Abstract
While interest in visual representations of animals is well established in visual sociology, this article explores another set of possibilities connected with practices of looking at animals. In particular, I examine the social organization of visual experience in whale watching, with a focus on the role of narration. Using detailed transcriptions of whale watch narration as data, I argue that naturalists produce publicly witnessed trip sightings by coordinating what can be seen in the water with understandings of whales as objects of scientific research and environmental concern.
Tourism has long been associated with visual experience, a connection dramatized with verve in John Urry’s influential study The Tourist Gaze (1990; cf. Crouch and Lübbren 2003). But what are tourists actually doing when they are engaging in—or being engaged by—touristic gazing? Urry’s account, drawing on history and political economy, explains how tourism developed as a cultural phenomenon, for example, how seaside resorts became popular, but provides little detail about how tourism is practiced within locally organized fields of activity. An ethnographic approach should make it possible to explore the tourism/vision link with greater specificity. For a clear and instructive example of how visual practices are woven into touristic activities, we can turn to whale watching. The matters with which the present study is concerned can be characterized as looking at whales, seeing whales, watching whales, and the like. More precisely, its focus is the social organization of vision in whale watch tours. How is “watching whales” actually done in practice? How is talk involved in making looking at and seeing whales accountable? 1 And how do these questions fit within the concerns of visual sociology?
Toward a Sociology of Seeing
Early visual sociology was closely connected with uses of photography in sociological research (Ball and Smith 1992; Harper 2012; Stasz 1979). More recently, there have been significant efforts to rethink visual sociology’s concerns and boundaries. John Grady’s expanded definition (1996) merits close attention. Reflecting on the growing diversity in visual sociology, he proposes a threefold scheme centered on concern with imagery or “icons” in visual sociology. The scheme involves three distinct areas: seeing, communicating with icons, and doing sociology visually. While Grady makes icons central in his scheme, he recognizes that seeing has a different status: “Seeing is, of course, antecedent to a world of icons and, thus, its study would be host to its own particular set of practices” (p. 15). Grady suggests that “visual sociologists should have much to contribute to the naturalistic study of visual perception and cognition” (p. 16). Drawing on Coulter and Parsons (1991), he proposes that a sociology of seeing might begin with attention to the language of vision. He points to Coulter and Parsons’s long list of “verbs of visual orientation,” including beholding, examining, gazing, glancing, glimpsing, inspecting, looking, noticing, peeking, scanning, scrutinizing, spotting, spying, staring, surveying, watching, and witnessing (Coulter and Parsons 1991, 261). While Grady makes a place for seeing in his scheme, icons remain his focus. He suggests that visual sociology, as the study of icons, might even be regarded as a third tradition in sociology, standing alongside survey research and ethnographic fieldwork (p. 21). Two important questions arise from Grady’s proposals: (1) what are the prospects for a sociology of seeing in its own right, distinct from studies of imagery, and (2) what role might ethnography play in a sociology of seeing? Grady’s proposals are intriguing and open up new possibilities but leave much unanswered.
Two other schemes for conceptualizing visual sociology may be briefly mentioned. Pauwels’s account in “Visual Sociology Reframed” (2010) is chiefly concerned with images, the materials in which they are embodied, and the uses made of them. Emmison, Smith, and Mayall, in Researching the Visual (2012), devise a classification that includes researcher-produced visual materials, research subjects’ use of visual materials, analyzing existing materials, and using video materials. What is striking about both of these accounts is that they remain centered on images 2 and materials, whereas Grady allowed for seeing as a topic in its own right.
