Chryssanthi Papadopoulou, Editor: The Culture of Ships and Maritime Narratives
- PDF / 153,340 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 26 Downloads / 245 Views
(0123456789().,-volV)(0123456789().,-volV)
BOOK REVIEW
Chryssanthi Papadopoulou, Editor: The Culture of Ships and Maritime Narratives Routledge, New York, 2019, 211 pp Joseph Flatman1 Accepted: 2 November 2020 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
This book stems from the 2014 Association of Social Anthropologists Conference panel ‘Humanity at Sea: Hybridity and Seafaring’. Priced at £40 for the paperback/electronic editions (£70 for the hardback), it is just within reach of private purchasers. It is an excellent, wide-ranging volume, deserving of readership by all those interested in maritime cultures and communities, be they archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, historians, philosophers or other. Pretty much anyone interested in the ‘maritime’ social sciences will get something out of this volume, and while ostensibly focused on the Mediterranean it reaches widely in both time and space. Two adjacent chapters give some sense of this range—Benjamin Bowles’ survey of life on the inland waterways of southeast England in chapter four moors neatly alongside Daniel Knight’s analyses of maritime myths in the Pindos Mountains of northern Greece in chapter five. As a reviewer, I have rarely enjoyed reading a new book so much, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. Papadopoulou’s introductory chapter on ship cosmology does an excellent job of the unenviable task in volumes of this type to frame the book’s structure and philosophical stance. Of particular value here is the blend of historical and modern-day realities, moving deftly between semi-mythical narratives of classical seafaring and modern-day concerns such as the challenges of twenty-first-century crew demographics. This brisk but unhurried review does the job of whetting our appetites for later chapters while framing our expectations as readers. The first main chapter is by Elena Maragoudaki, examining the life and work of boatbuilder Nikos Daroukakis around the seas surrounding the Greek island of Aegina in the Saronic Islands. As a microcosmic analysis of the distinctive culture of boatbuilders, this is one of the most effective that the reviewer has read: it gets under the skin of both the individual and also their role as representative of this wider cultural community while remaining respectful and is simply a very pleasing read. There is powerful dramatic contrast made in the next chapter, moving from a lone but never lonely individual building wooden boats the traditional way on a small island to the isolated & Joseph Flatman [email protected] 1
The National Trust, London, UK
123
Journal of Maritime Archaeology
narratives of a 24-person multinational crew on board a 110,000-ton, Greek-registered oil tanker cruising the world’s oceans. This is the frank reality of the twenty-first-century maritime profession: a Greek-registered tanker, working globally, with a Greek captain and majority of its officers and crew alongside mostly Filipino ratings; a lone Russian officer; and a smaller group of Romanian ratings. T
Data Loading...
