Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal (Sep 2015)
An anthropology of the sea voyage - Prolegomena to an epistemology of transoceanic travel
Abstract
This paper draws a distinction between an anthropology of the sea and an anthropology as sea travel – using the latter as an epistemological window to understand immigrants’ experiences of long-distance sea travel which have rarely been considered in the anthropology of immigrant societies. The paper reviews Bronislaw Malinowski’s own travel linked to some explorations of archetypical sea voyages among the Trobriand Islanders (Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1922). In a further step, the ‘shipboard notes’ of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955) are used to consider what might have been gained if early and mid-20th century anthropologists had turned their ethnographic eye on ships, their crew and immigrants travelling on them. This paper then takes inspiration from early and mid-20th century anthropologists on sea voyages (not or only rarely related to immigrants’ travel), and applies insight from this to material from 20th century immigrants to Argentina. Though some of the empirical evidence has been published previously (Schneider 2000), it is here complemented with more recent material (from fieldwork in 2014), and interpreted in a new comparative and theoretical key.