Some of the most productive contributions toward developing a sociology of seeing are associated with ethnomethodology (Ball 2003; Ball and Smith 2011). In 1994, Charles Goodwin published a groundbreaking paper titled “Professional Vision.” Goodwin seeks to characterize the kinds of practices that constitute professional vision as a distinct way of ordering visual experience. He points to the role of coding, highlighting, and graphic representation as key dimensions of professional vision. Using the example of archeological fieldwork, he shows how archeologists use coding schemes to address dirt as a scientific object, highlighting practices to make certain characteristics of dirt stand out visually, and graphic representations to communicate with others about the dirt they are examining. As scientists concerned with the past, archeologists look at dirt quite differently than farmers or builders do. It is crucial to note that Goodwin focuses on practices of seeing and looking in themselves, not just the objects and images that are seen. 3 In a related vein, chapters in The Handbook of Visual Research (Van Leeuwen and Jewett 2004) and The SAGE Handbook of Visual Analysis (Margolis and Pauwels 2011) highlight ethnomethodological contributions to the study of visual practices. In “Practices of Seeing Visual Analysis: an Ethnomethodological Approach” (2004), Goodwin reprises his account of professional vision, setting it alongside other avenues of ethnomethodological work on vision, including studies of gaze in conversations and imagery in scientific work. Ball and Smith, in “Ethnomethodology and the Visual: Practices of Looking, Visualization, and Embodied Action” (2011), also survey ethnomethodological contributions to visual studies. They point out an abiding concern in ethnomethodology with the looks of things: “An appreciation of the importance of how the world looks to its members, of how the orderliness and intelligibility of ordinary human action critically depends upon its appearance, has led ethnomethodologists to accord the visual dimension an important role in their analyses” (p. 1). Examples provided by Ball and Smith include Sacks’s study on how police work is learned by paying attention to the looks of things (1972); Garfinkel, Lynch, and Livingston’s study of the astronomical discovery of the optical pulsar (1981); and Psathas’s study of occasioned maps (1979).
My approach in this essay builds on aspects of the ethnomethodological approach to visual practices described above. What is aimed at is a close-up, fieldwork-based respecification of touristic gazing. My concern is with how whale watching is done as a practical activity, and on the role of narration in the organization of that activity. If sightings are the heart of whale watch activities, how, exactly, are they produced? While this could be studied from various angles, in this article I focus on the work done by naturalists in narrating trips. I argue that this work is an essential key to understanding the social organization of vision in whale watching, and I conclude by proposing that there are fruitful parallels with several other areas that deserve more attention in visual sociology.
Sightings and Narration
In recent decades, whale watching has become an important sector of the ecotourism industry (Beach and Weinrich 1989; Ellis 1991; Gould and Lewis 2014; Hoyt and Parsons 2014; Nutch 2007). Public enthusiasm for watching whales has arisen in connection with shifts in how animals are viewed, from resources to be exploited to fellow beings to be appreciated and respected, and from caged and captive beasts to wild animals best encountered in natural settings (Berger 1980; Cronon 1995; Davis 1997; Dizard 1999; Ellis 1994; Grahame 2017; Grady and Mechling 2003; Morgenstern 2015; Podeschi 2002; Wilson 1991). In New England, commercial whale watch companies conduct tours from April to October, offering passengers narrated excursions into coastal waters.
When members of the public enter coastal tourist regions from Rhode Island to Maine, they are likely to see promotional messages that promise whale sightings and link the whale watching experience with fun, adventure, conservation, research, and science. The presence of a tour guide is a standard feature of these tours; guides take the role of trip naturalist 4 and provide narration over the boat’s public address system. In these tours, an interesting tension between science and spectacle arises. Doing narration provides naturalists with opportunities to invite attention to conservation and research, but they cannot just say whatever they like. They may wish to foster the idea that their audience is “taking part in a scientific expedition” yet they also must show concern for “giving their passengers a good look at whales” (Figure 1).
Humpback whale’s tail seen from the underside, showing unique pattern of black and white markings that make identification possible. The typical tail shot isolates the tail from other parts of the body. Birds, boats, passengers, additional whales, and other distractions are absent. The picture is “real” but represents an idealized view. Whale tail shots on postcards, flyers, and other media do not always show the underside markings. Thus, they may lack key details of interest to researchers.
While whales might be spotted during any portion of a trip, my focus here is on sighting episodes that unfold when boats reach prime viewing areas such as Stellwagen Bank or Jeffreys Ledge. If the term “sighting” were taken broadly to mean seeing whales, it would include practices that have diverse purposes and audiences. During segments of the trip that involve searching for whales, crew members engage in unnarrated sighting activities referred to as “spotting.” Whale researchers and their assistants, if present, engage in other kinds of sighting activities geared to obtaining photographic data and producing a written record of sightings; these are also unnarrated. The trip’s naturalist uses the boat’s public address system to produce a spoken narration of sighting events for the passengers’ benefit. In addition, passengers conduct their own independent sighting activities, sometimes announcing these to each other. Of these, the naturalist’s narration contributes most directly to producing public, collectively witnessed sightings like those guaranteed in tour promotions. Accordingly, I focus on these naturalist-led sightings as a key dimension of the social organization of vision at work in whale watching. In doing so, I examine specifics of trip narration that illustrate the actualities underlying abstract concepts such as the tourist gaze.
