The project idea

In coastal communities around the world, peoples’ experiences of time are tightly entangled with life in the sea. The seasonal comings and goings of fish and other marine life are integral parts of the pace and rhythms of these societies, memories of earlier abundance or scarcity of fish are central to their imaginations of the past, and peoples’ hopes and fears for the future are often connected to how they envision marine resources to grow or disappear. What happens, then, when marine species start moving in unprecedented ways?

Climate change transforms marine ecosystems

Climate change is now actually causing sea temperatures to rise so much that many marine species have begun to change their seasonal movements significantly, fled altogether or found new waters to inhabit. SEATIMES aims to investigate what implications these changes have for the rhythms and temporalities of human-marine relations.

How do coastal communities experience these changes? How does it affect people’s daily lives? How do they respond, and how do they attempt to find new ways of living with the emergent ecologies that these changes engender? And what can these transformations tell us about how temporality is a product of human-nonhuman entanglements?

SEATIMES will answer these questions by conducting ethnographic research in three different sites which experience these transformations differently: in West-Africa, e.g. Senegal, where the sardinella is fleeing out towards colder water, in Maine where warming waters produce optimal breeding conditions of lobsters, and in the North-Atlantic, e.g. Norway where the warmer sea temperatures attract new species such as snow crabs and Pacific oysters.

In all these sites, changing mobilities of marine species seem to create new forms of relations between humans and marine life, but so far, we know little about exactly what forms these relations take and what kind of effects they have on the temporality of human-marine ecologies. SEATIMES aims to produce knowledge about what implications climate change has for human-marine relations and how these transform the temporality of these relations. Moreover, SEATIMES aims to develop a better theoretical understanding of how temporality canbe understood as emerging from multispecies relations, that is relational assemblages that include both humans and animals. The project will thus contribute to a broader understanding of how humans and marine life are entangled, a knowledge which is crucial for developing policies and ways to live better and more sustainably with life below water.

Recent scientific studies have shown that sea temperatures are on the rise and cause significant changes to the geographic range and composition of marine ecologies (Sunday, Bates, and Dulvy 2012; A.J. Richardson and Schoeman 2004; Belkin 2009; FAO 2018; Walther et al. 2002; Free et al. 2019). A major effect of these changes is that many of the ocean’s marine species seek out locations better suited for their feeding and breeding habits. The resulting relocation of marine life has been described as an “epicunderwater refugee crisis” (Reuters 2018) that has severe consequences for the livelihoods of fishery communities. However, as with other environmental problems (Chakrabarty 2009; A.L. Tsing 2005), the effects of global sea warming are not the same everywhere (Halpern et al. 2008). While some places see fish stocks moving further out to sea, other places see certain species experiencing explosive growth as warming temperatures and overfishing of predatory species create optimal living conditions for them. In other parts of the sea again, warming waters attract new species, some of which become target for an already thriving fishing industry and others that pose significant threats to existing marine ecosystems. In all these places, the underwater refugee crisis leads to new emergent ecologies (Kirksey 2015) that transform the ways in which fishers and fishery communities are entangled with life in the sea.

A new multispecies marine anthropology

The changes in marine ecologies caused by warming sea temperatures are by now well documented by research within the natural sciences. The social sciences, however, have so far had a relatively narrow approach to these issues. While much research within maritime anthropology and human geography has been done on how humans relate to marine resources, it has tended to focus on how fishery has been and can be sustainably managed, i.e. by formal and informal policies (e.g. Acheson 2003) and on how marine ecosystems provide services to humans (see Hirons, Comberti, and Dunford 2016).

While both of these approaches have contributed important insights into how humans can make sustainable use of natural resources, their views on how humans and marine life are entangled are also quite limited. They tend to approach humans and marine ecosystems as fundamentally distinct and as primarily related through resource extraction or service provision. They thus reproduce a common, but also questionable, distinction between the cultural world of humans on the one side and the natural world of marine ecosystems on the other, where relations between them is primarily seen as economic and instrumental. Furthermore, they build on a view of human-animal relations that sees humans as dominant subjects and marine life as more or less passive resource objects. The result is that although the transformations in human-marine relations caused by climate change may tell us a lot about how people live closely entangled with life below water, how climate change affect these relations and how they lead to the emergence of new multispecies temporalities, current social science of fishing has so little to contribute when it comes to knowledge about these processes.

