Thinking Maritime Spaces Sociologically: An Introduction

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Marie C. Grasmeier
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Agnieszka Kołodziej-Durnaś
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Frank Sowa
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1 Introduction to the Book Series International Studies in Maritime Sociology

This is the first volume of the new book series International Studies in Maritime Sociology. We intend to present research on maritime topics including, but not limited to, the culture of maritime spaces, marine environmental issues and society, the sociology of the use of marine resources (e.g., fisheries and extractive industries), maritime migration routes, maritime policies, and marine and maritime tourism. We want to assemble perspectives from sociology and other social science disciplines on these topics to facilitate an interdisciplinary understanding of the relationship between the sea and society.

Maritime sociology focusses on land and sea activities, avoiding the dichotomy between land and sea. For these phenomena, Cocco (2013) proposed the sea as a third space. So far, the discipline has had no theoretical framework of its own but has found its identity merely in dealing with sociological subjects connected to the sea. Recently, however, various authors have called for this condition to be overcome through independent conceptualisation (Hannigan, 2017; Kołodziej−Durnaś, 2014).

John Hannigan (2017) identifies two predominant theoretical currents in maritime sociology, both of which, however, draw on theories from general, land-based sociology and apply them to the maritime domain. One of these is the approach of critical political economy, especially in a Marxist tradition. The questions posed by these research directions focus on how the capitalist mode of production interacts with the ocean, what role the “maritime factor” (Campling & Colás, 2021) plays in processes of capitalist societalisation and how capitalism, in turn, shapes the maritime space. The most recent example of this perspective is Liam Campling’s and Alejandro Colás’ (2021) publication on “Capitalism and the Sea”. In their book, the authors “[…] aim to demonstrate how capitalism has transformed the spatial relationship between land and sea in ways that has made them both increasingly interdependent and resolutely differentiated” (ibid., p. 47). They make an attempt to overcome the dichotomy mentioned above by applying a terraqueous perspective, mediating between the terrestrial and the marine realm (ibid., p. 1–18). Another strand of critical political economy approaches to maritime sociology deals mainly with environmental and sustainability issues, using social-ecological theories like e.g. social metabolic analysis (Hannigan, 2017).

The ‘aquatic/oceanic turn’, the ‘blue economy’, and other captions associated with our global water reservoirs widely used in the process of shaping contemporary policies of major organisational actors in the global scene (UN agendas’ resolutions, EU treaties) prove they are resources in the centre of our attention now. This awareness of the oceans is mostly rooted in the fact that they are still full of food and energy we need and not due to our special concern about sustainable development. Nevertheless, some currents of the social sciences and the humanities perceive maritime spaces in more and more divergent ways, considering them as metaphors of a boundary, bridge, way, track, or an actor itself which communicates its meanings and symbols to us, resembling the living, cytoplasmic ocean in Stanislaw Lem’s (1961) ‘Solaris’ and its film adaptions by A.Tarkovsky (1972) or S. Soderbergh (2002). In this sense, postmodernist (or poststructuralist) and posthumanist approaches constitute the other prevailing research direction on maritime sociology. Drawing on approaches like, among others, Actor-Network-Theory and the works of the feminist scholar Sandra Harding, they argue to overcome binary distinction like human/non-human, nature/culture, and sea/land. Accordingly, oceans can be conceptualised as phenomena partly constructed by humans and partly interweaving with social ‘tissue’. Seas and oceans become actors co-creating our laws, actions, and thoughts (compare political ecology – Latour, 2004, sociopsychological grounds of cognition and revolutions in science – Fleck, 1939 followed by Kuhn, 1962). Seung Kuk Kim (this volume), in a similar fashion, combining Western posthumanist approaches with East Asian classical thought, proposes an understanding of the ocean as hybrid instead of viewing it separately as a social or natural space.