Sites and Methods
The present article draws upon long-term, ongoing research on nature-based tourism (Fennell 1999; Whelan 1991). Between 1990 and 2015, I went on more than forty whale watch trips off eastern Massachusetts. During the first decade, I also did audio recordings of whale watch narration, taping over twenty trips, yielding more than thirty hours of recorded material. On each trip, I sought and was granted the naturalist’s permission to record the narration delivered over the boat’s public address system. In the mid-1990s, I began to take a more comparative approach to ecotourism, and participated in organized birdwatching trips, swamp and marsh tours, puffin and seal cruises, and butterfly and dragonfly walks, making repeated visits to sites in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Trinidad, West Indies, and shorter visits to Florida, Louisiana, Maine, and New Jersey. I acted as a participant-observer on all of these excursions and also interviewed numerous guides and naturalists. While the focus of this article is whale watching, the interpretation ventured here is informed by this wider ethnographic exploration of ecotourism over a period of twenty-five years.
In what follows, I make use of detailed transcriptions of trip narration to examine the role of talk in the organization of whale watching and in particular the production of sightings. Transcribed extracts are not intended as a statistical sample of communication behaviors, and no comparison between different whale watch operations is intended. Extracts were chosen because they provide instructive instances of ordinary narration practices. In line with basic tenets of ethnomethodologically informed studies (Heap 1980; Pollner and Emerson 2001; Psathas 1995; Silverman 1993), my discussion of transcribed data eschews the use of theoretical glosses for assigning meanings to what is said or done by actors on the scene. In particular, I do not use narrative theory as a scheme for deciding what features of talk are of analytical interest. Rather than treating the phenomena studied as “narrative” in a literary or philosophical sense, my aim is to discover what is going on when naturalists are accountably doing narration. Thus, I examine trip narration as a basic constituent of whale watching that brings practical reasoning about observation into play in the form of instructions, advice, explanations, directions, admonitions, informings, etc., delivered in public. In this regard, my examination of transcripts is closer to ethnomethodological uses of conversational data that address features of activity systems in which talk plays a role, rather than more formal and technical study of properties of speech production per se. 5
The type of data that I collected through audio recording would also be available from videos purchased from whale watch operations and from amateur recordings posted on the Internet. This kind of data is in the public domain. A key difference is that since I was on board as a participant-observer, I had access to a wider range of information than would be available from reviewing someone else’s recordings. Some of that information was recorded in the form of field notes. And by going on many different whale watches from different ports, conducting interviews, and engaging in conversations with passengers, I was also able to build up a more general impression of the whale watching experience and to reflect on what distinguishes it from other types of nature tourism.
Talk and Sightings
In whale watch trip narration, the following features are standard: (1) a welcome speech covering safety regulations, coastal ecology, and whale biology, (2) one or more sighting episodes, during which whales are pointed out and commented upon, and (3) closing comments, in which the trip is summed up and passengers are bid farewell. The focus of this article is how sightings are narrated. One might object that the real point of whale watching is looking at whales, not talking or listening. This notion is evident in the following remark from a naturalist doing narration over the public address system: NOW- uh for those of you who haven’t been out or uh i- y- not familiar with the whale watch you’re probably wondering w- when’s this guy gonna stop talking and when are we going to see a whale.
The narration of sightings is often presented as having a straightforward representational character. As one naturalist put it, “I try to just talk about what the passengers are seeing.” Another naturalist’s humorous comment implies a similar orientation. After a sightings-filled trip requiring almost continuous narration, he remarked, “Next trip I’m just gonna say, ‘Whales, they’re big and they’re black.’” Both comments pay attention to the notion that narration could amount to just telling people directly what they are seeing. Practitioners’ ways of talking about narration seem at times to accept a commonsense notion of observation as an activity independent of talk and narration as talk about objects observed. However, a different view emerges when narration segments are examined closely. In what follows, I use transcribed narration extracts to demonstrate some of the main ways that narration contributes to the social organization of vision in whale watching.
Narration and the Social Organization of Watching In Situ
While nature is all around us (often “seen but unnoticed”), whale watch trips involve making nature visible in distinctive ways that go beyond simply transporting passengers to locations where whales are present. Trip participants are encouraged to view whales in preferred ways by participating in a normative order of watching made incarnate through naturalists’ instructions and commentaries. This order becomes evident as soon as the whale sighting phase of the trip begins. In the extract below, the narrator summons passengers to participate in a definite time and space of watching in which certain visible objects are elevated, defined, and attended to.
