Page - 31 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

Mobile culture Studies. The Journal, Vol. 1 2015, 31-52 Double blind reviewed article Open Access: content is licensed under cc BY 3.0 An anthropology of the sea voyage Prolegomena to an epistemology of transoceanic travel1 Arnd Schneider 1 fieldwork in Saladillo, Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina (see section III) was carried out in November 2014. I am grateful to the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo for a travel grant. Special thanks are due to Nélida cimino of the Sociedad Italiana de Saladillo who opened many doors for me, to Marcelo Pereyra and claudia Ana calcedo from the Museo y Archivo Histórico de Saladillo, and to filmmakers fabio Junco and Julio Midú who invited me to Saladillo in the first place. I am also grateful to Joachim Schlör for having invited me to contribute to this special journal issue, and for comments by two anonymous reviewers. Abstract This paper draws a distinction between an anthropology of the sea and an anthropo- logy as sea travel – using the latter as an epistemological window to understand immi- grants’ experiences of long-distance sea travel which have rarely been considered in the anthropology of immigrant societies. The paper reviews Bronislaw Malinowski’s own travel linked to some explorations of archetypical sea voyages among the Trobriand Islanders (Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1922). In a further step, the ‘shipboard notes’ of claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955) are used to consider what might have been gained if early and mid-20th century anthropologists had turned their ethnographic eye on ships, their crew and immigrants travelling on them. This paper then takes inspiration from early and mid-20th century anthropologists on sea voyages (not or only rarely related to immigrants’ travel), and applies insight from this to material from 20th century immigrants to Argentina. Though some of the empirical evidence has been published previously (Schneider 2000), it is here complemented with more recent material (from fieldwork in 2014), and interpreted in a new comparative and theoretical key. Keywords sea voyage, transoceanic travel, onboard ethnography, Argentina, epistemology