The abandoned seafarer: Networks of care and capture in the global shipping economy

ABSTRACT

Despite its importance, life at sea, as well as the labour of those who toil in these waters, often remains murky to those on land. Based on ethnographic research onboard cargo ships and ashore at Mission to Seafarers (MtS) and other seafarer clubs this essay emphasizes the centrality of care and capture in shaping the global shipping economy. Drawing insights from an anthropological archive of capture, this essay highlight the multi-faceted ways in which care and capture define maritime labour on land and sea and where the ultimate form of captivity is abandonment.     

On the aesthetics of captivity

ABSTRACT

An anthropology of captivity can theorize beyond the brute reality of enclosures by assessing the aesthetics that contribute to the imprisonment of people. Drawing on Gernot Böhme’s philosophy of atmosphere, this essay engages the carefully curated front offices of Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres in Guatemala City.     

Colonization, kidnap and confinement in the Andamans penal colony, 1771–1864

This paper explores practices of kidnap and confinement in the Andamans penal colony, for the period 1771-1864. It argues that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries indigenous captivity was key to successful colonization. The British kidnapped islanders in an effort to educate them about the supposed benefits of colonial settlement, and in the hope that they would become their cultural advocates. The paper shows also that the close observations that accompanied the confinement of islanders informed global discussions about ‘race’ and ‘origin’, so that the Islands were brought into a larger global frame of understanding around indigenous - settler contact. The paper draws out some of the complexities and specificities of the colonial encounter in the Andamans. It argues that with respect to sexual violence, there was a significant gender dimension to colonization and confinement. Finally, it suggests that in a settlement comprising a penal colony and its associated infrastructure (and no free settlement) there were no straightforward distinctions between ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’. Rather, there were significant overlaps between the treatment and experiences of convicts and islanders, and these expressed something of the inherent ambiguities of the penal colonization of the Andamans itself.