Extract 1
Narrators exhibit a pervasive concern with the temporal and spatial organization of observation on the whale watch, referenced above in “coming this far” (line 01) and “as much time as we’d like” (line 03). The narrator also seeks cooperation from passengers in organizing the time and place of watching by treating his hearers as engaged in diverse unfolding actions (lines 03-06), some congruent with whale watching (readying their cameras), others incongruent (waiting for food in the galley). Passengers are urged to assemble by shifting from dispersed individual activities into a collective mode in which they are poised to participate in watching. This is more than an instruction to take up a physical position somewhere on the boat; it is a call to join in the group’s watching (Figure 2). This extract also shows the narrator working to direct attention to what is in view, coming into view, temporarily out of view, or gone. At lines 06-12, he announces the presence of whales temporarily out of view for passengers, and suggests they may soon come back into view, making “a look” possible. At lines 14-17 he points out the presence of watchable objects, including “spouts,” a “pair of whales,” and “tails.” In these ways, the narrator threads together a succession of moments and places in which whales are in view or out of view, and selectively shapes these into an unfolding sighting episode.
Photo taken with smart phone by whale watcher. Note the presence of other whale watchers. The tail is seen from a distance and a second whale is present.
Narration also helps to transform the setting into an organized field in which objects become available for observation. The narrator works to coordinate passengers’ gaze by treating the boat as a “giant clock” with the bow as twelve o’clock and the stern as six o’clock. Passengers distributed around the boat, whether upper or lower deck or starboard or port sides, are provided with common terms of reference (lines 11 and 15) to guide their watching. Within this temporally unfolding, spatially articulated field, the narrator directs attention to a variety of objects. Not all objects in or on the water are treated as worthy of remarks, and objects remarked upon are presented as deserving different kinds of attention. Some objects, for example, tuna boats (lines 10-12) are used to point out areas of possible whale presence. Other objects are treated as definite indices of whale presence, for example, visible exhalations referred to as “spouts” (line 14). Certain body parts, such as tails (lines 16-17), are pointed out as sights particularly worth seeing, and used to link visible phenomena with talk about whale research. Body parts are interesting in another way as well. Although whales sometimes “breach” (leap out of the water), this is a relatively rare sight: a normal trip offers more limited glances at whale body parts such as blowholes, dorsal fins, pectoral fins, and tails. First-time whale watchers rarely see the whole whale body depicted in postcards, brochures, signs, whale art, and other pictorial materials, and the parts they do see come into view sporadically. By following the same whale through a sequence of appearances at or near the water’s surface, narration connects and fills in passengers’ glimpses to help produce a shared visualization of the whole whale in the water. More generally, narration helps to produce a sense of the waters surrounding the boat as a coherent field whose diverse sights have significance in relation to whales’ presence.
Attention is typically given to the species of whale, for example, humpback (line 17), as well as to the number of whales present (“a couple” at line 06, and “a pair” at line 15). The issue of number is noteworthy, since it involves the ability to assign a succession of sights to the “same” whale, and to not only count individuals but infer relationships. For example, a “pair” is not simply two whales in the field, but two of the same species swimming in association; a pair may be two adults or a mother and calf. The whales that receive primary attention are the ones being watched jointly; the narration is built around these rather than other whales that might become visible (lines 14-17). These whales are treated as definite in number, and as distinguishable (as in “there it is, and there’s another one beyond,” line 14). Multiple sightings are attributed neither to a single, omnipresent whale nor to an indefinitely large number of whales appearing and disappearing randomly. This handling of species and number shows competence not only in recognizing kinds of animals, but also in keeping track of a definite set of individuals.
Beginning with this extract, then, we can see that the narrated whale watch is far from being a loose collection of disparate phenomena. We can notice how the narration establishes the coherence and continuity of a field in which sightings can occur. Narration also establishes social relations of observation in which passengers share in a joint sighting coordinated by the narrator. The narrator’s announcements are grounded in claims to specialized knowledge, yet the terms of reference communicated to passengers may become the basis for their own observational claims.
