The Sea Identity And History

The focus of the book is the wide stretch of water- and sea-ways connecting the coasts of Bengal and Sri Lanka to the coast of Vietnam. The authors address three broad issues through an interdisciplinary perspective. The first relates to boat-building traditions and the communities who traversed these waters. The challenge is to use the ethnographic present' and mobility of the fishing and sailing groups for an understanding of the history of the sea and the extent to which knowledge of the waters was vital to the construction of identity of a maritime society. Linked to this movement across the waters, are the narratives of trans-locality inherent in memories of groups in the region. Long-distance pilgrimage and devotional networks have been consistent features of the cultural life of South and Southeast Asia. A third issue relates to European intervention, starting with the Portuguese and the Dutch. The engagement of the English East India Company with the countries of the Bay of Bengal was of a different order from that of its predecessors, as the Company sought to establish a maritime empire. The eighteenth century thus, raised a different set of issues with the colonisation of large parts of South and Southeast Asia. How did notions of a maritime empire impact the study of the region's past? It is these themes that we address in the volume thereby shifting the focus from chronological markers and national histories to communities who crossed the waters and the changes that these underwent in time.

Countering the dominant paradigms of recent Pacific Islands' historiography, which tend to limit understanding of the sea's importance, this volume emphasizes the flux in the maritime environment and how it instilled an expectation and openness toward outside influences and the rapidity with which cultural change could occur in relations between various Islander groups." "Students and scholars of Pacific history and environmental and cultural studies will welcome this re-evaluation of the sea's influence in Oceanic history."--BOOK JACKET.

"The sea and its relation to human life has always been a subject of fascination for historians. For the first time, this book looks at the field of Maritime History through the prism of identity, looking at how the sea has influenced the formation of identity at a national, local and individual level from the early modern age to the present. It looks at a variety of people who interacted with the sea in different ways - from merchant sailors to naval officers and, on land, from dockworkers to the civilians who participated in the sea-based festivals in the Mediterranean port city of Messina. A cultural strand runs through the volume, with chapters focussing on the cultural construction of the 'naval hero' in literature, poetry, music and art, and an appraisal of the Japanese author and journalist It? Masanori, whose works had such a profound influence on Japan's post-World War II national identity. A key focus is the ways in which the Royal Navy influenced British identity at a national and regional level, but other countries with a strong naval tradition - such as Japan, Italy and Germany - are also analysed. By bringing together a variety of themes related to identity, this book provides the first attempt to thoroughly analyse the ways in which maritime historians have engaged with the question of identity in recent years. In doing so, it provides an important and unique addition to the historiography, which will be essential reading for all scholars of maritime and naval history and those concerned with the question of identity."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

For the Makahs, a tribal nation at the most northwestern point of the contiguous United States, a deep relationship with the sea is the locus of personal and group identity. Unlike most other indigenous tribes whose lives are tied to lands, the Makah people have long placed marine space at the center of their culture, finding in their own waters the physical and spiritual resources to support themselves. This book is the first to explore the history and identity of the Makahs from the arrival of maritime fur-traders in the eighteenth century through the intervening centuries and to the present day. Joshua L. Reid discovers that the “People of the Cape” were far more involved in shaping the maritime economy of the Pacific Northwest than has been understood. He examines Makah attitudes toward borders and boundaries, their efforts to exercise control over their waters and resources as Europeans and Americans arrived, and their embrace of modern opportunities and technology to maintain autonomy and resist assimilation. The author also addresses current environmental debates relating to the tribe's customary whaling and fishing rights and illuminates the efforts of the Makahs to regain control over marine space, preserve their marine-oriented identity, and articulate a traditional future.

The Vezo, a fishing people of western Madagascar, are known as 'the people who struggle with the sea'. Dr Astuti explores their identity, showing that it is established through what people do rather than being determined by descent. Vezo identity is a 'way of doing' rather than a 'state of being', performative rather than ethnic. However, her innovative analysis of Vezo kinship also uncovers an opposite form of identity based on descent, which she argues is the identity of the dead. By looking at key mortuary rituals that engage the relationship between the living and the dead, Dr Astuti develops a dual model of the Vezo person: the one defined contextually in the present, the other determined by the past.

Although the post-colonial situation has attracted considerable interest over recent years, one important colonial power - Portugal - has not been given any attention. This book is the first to explore notions of ethnicity, "race", culture, and nation in the context of the debate on colonialism and postcolonialism. The structure of the book reflects a trajectory of research, starting with a case study in Trinidad, followed by another one in Brazil, and ending with yet another one in Portugal. The three case studies, written in the ethnographic genre, are intertwined with essays of a more theoretical nature. The non-monographic, composite - or hybrid - nature of this work may be in itself an indication of the need for transnational and historically grounded research when dealing with issues of representations of identity that were constructed during colonial times and that are today reconfigured in the ideological struggles over cultural meanings.

Kenneth McPherson shows that for millennia the Indian Ocean had a profound influence on the lives of the people who lived on its shores. Fishermen, sailors and merchants traveled its waters linking the world's earliest civilizations from Africa to East Asia in a complex web of relationships. The ocean was also a highway for the exchange of religions, cultures and technologies, giving the Indian Ocean region an identity as a largely self-contained "world." This important study traces the history of the Indian Ocean from ages past to the present day.

From the seventeenth century Cavaliers and Uncle Tom's Cabin to Civil Rights museums and today's conflicts over the Confederate flag, here is a brilliant portrait of southern identity, served in an engaging blend of history, literature, and popular culture. In this insightful book, written with dry wit and sharp insight, James C. Cobb explains how the South first came to be seen--and then came to see itself--as a region apart from the rest of America. As Cobb demonstrates, the legend of the aristocratic Cavalier origins of southern planter society was nurtured by both northern and southern writers, only to be challenged by abolitionist critics, black and white. After the Civil War, defeated and embittered southern whites incorporated the Cavalier myth into the cult of the "Lost Cause," which supplied the emotional energy for their determined crusade to rejoin the Union on their own terms. After World War I, white writers like Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner and other key figures of "Southern Renaissance" as well as their African American counterparts in the "Harlem Renaissance"--Cobb is the first to show the strong links between the two movements--challenged the New South creed by asking how the grandiose vision of the South's past could be reconciled with the dismal reality of its present. The Southern self-image underwent another sea change in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, when the end of white supremacy shook the old definition of the "Southern way of life"--but at the same time, African Americans began to examine their southern roots more openly and embrace their regional, as well as racial, identity. As the millennium turned, the South confronted a new identity crisis brought on by global homogenization: if Southern culture is everywhere, has the New South become the No South? Here then is a major work by one of America's finest Southern historians, a magisterial synthesis that combines rich scholarship with provocative new insights into what the South means to southerners and to America as well.

With American independence came the freedom to sail anywhere in the world under a new flag. Drawing on private journals, letters, ships' logs, memoirs, and newspaper accounts, this book traces America's earliest encounters on a global stage through the exhilarating experiences of five Yankee seafarers.