Maritime Anthropology

Contemporary Philosophy for Maritime Archaeology: Flat Ontologies, Oceanic Thought, and the Anthropocene., 2023

Ever since Columbus mistook Cuba for Japan, Christian-Europeans have struggled to come to terms with their ancient terrestrial prejudices. With their repeated circumnavigations of the globe in the age of European land-appropriation, Early Modern, risk-taking mariners initiated an iterative process of revision where Earth, what for them had been experienced hitherto as predominately land-based, was reimagined as a waterworld (Schmitt [1942] 2015; also see Sloterdijk 2013, 40-46). The masterless ocean, upon which the sun never set, overran the terrestrial globe and through the new world pictures of this age (Heidegger 2002, 68), Europeans learned how what they called Earth would have been better named Oceanus. Long-distance engagements between sailors, ships, maps, instruments, new lands, and world-encompassing oceans teeming with creatures gave rise to a new sense of space that, as Carl Schmitt recognized ([1942] 2015), shaped a common consciousness and ushered in an epoch of profound economic, cultural, and political transformation. After the disclosure of the oceans’ true proportions, the boundless blue offered navigable routes for transportation, seemingly inexhaustible hunting grounds for whale oil and fish, a vast clandestine dump for the malefeasance of land-lubbers, and so much more. Of course, there are limits to how much terrestrial ignorance the maritime can absorb. Now human-induced alterations to and within the briny deep suggest a radical shift in relations, for we eight-billion humans entangled with trillions of other things now seem to rival the oceans themselves with a comparable collective agency. Let us register this new sense of proportionality. Given the planetary-wide challenges of global warming, ocean acidification, plastic pollution, widespread environmental degradation, and incomprehensible biodiversity loss spiraling into mass extinctions, the revelation of finitude with respect to the oceans and their bounty is perhaps of even greater scope than that of their sublime eminence, for it shatters all previous sensibilities shaped by the sea. If it seems like a tall order to connect changing definitions of the maritime, modern consciousness, ships, and the oceans themselves with the aftereffects of globalizations in the Anthropocene, then this is precisely what the present volume rather ambitiously seeks to accomplish.

Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries, 2021

2018

International Social Science Journal, 2019

The dynamic and unfolding relationship between the oceans and humans underwrites a general narrative of oceans in ‘crisis’ and the need for new governance and regulatory frameworks to attend to it. As concerns surrounding marine space have proliferated, sovereignty, territory and property in the oceans remain imprecise and subject to controversy, presenting challenges (and opportunities) for oceans governance. This special issue employs the concept of ocean frontiers as a pivot into these concerns because of the eroding, but still frequent, portrayal of the oceans as a planetary space separate from humans and because the concept offers entry points for navigating the unfolding dimensions of ocean conservation and exploitation. Deducing from the eight contributions from the special issue, we develop four inter‐related arguments. First, while ocean frontiers pre‐exist the epistemological, jurisdictional and commodification categories that we conceptualize in this editorial introduction, we find that these categories, which may be understood as intersecting in ocean regimes, play central roles in closing the spatial and socially‐constituted ocean frontier, bringing it closer to human purview. Second, the materiality of oceans – their mobile and volumetric elements ‐ influences all of these emerging and intersecting oceanic processes. Third, contributing authors have developed innovative methodological approaches to the study of the oceans, revealing oceans not as ‘siteless’, but multi‐sited, and demonstrating that the social sciences are well suited methodologically to bring unfolding ocean processes into view. Last but not least, drawing from the insights set out by the contributors, we argue for ongoing interdisciplinary social (and natural) science research on the oceans as they and human‐ocean relations unfold in a period of dramatic change.

