Seite - 25 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 1/2015

25Mobile culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Joachim Schlör | The sea voyage as a transitory experience (with Gerald Lamprecht) a workshop on this topic and to invite a number of colleagues to pre- sent their research. Thus the focus widened considerably, including papers on migration from Poland (Elisabeth Janik) and to Argentina (Philipp Mettauer). The call for Papers for this issue produced – fortunately, I think – an even wider perspective on the topic: with contributions on sea voyage experiences by noted anthropologists (Arnd Schneider), on 19th century sources that document the transatlantic crossings of German female travellers (Ursula feldkamp) and of Swiss emigrants from Appenzell (Sabine August), but also on mediated representations in graphic novels and films (Anja fuchs, Robin Klengel), on the lifestyle of „liveaboards“ on the Mediterranean Sea (Nataša Rogelja), and on the current situation of refugees between Turkey and Greece (Estela Schindel). „The current situation“ is, obviously, a euphemism. The Mediterranean Sea today is the theatre of a profound tragedy. Refugees from the African continent try desperately to reach the coasts of Europe, in Lampedusa or in Malta, hoping for the security and the freedom that is – or has been? – the promise of Europe. caught in the in-between-ness of political unrest in their home countries, the criminal activities of smugglers, and the tightened security measures of the „fortress Europe“, migrants face death, detention, and deportation. There is no time for them to reflect on their experiences or to make notes. One might even think that political activism in support of the refugees would be more urgently required of us today than academic research. On the other hand, ethnographical and anthropoloical research on migrants‘ experiences does already take place, in the context of Border Studies or Diaspora Studies, and it may well be that the „situation“ (including the images we are confronted with daily) challenges, indeed forces us to re-think and re-conceptualize our ideas about ships, about voyages, and about mobi- lity in general. In her comments on the papers delivered during the Graz workshop in June 2014, Johanna Rolshoven offered a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches for an understanding of both the historical and the contemporary „situations“: of people finding themselves aboard ships from an old home to a new one.3 What Todd Presner has required of „mobility studies”, not only in the context of Jewish Studies – „an attention to moving bodies, an emplotment of the places traversed, and a visua- lization of narratives of dislocation, encounter, and dispersal” 4 –, can be made useful in our example when theoretical deliberations on the production (Lefebvre) and construction of space are discussed with regard to, and in respect of, the individual experiences of migrants; when observations of the material culture (the ship) are brought into a dialogue with personal reflec- tions about the meaning of the passage for those who travelled across the oceans; in short, when the passage itself (van Gennep) and the systems related to it (Urry) acquire a human face. Notions such as „liminality“ (Turner), „threshold“, or „moratorium“, are all tentative approaches to an understanding of the spatial and temporal in-between-ness which sea voyages symbolically represent. Leaving and arriving, looking back and looking forward, making travel arrangements relating to countries – and states of mind – „here“ and „there“, expressing feelings 3 Rolshoven, Johanna. [2014]. Die Schiffsreise als Übergang. Gedanken zur Heuristik des gesellschaftlichen Zwi- schenraumes. commentary for the attention of the workshop audience „Schiffsreise“, Graz, June 2014, Zentrum für Jüdische Studien, Institut für Volkskunde und Kulturanthropologie, KfU Graz. E-mail sent to the partici- pants on 2014-06-26. 4 Ibid. Presner, Todd. 2009. ‘Remapping German-Jewish Studies: Benjamin, cartography, Modernity’, German Quarterly 82, no. 3 (summer 2009), p. 298.