Ludwik Janiszewski, who took efforts for a few decades to establish, develop and institutionalise maritime sociology in Poland, had the vision of a brand new sociological discipline (Janiszewski, Sosnowski, 1984, p. 22). In other works, he claimed that maritime sociology would be a discipline that had the potential to enrich various sociological fields such as the sociology of education and sport (maritime upbringing), the sociology of the family (studies in seafarers’ and fishers’ marriages and children), organisational and economic sociology (studies of maritime professions as well as vessels and shipyards as specific places of work), the sociology of culture (maritime culture of coastal communities as well as its motives in larger national cultures), urban sociology (studies in the specificity of port cities) which Wioleta Bryniewicz called the matrix perspective of maritime sociology (Bryniewicz, 2004). These pieces of the puzzle are interconnected by the concepts of maritime social reality and the maritime factor. In his various writings, Ludwik Janiszewski dreamed of a grand theory but also often claimed that maritime theory should be a middle-range one. In 1994, he wrote that the inspiration creating maritime theory was also theoretical elaborations of such social phenomena as urbanisation and industrialisation. Such a theory is supposed to adequately describe the influence of the sea and associated human activity on the life of society (Janiszewski, 1994, p. 7–9). He developed notions, variables and statements indicating that e.g. the process of marinisation is one of the most ancient processes taking place in societies, that it is partly spontaneous, partly organised, and that it is relatively autonomous (Janiszewski, 1994, p. 13). The process of marinisation facilitates the differentiation of social communities, implies the emergence of various forms of labour, changes the social-professional structure, and strongly influences the attitudes and behaviours of vessels’ crews and the relatives of seafarers and fishers (Janiszewski, 1994, p. 24). The concept of marinisation is so far the only instance of genuinely maritime-sociological theory development before the very recent approaches e.g. by Campling and Colás. Following on from this, Robert Bartłomiejski and Maciej Kowalewski, in this volume, offer thoughts on updating the theory of marinisation by combining it with posthumanist theories such as ANT or other poststructuralist approaches and making it compatible with the current sociological discourse.

Maritime sociology is and was represented by various schools and currents all over the world. In East Asia, the discipline is mostly known by the term ‘ocean sociology’. However, many of these scientific undertakings are concerned with the same topics as those covered in maritime sociology in Europe – among others: maritime professions, maritime culture, pollution and sustainable development of marine areas. For several years now, maritime sociology has its place in the research and teaching programmes at numerous Chinese Universities, with the first Institute of Marine Culture and Society being founded at the Chinese Ocean University in 2001. The discipline was nationally institutionalised by the foundation of a professional committee in the Chinese Sociological Association in 2010. The research programme of the Chinese ocean sociology focusses mainly on the social and ecological consequences of the Chinese economy’s contemporary growth dynamic (Hannigan, 2017, p. 11–12, Song, 2011). In 2019, at the East Asian Sociological Association’s inaugural meeting, scholars from the region undertook a further step towards the international integration of maritime sociological research by holding a session on the topic.

In Europe, the activities of establishing maritime sociology as a subdiscipline of sociology started a long time ago. In Poland, there is a rich tradition beginning with the establishment of sociology as a scientific discipline in the years after the second world war. With the sea becoming a major topic of public interest due to the increased coastline resulting from the outcomes of the war, Polish sociology was, from its very beginning, also oriented towards the sea. In Germany, in the 1980s, there was an attempt to institutionalise a working group called Maritime Sociology (Arbeitsstelle Maritime Soziologie; 1985–1992) at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Kiel. Another strand of maritime social research in Germany was the establishment of the Maritime Research and Cooperation Centre at the University of Bremen by the economist and social scientist Heide Gerstenberger in 1997, which was, however, discontinued in 2005. In the last decade, maritime-sociological activities in Germany were resumed, e.g. during the conferences of the European Sociological Association (ESA) and national sociological conferences in Germany and Poland (Sowa & Kołodziej-Durnaś, 2015).

Another important spot of maritime-sociological research is Canada, where scholars of several universities have engaged in the field in recent decades since the early 1990ies. The Canadian strand of research has traditionally focused on the world of fishing, mainly from a perspective of environmental aspects and human-nature relations. In recent times, the focus was widened by incorporating issues of off-shore extraction, aquaculture, and marine tourism (Hannigan 2017, p. 12pp.).

