Program: Session VI
Session VI
Wed. 30 September
15:30–17:00
Ruuma (Linnanpuomi, ground floor)
Chair: Robert Louhimies
Jasmine Aavaranta (Åbo Akademi University)
Mermaiding as a Form of Ocean Advocacy
This work paper presents the cultural practice of mermaiding, a fast growing subculture in which adults embody aquatic mythical beings such as mermaids, sirens and selkies while freediving in fishlike tails. I claim that mermaiding functions as a form of ocean advocacy, where participants actively engage in embodying more-than-human water beings in order to create affective reengagement and action around saving waterworlds. While at times dismissed as escapism or superficial social media aesthetics, the study approaches mermaiding as a community where participants actively experiment with alternative ways of relating to the natural world.
Drawing on my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork which includes participant observation, interviews, and walk-alongs, the guiding question centers how mermaiding operates as a form of serious play through which participants enact reenchantment and explore alternative relations to between human and more-than-human waterworlds.
Theoretically the analysis centers around theories of play and imagination, conceptualising mermaiding as a form of embodied play through which participants temporarily suspend everyday cartesian categories and ontologies. In this sense, the practice is understood not merely as representation, but as a form of world-making in which boundaries between human and more-than-human become fluid and possible to renegotiate. By grounding abstract posthumanist discussions of more-than-human ontologies and environmental relations in embodied and expressive contemporary practices, this paper contributes to understandings of how play can function as sites of re-enchantment and possible existential meaning making
in late modern society.
Arwen Rosenberg-Meereboer (Åbo Akademi University)
The Sea as a Haunted House
In Specters of Marx, Jaques Derrida introduces the concept of hauntology. Hauntology always lies underneath onthology. Hauntology according to Derrida is the work of mourning. Mourning for Derrida is a process of faithful infidelity, taking someone with you into the future, while knowing you can never fully do justice to the wholeness of the other.
The sea is both full of life and also an extremely inhospitable place for humans. The sea now is one of the main topics of environmental anxiety. The death of coral reefs and the expanding islands of plastic, as well as the depletion of biodiversity are a measurement of human impact on the environment. The death of the sea haunts our environmental discourse. In this talk I will examine the ways the sea and the monsters and death it contains impact our discussions on environmental conservation.
Emilia Syväsalmi (independent researcher and teacher)
Wondering the Depths: Experiences of the Sea and Whales on 19th-Century Whaling Ships
How does a prolonged residence on a ship affect one’s perceptions of the sea and its inhabitants? “Into the deep” was a common phrase used by whaling captain’s wives who were travelling with their husbands on the 19th century US whaling ships. Wives wrote about the sea as an environment, but it was also a place. Each day, they observed the sea and described how it looked; sometimes as smooth as molten glass, other times rising into gigantic waves full of fury.
Whaling ships ventured out solely for whales which were often referred as “the monster of the deep”. When pursued, the whales disappeared into the depths. They broke harpoon ropes, prompting men to question the sea’s true depth and the creatures within it.
Religious women who had been raised in eastern US coastal towns viewed the sea and its creatures as God’s creation. Women often wrote how everything in the deep must be wonderful, because they are the works of God.
The depth was also considered a frightening element. For the seamen the death at sea was considered a horrible accident, because they would be buried into the waves. When their body was committed to the deep, all were present on deck. Shipboard funerals unified everyone in grief, regardless of age or nationality.
Captains’ wives recorded in their journals the daily life aboard whaling ships, detailing how every part of their life depended on the surrounding waters. This presentation examines how the wives portray the sea as an environment and whales as deep-sea monsters in their journals.