Page - 33 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Arnd Schneider | An anthropology of sea voyage 33 Trobriand Islanders by Bronislaw Malinowski (Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1922), one of the emblematic founding figures of modern anthropology. This is set against Malinowski’s methodology of extensive fieldwork, the future signature practice of anthropology, and in fact the result of sea travel at the outbreak of WWI which suddenly became a voyage of uncertain return. Thus in anthropology the trope of sea travel is intricately bound up with the development of the discipline and its new standard method of ethnographic fieldwork, i. e. the long-term immersion into another culture, involving participant observation. In a famous passage, Malinowski writes: “Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight. Since you take abode in the compound of some neighbouring white man, trader or missionary, you have nothing to do, but to start at once your ethnographic work. Imagine further that you are a beginner, without previous experience, with nothing to guide you and no one to help you. for the white man is temporarily absent, or else unable to waste time on you. This exactly describes my first initiation into field work on the south coast of New Guinea. ” (Malinowski 1992[1922]: 4) The scenographic, indeed cinematic qualities of this passage are immediately apparent (and have been commented upon; Marcus 2010: 88), as is the sense of abandon, separation and dislo- cation inherent in and resulting from sea voyages. for the anthropologist, as an important rite of passage, this physical separation was (and for some still is) the precondition of the cultural separation and distance deemed necessary to achieve the cultural understanding of others, but it has been also much criticized since anthropology’s hermeneutic turn and writing culture critique of the 1980s (clifford/Marcus 1986). Ethnographic fieldwork required for its eventual mise-en-scène (Marcus 2010) severing the ties that still connected the ethnographer to his or her own recent sea voyages, the ultimate purpose of which was arrival in the field. The last leg of these voyages was done in Malinowski’s case with a small craft – see the above quote – and was preceded by shorter connecting travels, and of course the transoceanic voyage itself. But fieldwork for its successful closure also needed the return trip – another essential step in the rites of passage, now re-transiting once more into the ‘civilized’ world of learning and academia. however, bringing the results back to that world and analyzing them was not only achieved in the private study or university offices in London, but also through further dislocations, involv- ing (then) again sea travel, such as Malinowski’s writing up period on Tenerife in 1920/21 (cf Malinowski 1992[1922]: xvii, firth 1957: 3-4, Wayne 1985: 535 ). Significantly, for Malinowski the outbound trip to the Antipodes was not only a means to an end to arrive at the British Association meeting in Australia and to do fieldwork in the British part of Papua New Guinea (Young 2004: 245-46, 264-269, 289-292); it also confirmed him in his vocation for a scientifically grounded anthropology. The sea voyage and its conclu- sion was literally a watershed in his career, demarcating and putting into relief his philosoph- ical convictions in contradistinction to his close friend, the Polish avant-garde artist Stanislaw Witkiewicz, who had accompanied him on the trip and with whom he briefly toured ceylon (taking also photographs, which unfortunately don’t survive). Immediately after this trip Mal-