Social Science Information

We sought contributions from the widest possible spectrum, asking the authors to reflect upon the notion of ‘AnthropOcean’: theory, fiction, journal, ethological accounts, or ethnographic material from time spent at sea, testimony by those who have gained experience from the ocean, encounters with ocean inhabitants (no species preferred), etc. The aim is to build imagination and sensitivity upon these contributions in order to invent new narrative forms coherent with our contemporary experiences of an animated world. We would like to suggest that oceanic sensitive-anthropology can provide precious sense-ideas in order to think, feel and imagine the contemporary ecological crisis. Considering our present as anything but an ‘end of the world’, and more as a profound transformative process, how can ocean-sense-ideas bring useful intuitions? How can ocean inhabitants, ecosystems and dynamics, teach us a lesson in imagination? Can we dream other dreams than that of industrial exploitation?

Humans have dumped ‘stuff’ in oceans in a particularly concentrated way since the Industrial Revolution, the effects of which we now note as evidence of the Anthropocene – or the Anthropocean. In this article, I consider what the oceans now return to us in the form of pollution. I trace the production of a mercurial ocean through the production of mercury as it is taken up and transported by atmospheric and oceanic currents from artisanal mines in Asia, and transformed into methylmercury. As methylmercury, it enters into the food chain and eventuates in the diets of certain populations, especially those in Nordic countries, with toxic effects into future generations. This, I argue, produces a particular ocean, one with temporal and spatial multiplicity. The flow of mercury is gendered and racialized with women workers in Indonesia being primarily affected while women in the north are the recipients of methylmercury in the form of toxic fish. I engage with scientific research on mercury flows and methylmercury biogeochemical cycling, and draw on the work of Annemarie Mol on the body multiple, feminist research into epigenetics (Mansfield, Guthman, Landecker), and feminist environmental posthumanism (Alaimo, Neimanis). My argument seeks to disturb the singular and othered ocean in order to make way for the ocean multiple – a conception of the different forms of the oceanic produced through the athwart admixtures of the more-than-human (Helmreich, Probyn).

People commonly interact with terrestrial domestic animals, such as dogs and cats, horses, cattle and goats, and birds. Thereby individuals of different species form animal–human bonds. We are now forming relationships with ocean animals in increasingly common ways through growing human populations, advances in technology such as SCUBA, ocean mapping, underwater instrumentation and advances in aquatic animal husbandry. Octopuses and humans share quite distant evolutionary ties and yet share aspects of sensory ability and intelligence. Octopuses thereby pose interesting challenges and conundrums for understanding animal–human relationships. I consider several reasons to expect that the evolution of octopuses, and of animal cognition generally among active and visually sophisticated animals, will favour traits that support relationships between individuals. The evolutionary outcome of animals capable of forming inter-individual relationships may thus be expected in any evolving biota with organisms of this kind. This article explores the ability of ocean and terrestrial animals to relate to one another in ways that are reciprocal, if not equally balanced, and illustrates this with the examples of octopuses.

Robertina Šebjanič, a Ljubljana artist, describes in this text her research-based artworks dealing with cultural, (bio)political and ecological realities of human imprint on aquatic environments and its consequences and challenges. Based on Paul Celan’s quotation: ‘there are still songs to sing beyond mankind’, the author propose in this article to explore an odyssey of interspecies communication, a way of discovering parameters to restore a deep relationship within all of life and a key to better understanding of the earth’s environment. The Aurelia 1+Hz project is divided in two parts: the performance Aurelia 1+Hz / proto viva sonification looks into a new critical redefinition of social values and new attitude towards cohabitation of interspecies, while the installation Aurelia 1+Hz / proto viva generator deals with the biopolicy of prolonging life. In the project Aquatocene, the artist investigates the phenomenon of underwater noise pollution created by humankind in the seas and oceans. It encourages rethinking the human impact on the (under)water habitats.