Narration, Contestation, and Authority
In addition to gathering passengers into a time and place of watching, narration also trades on authority to define the situation. Authority is established and sustained through the narrator’s ability to provide a coherent, ongoing account of what is being seen during the trip. While not common, there are occasions upon which passengers may make their own assertions about what is being seen at a given moment, thereby contesting the narrator’s version. One resource for dealing with definitional contests lies in the way narration builds on a succession of moments that constitute a body of sightings. In the following extract, trouble emerges when passengers and the narrator engage in a contest over claims about what is being seen.
Extract 2
The extract begins with narrator addressing what “people are seeing,” followed by a quick downgrading of this as “just” a boat wake (lines 01-02). Note that the narrator doesn’t affiliate himself with this seeing; it is not what “I” see or “we” see, but what (some) people (claim to) see. By connecting the “wake” to “that boat that went by,” the narrator suggests he was aware of the object and grasped the conditions that produced the sighting. The narrator’s comment on passengers’ sighting activities is then followed by passenger comments (lines 03-04). (Olympia was the name of the individual whale being watched by the group until this incident.) At lines 06-07, passengers announce sightings, and at line 08 a passenger reports a sighting using the clock system of reference. At lines 09-10 the narrator responds by suggesting that the same kind of sighting error has been made again. With this second attempt to downgrade passengers’ claims, he reasserts his competence to judge errors, linking them to the same source. However, this second attempt is met with a loud objection (“Nooo!” at line 11), and at line 14 the narrator relents and acknowledges the presence of another whale. Here we can see watchers orientating to whether what the narrator says is an enforceable account of what they are “actually” seeing. While novices occasionally misidentify objects in the water, the narrator’s authority is also conditional, and can be undermined by others’ ability to draw attention to visible objects (Figure 3). The narrator reclaims authority in two distinct ways. First, he re-specifies the passengers’ sighting in a way that is more precise (“different whale,” “humpback,” and “seven-thirty”) and involves continuity of observation based on distinguishing individual whales. Second, he says that the whale sighted by them is not the whale the group is watching: that is, the unfolding sighting directed by the narrator is treated as the group’s proper focus, having precedence over other sights. Although whale watchers may engage in independent sightings and try to gain recognition for their claims, even using specialized terms, it is the narrator’s role to take the lead in making sightings public.
Two whales during feeding activity—a common sight. It is often not obvious to inexperienced whale watchers what part of the body they are seeing, what the whales are doing, or how many whales are present.
Research as a Relevance of Sightings
Another way in which naturalist narrators can exercise authority is by referring to what is known in the scientific research community and describing how it is known. In doing so, the narrator may invoke a “we” of membership in the scientific community. Extracts 3-5 illustrate some of the ways that research becomes relevant in doing sightings.
Extract 3
This extract from the orientation segment uses a style of continuous exposition that is difficult to sustain in a sighting segment. The core of this extract is an account of how the research practice of identifying individual whales relies on “unique natural marks” (line 07) that can be photographed. The pattern on the underside of the humpback whale’s tail is cited as the best example of this (“all white ta all black”). These marks are easily seen in the field by neophyte whale watchers and experts alike (see Figure 1).
A sighting later in the same trip underscores the imperative of achieving good looks at tails while keeping on the trip schedule. Often there are tradeoffs between remaining with a whale to identify the individual and moving to another location in the hope of seeing something new.
Extract 4
Here we see a close interweaving of gaze instructions and identification work. It opens at line 01 with advice on the general location of the whales. The narrator then returns to the issue of the familiarity of one of the individuals (line 03). At this point neither whale has raised its tail but a better look still seems possible. He directs passengers’ gaze to the point at which the tail should appear (line 04), but then disappointment follows: “Oops. No, arching the back but not lifting the tail that time” (lines 04-05). Twice more in this sequence the narrator points out these whales’ reappearance (lines 07 and 12), but he abandons further comment on the identity of the “familiar” whale. Extracts 3 and 4 show identifying individuals to be a significant but provisional objective of sightings narration. While research involves identifying whales, the trip imperative is to encounter and view whales. A whale watch can be counted as successful as long as “good looks” are obtained; identification might contribute to a good look but is not essential.
A longer extract shows a more successful incorporation of individual identification into sighting narration. Here, an account of the narrator’s own membership in the research community is interwoven with an account of the significance of tail sightings in humpback whale research. The extract continues with achieving an identification, along with details about the individual whales seen. As the extract unfolds, we see a shift from talking about photo-ID techniques to doing identifications in situ and using them as the basis for a more extended commentary.