Moreover, while there have been significant advances within the so-called multispecies anthropology and posthumanist inspired anthropology that addresshuman-animal relations in more dynamic and mutual ways, the anthropologyof fishing has yet to adopt these perspectives and has consequently become marginalized within the state of the art of “more-than-human” scholarship. In addition, attention to these forms of human-marine mutual relations is insufficiently covered by the conventional anthropocentric methods of interviews and participant observation. While these are valuable for certain aspects of these relations, there is a need for developing better methods with which to research human-nonhuman relations.

Building on and aiming to contribute to these recent developments in multispecies scholarship and posthumanist theory that emphasize the multitude of ways in which humans and nonhumans are mutually entangled, SEATIMES aims to expand the scope of marine anthropology by attending to the complexity, variety and dynamics of human-marine relations. That is, we would like to change the focus from solely looking at human use of marine life to ways in which people live with and partake in what could be described as human-marine ecologies. Taking our cue from Greenhouse’s (1996) argument that people’s accounts of time disclose their formulations of agency, we think that a focus on the temporal aspects of human-marine relations will be particularly useful for revealing the multiple and shifting ways in which humans and marine life interrelate in relational assemblages where agency is not restricted to humans, but distributed among different kinds of human and nonhuman actants (Latour 2007).

We think that by combining approaches from multispecies and posthumanist studies with an attention to the temporality of human-nonhuman relations may contribute to, on the one hand, radically transforming the relatively conventional and limited anthropology of fishing and, on the other hand, developing a new marine anthropology that is able to speak to larger issues beyond its current limited resource management scopeand thus enhance its impact within more-than-human scholarship.

The primary objectives of this project are therefore: 

• To produce knowledge about the complexity and dynamics of relations between humans and marine life. 
• To produce knowledge about how human-marine relations are affected by climate change.
• To develop new empirically based theoretical understandings of how temporality emerge in human-marine relations.
• To mobilize these insights to develop a new marine anthropology that is able to address issues related to broader issues of human-nonhuman relations.
• To develop new anthropological methods better able to uncover human-nonhuman relations.

To understand the consequences of global climate change for societies around the world, we need to understand how humans relate to and live with the environment they are part of.

By achieving its objectives, SEATIMES will provide significant contributions to this understanding and will contribute to a radically transforming the social sciences of fishing and human-marine relations.

The fieldsites

To achieve these objectives, SEATIMES will empirically investigate the transformation in human-marine temporalities in three different sites. The three sites have been carefully selected in order to cover a variety of different transformations, responses and species involved. This gives the project a comparative angle that is held together by the common concern with how climate change transforms human-marine temporalities, a common set of research topics (see below) and a regional orientation around the Atlantic while at the same time providing sufficient differences to generate constructive analytical frictions between the sites. The project will therefore consist of three sub-projects, each led by one of the three project members, located in each their human-marine transformation zone:

Departure zone

In Senegal fishing towns such as Joal-Fadiouth, Hann, M’Bour and Kayathe warming ocean temperatures have caused the important sardinella stock to increasingly flee out towards deeper and cooler water further north. For Senegalese small-scale fishers, these changes require larger boats, heavier equipment and being out to sea at longer period, and many now fear that further northward movement of the sardinella will make them out of reach altogether. The rhythms of fishers’s involvement with sardinella are definitely up for massive changes, and people have begun longing for a past where sardinella were abundant, reliable and reachable, while at the same time combining fear and hope in what seems to become a post-sardinella refugees seeking new lives further north in Europe. This sub-projecet is conducted by PhD fellow Louis Pille-Schneider.

