Page - 49 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Arnd Schneider | An anthropology of sea voyage 49 the travel itself in most cases has no other purpose than to reach the destination (the idleness Annunciata Peppe mentions above), and only in a few instances it is turned into something else which will have a lasting effect on life after ‘transit’, such as Stefania Devoto getting engaged to her future husband, or hayrabet Alacahan forming a group of close friends, and cultivating his love for the cinema Whilst periodes of idleness and the purpose to reach a destination also char- acterize anthropologists’ long-distance sea travel, the prolonged travel times play an important part in forming ideas in relation to research left behind or lying ahead, and the time on board is also used to read and writing first drafts for publication, for the most part, in the immigrants’ accounts of sea travel relatively little is said further beyond the immediate surroundings of their life on board; the perspective remains centred on the self and its experiences – this is perhaps not unsurprising given the dramatic and existen- tial nature of this type of travel. for almost all of them it is the first time on a large passenger ship, and even though they might later repeat the journey –this first overseas journey, includ- ing novel experiences with port cities and their control regimes of migration at dis/embarka- tion, remains the decisive turning point, or rupture, in their lives. With the anthropologists, descriptions include more views and reflections of others and things on board, and outside, and beyond the immediate surroundings – it seems that the view widens beyond the immediate self – although with Malinowski in particular, there is also a great deal of psychological self- inspection (cf. Young 2004). Whilst the accounts of the immigrants in retrospect are more like an inverse telescope focusing just on the immediate details of travel, for Malinowski and Lévi- Strauss, other people, the landscapes, and the sky, also come into view. This paper has been somewhat experimental in that it used early and mid-20th century accounts by anthropologists of their sea travel to contemplate, like an epistemological window which remains impossible in its empirical historical application but employed here as a heu- ristic device, a retrospective ethnography of immigrants on passenger ships in the age of mass migration. Whilst such an ‘ethnography’ remains an impossibility of the past, the potential ethnographic eye (Leiris 1930, Grimshaw 2001) or gaze these anthropological accounts from the age of high modernity entail, could become an important epistemological tool ‘on board’ when juxtaposed with immigrants’ empirical testimony, as indeed for research with contemporary seafarers and maritime immigrants. References Acheson, James M. 1981. ‘Anthropology of fishing’, Annual Reviews in Anthropology, 10, pp. 275-316 Angé, Olivia and David Berliner (eds. ). 2014 . Anthropology and Nostalgia (Oxford: Berghahn) Aubert, Vihelm and Arner Odvar. 1958. ‘On the Social Structure of the Ship’, Acta Sociologica, 3, pp. 200-219. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of history’, Illuminations, edited and with an introduction by hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken) Blount, Ben B. 2005. ‘Small-Scale fisheries in the contemporary World: Adaptation and Management’, Reviews in Anthropology, 34, pp. 1-19