Anthropology at Sea: Displacement as Ethnographic Praxis

Discussant: Chloe Howe Haralambous, Lecturer in the Humanities Council

Shipping plays a crucial role in global circulation and geopolitical imaginaries of mobility. Approximately 90% of the world’s imports and exports travel by sea on some 93,000 merchant vessels, operated by 1.25 million seafarers, carrying almost six billion tons of cargo. Based on fieldwork conducted along these routes of maritime commerce, specifically focusing on ports and shipping lanes in the Bab-el-Mandeb, a narrow strait that separates Africa from Asia and connects the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, this talk explores the possibilities of an anthropology of and from the ocean. Specifically, it argues for taking apart two of the guiding metaphors for ethnography—fieldwork and immersion— in order to explore the distinction of land and sea that undergirds them. While the field in fieldwork has been heavily theorized, immersion often appears as a metaphor to signal anthropological legitimacy. But for those who are at sea, immersion is not just metaphor but materiality. For objects to be immersed at sea, requires an understanding of displacement and buoyancy. Beyond dislocation, displacement produces the buoyancy essential to navigation. Thinking through this principle allows for an ethnographic practice attuned not only to the frictions of contemporary life, but the ways displacement moves forward, in unequal and haphazard ways, but forward, nonetheless.

Jatin Dua is an associate professor of Anthropology. He also directs the Oceans Lab at the University of Michigan dedicated to collaborative and multimodal ways of engaging oceans as anthropological interlocutors. His research explores maritime mobility, and its perils and possibilities, in the Indian Ocean, focusing on processes and projects of governance, law, and economy. His book, Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean, published with the University of California Press (December 2019) and winner of the 2020 Elliot P. Skinner Book Award, is a multi-sited ethnographic and archival engagement with Somali piracy and contestations over legitimate and illegitimate commerce in the Western Indian Ocean. In addition, he has published a number of articles on maritime anthropology, captivity, political economy, and sovereignty and is the editor of the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History.