Page - 48 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

48 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Arnd Schneider | An anthropology of sea voyage standing in front of a shop window staring at a doll, sees inevitably also her own mirror image; or the more austere image of the boy observing the black kids diving for money in Dakar in 1906 (Enrique Gerardi in section II) – then these images – not unlike Walter Benjamin’s ‘dia- lectical image’ (Benjamin 1968: 255) or in film theory, Gilles Deleuze’s ‘crystal image’ (Deleuze 2013: 72)14 conjure up the complex temporal spatialities or spatial temporalities of future’s poten- tials and past’s possibilities now unobtainable (just as the contents of the travel trunk now left unopened (Nélida cimino above) which are intrinsic to these immigrant experiences and their sea voyages. Just as Malinowski’s sea voyage to the antipodes ushered forth the possibility of fieldwork, and Lévi-Strauss’s first transatlantic travel brought for him the possibility of direct encounters in indigenous South America, so too the immigrants’ voyages, belonging to same age of massive sea travel, implied the multiple possibilities for the realization of future projects, or cutting off a past life (with its unrealized projects). IV I opened this essay with a reflection of anthropological researches of sea travel as well as the anthropology as sea travel. It is clear that the ship, and here the transoceanic ocean liner used by immigrants, would lend itself to ethnographic observation, since it is – in spatial terms – a restricted and well circumscribed space similar to the seemingly ‘closed’ tribal, village, and island societies once in favour (and thus constructed as research subjects) by anthropologists for a better part of the 20th century. Whilst we can speculate (and have by way of conjecture and juxtaposition in this paper) about the (unrealized) potentials if early anthropologists, contem- porary to the experience of mass migration, had turned their ethnographic eye on the ships, the crew and their passengers, now an ethnography of the immigrants’ sea voyages is only possible in retrospect, as a kind of narratively situated oral history, not as participant observa- tion. What such an ethnography could yield has however been put into relief by ethnographies of contemporary transoceanic seafaring, not of passenger ships, but of modern cargo ships (e. g. Aubert 1965, Weibust 1969, Karjalainen 2007, Sampson 2013). here the picture emerges on the one hand of a ship as a total institution, closed off and with clear hierarchies of its own (cf. Karjalainen 2007) – a fact that also did not escape Lévi-Strauss (see the first vignette from his ‘seaboard notes’ in section I) –, and on the other hand of transnational and global communi- ties of workers (Markkula 2011, Sampson 2013). Yet it is also a world completely different from that of passengers on previous passenger ships, as kinship and marriage do not play a part for the crew on board, but belong to life on land (Karjalainen 2007). This is evidently different to passengers who can be married already and travel with their spouse, or are unmarried and find a new partner on the ship(as the story told about Stefania Devoto in section II). Women might also travel precisely to join a husband who had emigrated before them, and whom they had married by proxy before departure (Annunciata Peppe in section III). Whereas for the crew the travel on the ship means work, and despite the overall connotation of this work with a certain notion of unbound ‘freedom’ (Karjalainen 2007), for passengers on transoceanic liners 14 I have been inspired to use these concepts here by the writings of Michael Taussig (for Benjamin, for instance, Taussig 2006) and Bruce Kapferer (for Deleuze, for instance Kapferer 2013), two anthropologists who have wor- ked in extenso with the two philosophers.