Abstract
Weighing anchor from the Indian Ocean and taking a cue from concepts of emergence, this paper proposes something called “sea/knowledge”: the conjunction of the primordial physical and the abstract. When an elderly Gujarati sailor says, “Ah, I know London! And Liverpool. I am a sailor,” he speaks of the fruits of intangible networks, of what the sea brings. Navigation – knowing where we are – is central to knowing who we are; but it is difficult. Voyaging, from the mythological to today’s containerized global trading, has always taken men and women to the borders of knowledge, conscious and unconscious. This paper, referencing, among others, CG Jung, Rachel Carson, Javed Diamond and Rose George, sketches temporal, spatial and emotional contexts in the attempt to plumb sea/knowledge.
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- 1.
Edward Simpson, in his 2008 essay “Sailors that do not sail”, warned against “theoretical contributions made by historians” that have promoted ideas of the Indian Ocean region as the “cradle of globalisation” and a zone of “moving spaces”; concepts, he argued, that blot out ethnographic detail of the region, in which “connections at the human level (…) are rather more limited and mundane” (Simpson 2008, pp. 90–91).
- 2.
“Gujarat and the Sea ” was hosted by Darshak Itihas Nidhi and held in Mandvi, 1–3 October 2010.
- 3.
For a useful explanation of this, see http://www.human-memory.net/brain_neurons.html.
- 4.
- 5.
International Maritime Organization, see https://business.un.org/en/entities/13.
- 6.
This was widely misreported as the world’s seventh largest shipping company; see International Chamber of Shipping latest stats (2014). http://www.ics-shipping.org/shipping-facts/shipping-and-world-trade/top-20-containership-operators.
- 7.
See The Journal of Commerce report, http://www.joc.com/special-topics/hanjin-shipping-bankruptcy.
- 8.
International Chamber of Shipping, Manpower Report 2015: estimated average operational manning levels for the largest containerships, of 100,001 gross tonnage or more; information confirmed to writer by George Charalampidis of International Chamber of Shipping, January 2017.
- 9.
“Ipsa scientia potestas est” (“knowledge itself is power”), wrote Sir Francis Bacon in Meditationes Sacrae (1597).
- 10.
A practice amusingly raised by Herman Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, in Moby-Dick (Melville 1851, p. 94).
- 11.
The oldest recovered fragments of the tale date from 1900 BCE, but its origins are almost certainly from the third millennium BCE; BBC Radio 4, In Our Time, 3 November 2016, with Andrew George, Professor of Babylonian at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b080wbrq.
- 12.
Plato (c. 428–347 BCE), Meno, 80d, quoted in Day (1993).
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Bancroft, S. (2019). Places We Can Go: Some Notes on Sea/Knowledge. In: Keller, S. (eds) Knowledge and the Indian Ocean. Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96839-1_2
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