examines how credit-based networks that South Indian traders forged through maritime movements during the twentieth century continue to shape commodity exchange today.

Paper long abstract:

How did a group of traders from a small South Indian coastal town come to control the trade of Sri Lankan sapphires in Hong Kong? What can memories of maritime mobility and histories of imperial infrastructures and networks reveal about the contemporary movements of a highly valuable, speculative commodity across the Indian Ocean? This paper uncovers the traces of the seas in the transnational trade of Sri Lankan sapphires, now hand-carried by air. Unlike newer commodity chains with 'flexibilized' distribution and shifting sites of production, the Sri Lankan sapphire trade relies on a old Indian Ocean trading network run by gem dealers who work across ethnic lines to move sapphires from hinterland mining villages in Sri Lanka, to markets on its coast, and across the Indian Ocean to Hong Kong. The paper examines how credit-based networks that South Indian traders forged through maritime movements across Palk Strait and the Indian Ocean across the twentieth century continue to shape the trajectories of commodity exchange today. Specifically, it examines how traders used colonial infrastructures that linked metropolitan centers in South India and Sri Lanka through a system of railways and ferries to access sapphires mined in the island's hinterlands, and to sell them to buyers stopping at Colombo's port while traveling along Indian Ocean shipping routes. It examines how they rerouted their trade to Hong Kong, using colonial networks once nationalist movements in postcolonial Sri Lanka curbed their mobility, opening up routes that continue to be critical for the sapphire trade today.

Paper short abstract:

What kind of labour goes into the making of a container ship? In this paper, I engage ethnographic material collected during fieldwork in South Korea and the Philippines to shed light on how ongoing global economic uncertainties affect labour within the (East & S.E. Asian) shipbuilding industry.

Paper long abstract:

What kind of labour goes into the making of a container ship? Often seen as the most significant icon of economic globalization, an ever-growing amount of commodities in circulation on this planet end up in stores after having been transported on this type of vessel first. The ubiquity of the image of the container ship as a stand-in for globalization, typically used as a stock photo to signal "global business", however, stands in contradiction to a rather peculiar issue: the thing so often depicted upon closer inspection turns out to be vastly understudied, especially among anthropologists. Recently, container ships have significantly grown in size, as stacking ever more containers on a single vessel has been one response to the challenges emerging during and after the crisis of 2007/08. The result has been a rise in the demand for ultra-large container ships, which East and Southeast Asian shipbuilders produce for the major players in the shipping industry. In this paper, I will engage ethnographic material collected during fieldwork in South Korea and the Philippines to shed light on how ongoing global economic uncertainties affect labour within this maritime world. While Korea has been one of the world's key players in ship-building since the 1970s, recent improvements in workers' wage levels have made the country vulnerable to encroachments by cheaper competitors. The Philippines, on the other hand, is a very recent arrival to the scene, and as of yet heavily depends on Korean direct investors to bring in capital and know-how.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the different ways of "moving worlds" that seafarers engage in. It examines the everyday work that goes into transporting the goods of the global economy, in particular the cultural and social labor involved in living and working within the multicultural community of cargo ships.

Paper long abstract:

With my paper title, "Moving worlds", I have three different meanings in mind. Firstly, seafarers literally "move the world" by transporting the goods of the global economy across the world's oceans. Secondly, seafarers move social and cultural worlds, such as between their home communities and the multicultural environments of different ships. And thirdly, ships are themselves "moving worlds", floating microcosms or social worlds "on the move".

By drawing on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork onboard internationally trading cargo-ships with mixed national crews, and with maritime organisations, institutions and businesses ashore, this paper explores the different ways of "moving worlds" that seafarers engage in. It examines the everyday labor that goes into transporting the goods of the global economy, focusing in particular on the cultural and social labor involved in living and working inside these floating multicultural communities.

Many shipping companies use unequal contracts that pit shipmates of different nationalities against one another, thereby discouraging workers' solidarity and organizing. At the same time, this means that the skills required of contemporary seafarers to ensure the smooth and in-time logistical labor of the global shipping industry are as much about intercultural competencies as they are about manual and technical skills. This paper explores the tensions between these structural inequalities and the equalizing crosscultural demands of "being in the same boat".

