Page - 47 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Arnd Schneider | An anthropology of sea voyage 47 ness in Argentina. In each single case the liminal and transitory experience on the ship (which seemingly follows its own historic time), is somehow suspended from events at the points (or rather ports) of departure and arrival, bearing already the seeds of the futures yet to be realized (or remaining unrealized) by the immigrants in transit. Thus one of the most interesting themes to appear from the immigrants’ accounts is that of the multiply fractured movements of time. Like stoppages on a railway network13 each life history is linked up to the whole of the migration network, but also individually represents a set of both realized and unrealized possibilities of human action. The journey to reach the des- tination was normally split up between the segments of coming from the home (village) to the port of embarkation (Naples or Genoa, in the case of the Italian immigrants), the sea voyage itself, and disembarkation in Buenos Aires. But other times of expectation and promise were also involved, for example, through marriages by proxy. Migration was often a business of sin- gle men, who later would arrange for a marriage with a woman from their home town. These marriages were carried out at a distance, with a wedding ceremony (where a male relative of the bride would accompany her to the altar) carried out first in the home town, and a second one performed in Argentina, after arrival. The idea of ships as sites with their own temporary order, as ‘nomadic wanderers through time’ as Michael Taussig (2006: 109) calls them, in fact as a temporal state in-between (for the duration of the travel), comes powerfully to the fore in the following account. hayrabet Alacahan, born 1950, now a historian of cinema, organizer of film festivals and director of the cine/video library and screening space cineteca Vida in Buenos Aires, grew up in Istanbul of Armenian origin and came to Argentina in 1970 on the MS Augustus from Genoa. When I interviewed him November 2014 in Saladillo where he was attending a film festival, he spoke about his enormous desire for the new and the unknown. he had travelled through Europe, and joined some french young women on the train but then left them and found himself in Genoa, where he bought a ticket for the equivalent of $300 (‘much cheaper than a plane ticket’). Not one day was boring, in his own words the trip ‘awakened in me the curiosity towards the new’ and ‘I wished that the trip wouldn’t end’. 3000 people travelled on the MS Augustus (the sister ship of the Giulio Cesare – both important ocean liners on the South America route after WWII). he deepened his love for the cinema and watched seventeen movies, and most importantly, made friends with his cabin mates, including an Italian and a German, who not only became a close-knit community for the time of the travel but with whom he would stay in touch for many years to come. What for Domenico Donatello (featured in section II) had been the observation of a shipwreck at a distance, for hayrabet Alacahan became the simulation of the event, when the crew and passengers had to exercise for the case of emergency. Perhaps the most powerful enigmatic, but also poetic images are those from the accounts which encapsulate the experiences of children: the view of another, mysterious maritime world through the lower deck porthole, the glimpse into an unknown world of amusements and riches when peeping into the first class restaurant and ballroom on the upper deck (which could stand proverbially for the image of an Argentina still to come but never met in this form – as a country of infinite goods, food, and wealth). Add to this the girl lost or left behind, and who 13 for another extended use of the notion of stoppages (expanding on the artist Marcel Duchamp), see Gell (1998: 246), also more generally, Gell (1992).