Entangled Elements: Between Sand & Sea

• In Event: Mediated Seas, Elemental Oceans

Abstract

Within the “oceanic turn” in social sciences and humanities, the ocean itself is a multiplicity. Yet, as scholars, we often engage it piecemeal, discussed as the element of water or its waves, other times as a resource of fish, oil, minerals, sand, and increasingly as data, sensing, media. Outside academic discussions, ocean management practices commonly disassemble ocean spaces and ecosystems into disparate parts by sector or jurisdiction. In New Zealand, an ongoing struggle between the federal government and indigenous Maori tribes, involves questions not only over offshore resource rights, but more fundamentally whether there exists a divide between elements of land and sea. While the government has utilized legal baselines as defined in the U.N. Law of the Sea to nationalize the seabed, tribes have long held a competing whole-of-landscape approach which situates the human and more-than-human within a framework of kinship, extending from mountains to sea. Such disputes reflect broader questions pertinent to theoretical interventions with ocean positioned as element, territory, archive, resource. This paper argues we can recognize tensions between the entangled, indivisible nature of the ocean and specific desires to divide it into distinct, alienable objects and geometries, particularly to distinguish it from land. Many contemporary ocean troubles exhibit such antagonisms — sea level rise submerges coasts, seafloor sediment transformed into island, land-sourced pollutants dissolving into the water. This paper locates continued foreshore disputes in New Zealand within an STS context, informed by Karen Barad’s agential realism and Elizabeth Povinelli’s geontology.

Author

• Katherine Sammler, California State University, Maritime