Extract 5
With the disappearance of the whale (lines 01 and 02) the narrator shifts to an account of photo-ID research and the significance of seeing tails (lines 02-07). Elements of photo-ID research are treated as properly mentionable within a sighting, but while the whale is out of view. With “Hup!” (line 07) she abruptly shifts to directing passengers’ gaze and then quickly moves from species identification (“humpback” at line 08) to number and relationship (“mother and calf” at line 9) to identifying individuals (“Splinter and her calf” at lines 09-10). After a pause, and with the calf in view (“just lying there,” line 13), the narrator comments on how she was able to perform the identification (lines 13-18). “This isn’t the whale we first saw,” “looked a bit like Splinter,” and “calf is very very mottled” all suggest identification work in progress. Curiously, her identification doesn’t rely on the method just described, since the tail is not in view. What is it for the first whale to look “a little bit like Splinter”? Her resource for identifying the pair, and thus the mother, is the mottling of the calf. This chain of inference works differently from the standard approach, which uses catalogued photos of flukes 6 and dorsal fins, and which would proceed from adult to associated calf. Yet her method accords with the general approach of using “unique natural marks.” Thus, she makes the identification accountable by drawing attention to markings as her grounds. Note also that identification of the pair provides an occasion for telling Splinter’s genealogy (lines 18-22) and connecting that with knowledge accumulated through organized research activities. As with extracts 3 and 4, this extract involves shifts from background matters (the research process, accumulated knowledge) to pointing to and commenting on objects in the field; utterances like “Hup!” (line 07) and “Sup!” (line 23) signal these shifts.
Institutional Vision and the Social Construction of Good Looks
In wildlife watching, what counts as a good look has important institutional resonances. 7 Below, we can see how discursive uses of “we” trade on a wider set of institutional arrangements connected with both research and tourism.
Extract 6
Extract 6 begins with the narrator calling attention to a balloon in the water (lines 01-03). Narrators often comment on the tendency of marine animals to mistake plastic bags, balloons, and other objects for food. “Oop!” (line 03) signals a shift to instructions for seeing one, then two, whales. She describes them as “whales that we recognize” (line 05) and announces their names (lines 07-08). The “we” here is an institutional we referring to whale researchers; the passengers included in the “we” of watching together would lack resources for recognizing these individuals. The use of “we” (“we know as” and “we call”) also marks the use of whales’ names as an institutional practice (cf. extract 5, lines 18-22). Her comments on these whales’ recent history (lines 08-10) has an implicit institutional basis as well: it is not that she claims to have been following these whales around personally, but rather that she has access through her work to collectively produced knowledge about these whales. Lines 12-18 involve a nice field demonstration of the basis of photo-identification work. Here the notion of a “good look” is closely connected with research relevances. These whales are “a great pair for seeing” because they show differences in fluke markings so clearly. She employs the more technical term “fluke” rather than tail, again aligning sights in the field with research. Lines 12-15 are constructed in a way that is not tied directly to sights in view, enabling her to fill in features that remain hidden. Then at lines 15-18, she shifts attention back to what is visible in the water: “here comes that fluke with the white fluke with the black lines on the right side. Down it goes (3) and Firefly going down with its mainly black tail.” In this case, viewing conditions were optimal for not just mentioning the research relevance of flukes, but pointing to differences in marking displayed clearly in the field: “Now you can see how we tell these whales apart by those marks.”
Naturalists often subscribe to the view that “any sighting is special,” but a novice might wonder what is so great about a “fluke.” Admittedly, whale watchers often utter a collective “Ooohhhhh” when they see a tail display. Yet to someone used to pictures of the whole animal, the tail is not “obviously” the best part. Nor is it the part most often seen in the water; blowholes and dorsal fins are more common sights. Extracts 3 and 5 make it clear that the tail has special relevance for research. For naturalist-narrators, the flukes become a focal object because it provides occasions for linking matters worth mentioning to sights clearly in view for passengers. The fit between these two is vivid in extract 6. The opportunity to link what “you can see” with “how we tell” provides a good field demonstration, but anyone examining a catalogue of flukes would discover that many humpbacks have mainly black tails, while many others have white tails with lines evident. Other important features, such as shape, symmetry, cuts, and other markings are not mentioned by the narrator. While passengers were able to witness the difference between white and black flukes clearly, they did not receive sufficient instruction in how other features are used to identify these animals as unique individuals. Thus, what counts as “good looks” in whale watching is tied to institutional vision, but viewers do not get more than a hint of what researchers’ visual practices involve. “How we tell these whales apart by those marks,” then, is a deep topic touched upon only through glimpses and remarks in the whale watch context.
