Seite - 35 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 1/2015

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Arnd Schneider | An anthropology of sea voyage 35 to his biographer was no stranger to superstition for impending sea travel (Young 2004:537). for instance, when travelling back to Port Moresby (Papua New Guinea) from the island of Mailu, his ship gets stuck on a coral reef; Malinowski is afraid of losing his field materials, and has a ‘hysterical fear’ of shipwreck (Young 2004: 353, Malinowski 1967: 75). The loss of field materi- als is of course one of the anthropologist’s worst nightmares, and the anthropologist Gunnar Landtman, for example, paid a diver to retrieve them (Landtman 1927: ix). Whilst on the whole (but vide the Titanic and other maritime disasters), transoceanic sea travel in steamships was considered safer than that on the small indigenous crafts and outriggers of Trobriand islanders, WWI with its increased dangers also for passenger and merchant ships clearly added uncer- tainty to such travel, acknowledged in Malinowski’s diary (1967: 199), which also reveals his bouts of seasickness (Young 2004: 342), and other apprehensions of sea travel. Malinowski is acutely aware of the special qualities of sea travel and evokes them, for instance, in powerful descriptions of the ship leaving port or arriving, or the changing land- scapes and coastlines, slowly receding or approaching. “There was a lovely green sea, but I could not see the full sweep of the [Great Barrier] Reef. Many little islands along the way. Would have wanted to learn the principles of navigation, but feared the captain. Marvelous moonlit nights. (…) We left Brisbane Saturday, 9. 5. 14, arrived cairns Wendesday, … The bay was lovely seen in the morning half-light – high mountains on both sides; the bay cuts deep into a broad valley. The land was flat at the foot of the mountains; at the end of the bay, thick mangrove forests. Mounts in fog; sheets of rain kept moving down the slopes into the valley and out to the sea. ” (Malinowski 1967: 5-6). for Malinowski, sea travel is a means to an end, either as long-distance transoceanic travel to reach a final destination, travel between the islands of Melanesia, or in a number of shorter trips in coastal waters on small boats to do research in the Trobriand islands. On the whole, and apart from a few recorded instances in his diaries, and despite his intense friendship with the artist-writer Witkiewicz who accompanied him, life on board of passenger ships is not worthy of ethnographic description or anthropological analysis. A generation later, another towering figure of 20th century anthropology, claude Lévi- Strauss, undertakes several memorable sea voyages, two of which have been immortalized in particular detail in his famous Tristes Tropiques (1955): one to take up a position in Sociology at the University of São Paulo in 1935, the other his flight of refuge to New York in 1941 from persecution in Nazi-occupied france and certain deportation to a concentration camp. Tristes Tropiques is the swan song on any romantic possibility of travel to the exotic other, and a con- current indictment of the spread of Western civilization – what today we would call globaliza- tion. Written in retrospect of these travels and published in 1955, Tristes Tropiques rationalizes sea travel, provides acute depictions of life on board, and offers philosophical reflection on the forever changed status of (sea) travel in the dawning age of massive air travel and a world of shrinking distances and increasing cultural homogenization (a topic Lévi-Strauss famously addressed in his essay ‘Race and history’ in Structural Anthropology 2, Lévi-Strauss 1973: 358-59).