Abundance zone

In the Gulf of Maine, US, warming waters have led to an unprecedented abundance of lobsters, which is welcomed and becomes a source of hope for a future in the lobster industry for many young aspiring lobster fisher. However, with lobster overflowing the market, prices drop and fishers need to develop new markets, for instance in Eastern Asia, where consumption patterns affect the seasonal rhythms and pace of the local lobster industry significantly. At the same time, marine scientists, for instance at the civil science-oriented Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries in Stontington, Maine’s primary lobster village, warn that overheating of the Gulf of Maine may eventually make the gulf uninhabitable for lobsters, driving them into colder waters further north in Canada, thus making the current lobster boom a temporary phenomenon. A number of other multispecies relations emerge in the Gulf these days that potentially entangle and disentangle humans and marine life in new ways to form new multispecies polyrhythms: Right whale protectionists are attempting to ban the use of lobster pot ropes to prevent deadly entanglements, and efforts are made to restore the local river-migrating alewife population, a former source of lobster bait that may be used when the sea temperatures also changes the seasonal movements of the current bait fish, herring. This sub-project will be conducted by SEATIMES project leader, Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme.

Arrival zone

In Norway, changing sea temperatures have attracted new species that has resulted in a variety of emergent human-marine ecologies. Up north, a snow crab industry is emerging, with seasonal migrant workers arriving from low-income Eastern European countries into Norwegian harbors such as Båtsfjord to work long periods in a dangerous working environment. Further south, the eastern south coast the invasive species Pacific oyster has taken over many beaches, bays and other coastal areas often used for recreational purposes. Despised by many, scientists and coastal managers foresee a rather gloomy coastal future if the Pacific oyster is allowed to take over. At the same time, food entrepreneurs are seeing the possibilities these have, particularly in European andAsian markets hungry for fresh seafood. In both cases, the arrival of new wanted or unwanted species engender transformations of human-marine relations, not only in Båtsfjord or in southern beaches, but also in for instance Poland and Lithuania from where migrant fishers arrive. The arrival zone thus also harbors a multitude of different forms of human-marine temporalities, all undergoing climate change induced transformations. This sub-project is conducted by PhD fellow Sadie Hale.

In all these zones, SEATIMES will ask: what can climate change induced transformations in human-marine temporalities tell us about how humans and marine life are mutually entangled and how temporality emerge in human-marine relations?

Multispecies temporal imaginations, rhythms and practices 

More specifically, the project will focus on three different, but interrelated research topics in all three zones:

1)Temporal imaginations: What transformations in people’s imaginations of the past, present and future do these changes in human-marine relations engender? How do people’s memories, narratives and affects related to these temporal periods become shaped by the disappearance, abundance or arrival of marine species and their experience of their entanglement in these processes? How do imaginations of and affects towardsfuture human-marine relations materialize in the present? How do they envision themselves living with marine life in the near or distant future?

2) Multispecies rhythms: How do these changes affect the rhythms and pace of human lives with each other and with marine species? How do seasonal changes, transformations in working and migration patterns and consumption patterns of distant markets intersect to create new synchronies, sequences and interferences in human-marine relations? What new rhythms do theyadd to the already existing multispecies polyrhythms?

3) Temporal practices: How do people respond to these changing human-marine temporalities? What sort of attempts are made in order to adapt to, counter or influence these temporal transformations? What kind of practices do these changing multispecies rhythms engender? How do different temporal practices – conservation, restoration, market development, new fishing practices and attempt at caring for marine species – combine, collide and find ways to operate simultaneously? How are the differences between various temporal practices politicized and connected to moral evaluations?

By addressing these research questions in each of the three sites, SEATIMES works on the hypothesis that climate change unsettles and transforms human-marine relations in ways that make it particularly visible how temporality emerge from and become shaped by these relations.

Theoretical orientations

First, generally referred to a “more-than-human” scholarship, posthumanist theories (Barad 2003; Alaimo 2010; Birke, Bryld, and Lykke 2004) and multispecies approaches (Kirksey 2014; A. Tsing 2015; van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster 2016) have been central for decentering humans in social processes, i.e. seeing humans as part of assemblages consisting of humans, but also including various kinds of nonhumans like animals, plants and materials. Not seeing worlds as composed of stable and separate entities engaging in relations with each other, but rather as emergent results of ongoing relational processes, this approach has emphasized the ways in which for instance humans and nonhumans are constitutively entangled through processes of “becoming-with” (Haraway 2008; Margulis and Sagan 2007). Such processes involve a variety of forces and components, which come together in temporary stable, but inherently unstable, assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 2010). As Tsing (2013, 2012) and others (Latour 2007; Bingham and Hinchliffe 2008; Lorimer 2012; Law and Lien 2013) have emphasized, this constitutive entanglement of humans and nonhumans in “more-than-human socialities” is processual and fluid, making the shape of relations between humans and nonhumans and the distribution of agency between them not something that is given, but something which is rather enacted in and through relational practices.

