Page - 9 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

Die Schiffsreise als Übergangserfahrung in Migrationsprozessen Joachim Schlör Abstract The introduction to this volume, the first issue of the online journal Mobile culture Studies, can maybe best be summarized with the sentence: Recent research on Jewish migration meets ethnographic and anthropological research on mobility. The common denominator is the sea voyage, the common interest lies in the cultural practices of „people aboard ships“, and in the search for useful and contemporary theoretical and methodological approaches that – hopefully – allow us to study a wide variety of individual experiences and a large num- ber of relevant sources (from 19th century diaries written by female transatlantic travellers to contemporary interviews with „liveaboards“ on the Mediterranean Sea, from the travel notes of eminent anthropologists to documents relating to the current catastrophic situation of refugees) in the common perspective of Mobile culture Studies: The contributions bring into a dialogue van Gennep’s „Rites de Passage“ and foucault’s „heterotopia“, Turner’s „liminality“ and the new „(Jewish) Maritime Studies“, in a joint effort to understand how individuals and groups, in different temporal and geographical settings, experienced their sea voyages as a turning point in their lives and as an opportunity to reflect (and write or talk) about the meaning of these experiences between here and there, between past and future. Keywords sea voyage, migration, transition, liminality Mobile culture Studies. The Journal, Vol. 1 2015, 9-22 Open Access: content is licensed under cc BY 3.0