{"title":"The shipping container","authors":"H. Leivestad","doi":"10.1080/02757206.2022.2066094","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT When the Ever Given became stuck in the Suez Canal, the megaship was carrying 18,300 rectangular, steel boxes on her back. In the weeks and months after the incident, the concealed contents of the shipping containers – stuck in legal limbo – captured global attention. Technologically developed in the years after the Second World War, the standardized shipping container has featured as one of the protagonists of the transformations in international trade. But the container’s logic of concealment and transaction has made ‘the box’ a common figure also in popular culture and social theory. This essay interrogates the shipping container’s multiple repertoires by focussing on containers at work. By tracing how the shipping container moves through the port infrastructure this essay takes us from the Suez Canal towards another central maritime passageway: the Strait of Gibraltar. This essay reflects on the different scales at which the shipping container functions in the port: from heavy materiality to abstracted codes and units of measurement.","PeriodicalId":46201,"journal":{"name":"History and Anthropology","volume":"2014 1","pages":"202 - 207"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6000,"publicationDate":"2022-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"History and Anthropology","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2022.2066094","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"ANTHROPOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
ABSTRACT When the Ever Given became stuck in the Suez Canal, the megaship was carrying 18,300 rectangular, steel boxes on her back. In the weeks and months after the incident, the concealed contents of the shipping containers – stuck in legal limbo – captured global attention. Technologically developed in the years after the Second World War, the standardized shipping container has featured as one of the protagonists of the transformations in international trade. But the container’s logic of concealment and transaction has made ‘the box’ a common figure also in popular culture and social theory. This essay interrogates the shipping container’s multiple repertoires by focussing on containers at work. By tracing how the shipping container moves through the port infrastructure this essay takes us from the Suez Canal towards another central maritime passageway: the Strait of Gibraltar. This essay reflects on the different scales at which the shipping container functions in the port: from heavy materiality to abstracted codes and units of measurement.
期刊介绍：
History and Anthropology continues to address the intersection of history and social sciences, focusing on the interchange between anthropologically-informed history, historically-informed anthropology and the history of ethnographic and anthropological representation. It is now widely perceived that the formerly dominant ahistorical perspectives within anthropology severely restricted interpretation and analysis. Much recent work has therefore been concerned with social change and colonial history and the traditional problems such as symbolism, have been rethought in historical terms. History and Anthropology publishes articles which develop these concerns, and is particularly interested in linking new substantive analyses with critical perspectives on anthropological discourse.
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