2 Introduction to This Volume

Maritime spaces are socially constructed by humans and refer to seas and islands, coasts, port cities and villages, as well as ships, and submarines, to mention only some of them. Social interaction with the maritime environment as well as other living beings, e.g. in a symbolic, cultural or economic manner, has led to the emergence of spatial structures which have an impact on the knowledge, beliefs, meanings and interpretation and obstinately patterns, which shape the mutual expectation of human beings, and which form the perception, imagination, or memory of inhabitants of maritime spaces. These spatial structures of the maritime enable or restrict human action, construct people’s everyday life, their norms and values, and are changeable through (in relation to dominant maritime discourses deviant) behaviour.

As Lefèbvre points out, „(social) space is a (social) product“ (1991, p. 30). According to him, one can differentiate between physical, material, or natural space and social space. Whereas the physical space concerns nature or cosmos in the sense of a background image, the social space makes reference to the sensually perceptible, imaginations and memories as a product of society producing an own specific space. Löw develops an understanding of space as relational arrangements of social goods and living beings at places (Löw, 2016). She uses the term ‘social goods’ to emphasise the material and symbolic nature of goods. Her main focus is on the production and reproduction of spatial structures as enabling and restricting arrangements and the processual modifiability of arrangements.

The emergence of space is a social phenomenon and can thus only be understood on the basis of social developments, which also means that it ought to be understood as a processual phenomenon. Space is constituted as a synthesis of social goods, other people, and places in imagination, through perception and memories, but also in spacing by means of the physical placement (building, surveying, deploying) of these goods and people at places in relation to other goods and people. In everyday life, the constitution of space (synthesis and spacing) often takes place in routines. Spatial structures are recursively reproduced through repetitive actions. Spatial structures are incorporated in institutions that are repetitively replicated by relational placements and the recognition or reproduction of these arrangements. Spatial structures are a variation of social structures. (Löw, 2016, p. 225)

In the maritime context, the relational arrangements of social goods, people, and places (re-)produce maritime cultures, coastal communities and identities. Cultural memory is the point of reference for many people interacting in maritime spaces. Analysing coastal hunting communities in Greenland, Nuttall speaks about memoryscapes (Nuttall, 1991, 1992) that are “constructed with people’s mental images of the environment, with particular emphasis on places as remembered places” (Nuttal, 1991). As marks of community, these marks manifest in place names that are narrated, symbolising memories of hunting and past events, making a connection to a specific community which is different from other neighboring communities. These oral landscape names differ from those found on official maps, which originate from colonists, explorers or whalers, and show their connection to natural and maritime spaces as well as personal experiences, mythical meanings and historical stories. Greenlandic names, therefore, do not necessarily correspond to geographical reality, e.g. they focus on hunting activities as “the place where I killed a walrus last autumn” (ibid.).

Such landscape names result from individual experiences that can become part of the repertoire of the whole community. The past, therefore, remains present in the present. The term memoryscape shows how much the landscape is modified and culturally constructed by Greenlandic hunters: “Through land and sea use, myth and historical events, an image of the community is reflected in the landscape” (Nuttall 1991, p. 49). Each hunting community collects its members’ personal memories and expresses its relationship to nature in the names of landscape places. Sejersen notes that these constructed attributions do not only refer to the past. Very often, people include the future in their naming, for example, “On this island, my family will build a cabin next year. You are always welcome” or “Next year, we plan to explore the fjord up north, maybe there are ringed seals”. He, therefore, considers the additional use of the term visionscapes necessary (Sejersen, 2002, 2004). Thus, stopping and travelling through the landscape becomes a journey through one’s own history or the history of the coastal community.

Identities of coastal communities and port cities are influenced by the sea and seaside activities, especially activities in relation to the maritime environment or exploitation activities, e.g. fishing, hunting, whaling, emphasising the cultural relation between man and nature (Dahl, 1989, 2000).

