Nature/Culture/Seawater

Abstract

This essay considers seawater as a substance and symbol in anthropological and social theory. Seawater has occupied an ambiguous place with respect to anthropological categories of nature and culture. Seawater as nature appears as potentiality of form and uncontainable flux; it moves faster than culture — with culture frequently figured through land-based metaphors — even as culture seeks to channel water/nature’s flow. Seawater as culture manifests as a medium of pleasure, sustenance, travel, disaster. I track these associations historically, arguing that while the qualities of seawater in early anthropology were portrayed impressionistically, today it is technical and scientific descriptions of the form of water that have become prevalent in figuring social, political, and economic forces. For example, processes of globalization — which I suggest may also be called “oceanization” — are often described in terms of currents, flows, circulations. Examining canonical sea-set ethnography, maritime anthropologies , and contemporary social theory, I argue that seawater has operated as a “theory machine” for generating insights about human cultural organization. I develop this argument using ethnographic materials drawn from fieldwork among oceanographers working in the Sargasso Sea and in the Sea Islands. I conclude with a critique of appeals to the form of water in social theory.