Ultimately, the paper argues that the current global economy is dependent on an ethnically segregated maritime labor force, whose work, more than anything, involves learning how to collaborate across cultural differences.

Paper short abstract:

Imagine the masses of digital data produced by the shipment of containers around the world. The social meaning of this data varies radically depending on who produces it and what purpose it serves. This paper explores the cryptographic challenges to securing the merchant maritime supply chain.

Paper long abstract:

Based on on-going ethnographic research, this paper explores the implicit tensions in securing digital data within maritime supply chains. The merchant maritime supply chain is currently being transformed by automation technologies, all of which are dependent upon the generation of relevant digital data and its security. Along the supply chain, digital data is produced by different actors, such as shippers, port logisticians, and seafarers and stevedores. For some, the data represents valuable information that can point toward opportunities for more profit, streamlining products to customers' perceived wishes or needs or optimizing work processes that can save money. For others, the data represents ways to monitor timely handling of freight, proof of proper handling and compliance with national law. Finally, for seafarers and stevedores, this data can represent evidence of compliance with company, port state or international policy, social relations with colleagues, and daily work routines, accident prevention or rest hours. Although digital data is produced along the same discrete supply chain - for example the shipment of containers from Rotterdam to Singapore - the social meaning of this data is radically different depending on who produces it and what purpose it is meant to serve. The ethical and practical tensions embedded in these implicit layers challenges cryptographic practices and the rights they are meant to protect.

Paper short abstract:

Following a downturn in oil-backed infrastructure construction and imports, this paper investigates the practices of customs brokers and agents at the Angolan port of Lobito to disaggregate the notion of crisis and study its effects in people's everyday lives.

Paper long abstract:

Infrastructure projects centred on the Angolan port of Lobito and its transport corridor epitomise the ruling MPLA government's developmental visions, as well as its transnational economic entanglements. As such, the economic crisis the country is facing as a result of a downturn in world oil prices since 2014 is at the same time a political one, as it reveals the material limits of the regime's hegemonic project.

Past, present, and future economic interests and political visions are made concrete in Lobito's maritime logistics infrastructures, while revealing the limits and failures of these concrete politics and an oil-dependent economy: nothing works, or at least not as promised, and the imports of goods have run dry. How do the 'thingness' and relational qualities of port infrastructures, and their symbolic and aesthetic values change if they seemingly 'fail' to fulfil their intended (political and economic) purpose?

A state of crisis has arguably been a permanent reality for a majority of Angolans for most of the past 50 years. If incompleteness is normal, do people living with and through this economic architecture see it as failure? Ports, as nodes of globalised capitalism, materialise multiple regulatory regimes. In the context of crisis, how are global capital flows de-regulated and reappropriated? Based on fieldwork carried out in May and June 2018, this paper will look at customs brokers and agents at the Angolan port of Lobito to interrogate and disaggregate the notion of crisis as an emergency, and study its effects in people's everyday lives.

Paper short abstract:

The paper picks apart the concept of "logistics" by examining its co-existing notions of dystopia and utopia. The presentation draws upon fieldwork among logistics companies, port workers and local residents in and around the Port of Algeciras Bay, Europe's fourth busiest container port.

Paper long abstract:

Through intricate systems of logistics and a cost-efficient "just-in-time" logic, commodities travel the world along maritime routes and port infrastructures. A growing body of literature in the social sciences has (re)turned to maritime space, engaging with the "dark side" of globalisation, and the unequal power relations coming as a result of the logistics revolution (Bonacich and Wilson 2008; Gregson 2017). In this paper I turn to a European container port, where the global mobility of commodities intersect with local visions of economic and social futures. The paper picks apart the concept of "logistics" by examining its co-existing notions of dystopia and utopia. Doing so the presentation draws upon ongoing fieldwork among logistics companies, port workers and local residents in and around the Port of Algeciras Bay, Europe's fourth busiest container port. Algeciras is a so-called transshipment hub with a strategic location at the strait of Gibraltar, in an area otherwise characterized by Spain's highest unemployment rates and parallel shadow economies. Freight is a contested future, I argue, in a port where commodities are unloaded, temporarily stored, cleared and loaded before being moved on.