Maritime spaces are also shaped by the consumption of marine animals. These are unreflective everyday actions as well as markers for difference (Bourdieu, 2010 [1984]). The socially constructed taste for marine animals brings people together and separates them as a group from others. They could be food signs for national identities (Barthes, 1964) or categories of attribution and identification that come from a group, have an organising character and are articulated in daily interaction to separate (ethnic) groups (Barth, 1998 [1969]). Barth resists the claim that there is such a thing as an empirically verifiable phenomenon of the ethnic group that exists everywhere. Instead, it is a preconceived view of the significant factors in the genesis, structure and function of such groups. The consumption of Greenlandic food is a good example to show how the distinction between Greenlanders and Danes is working (Sowa, 2014a, 2015, 2016). Furthermore, a globalised and internationalised world (Appadurai, 1998; Beck, 2000; Waters, 1998) leads to the self-assertion of the own culture with the help of food in order to be proud of the culture, to underscore the community spirit or to present the quality of the food (Kleivan, 1996, p. 155).

Maritime spaces are also suitable to construct collective cultures, e.g. a whaling culture in Japan (Akimichi et al., 1988). In the politicised conflict over whaling, whales were constructed as cultural symbols or icons for environmental protection (Einarsson, 1993; Freeman & Kreuter, 1994; Kalland, 1994; Lynge, 1990; Oreskov & Sejersen, 1993; Peterson, 1993; Ris, 1993), with narrations of new myths (Freeman, 1990a, 1990b; Lynge, 1990), a Disneyfication of whales (Barthelmeß, 1992) or whales as totems (Kalland, 1993). Apart from the everyday culture of whalers, their families and their local communities, in which a specific perception and sharing activities play a role (Sowa, 2013c), a new dichotomy between whaling cultures and other cultures that do not eat marine mammals was constructed in the political discourse. Whales and consumption activities were instrumentalised to influence political decisions and public opinions. Interestingly, the fewer whales were caught, the more the symbolic construction of whaling communities were fostered (Sowa, 2013a, 2013b, 2014b).

However, the sea is not only constituted as a social space through its role as a reservoir of dead and living resources and a condition for their extraction, as discussed in the examples above. It is also its capacity to separate geographically distant places and at the same time serve as a spatial condition to overcome this separation and thus connect terrestrial social spaces that plays a role in the construction of maritime spaces. In this context, social and cultural studies have addressed the question of the ship as a social space. Erving Goffman, for instance, examined the ship as an example for his theoretical exploration of the total institution as a specific type of social space (Goffman, 1961). In a similar vein, Michel Foucault mentioned the ship as the “heterotopia par excellance” (Foucault, 1986, p. 27). While the ship, in structural respect, cannot be considered a total institution in the strict sense, the symbolism of the total institution, however, plays a significant role in seafarers’ narratives about themselves and their lifeworld, which leads its constitution as a social space back to Goffman’s theory (Grasmeier, 2020).

Ludwik Janiszewski (1992), on the other hand, presented a critical review of major research approaches in this matter (Kołodziej and Kołodziej-Durnaś in this volume). Heide Gerstenberger and Ulrich Welke (2004) criticised Goffman’s equation of merchant ships with prisons, barracks and other disciplinary institutions. For such ships do not serve the transformation of their inmates but rather the valorisation of capital through their wage labour (see also Kołodziej & Kołodziej−Durnaś, 2018). Accordingly, when asking about the socio-spatial character of the ship, they place its role in globalisation at the centre of their considerations by using the metaphor of a no-man’s land instead of the metaphor of the total institution. The symbolism of no-man’s land expresses that ships in the age of global capitalism are social spaces almost entirely disembedded from nation-state contexts of sovereign control and regulation through practices such as flagging-out and third-party management (ibid.). The legal fiction of nationality of today’s merchant ships created by the FOC system enabled, among other things, the globalisation of the maritime labour market and the emergence of ethnically segregated ship crews. Those multi-national crews reflect the power and inequality relations between nations and regions of the world system in a small, quasi-laboratory way (see Grasmeier, this volume).

