Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean

Kimberley Peters, Jon Anderson, Kimberley Peters, Jon Anderson

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317000150
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Ciencias sociales
• Sous-sujet: Geografía humana

Our world is a water world. Seventy percent of our planet consists of ocean. However, geography has traditionally overlooked this vital component of the earth's composition. The word 'geography' directly translates as 'earth writing' and in line with this definition the discipline has preoccupied itself with the study of terrestrial spaces of society and nature. This book challenges human geography's preoccupation with the terrestrial, investigating the terra incognita of the seas and oceans. Linking to new theoretical debates shaping the geographic discipline (such as affect, assemblage, emotion, hybridity and the more-than-human), this volume unlocks new knowledge concerning the human geographies of ocean space. The book casts adrift stable, bounded and fixed conceptions of space and advances geographical understanding based on the world as 'becoming', changing, mobile and processional. This ontology supports the notion that the oceans are not simply fluid in a literal way, but also in a conceptual sense, suggesting that the seas have their own fluid natures - their own capacities and agencies - which are co-fabricated with social and cultural life. This book features twelve chapters, authored by key academics contributing to this growing field of research. The book is divided into three sections, including an Introduction by the editors and a foreword by Prof. Philip E. Steinberg, the leading scholar in the field of maritime geographies. The first section of the book considers the ways in which different watery spaces from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea have been conceptualized, theorized and 'known' through metaphors, voyages of discovery and scientific endeavour. The second section examines how oceans are experienced; through various activities including driving on water, kayaking in water and diving under water. The final section explores the relations between human life and the nature of the sea as a material, mobile and more-than-human spa

PART I
Ocean Knowledges: Understanding the Water World

Chapter 2
Mediterranean Metaphors: Travel, Translation and Oceanic Imaginaries in the ‘New Mediterraneans’ of the Arctic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean

Philip E. Steinberg

Oceans are ‘known’ in many different ways. As the chapters of this book reveal, scientists, sailors, surfers, passengers and divers all have their own perspectives on the ocean as a fluvial, dynamic arena of human and non-human biota, of minerals and molecules, of affects and ideologies.

But what of the perspective from beyond the sea? Does that even need to be considered in this book? After all, this is a book that emphasizes affect and experience in a resolutely material sea. Do we need to provide a forum here for those who view the ocean simply as a surface in the middle – whether as a space to be crossed, or plundered, or ignored, or as a space that merely divides or connects?

I answer this with an emphatic ‘yes.’ For better or worse, our perceptions of the ocean are structured not just by the tactile experiences that we have with its liquid element but by the stories that we tell about the sea, including the simplified stories of functionality or the non-stories of absence. Narrated understandings, even if not derived from sensory experience, contribute to the ocean assemblage. Indeed, as the paradigmatic space of the sublime – where emotional understanding exists on a plane removed from cognition – the ocean derives much of its power from the reproduction of its image, including by those who never come in contact with, or sail across, its waters. Like a map (Del Casino and Hannah 2006, Kitchin and Dodge 2007), an ocean is more-than-representational. It is continually reconstructed through our encounters, but as we engage the sea our experiences are performed and internalized through articulations with pre-existing imaginaries.

To be clear, this call for taking imagined oceans seriously should not be seen as an endorsement of a perspective wherein the ocean is reduced to a metaphor – a signifier for cultural hybridity or global commerce or any of the other social processes that the ocean has been made to stand for in recent work in literary, cultural and historical studies. Indeed, elsewhere I specifically reject this perspective (Steinberg 2012, see also Blum 2010). But images of the ocean do matter, not because they exist apart from, or after, our interaction with the material sea but because they contribute to that interaction and, thereby, to its social (and more-than-social) construction. To that end, this chapter focuses on one specific imagined ocean – the Mediterranean – and how its image has been applied to construct meanings and practices in other maritime regions.

The Mediterranean as an Ocean of Connection and Division

Oceans have long been seen in Western thought as barriers. In Macrobius’ worldview the oceans were impassable. A world was believed to exist on the other side of the ocean, but it was inaccessible because it lay across the torrid zone. In the medieval world of the mappamundi, the ocean had even less potential as a surface for connection; it was simply a limit, and no earthly space of note, certainly nothing that was mappable, was believed to exist on the other side (Cosgrove 2001, Edson 1997, Gillis 2004, Harley and Woodward 1987). In the modern era, the world typically has been characterized as a universe of continents, wherein the oceans that exist between these fundamental land masses serve simply to divide the terrestrial spaces that matter (Lewis and Wigen 1997). From this continental perspective, the ocean and its uses occur outside the space of society, subsequent to the constitution of state territories and in defiance of their terrestrial roots (Steinberg 2001).