Discussion: Narration and the Organization of Watching
The general concern in this article has been with how whale watch narration is used to make visual experience an accountable matter. Credible narration involves producing talk that is neither what everyone already knows (“whales are large”) nor mere fluff (“amazing creatures”). Both general scientific knowledge and local knowledge from the whale research community are used by narrators in developing their accounts. Yet producing a credible narration is not simply a matter of talking science. The tasks of narration involve giving watching a public coherence, and include making passengers aware of where to see, when to see, and what kind of seeing is possible. One might suppose that duration and proximity to whales are what counts, so that a “good look” is a long look and a close look at many whales, but the relevance of “close” and “long” and “many” depend in turn on the nature of the watching being done.
The nature of watching, as fostered through narration, can be further specified by considering the relation of visible objects and interpretive comments that draw on a variety of forms of knowledge and discourse. Over the course of the whale watch trip, certain kinds of visible objects are treated by narrators as worthy of attention. Objects routinely mentioned include landmarks (lighthouses, city skylines), floating objects (balloons, bottles, buoys, plastic bags), vessels (cargo ships, fishing boats, runabouts, other whale watch boats), aquatic conditions (water color and clarity), atmospheric conditions (clear, foggy, hazy), wildlife (dolphins, petrels, seals, sharks, shearwaters, sunfish), signs of whale presence (spouts, fluke prints, excrement), and kinds of whales (fins, humpbacks, minkes). These objects are not pointed out every time they are seen, nor are they all treated as worthy of the same kinds of attention. Yet they share the common feature of being visually accessible to passengers on the occasions of their presence in the field. As such, they contrast with issues and problems to which the narrator may also call attention, including scientific classifications, research procedures, environmental hazards, marine conservation, laws, and government regulations. The latter operate as a background scheme that defines, somewhat loosely, what belongs in the social world of whale watching. Other matters—for example, whales as food, performing animals, or industrial resources—are treated as inappropriate concerns for that world.
The complex relation of visible objects and noteworthy issues is evident in the following (from extract 6): Up ahead of us you can see something else floating in the water, which is a yellow balloon. And that is really an unfortunate sight because balloons- Oop! right alongside of us, talk about the balloons later, one of the humpbacks up right at nine, and here’s two humpback whales that we recognize.
“Oop!” signals a shift in attention from a previously remarked object (the balloon) to new objects (“whales that we recognize”). The abrupt shift to gaze direction and identification talk suggests that the primary task of such narration is producing the watchability of whales. An order of precedence is involved, since shifts in the opposite direction, from whales to balloons, boats, etc., are not typically found. Shifts in other extracts considered earlier in this article suggest that directing passengers’ gaze to watchable whales also has priority over a range of scientific and environmental matters. There is thus a dilemma built into the structure of narration. In designing their talk, narrators can introduce scientific and environmentally related matters at a point close to or distant from occasions of observational relevance. Matters mentioned in close proximity to visible objects (e.g., the balloon) may gain in salience, but there is an increased risk that such mentions may be dropped in favor of comments on new objects coming into view. These examples show that the narrative handling of visible objects and interpretive background differs in at least two ways. First, visible objects are more salient for public watching activities than scientific and conservation-related information since they can be demonstrated through observational practices. Second, visible objects are set within a different time structure, since their observability is sustained or lost in a rapidly developing present, whereas background problems and issues can be unfolded within the longer time frame of story and exposition. While narrators may have much that they wish to impart through interpretive commentaries, their more immediate task is guiding observational activities.