The conceptualisation of the ship as a “hyperspace” by Helen Sampson (2013), which aims in a similar direction, refers to the cultural indeterminacy of the ship, whose culture is largely standardised and homogeneous worldwide (ibid., 18). Hyperspace is the cultural expression of the structural no man’s land (Grasmeier, 2020, p. 27). Following these considerations, Marie Grasmeier, in this volume, uses ethnographic case studies to show that the thesis of the ship as a hyperspace must, however, be differentiated to the effect that this should by no means be understood as an ideal “third space” in which seafarers negotiated a transnational occupational culture on equal terms. Instead, the ship represents a postcolonial hyperspace permeated by global relations of power and inequality (see also: Markkula, 2021).

3 Organisation of This Volume

This book is organised into five parts (Parts 1–5). In Part one, we present contributions that ask how maritime sociology can be conceptualised as an own sub-discipline. In their contribution, ARKADIUSZ KOŁODZIEJ and AGNIESZKA KOŁODZIEJ-DURNAŚ discuss the emergence of a new discipline indicating, among others, its British, Polish, German and Scandinavian roots and conduct a closer exploration of over half a century of Polish maritime sociology. They also discuss the socioeconomic and ideological context in which the regional emergence and development of the discipline took place, which is currently experiencing increased interest among scholars both in Poland and internationally.

SEUNG KUK KIM, in the second chapter, proposes to conceptualise maritime spaces from the perspective of posthumanist and post-materialist theories, combining these approaches with East Asian classical thought. The maritime space, in this conception, is to be understood as ‘a hybridising and hybridised’ actor interacting as an ‘ocean of hybridisation’ with other nonhuman and human subjects in a multiscalar way. Thus, the author postulates a more human-decentred approach to oceans. He believes that thanks to the process of ocean hybridisation, many contrasted binarisms can be overcome (like individualism vs collectivism, material vs ideal) and lead to the emergence of a single oneness. The author’s inspirations are both the Asian spiritual heritage of Taoism and Buddhism, especially the Taoist ‘Book of Changes’, and Western sociological (meta)theories like the idea of multidimensionality of Jeffrey Alexander. According to Kim, together with the decline of the West, terrestrial sociology declines, and the era of Asia and oceanic sociology is coming.

Part two contains theoretical and empirical examinations of the port city as a maritime social space. ROBERT BARTŁOMIEJSKI and MACIEJ KOWALEWSKI state that classical concepts describing port cities usually limit their analysis to either the economic, historical or cultural aspect. However, recent studies show that recent global developments offer a new context in which ports are increasingly separate from, but also transcend, cities. The authors present different approaches to explore the connection between the sea, port cities and maritime communities, e.g. marinisation theory developed by Polish maritime sociology, the perspectives of environmental sociology and human ecology, as well as attempts to establish a sociology of the coast. In doing so, they conceive of today’s coasts as post-productive places that are less connected to the maritime industry than to consumption, recreational infrastructure and serve as spaces for cultural and ecological activities. The sea, the authors argue, ‘regulates processes that translate, mediate and control the course of metabolism between environment and society’. Following these theoretical considerations, the authors propose a research programme for the application of the Actor-Network Theory to the study of port cities.

JAN ASMUSSEN addresses the question of what influence the structural change in port cities has had and continues to have on the cultural identity of these cities. Traditionally, the economic life of port cities was deeply influenced by their physical proximity to the sea. The majority of their inhabitants depended on maritime economic activities for their livelihoods. Beginning with industrialisation, the proportion of those whose everyday life had such a tangible connection to the sea decreased more and more. Now, the majority of the population found employment in other industries. The author traces these developments primarily through the work of the early maritime sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies on labour relations in the Western Baltic German port cities of Lübeck and Kiel. He then asks how this change has affected the cultural identities of these cities and how maritime identities are constructed today, for example, by evoking the past, in view of the largely disappearing material significance of the maritime for life in these cities.

