Anthropology of and from the Ocean

Abstract

The ocean has a key, though often unremarked role, in shaping everyday life, from impacting weather patterns and food supplies to facilitating, and contesting, systems of capitalism, including contemporary logistics, empires, mobility, and migration. Beginning with early debates on maritime anthropology, this review traces the shift from maritime anthropology to an anthropology of and from the ocean. It notes the ways that the ocean appears and disappears as metaphor or material space of encounter and engagement within the past, present, and possible futures of anthropology. It shows how absence and presence as well as metaphor and materiality are the modes through which oceans are imagined and inhabited. While there is no distinct oceanic turn in anthropology in contrast with a number of other disciplines, the anthropology of and from the ocean holds the possibility to reenergize anthropology's interdisciplinary encounters, including with history and geography, as well as modes of engaging scale and specificity.