The Sea by John Mack

Author:John Mack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

A man dies on shore – you follow his body to the grave, and a stone marks the spot . . . A man is shot down by your side in battle, and the mangled body remains an object, and a real evidence; but at sea, the man is near you – at your side – you hear his voice, and in an instant he is gone, and nothing but a vacancy shows his loss. Then, too, at sea – to use a homely but expressive phrase – you miss a man so much.4

Dr Johnson’s sense of the advantages of the jail over the ship misses the active engaged sense of mutual self-reliance which actual experience of the sea engenders. Losing a fellow crew member at sea is indeed like losing a part of oneself.

Yet anthropologists have rarely exposed themselves to the ‘culture shock’ of being on ships at sea or considered them as social units. Indeed, had they done so they would have discovered, as Redmond O’Hanlon did,5 that as social entities ships, if they are not modern cruise liners (and sometimes even if they are), are quite distinctive kinds of societies from those that an older generation of anthropologists characteristically studied. One major distinguishing feature is that, far from being uniform communities, ships’ crews, other perhaps than when constituted as ‘national’ navies, have often been very diverse in their composition. Arguably ships are the first truly cosmopolitan spaces. Their crews might be of different ages and experience, often recruited amongst those with differing first languages and cultures, and often brought together to work as a unit on ships of unfamiliar design. Indeed the one common feature of ship’s crews is that they are very largely male, a situation made even more evident in the fact that ships themselves in different cultures and contexts are sometimes explicitly regarded as female. This sets ships and their crews apart and raises a leading question for this chapter. How does such a diverse community as that brought together for specific voyages come to form a community of skill and discipline? If we have just looked at how a ship becomes an embodied technological space, here we discuss ships as embodied social spaces.

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