Seite - 42 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 1/2015

42 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Arnd Schneider | An anthropology of sea voyage In the second life history of Domenico Donatello, we find a melancholic and nostalgic music lover, son of an anarchist father whose life he was living once more in a kind of quiet rebellion. here the sea travel marks on the one hand the break-away from the old, a restless life- style as a young man taking on jobs in several European countries in the crisis-ridden twenties (Schneider 2000: 127-134), but it also includes, recounted with melancholic sensibilities a singu- lar, and tragic event, the sinking of the Principessa Mafalda. Set in the first half of the life-his- tory, on a deeper level the event points to the vagaries of sea travel, and the implied possibility of failure, or disaster. Sea travel with its imponderability, and of course, shipwreck in particular, are metaphors for a life’s journey; but specifically the contemplation (or even witnessing of ship- wreck) from safety has been taken as a metaphor for existence (famously by philosopher hans Blumenberg, 1996). It is exactly this view from safety which characterizes Domenico Donatel- lo’s description of the event, but also his later withdrawn attitude to life. In the third account, the sea voyage represents the primordial flight from oppression and beginning of a new life, further heightened by the fairy-tale like encounter on the ship with the future husband. here the voyage not only is a rupture with a previous life (although much later Stefania Devoto reconciled with her relatives, and they also emigrate to Argentina), but migration becomes a means of empowerment, and the voyage signifies also one great movement towards the new, and a reflection of the single determination of a woman, who later (after her husband’s death) would lead the family business in Buenos Aires. III The cruel factuality of passing time and inexorable historical change presents itself immediately when doing ethnographic research now with those having still first-hand experience of tran- soceanic sea travel to Argentina. Unlike in 1988/89, it is now impossible to find anybody who had arrived before WWI, even as a child, and very few who had come between the wars. The last generation of European immigrants to Argentina is now in their 70s and older. Most of them form part of a last wave of immigration after WWII attracted by the initially good eco- nomic fortunes of the Peronist governments (up until 1955). Since then European migration to Argentina has been more sporadic, and by the mid-1970s more people migrated from Argentina to Europe than newcomers were arriving. Sea travel, not fundamentally changed from earlier parts of the 20th century, still characterized this last wave. Some of this immigration was chan- neled through Peronist immigration programmes, and ships were met at port by officials from a United Nations agency, the Intergovernmental committee for Migration (Schneider 2000: 97, 101). A retired cIM official (who had worked for the agency from 1953 to 1961) described the procedure to me in 1989: “ (…) The Italian immigrant who had family in Italy – and who after World War II might not have seen them for 20 years – came to us. We filled in forms, taking details of the composition of the family, and gave a list of those relatives the immigrant wanted to bring from Italy, to Argentine Immigration Bureau (Dirección de Migraciones). They issued a passenger list and sent the documentation to the cIM headquarters in Geneva and to the Argentine Immigration Offices (DAIE) in Europe. Before embarkation, the immigrants were examined by doctors. When the departure was fixed, we received a list of passengers –