These considerations show narration to be concerned with that side of the trip that is made up of public events. Indeed, narration plays a key role in making seeing social. The sightings coordinated by the narrator are distinct from idiosyncrasies of personal watching that often go unnoticed and unheeded. Narrated sightings work in a particular way: they function as a series of public witnessings rather than private perceptual episodes. Each sighting gathers weight not only from the reflexive relation of its visual and interpretive elements, but also from its relation to other sightings produced during the trip. These public sighting episodes come to count as the corpus of trip sightings. Here I draw upon James Heap’s (1985) conception of the classroom lesson as an occasioned corpus. Heap demonstrates that teachers, as they deal with student responses, weave the back-and-moments of classroom talk into a lesson corpus—the body of what will count, interactionally, as the day’s lesson. The lesson corpus comprises what was taught and learned publicly and accountably, as distinct from what was noticed or missed by individuals. In a similar way, each whale watch trip involves the assembly of a body of sightings that makes up the trip corpus. Thus, the narrator produces an authorized history of the trip that is distinct from both the personal memories and records (photos, videos) acquired by passengers and the formal data gathering performed by researchers during the trip. While this history is organized around the single trip as a unit of experience, it also incorporates awareness and knowledge grounded in the accumulated experiences of staff naturalists and the larger community of whale watch workers, researchers, environmentalists, and government agencies with which naturalists interact.
From the narrator’s standpoint, there is an issue of whether—at any given point in a sighting—to mention relevant scientific and environmental matters or not. Narrators express some ambivalence regarding how much stress should be placed on science. Some point out that “people come along to have a good time” and concede that this is an orientation that should be respected or at least accommodated. They express sensitivity toward the issue of whether, for passengers, science talk is intrusive. This is the larger context for the comment cited earlier, in which the narrator says, “I try to just talk about what the passengers are seeing.” But it should be clear by now that this cannot be a workable solution, since there is no primitive form of talk—in the guise of “literal description”—available for handling all exigencies of narration.
In the settings studied, referring to research activities was the preferred way of bringing science into the talk. Identification of individual whales was presented as simultaneously a concern for researchers and as a matter of special interest to passengers. In the presence of whales, narration is often geared to getting passengers to spot anatomical features that are relevant for photo-ID techniques. One advantage of making natural markings a focus is that the features being talked about are in view in the field. Tails (flukes) are available to everyone’s gaze, implying a democracy of observation. Yet the organization of practice associated with the research orientation to flukes is not fully evident to passengers. In particular, the textual basis of photo-ID work, which involves access to whale catalogues and familiarity with their organization, remains unavailable. Narration effects a partial recontextualization of fluke sightings by overcoming the episodic character of unaided watching and by establishing some of the continuities upon which systematic scientific observation depends (discovering the same whale in a different location at a later time, etc.).
I conclude by briefly sketching some possible directions for future research. First, the features of narration and visual practices reported here can be compared with narrative and visual practices in other types of nature tourism. Puffin cruises, swamp tours, and rainforest walks are both similar to and different from whale watch tours in ways that might provide scope for a fuller examination of the interplay between talk and visual practice. Second, it should prove worthwhile to reopen Goodwin’s account of professional vision in the light of what the present case shows. Goodwin was concerned with the exercise of visual expertise in professional contexts such as archeological field sites. Whale watch narration involves talk and visual practices that trade on professional discourses and practices, but it is not the primary work site for deploying those professional practices. Thus, we might consider a wider horizon of ways in which practices of professional vision are extended beyond their primary spheres into a range of popular or nonprofessional activities. And this might include looking at ways in which professional and popular communications are multimodal, involving vision, sound, and other sensory experiences (Van Leeuwen 2012; Vannini, Waskul, and Gottschalk 2012). Third, the present study can be viewed as one example of a much wider array of activities that could be approached in terms of a sociology of seeing. These include practices of citizen science (such as Christmas bird counts), parades and demonstrations, live performances and entertainments, public competitions and games, urban walking tours, and many other fields of activity organized around visual practices. In these cases and others, it should be possible to build up a picture, grounded in fieldwork, of what people are doing when they are looking, seeing, watching, gazing, spotting, surveying, and the like—in other words, to specify how embodied visual practices actually work.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Frank Nutch first drew my attention to sociological dimensions of cetacean studies. His interest in research activities of scientists on whale watch operations inspired me to develop a parallel line of inquiry on whale watch tourism. I am grateful to Tim Anderson for reviewing transcriptions with me and providing valuable input. Daniel Abondolo gave further assistance with particularly difficult passages. I would also like to thank Alyssa Grahame, Elora Grahame, James Heap, Liza McCoy, Bob Prus, Tony Hak, Katherine Moore, Peter Weeks, and Steve Couch for their encouragement, questions, and suggestions. Fieldwork makes heavy demands on family life, and I am very grateful to Kamini Maraj Grahame for her support and understanding during these investigations. Finally, I would like to thank Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott and the reviewers at the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography for their valuable comments and suggestions.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.