Journal of American History, 2013

Paul Sutter closes his essay on the state of the field of environmental history by calling attention to the relatively short time during which humans have transformed the planeta point that certainly applies to the ocean. Anthropogenically induced global climate change is affecting ocean temperature and acidity. Overfishing has not only decimated marine populations but has emptied entire levels of the marine food web. Bottom trawling has scarred virtually all the commercially reachable seafloor. Attention to marine environmental issues has lagged behind similar attention to land by a century or more; only since the 1990s has the ocean's environmental status gripped the attention of mainstream media and ordinary people. 1 Although the ocean seems remote, marine environmental activists and ocean boosters rightly note the many ways that all people are tightly connected to it. The seas provide food, energy, communication, and transportation of the goods and raw materials that fuel the global economy. Threats to oceans and the uses made of ocean space and ocean resources have prompted the formation of international legal regimes and agreements. The majority of the world's population lives along coasts-and the proportion of coastal dwellers is on the increase-therefore even more people will be involved in the challenges associated with sea-level rise and the increasing frequency and intensity of storms. 2 Such interactions between people and ocean are grist for historical scholarship. Sutter acknowledges environmental history's terrestrial bias and notes the small but growing body of literature that recognizes the ocean's place in history. This notice has happened at an auspicious time, because environmental history's embrace of hybridity opens a space for the sea and other environments like it. Like land, the ocean is a natural environment that is-perhaps to a greater degree even than terra firma-knowable through cultural lenses. Technology necessarily mediates understanding of the vast depths of the ocean and even

New Earth Histories, 2023

In many Oceanic societies, the cosmos is a continuous state of movement. Stars and constellations, islands and archipelagos, people and their canoes, and fish were existentially interconnected, in an oceanic world in which sky above and land below (at the pae or horizon), and land and sea (at the tai, or shoreline) were interfolded and fluid. In ‘Think like a Fish’ we draw attention to the seemingly invisible yet completely dominant terrestrial focus, and we suggest a reframing that centres the ocean. In this framing, Te Moana nui a Kiwa, the Pacific, is one expansive ocean, the great connector, in which the islands themselves were fish, moving through the water, mirrored above by the stars, which swam or sailed across the sky ocean. With a shift away from Western hubris and human exceptionalism, the law of the sea might be rewritten to recognise an Oceanic vision, one in which the world’s great ocean has its own independent life, and its own right to be healthy and flourish. From there, it is but a short step to recognising the independent life and rights of the planet, and to put humanity in its proper place as one planetary life form, among many.

English Language Notes, 2019

Recently, scholars have called for a "critical ocean studies" for the twenty-first century and have fathomed the oceanic depths in relationship to submarine immersions, multispecies others, feminist and Indigenous epistemologies, wet ontologies, and the acidification of an Anthropocene ocean. In this scholarly turn to the ocean, the concepts of fluidity, flow, routes, and mobility have been emphasized over other, less poetic terms such as blue water navies, mobile offshore bases, high-seas exclusion zones, sea lanes of communication (SLOCs), and maritime "choke points." Yet this strategic military grammar is equally vital for a twenty-first-century critical ocean studies for the Anthropocene. Perhaps because it does not lend itself to an easy poetics, the militarization of the seas is overlooked and underrepresented in both scholarship and literature emerging from what is increasingly called the blue or oceanic humanities. This essay turns to the relationship between global climate change and the US military, particularly the Navy, and examines Indigenous challenges to the militarism of the Pacific in the poetry of Craig Santos Perez.

https://www.rutter-project.org/uploads/1/2/9/4/129482413/salomoni_review_oceanic_histories.pdf About 70% of the earth's surface is covered by water and only the remaining 30% of it is dry land. In spite of this, even in recent times, attempts to describe human events in a global and deep historical perspective have had the hard and walkable surface of the world as a privileged object, or at least as a favoured framework. Oceanic Histories represents the first attempt ever made in contemporary historiography to counterbalance this intellectual bias with a comprehensive global history focused on the earth's waters. The book's structure is made of chapters dealing with the main seas, and all the oceans covering the earth 1. In this review I will not expand on the contents of each chapter to end up with a simple descriptive summary, but I shall leave to the reader the pleasure of discovering the historical peculiarities of each sea and ocean. What is more interesting, faced with such a significant book, is to understand what kind of historiographic operation we are facing, and how Oceanic Histories dialogues with contemporary academic debate.