Notwithstanding the predominance of this worldview, for at least a century it has been challenged by academic observers from geography and beyond. Early in the twentieth century, Ellen Churchill Semple (1911: 294) noted that the ocean on which ‘man explores and colonizes and trades’ is no less a space of society than the land on which ‘he plants and builds and sleeps.’ At mid-century, Richard Hartshorne (1953: 386) addressed the continentalist perspective directly, stating that although ‘[oceans] do divide, they do not separate.’ Since that time, scholarly communities have arisen to study a number of ocean basins (see Lewis and Wigen 1999), and although these communities vary with respect to disciplinary or interdisciplinary focus they all share a perspective in which the ocean is moved from the margin to the centre of the regional social formation.

Like any antithetical categorization, the ocean region can either challenge or reproduce the fundamental assumptions of the dominant construction to which it is posed as an alternative. On the one hand, when one designates an ocean as the element that unites a region, fluidity and connections replace embeddedness in static points and bounded territories as the fundamental nexus of society and space. ‘Roots’ are replaced by ‘routes’, and this suggests a radical ontology of deterritorialization and reterritorialization (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987). On the other hand, by reaffirming the concept of the region as a unit of analysis – a unit that is stable in space and time and, therefore, potentially explanatory – the ocean region perspective can inadvertently reproduce the static and essentialist spatial ontology that it attempts to subvert.¹

Giaccaria and Minca (2011) advance this critique by identifying ocean basin-based regions as exemplarily postcolonial spaces that reproduce and naturalize ideals of unity in difference. On the one hand, the ocean in the middle of a maritime region links spaces and societies that are purported to be ‘naturally’ different. The different societies exist on opposite sides of a seemingly natural divide, a purportedly empty and separating ocean. On the other hand, because the ocean connects, even if it does not homogenize, the societies in an ocean region appear to exist in a permanent and natural universe of exchange and interaction that reproduces difference. Existing within an idealized arena of connectivity amidst difference, the various societies within an ocean region are linked together in an arena of mobility in which all entities – those with relatively more power and those with relatively less – are transformed even as they resist the ‘other’.

While all ocean regions are, in this sense, prefiguratively postcolonial, arguably the paradigmatic case is the Mediterranean (Chambers 2008). In part, this is because of the Mediterranean’s physical geography (relatively small and enclosed), in part it is because of its location at the intersection of Europe and one of its longest standing ‘others’ (the Arab ‘orient’), and in part it is because of the long history in the humanities of treating the Mediterranean as a singularly unified, but also resolutely divided, region (Giaccaria and Minca 2011). For all these reasons,

[amidst] a paradoxical interplay between different (and potentially conflictual) representations of this sea that alternate narratives of homogeneity and continuity with those of heterogeneity and discontinuity, … [the rhetoric of mediterraneanism sustains] the belief in the existence of a geographical object called the Mediterranean, where different forms of proximity (morphological, climatic, cultural, religious, etc.) justify a specific rhetorical apparatus through the production of a simplified field of inquiry, otherwise irreducible to a single image. (Giccaria and Minca 2011: 348, emphasis in original)

The Mediterranean thus comes to be seen as something that, although permanently divided, is also permanent in its wholeness: ‘The mediterraneisme de la fracture [is understood as] … something substantially immutable – a vision that resembles, in many ways, the cultural “containers” imagined and celebrated in Orientalist colonial rhetoric and Romantic literature’ (Giaccaria and Minca 2011: 353).

In the remainder of their article, Giaccaria and Minca discuss ways in which one can harness the alterity that lies within the mediterraneanist discourse without inadvertently reproducing its orientalism. Even as they pursue this agenda, however, they fail to remark on how the ultimate power of mediterraneanism, like all forms of orientalism, lies not simply in reproducing an ideal of stabilized difference but in the designation of this unity as a category that can then be integrated into systems of language and meaning that, in turn, are used to ‘understand’ (and thereby design futures for) other peoples (Mignolo 2003, 2005). Put another way, the power of mediterraneanism (the idea of there being a distinct Mediterranean region) flows not just from its purported ability to explain the (upper-case) Mediterranean as a naturalized arena of linked difference but from its functionality as a category wherein the presence of an inner sea (a lower-case mediterranean) is used to explain a generalized condition of difference amidst connection. In short, the power of the Mediterranean idea derives not just from its representation of a divided but unified ocean basin as ‘something substantially immutable’ but from the idea’s existence as an ‘immutable mobile’ (Latour 1987), an idea that travels.

When an idea travels, however, it is never truly immutable. Although ideas gain their power through travel, travel invariably necessitates translation, and translation will always modify the power of an idea, even as it provides the means for realizing (or performing) that power (Clifford 1997). As is shown in this chapter, the mediterraneanist ideal of an inner sea that simultaneously essentializes both unity and difference has had specific histories as it has travelled to other regions. Below, I relate two stories of mediterraneanist travel and translation: first in the Gulf of Mexico/Caribbean, and then in the Arctic.