Implementing a similar research programme, GÜNTER WARSEWA explores the interdependence of port cities’ local culture and their postindustrial transformation. Like his forbearer, he draws on the assumption that the local culture of port cities is traditionally rooted in their economic dependence on the sea and the specifically maritime conditions provided by their geographic location. Unlike Jan Asmussen, who mainly explored the historical development of industrialisation and modernisation, Günter Warsewa focusses on contemporary processes connected with globalisation and the development of postindustrial societies. He shows how port cities use their maritime cultural identities inherited from the past for re-inventing themselves to cope with and adapt to the previously explored structural changes.

While the previous two chapters asked about the relationship of cultural identities and socioeconomic structure, WŁODZIMIERZ KAROL PESSEL moves to the question of how such cultural themes are employed in contemporary political struggles. He analyses the motives behind and controversies around the hydro-engineering project of creating a new waterway to the Polish town of Elblag, located at the mouth of the Vistula river. He claims that the project is proof of 19th-century thinking of conquering nature, using hard (instead of soft) power of enforcing interests against the interests of other players and developing retrotopia. Polish authorities legitimise their determination to create a passage through the Vistula Spit by the fact that the Russian Federation treats the crossing between the Baltic and the Vistula Lagoon as leverage of international diplomacy by first restricting its use by and then excluding Polish shipping from it after Poland joined the NATO and the EU.

Leaving the example of the port city, in Part three, contributors examine questions of maritime culture from various theoretical and empirical perspectives. It begins with ARKADIUSZ KOŁODZIEJ’s theoretical exploration of concepts of maritime culture. Adopting a holistic understanding of culture encompassing various tangible as well as intangible elements, the author compares the two concepts of maritime culture included in Ludwik Janiszewski’s notion of marinisation and Christer Westerdahl’s concept of a maritime cultural landscape. He shows that, on the one hand, with increasing cultural homogenisation and interconnectedness, distinct maritime cultures, as opposed to land cultures, become increasingly less significant in today’s world. On the other hand, the cultural influence of the sea becomes more and more important as it is the very same processes that cause the mentioned homogenisation, which are strongly conditioned by maritime spaces and their human uses.

In the following chapter, RITA GRÁCIO, NUNO CINTRA TORRES, ISABEL DUARTE, CÉLIA QUICO, RUTE MUCHACHO, and EDUARDO SARMENTO FERREIRA explore the role of sea museums for the communication, dissemination, and maintenance of maritime cultural heritage at the example of the Portuguese case. Thereby, they focus on the two challenges faced by contemporary museums of, on the one hand, the changing role museums play in contemporary society and culture and, on the other, the impact of current processes of digital transformation. Their research is empirically informed by quantitative surveys of museums’ managers and their audience.

KAROLINA IZDEBSKA and URSZULA KOZŁOWSKA broach the issues of maritime monuments as instances of objectification of collective memory and, thus, instances of material maritime culture. They analyse the monuments and anti-monuments most important for the social memory and maritime identity of the Polish city of Szczecin by viewing them as elements of maritime cultural landscapes, employing the notion of „maritime landscapes of memory”. The authors analyse the role of various monuments in Szczecin maritime landscape – e.g. Sedina, which goes back to the previously German history of the city, or the Angel of Freedom, commemorating the protests of Szczecin workers (mostly employees of port companies and ship-yard) against the communist authorities in December 1970 with 16 shot dead and hundreds wounded.

In Part four, contributions investigate maritime spaces as spaces of living and motion. In the first chapter, BENJAMIN BOWLES presents ethnographic research on Boaters living on the waterway of East England. The homes of these Boaters are so-called narrowboats moored to the banks of the rivers and moving in regular intervals to comply with legal regulations on living on the water. Bowles draws on the hypothesis that Boaters show a more pronounced sense of community as compared with the general public. He finds that community among the Boaters consist of a system of mutual obligations, which is created and maintained through rhetoric. This morality to care for other Boaters in need was much more important for their sense of community than everyday closeness and interaction. The kind of community Bowles identified in the case of the Boaters is not so much something that is and that they are part or members of, but something Boaters do to each other.

