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Ocean Narratives: Fluxes of Commodities Across the Pacific in the Contemporary Age

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East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies

Abstract

In recent years, studies on the impact of flows of scientific knowledge have been revitalized in a very important way. These studies pay attention to the formation of sea narratives of knowledge between Asia and America as a space of encountering. They have focused on the impact of colonization models on the territories of the Global South and ways of occupation and territorial annexation with a biopolitical dimension. This chapter explores three themes. The first covers the field of environmental history, the flows of animals, plants, and scientific knowledge between Asia and America, while touching on intersectional research between biological flows and gender. The second theme tackles the extraction of commodities toward the study of an emergent investigation in the field of environmental history: oceans as a place of exchange of biological flows. For this perspective attention is paid to two commodities in the Asian and American context, converted into exchange goods in the world economy (following Wallerstein): whales and turtles. Finally, the third theme, by means of a quantitative and qualitative information extraction methodology, prepares a baseline for the extraction of these resources based on the Material and Energy Flow Accounting (IFF Vienna) methodology, selected from two laboratories, one in Mexico (Baja California Sur) and one in China (Guangdong Province).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Coloniality could be understood as the result of unequal, racial and social appropriation of lands, bodies, and knowledges along the modern or contemporary age, driven to increase the ecological unbalance and debt from the North to the South, as result of a looting economy promoted by imperial forces to reinforce the world economy system with “cheap nature.”

  2. 2.

    Up to the 2000s, the volume of shark production in the Gulf of California was a total of 21,107 tons, while the production of dogfish only reached 2441 tons, that is, in comparison, only 20% of the shark production (Domínguez and Tiburcio 2020).

  3. 3.

    The Chinese word bu (sometimes transliterated as pu) means “strengthening supplementing, patching up” (Anderson 1988, 235).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Antonio Ortega Santos

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  1. Antonio Ortega Santos
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  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Chiara Olivieri

  2. CEAA, El Colegio de México, Mexico City, Mexico

    Jordi Serrano-Muñoz

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Santos, A.O. (2022). Ocean Narratives: Fluxes of Commodities Across the Pacific in the Contemporary Age. In: Olivieri, C., Serrano-Muñoz, J. (eds) East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies. Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74528-8_4

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