Siren call of the sea: disenchantment and estrangement of seafarers

In cultural studies, as in the social sciences, the sea and the ships that travel upon it have often been used as metaphors for conceptualizing various social, economic, political, and cultural processes, such as globalization, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Yet, the sea and ships are more than just metaphors–they are actual material and empirical objects central to the very processes that their metaphorical imagery depicts. This special issue on ‘cultures of water’ invites us to reflect on the transformations of small-scale local communities, whose cultures, lifestyles, and traditions are intimately entangled with different bodies of water. With my contribution, I make a prepositional leap from ‘cultures of water’ to ‘cultures on water’, as the community I work with lives not by the water, or even off the water, but on it–or, rather, on ships at sea. Drawing on long-term, ethnographic research carried out onboard cargo ships of various types, flags, and with seafarers of many different nationalities, I argue that while the sea is the seafarers’ work environment writ large, their more immediate and significant work environment is not the sea itself but instead their ships and crews. Nevertheless, the particular and unique conditions of the sea as the larger environment in which their work takes place fundamentally shape nearly every aspect of their lives. In switching from of/f to on then, I highlight that, rather than constituting a specific relationship of intimacy and connection with the sea itself, the particular condition of living on ships at sea shapes seafarers’ intimate relationships and connections with the social worlds of which they are part, whether at sea or at home. This condition produces multiple meanings and complex, contradictory, and shifting relations of intimacy and estrangement, connection and separation, and isolation and togetherness between seafarers and various people, places, and practices.