Page - 38 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

38 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Arnd Schneider | An anthropology of sea voyage 2000). In a further section, I complement this material with some recent interviews carried out in Saladillo, Province of Buenos Aires in November 2014. Whilst during my first fieldwork with Italian immigrants in 1988/89, I was able to still interview people who had come as very young children during the times of mass migration before WWI to Argentina, the recent inter- views are in terms of generation from the last that still came by boat to Argentina after WWII. We find here, albeit in different context, similar preoccupations of sea travel: the transitory nature of the travel, the projection towards the new, the uncertainty of travel itself, including shipwreck, and the material objects associated with travel. certainly, Malinowski’s insights from the kula ring, his own notes on sea travel in the posthumously published diary, or Lévi- Strauss’s shipboard notes cannot be applied directly to such material, but they nevertheless show the potentials to think through the migrant experience at sea. It remains fascinating to contem- plate what material early and mid-20th century anthropologists could have produced on sea travel if they had applied to it their ethnographic sensibilities and the newly invented method of participant observation. Both the surrealist writer and anthropologist Michel Leiris(1980, [1934]) 8 in his L’Afrique fantôme, the highly personal account in diary form of his travel with the french Dakar-Djibouti expedition 1931 – 1933 led by anthropologist Marcel Griaule, and Alfred Métreaux (who did fieldwork in South America, haiti and on Easter Island) in his posthumously published diary (1978), commented to some extent on their life on board at the beginning and end of prolonged fieldwork travel. During the research travel, Leiris even dreamt that the whole expedition party found itself on a sinking ship, but the ship turned out to be the building of his Paris flat (Leiris 1980: 86; diary entry for 1 August 1931). At another instance, when the Volpi with which he had arrived in Djibouti had just disappeared out of sight, he planned to write a fantastic ship story, in which the ship would be doomed by desaster (Leiris 1985: 365; diary entry for 11 January 1933). It is unfortunate that Malinowski did not keep a diary on his two –months return journey to Europe in 1920. 9 however, more examples by other anthropologists could surely be added, and future research would have to establish what possible diary entries, written onboard by early and mid-20th century anthropologists, could yield in terms of ethnographic and theoret- ical-analytic insight. 10 A glimpse of these more implicitly analytic possibilities can be garnered again from Lévi- Strauss ‘shipboard notes’ in Tristes Tropiques: “The passengers were preoccupied neither with our position, nor with the route we had to follow, nor with the nature of the countries which lay out of sight behind the horizon. It seemed to them that if they were shut up in a confined space, for a number of days that had been decided in advance, it was not because distance had to be covered but because they had to expiate the privilege of being carried from one side of the world to the other, without making themselves the smallest exertion. …Nowhere on the ship was there any visible sign 8 I am referencing the German editions of L’Afrique fantôme – to my knowledge; it has not yet been translated into English. for an early appreciation in English, see clifford (1988, respectively ch. 6), for a recent appraisal Debaene (2014). 9 Michael W. Young personal communication 12/06/2015, Grażyna Kubica, personal communication 17/06/2015. 10 for instance, Koch-Grünberg (2004: 23 -35) on his way to Brazil on a steamer at the turn of the century, leaves some extensive, and witty descriptions of life onboard.