MARIE C. GRASMEIER, in her chapter, traces the connections of the contemporary shipping industry to the colonial past and the neocolonial present and shows how colonial histories and postcolonial power structures permeate the social space ‘ship’ on the levels of socioeconomic structure, symbolic representation and everyday interactions among seafarers. Her empirical data stem from ethnographic fieldwork collected on six different ships over a total sea time of about fourteen months. She follows up on Helen Sampson’s (2013) hypothesis that contemporary merchant ships are culturally undetermined ‘hyperspaces’ that cannot be assigned any geographically localised ‘culture’ and that, therefore, all seafarers are ‘foreigners’ on the ship. Nevertheless, the author can show that the question of who legitimately belongs and who does not is contested among members of international crews along national and racial lines. Thereby, seafarers from the global North are usually in a dominant position of power and can thus enforce hegemony about issues of shipboard culture. In this sense, if a hyperspace, the ship should be considered a postcolonial hyperspace, taking into account those colonial entanglements on multiple levels.

The fifth and final part of the volume is dedicated to the relationship of maritime spaces with several societal, environmental, and political issues. In a long-term ethnographic study, Joana Sousa deals with rice production in the coastal area of Guinea-Bissau, where farmers cultivate the plant in the nutrient-rich soils of the mangroves in the immediate vicinity of the sea. This form of rice agriculture requires special techniques to transform these areas into arable fields. Flooding during high tide must be prevented by building dams and rainwater channelled away by drainage systems. While mangrove cultivation was shut down in the post-independence war period, farmers have been returning to this cultivation method for some years now because access to agricultural land in the highlands is restricted and the harvest threatened by the cane rat. However, the revival of the method proves more difficult under climate-change conditions, in that the technical requirements for protecting the fields are increasing. Simultaneously, returning to mangrove cultivation under more difficult conditions promotes the circulation of knowledge, technology and capital, and reactivates social ties between the different communities. In this context, the sea appears as a multidimensional actor that provides nutrients and transport conditions and, at the same time, expresses global climate injustice in a pointed way.

ULRIKE KRONFELD-GOHARANI analyses various narratives about the cruise industry. Such narratives are cultural repertoires people use to describe the world and construct meaning. They are often more than mere information. Instead, they have emotional effects, offer space for interpretation as ambiguous symbolic systems and can therefore serve as a means of manipulation and the exercise of power. In the narratives proliferated by the industry, cruising is intensively charged with notions of freedom, luxury and adventure. The particular conditions of the maritime space in which this type of holiday takes place further support the feeling that everything is far away, at least for a limited time. The advertising slogans create the impression of a beautiful, ideal world on board, where people from all continents live together harmoniously, peacefully and without conflict. Drawing on sources from literature and media, the author identifies and critiques some dominant narratives about the cruise industry by confronting the propagated myths with the industry’s social reality in terms of working conditions, environmental impact, and safety issues.

GIACOMO ORSINI and HARINI SIVALINGAM’s chapter proceeds from the paradox that maritime forced migrants are both hypervisible and invisible. Since migration has become a primary security concern, the disembarkation or drowning of illegalised migrants and asylum seekers has become extremely visible. Media reports of rescued survivors and their overcrowded wrecks are daily reminders of a permanent migration crisis, even though arrivals at sea represent a negligible part of undocumented border crossings in most countries of the Global North. On the other hand, despite their hypervisibility, boat refugees are constructed as passive, destitute, voiceless objects. At sea, they are hidden from the public gaze. Once rescued, they are invisible objects in the hands of the state authorities. The authors show how boat migrants become a primary target of security discourses in which they appear as racialised and gendered objects to be deported and kept on the margins of society. Using the example of Tamil refugees’ maritime forced migration to Canada, the authors show how their arrivals are constructed as such a social threat. They also show how the hypervisibility of boat migrants is used to reproduce them as invisible, racialised others.

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