Commentary 11 to the Manifesto for the marine social sciences: culture and religion
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COMMENTARY
Commentary 11 to the Manifesto for the marine social sciences: culture and religion Annet P. Pauwelussen 1 Published online: 3 July 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Across the world, maritime and sea-oriented societies show an outstanding diversity of practices, cultural expressions, and spiritual values related to the sea. Besides the multiplicity of religious and cultural traditions linked to sea-based ways of life (McGoodwin 2001), diversity is also found in how the human-marine relationship takes multiple forms. Considering different marine cultures—including science cultures (Knorr-Cetina 1999)—this also involves basic notions of what the sea is and how it is known and valued. Exploring and understanding such diversity is one of the empirical pillars of a marine social science agenda, as it revolves around the fundamental question of how humans relate to the sea. Over the past decades, marine social science has approached this question predominantly through an instrumental lens, with a focus on fisheries. Other manifestations of the human-marine relationship such as wayfinding, affective encounters, or making knowledge and sense have been rather scattered throughout anthropological, geographical and affiliated literature (e.g., Brown and Peters 2018; Hayward 2010; Merchant 2011; Ota 2006; Pálsson 1994). Drawing a broader relationship between people and the sea, the Manifesto highlights (MMSS 1.1.6) the importance of “bringing to the fore the manifold realities of people and communities and their role in the production of knowledge and in coastal decision-making,” an essential step towards understanding the cultural and spiritual manifestations of humanmarine relations. But how? To be able to pursue this line of inquiry, two points need to be emphasized. The first is about epistemological and ontological diversity, the second about the land bias in social science.
* Annet P. Pauwelussen [email protected] 1
Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, Netherlands
Epistemological and ontological diversity Across coastal cultures and seafaring societies, anthropologists have encountered ways of understanding and ordering marine reality that challenge the western-secular frameworks on which marine social science is commonly based. For example, research among sea-based Bajau in Malaysia shows a cyclical and tidal ordering of time at odds with the linear time frame that underlies the notion of sustainability (Clifton and Majors 2012). Likewise, conceptions of marine space by seafaring societies may not map onto Euclidian geometry and cartographic visualization used in participatory mapping (Turnbull 2007). Moreover, indigenous conceptions of the sea as a social assemblage of beings contrast with the modern idea of the natural and the social as distinct realms (Lowe 2006; Zerner 2003). Such discrepancies affect collaboration in management and conservation outreach (Pauwelussen and Verschoor 2017; Verschuuren et al. 2015). While diversity may be explained as the existence of different perspectives on m
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