The Travelling Mediterranean 1: The Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean

If mediterraneanism achieves its power by constructing the idea of the inner sea as a space that facilitates both fractures (or difference) and crossings (or unity), then at first glance it appears as if only the first of these is present in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. From the perspective of the United States, the Gulf of Mexico consists of a series of fragmented coastal destinations: a peninsular Florida coast of pristine beaches and recreational fishing, a Texas/Louisiana coast of off-shore oil drilling and shrimping communities, and, in the middle, a Mississippi/Alabama/Florida panhandle coast of shipyards, naval bases, and casinos. Further to the east (and south), the Caribbean is understood as a series of island isolates, what Epeli Hau’ofa (1993) calls ‘islands in a sea’ in contrast with the integrated South Pacific ‘sea of islands’ that he extols.

While each of these Gulf/Caribbean images is certainly maritime, none of them suggests an underlying historical, or ongoing, space of maritime unity – a mediterranean space of crossings. Mexico, which might logically be perceived as lying on the ‘other’ side of the region (the equivalent of North Africa and the Levant, in the Mediterranean context), is instead seen as an extension of the arid western United States, not a space that is joined to the United States through maritime connectivity. This geographic erasure in U.S. thought, in which the southern maritime frontier is subsumed by the western land frontier, is reproduced in the Hollywood Western, where Mexico is almost universally depicted as an extension of the southwestern U.S. desert, not the land that lies across from the Gulf coast of the southeastern United States. The resulting conception of the Gulf region as a series of local destinations, as opposed to being an integrated maritime space unified by a body of water, is so pervasive that when Mississippi state legislator Steve Holland proposed renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America in an effort to spoof his anti-immigration colleagues the joke was lost on the national media (Wilkinson 2012).²

However, this construction of the Gulf/Caribbean as an ocean without routes of connection is relatively new; it is no more ‘natural’ or static than the prevalent conception of the Mediterranean as a sea that joins connectivity with difference. During the first decades of the twentieth century, when the United States was asserting its regional ambition in the wake of the Spanish-American War and the newly opened Panama Canal, the U.S. perspective on the region was much more mediterraneanist. Indeed, analogies to the Mediterranean were explicitly deployed to signify the region’s potential as an arena in which the United States could expand its frontiers through maritime connectivity to different, but accessible, places. For instance, at the turn of the twentieth century, when the American naturalist and travel writer Frederick Ober (1904) published Our West Indian Neighbors, he subtitled the book The Islands of the Caribbean Sea, “America’s Mediterranean”, their Picturesque Practices, Fascinating History and Attractions for the Traveler, Nature Lover, Settler, and Pleasure Seeker. 1920s tourism promotion material for Key West, Florida (at Florida’s southern tip) and the Florida East Coast Railway (which ran trains to Key West) similarly identified the Caribbean not as the end of America but as its continuation.³ Key West itself was promoted as the ‘Gateway to Cuba, West Indies, Panama Canal, Central America, and South America,’ while on promotional maps from this era railroad lines merged seamlessly into ferry routes, and ocean shallows and reefs were coloured so that one had to concentrate to ascertain where land ended and water began. Most suggestively, Key West was labelled ‘America’s Gibraltar,’ a geographic appellation that, even more than that of the Mediterranean as a whole, resonates with dual connotations of connection and difference.⁴

Today, not only have these Mediterranean signifiers disappeared, but even the less specific mediterraneanist images of the Gulf/Caribbean as an inner sea of connection amidst difference are absent. On Key West, major tourist icons such as the ‘Southernmost Point’ monument (marking the southernmost point of the continental United States) and the ‘Mile 0’ marker (signifying the terminus of U.S. Highway 1, which runs the length of the country’s east coast) suggests that there is nothing to connect to beyond Florida’s shores. Indeed, in some senses the contemporary U.S. perspective on the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean resembles that of a mappamundi: The ocean appears simply as a limit, an end beyond which there is no known civilization (or even potential for civilization). Nothing, or certainly nothing of interest, exists beyond the coastal zone. In today’s de-mediterraneanized Gulf/Caribbean it is impossible to conceive of the ocean as the central binding element of a diverse region constituted by the various societies along its shores. Instead, the ocean is reduced to constituting the outer boundary of a series of coastal and island destinations.⁵

The Travelling Mediterranean 2: The Arctic⁶

In the 1920s, just as the Mediterranean metaphor was being deployed in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico to justify U.S. commercial (and military) expansion, a similar trope was being applied in the Arctic. A key proponent of this effort was the Canadian-American anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson. In such books as The Friendly Arctic (1921) and The Northward Course of Empire (1922a), Stefansson argued that the Arctic, far from being a frozen wasteland, was a ‘Polar Mediterranean.’ Like the Mediterranean, he wrote, the Arctic featured a relatively navigable central space that united diverse coastal peoples in commerce and productive interaction. With the advent of new transportation technologies (especially the airplane) that would further ease navigation across its inner sea, the Arctic was likel...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword: On Thalassography
• Dedication Page
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I OCEAN KNOWLEDGES: UNDERSTANDING THE WATER WORLD
• PART II OCEAN EXPERIENCES: EMBODIED PERFORMANCES, PRACTICES AND EMOTIONS
• PART III OCEAN NATURES: MOBILITIES AND MORE-THAN-HUMAN CONCERNS
• Index