IMMERSION: WHERE THE ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC MEET

Hélène Artaud

(La Découverte, 336 pages, 2023)

As an unprecedented climate crisis emerges around maritime issues, the sea is more than ever at the center of human affairs. Western recognition of the fragility of the oceans has lagged behind its ecological awareness of terrestrial environments. Through this captivating book on the collective representations of the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, the maritime anthropologist Hélène Artaud confronts our views on these two oceanic spaces which, respectively, separate the Old World from the New World, and the two Americas from Asia and Oceania. More fundamentally, she questions the depth and radicality of what she has termed the “oceanic turn.”

The Western perspective of the Atlantic has long imagined the ocean as a hostile, irremediably wild environment, fraught with fear, driven by ​​conquest, struggle, and exploitation, and mediated by an array of increasingly sophisticated technologies. When the first Western explorers arrived in the Pacific islands, they wondered how the native populations moved thousands of miles, from island to island, without map, compass, or astrolabe. What they encountered was an opposite paradigm, a Pacific vision that saw the ocean not as a hostile world but rather as an open connective space. The sensory maps of Pacific islanders depended on pathways where schools of fish, flocks of birds, wave formations, and the colors of the sea served as landmarks.

By weaving in a wealth of historical and ethnographic sources, Artaud shows how these perspectives are interrelated. She revisits at length the mapmaking collaboration between English explorer Captain James Cook and Polynesian navigator Tupaia in the eighteenth century as “a founding moment of intellectual encounter.” Her main intent is to illuminate the little-studied history of what she calls “transported affective seascape” that is the exportation of Atlantic environmental perceptions closely tied to colonial expansion. She dismantles the biases that have long dominated the field of African maritime history and the thesis of an “Africa turned away from the sea.” She also describes the complex strategies that reinforced, framed, and consciously stirred up the fear of the sea in French overseas colonies such as Réunion island.

She concludes by turning to the evolution of contemporary attitudes toward the oceans: increased empathy for certain marine species, technological prowess, and ecological fear. Elegantly written, Immersion compellingly associates, in an unprecedented way, postcolonial studies with the anthropology of nature.

Hélène Artaud is an anthropologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. She explores the ways in which humans interact with the maritime environment. Her writings include Poïétique des flots. Une anthropologie sensible de la mer dans le banc d’Arguin (Mauritanie) (PETRA, 2018), and she co-edited the collective work The Sea Within: Marine Tenure and Cosmopolitical Debates (IWGIA, 2017).