Abstract
The back matter of Helen Sampson’s International Seafarers and Transnationalism in the Twenty-First Century promises to combine two of my keenest interests: cargo ships and ‘offshore’ (literally this time) Indian labourers. While at first glance this might seem to be a tall order, the book does indeed manage to fuse these two domains (and others) into a seamless narrative about the trials and tribulations of life on the sea. The interface between these two topics is the occupation of seafaring and Sampson – who has been a significant seafaring researcher for a number of years now – does not disappoint in her efforts to put the reader into the deck shoes of her informants on board container ships plying the high seas. Since this is an ethnography it makes sense to give real estate in this review to the choice of fieldsite(s). Descriptions and narratives set on the novel ‘moving’ fieldsite is the stage for the majority of chapters in the book and this contribution fits very well into the series’ theme of ‘New Ethnographies’. This book, however, is a multisite study and also contains ‘stop-overs’ in Hamburg, Germany as well as Goa and Mumbai in India, where seafarers’ families are interviewed and provide rich accounts of the consequences of liquid modernity. Sampson’s legs on land appear to be as reliable as her sea legs and the liberally inserted verbatim interview extracts (typeset by the publisher in a fatiguing smaller font size) reveal the competence of her ethnographic questioning and fieldnotes. The book is tastefully seasoned with theories that furnish the quotidian ethnographic detail about life on board with more scholarly depth. The most obvious alongside ‘structural space’ is ‘transnationality’, which is hardly a virgin term in anthropology, yet obviously continues to provide calm from ethnographic fretting about regional specialization. Sampson is careful to place herself at the cusp of this ongoing theoretical enterprise and in many ways undermines transnationality and other framing concepts –diaspora, migrant, citizen – through her border geography. If there are any qualms with the book it is that too much lip service is paid to theories that do not do justice to the novelty of the fieldsite, context and topic of seafaring; along these lines, I did miss a discussion of the mobilities literature and its attempts to turn away from the nation as standard measure of identity. The progress in the book to the term ‘transmigrant’, in Chapter 9, made some headway in distancing this ethnography from the strictures of anthropology’s ageing grasp on empirical evidence; however, I probably would not have mourned this term and its trappings if it had been left behind on the quayside. Despite its modest title this book’s focus extends beyond the twenty-first century and provides a rich collection of past and present accounts about seafaring beyond the Global North. Research on the twentieth-century innovation of the container ship often leaves behind the stories and concerns of those on board and their families and this book is a welcome change from the usual tales of the sea(lane) that privilege logistics, planning and infrastructure over people.