Recent rethinking of the notion of domestication, which the PI has been a major contributor to (Remme 2014, 2018, 2021), also shows us that human-nonhuman relations also include aspects such as affects, spatiality and temporality (Lorimer 2015; Archambault 2016; Brice 2014), that they are heterogeneous, unruly and livelier than occurring simply as resources to be harvested or managed (Lien, Swanson, and Ween 2018; Lorimer 2015). Departing from much previous social science that is based on the fundamental division of culture and nature, humans and nonhumans, where only the former is ascribed agency and relates to the latter primarily through use and management, more-than-human scholarship helps us attend to the ways in which humans and nonhumans are mutually entangled and to how such “naturecultures” emerge and transform (Kirksey 2015).

To the extent that the human-marine relations are entangled with material things such as fishing gear, boats or scientific equipment, the project will also draw on the approach to materiality known as “New Materialism”, an approach that like other posthumanist approaches attends to the vibrancy (Bennett 2010) and agentive force of things (Barad 2003), thus contributing further to emplacing humans with a wide network that include also material forces (Coole and Frost 2010).

A further line of theorization which will inform this project is feminist posthumanist work that has a long tradition of challenging andro-and anthropocentric perspectives and foreground an understanding of humans as interconnected, entangled and transcorporeal beings that become in webs of material relations (Alaimo 2010, 2012, 2016; Cielemecka and Daigle 2019). Recognizing thus that both humans and nonhumans are active contributors to processes of “becoming-with” each other, these theoretical approaches allow for a variety of forms and processes of relations to be revealed between humans, animals and materials which will be particularly useful for a project which aims to move the anthropology of fishing beyond studies of human use and management of marine resources.

SEATIMES draws also on a subset of approaches within more-than-human scholarship that pays particular attention to the temporal aspects of human-animal relations. Contributions focusing on resources have shown that the processes of turning something into a resource (T.Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014) has evident temporal aspects. Resources may “frame the past, present and future in certain ways; they propose or preclude certain kinds of time reckoning; they inscribe teleologies; and they are imbued with affects of time, such as nostalgia, hope, dread, and spontaneity” (Ferry and Limbert 2008, 4). However, also other approaches that look beyond resource relations between humans and nonhumans underscore how temporality is made through practices involving both humans and nonhumans. Bird Rose’s (2012) concept of “multispecies knots of time” for instance, has been critical in drawing attention to how synchronicities in multispecies relations are embodied achievements and that processes such as extinction leads to the undoing and transformation of time. Bastian (2017) has taken further and looked at how animals are drawn in and out of people’s everyday existence, and asks what kind of time givers these animals thus become. Another more practice-oriented approach is inspired by Ingold’s (2000) argument that time is embodied and enacted through practice and Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis (2004) in which spacetimes take shape through relations of different tempos and rhythms. This has contributed to a growing awareness in more-than-human scholarship of how time is experienced and made through diverse and imbricated multispecies relational practices. Looking at these processes as fundamentally “naturecultural”, these theoretical approaches make it evident that a variety of, not always in synch, more-than-human temporalities and rhythms are involved in for instance rice production (Gan 2016; Remme 2021), possums’ intrusion in human efforts at home-making (Power 2010), tidal rhythms and seasonalities (Jones 2011; Krause 2013), lawn growing and gardening (Robbins 2007; Doody et al. 2014), producing grapes (Brice 2014), tending to bees (Phillips 2020) and caring for soil (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015).

For SEATIMES these theoretical approaches will contribute to direct our attention to how climate change unties and re-ties heterogeneous, unstable and co-existing forms of multispecies knots of time in the different zones.

