Sailing and insight reproduction of Geo-Socio-Cultural unity of Nusantara/Indonesia Maritime: A study focus of Maritime Anthropology

This paper aims to explain how Indonesia was conceptualized as the Indonesian Maritime Continent. From a geo-social perspective, maritime culture can be viewed in, three major dimensions. First, Indonesia is one of the largest archipelagic countries in the world with all the geographical potential, invaluable marine, and maritime resources; second, the potential for socio-cultural, socio-demographic, socio-economic, and long maritime cultural history within the framework of the unity of the Republic of Indonesia; and third, the existence of academic core and the maritime vision of Unhas, the idea of the Indonesian Maritime Continental Development which was launched by the government in 1995/1996, and the vision of maritime national development by President Joko Widodo marked the role of academics and governments in the dynamic process of development to the phase of maritime civilization in the future. In the context of developing maritime ethnographic studies and anthropological contributions to the development of maritime civilization in the future, ideas and academic commitment are needed to make the Indonesian Archipelagic State a large and unique area of maritime socio-cultural research development in the world and Southeast Asia in particular. Thus, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, comparative, and multidisciplinary research is needed to carry out broadly and intensively. For this reason, through my inauguration speech for Professor of Anthropology in Hasanuddin University, I introduced a focus of maritime anthropology studies on sailing experiences and the reproduction of Nusantara/Indonesian maritime geo-socio-cultural insights. Through the application of the concept of experience and reproduction of maritime geo-socio-cultural insights which were developed from the concept of maritime ethos disposition theory of reproduction from A.H.J. Prins as a mode of description and analysis, I found the categories of maritime cultural insights and attitudes of Indonesian sailors. They understand most of the territorial waters of the Nusantara (archipelago) and the resources within as common property, a space for interaction between groups of sailors who are diverse in their maritime ethnicity and culture, which in turn strengthens awareness and recognition of the unity of the homeland, culture, and nation that is Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (unity in diversity).

Fishing

The anthropology of fisheries is a core focus of maritime anthropology. Scholarship in this field is multifaceted, exploring fishing ways of life, fishing knowledge, marine tenures and economies, the gendered nature of fishing, how people cope with danger and risk, and the specificities of how this particular watery nature is manifested in social, political, and cultural systems. Fishing can be defined as a productive activity that takes place in a multidimensional space, depending more on natural or wild processes than manufactured processes. The idea of fishing being closer to nature is an analytical thread, giving the anthropology of fisheries a particular edge on the multispecies and more than human ethnographic turn in contemporary anthropology. Research in fisheries anthropology has long held the connections between fisher and fish to be of central concern. Significant too, however, is the thesis that the construction of commodity fisheries as a natural domain, of which fishers are atomistic extractors to be managed, is a highly politicized process involving the bioeconomic creation of fish stock and broader political economies. Anthropological research on fisheries engages critically with neoliberalizations, the extension of privatizations, and the proliferation of industrial aquaculture, thus challenging Blue Economy attempts to reconfigure nature–culture relationships and reposition the marine environment as a locus for the enactment and perpetuation of inequality.

Maritime anthropological studies in island and coastal areas in Southern Central and Southern Vietnam from narrative, oral History and life history approach

This paper explores conversations of fishermen and residents in island and coastal areas in southern Central and Southern Vietnam within the framework of maritime anthropology. The conversations are presented in the forms of narratives, storytellings and memories from three different approaches: narrative, oral history and life history. Deloyed in anthropology, history, literature, folklore and other disciplines, these approaches share one common character – interviewing as the means of data collection. Only through interviewing, a researcher is able to engage his/her subjects into the process of commemorating their lived experience, both individually and collectively. From fragmented memories and stories about the past to vivid representation of contemporary social reality of the people in island and coastal areas, the researcher then needs to “combine” them spatially and temporally to reconstruct a comprehensive narrative. If we fail to do that, these precious narratives would eventually vanish. To embed these narratives into the scientific stream of social life, we need to double-check, investigate, study and analyze them from multi-disciplinary perspectives. This is a real challenge to researchers; however, the information we achieve after “cleaning up data” is remarkably meaningful both scientifically and pragmatically.

Nature/Culture/Seawater

This chapter examines how the nature/culture binary imposes particular qualities on water, which water is then sometimes imagined to overflow. In asking after water this way, the chapter retools the historian of science Peter Galison's notion of a “theory machine,” an object in the world that stimulates a theoretical formulation. According to Galison, networks of electrocoordinated clocks in European railway stations at the turn of the twentieth-century aided Albert Einstein's thinking about simultaneity. The chapter considers how water has operated as a theory machine in anthropology, how it has been framed by nature/culture, and how it has in turn reframed nature/culture. It also discusses seawater imagery and metaphors in early ethnography, in maritime anthropology, and in recent social theory. It argues that seawater has moved from an implicit to an explicit figure for anthropological and social theorizing, especially in the age of globalization, which it also terms “oceanization.”