Maritimity and education of attention with ship fisherman on seacoast south of RS - Brazil

Abstract (English)

How to become a ship fisherman and how could we consider maritimity - understood as a relationship established with the sea - from living in an environment crossed by waters? Starting from these two questions, I try to elaborate some reflections on the notion of maritimity, come back on part of the ethnography of my doctoral research (Adomilli, 2007), with a fishing Community, localizated on the southern coast, south of RS - Brazil. This resumption is carried out throught mobile and sensory studies (Stoller, 2022; Howes, 1991; Pink, 2009; Pussetti, 2016), among others, based on participant observation.
I try to think about maritimity related to the learning processes of ship fishermen through experience and in a visceral way, especially in their engagement in the maritime-coastal environment. This process can be understood like a “education of attention” (Ingold, 2015), which concerns the development of new skills through engagement in embarked life. The native expression “do wel at sea” goes through the relationship with seasickness/sea air, revealing how bodies are affected by this environment and what this elucidates about the notion of seafaring and becoming ship fisherman.
The path taken in the fieldwork consists of a section around these crossings between land and sea, especially in the experience of being on board. Initially, I describe the landscape of a place crossed by water through ethnographic walks, bringing some perceptions around the rhythms, cyclical movements, and native practices and conceptions in relation to the places where the people on board live. In a second moment, I move on to the experience of accompanying them on their fishing trips. In these two moments of participant observation - ethnographic walks and the experience of being on board - I try to demonstrate how these landscapes of land and sea are not dissociated, but, in a certain way, are one within the other. Perceiving these crossings implies the condition of being “affected” by the same things that are affecting other beings (Favret-Saada, 2002, p. 122).
In this sense, the ethnographic journey based on a sensory approach consists of an important epistemological tool, as it is not a matter of merely describing what is observed, but seeking a narrative with the senses through visceral experiences (Pussetti, 2016), thus enabling openings to other ways of seeing the world.
In the participant observation involving the condition of being on board, the limits related to the space of the boat, the condition of a certain “confinement” in a group and the radical alterity of this displacement provided a great intensity of experiences with the onboarders. This condition implied, therefore, an impact regarding at the maritime environment, especially to the sense of seasickness.