“Blowing off” the boat The sea border crossing to Europe, a navigation of the nature/culture divide

Abstract

The crossing of undocumented travellers to Europe through the Greek-Turkish maritime border area and, particularly, the practice of destroying their own boats as a strategy to be rescued by border patrols are taken as a point of departure for a reflection on the political and cultural definition of the European borders today. Based on material collected during two research stays in the North Aegean, the article presents accounts of these sea crossings and analyzes them as navigations and negotiations along the symbolic boundary between “nature” and “culture”. The expulsion of unwanted migrants into a zone of exposure to the elements, or bare life, is the result of a border regime that forces unwanted travelers to take more dangerous routes, pushing them into a sphere of mere biological survival and submitting them to a particular mobility regime. This sea voyage is characterized as an experience of radical indetermination where the boundaries between what is conceived of as “nature” and a realm of civilization and technological superiority are being continually contested and redrawn.

Keywords

• sea voyage
• European borders
• bare life
• mobilities
• modernity
• nature
• technology