Third, with its focus on human-marine ecologies, the project will further draw on and contribute to developing an “amphibious anthropology” by rethinking the ways in which humans and marine worlds are interconnected in what has become known as “hydro-social”relations (Linton and Budds 2014; Jensen 2017; Brown and Peters 2018). As Jensen (2017) has noted, there has been an increasing attention to water related disasters and people are forced to adapt to their changing watery environments in ways that reveals their amphibious circumstances (Jensen 2017). These attentions have given rise to a small, but promising, scholarly effort to build an amphibious anthropology which looks at human entanglement with water and oceanic environments (e.g. Hastrup and Hastrup 2017; Morita and Jensen 2017; Krause 2017).

SEATIMES will contribute to this field, but will also add an important component, namely the unruly liveliness of marine life. While much of the current amphibious anthropology and other forms of maritime anthropology share with SEATIMES a focus on human relations with water and oceans, they tend to approach the sea as a singular entity or as a surface for transport, without sufficient attention to the myriads of life forms living and moving below water. By thus combining this scholarship with the previously mentioned theoretical approaches that emphasize the unruly liveliness of marine life and its entanglements in human-marine ecologies, the project will contribute to this emerging amphibious anthropology by tuning in on the processes that go on “beneath the waves” (Steinberg 2013).

Methodological challenges

In order to answer the project’s research questions, the project will be based on data produced through ethnographic fieldwork in the three different zones. Ethnography aims at getting insights into social processes as they occur and are experienced on the ground by ordinary people and do that by conducting close-up studies of communities over a long period of time. However, the multispecies character of the project requires us to conduct such research with a particular attention of human-human interactions. This means that we cannot solely rely on talking to humans, but also must emphasize observation of such interactions and as well as finding ways to elicit and interpret data on nonhuman practices. A combination of ethnographic interviews, participant observation in human-marine interactions and anthropological engagements with techniques and materials from marine science will therefore be the three main methodological pillars of the project.

Interviews with fishers and other stakeholders like wholesalers, fisher organizations, governmental managers, marine scientists, NGOs and other concerned citizens will provide valuable insights into the different experiences and imaginations of changing human-marinetemporalities. These interviews will be semi-structured interviews where we rely on questionnaires that we will prepare collectively before we commence fieldwork,but also on themes that occur throughout the fieldwork. The different field sites will vary with regards to relevant informants, but to ensure comparability of data, we will make sure that each of the project members approach the same set of key-informants. We will also conduct focus-group discussions where several stakeholders are present together in order to get insight into how these different informants experience and view the changes taking placein their area. 

Participant observation is a method where we take part in the everyday lives of our informants, follow them through their working days and live in their communities. Many aspects of human-marine temporalitiesare integrated as parts of the rhythms and affects of everyday life and are thereby not easily articulated and thus only partly reachable through interview data. To reveal the dynamics and complexity of human-marine ecologies requires thus a particular attentiveness of a trained observer. By participating in activities such as fishing, selling, distribution, conservation and restoration efforts along with those involved such practices and by observing how human-marine relations unfold, participant observation will enable the production of data on the relevant multispecies rhythms and temporal practices.

While these methods will give us access to data related to humans’ temporal imaginations, their involvement in multispecies rhythms and temporal practices, they may also risk reproducing an anthropocentric approach to these issues. To avoid this, SEATIMES will on the one hand work closely with marine biologists working in each of the field zones. These will provide us with crucial insights from marine sciences. However, we know that in order to develop a strong new anthropology of fishing and human-marine relations, we cannot resort to an interdisciplinary distribution of methods where the anthropologists talk to people and biologists study the animals as this will only reproduce the distinctions the project aims to challenge in the first place. We will therefore try out Swanson’s (2017; see also Hodgetts and Lorimer 2014) quite radical methodological suggestion to have anthropologists learn from scientists’ observational tools and practices. While collaborating with marine scientists, anthropologists should also learn, she argues, to read and understand scientific materials, because anthropologists tend to ask different questions from these materials and are curious about the animals in question and their relations to humans in different ways than scientists. Hence, the truly methodological novelty of the projectis thus that we will approach results from marine biology in an anthropological manner that is particularly attentive to human-marine relations. This will not only give SEATIMES a unique entrance-point into understanding multispecies temporalities but will also represent a groundbreaking expansion of anthropology’s methodological toolbox.