Three times thrown into the wake of ocean incursions. Three times brutally awakened. A semi-fictional anthropologist stumbles in media res upon three different depths or decompression stops, of res in media: (a) at several thousand metres below sea level in a nuclear submarine; (b) at sea level on a fishing trawler; and, finally, (c) deep blue diving at night along a safety line guiding military rescue divers towards a sunken trawler. This is both an essay in individuation and an exploration of associated milieus, inspired by a body of work concerning social constructs of the sea, ocean biopolitics and the oceanization of thought. However, rather than building through theory, we chose to compose through storytelling and body experiment, using interviews and ethnographic materials we collected in 2016. Part dream state, part insomnia, part night work, the narrative deals with our increasingly industrialized mode of existence, affecting our sensory relations to ‘environments’ such as the ocean, but also our sleep and ‘attention’, and the relevance of the ‘anthropocene’ once at sea. Is there anything left of the ‘human’ or the ‘(s)cene’ (terrestrial paradigm) in the movements of the swell and the darkness of the deep?

This article presents a part of the ‘Field notebooks’ of the members of the International Multidisciplinary Thematic Network (RTPi) of CNRS ApoliMer (political anthropology of the sea), which focuses on the form of government of the sea, at the crossroads of the social sciences policy and natural sciences. Throughout the text, some of the ethnographic materials from the team’s fieldwork surveys are used to describe how ApoliMer tracks governance on marine and coastal lands in an interdisciplinary manner. This article is also an opportunity to expose the genesis and evolution of the RTPi, through the various ‘seasons’ of research that has marked its existence since its birth in 2013–2014.

This article imaginatively submerges the media theory of German scholar Friedrich Kittler into the ocean in order to show how the ocean changes how one might theorize computational media. Beginning with a description of XL Catlin Seaview Survey’s oceanic ‘Street View’, it plunges into several examples from Kittler’s own work that engage sound and the sea. I argue that natural media are always already co-present with digital media; and we have only recently and retrospectively been able to see natural media as media through the lens of analogous technical media for storage, transmission, and recording. The ocean leads to a more comprehensive account of the networked power of computational media and their contemporaneity with natural media. Attention to the role of environment in this way suggests a mischievous inversion of Kittler’s claim that ‘media determine our situation’. Perhaps the possibilities of our media are determined by the materiality of distinct environmental situations.

The growing scientific and societal concern about the effects of underwater sound on marine ecosystems has recently been recognized through the introduction of several international initiatives aimed at measuring the environmental impact of ocean noise on large spatial and temporal scales. From a regulatory perspective, the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive includes noise as one of 11 descriptors to determine Good Environmental Status of the oceans. The Directive specifically requires European Union (EU) Member States to provide a measure of annually averaged noise. The international program LIDO (Listening to the Deep-Ocean Environment) has developed a software package that measures sound levels and monitors acoustic sources in real-time on a global scale; this software is now operating to provide industry with an environmentally responsible approach. The system is currently operating worldwide from several wired and radio- or satellite-linked platforms. It includes the automatic identification of acoustic events (physical processes, biological sounds and artificial noise) and the measurement of noise contributions from anthropogenic sources. Continuous monitoring of background noise will indeed help us to understand whether long-term exposures to noise, in areas with intense shipping or seismic campaigns, for instance, might alter animal natural behaviour and may be used in the future to assess the effects of ocean noise on marine life.

This article examines representations of ocean waves in disaster and science fiction movies, reading these for what they can indicate about shifting ideological accounts of human–ocean relations. I track the technical conjuring of such on-screen waves – made using everything from scale model wave tanks to computer-generated imagery (CGI) – and explicate how these enable waves’ narrative purposes and effects. I argue that towering waves in film have operated as emblems of (a) the elemental power of cosmic, inhuman, arbitrary forces, (b) the return of the social-environmental repressed, and (c) the power and limits of cinematic media themselves. The most recent fantastical waves, rendered digitally, I suggest, now generate reflexive usages that underwrite either optimistic aesthetics of a nature crafted in partnership with humanity or ironic pessimism about human enterprise in the face of looming ecological disaster.