Abstract
An individual’s ‘lifeworld’ guides perceptions, the attachment of meaning and in sum, the interpretation of reality in everyday life. Yet the lifeworld (Ger. Lebenswelt) has been an undertheorized concept within interdisciplinary marine research. Through a two-stage analysis, we critically engage with the philosophical foundations, heuristic value and the methodological versatility that the interpretivist concept of the lifeworld stands to offer, drawing from contemporary marine research. With two illustrative case studies exploring the lived realities of vastly different waterworlds in rural Uzbekistan and Sri Lanka, we further engage with the strengths and limitations of integrating a lifeworlds analysis into interdisciplinary work on localized perceptions. As a second step, we analyze the efficacy of adopting a phenomenological-lifeworlds approach in order to inductively explore diverse realities of coastal and sea-based peoples, while acknowledging the terrestrially-bound and anthropocentric genesis of the lifeworld as a concept. Therefore, in order to enliven hybrid thematic currents, conceptual debates and methodologies on ‘marine lifeworlds’ on its own terms, we propose two thematic vantage points for interdisciplinary intervention by: a) critically engaging with cognitive-material meanings and lived interpretations of 'saltwater' realities; b) tracing multiple modes of sociality and being with/in-the-world that go beyond human entanglements. In sum, we argue that while the lifeworlds concept affords spaces through which to study the complexities and ambivalences rife in surface-level perceptions, it promises the means with which to sidestep over-simplistic inferences to the vague and embattled notion of ‘culture’, while widening horizons for reflective and experimental-experiential lines of inquiry.
Highlights
Jean Rhys’ novel, set in nineteenth century plantation Jamaica, offers a postcolonial feminist retelling of the tragic tale of “Bertha” Mason, Edward Rochester’s mad wife, who remains locked away in an unforgiving turret of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre
Having explored the salience of understanding researcher lifeworlds, how does one set about reflecting upon, documenting and storying the lifeworlds of others? As the following section illustrates illustrates, since the concept entered the realm of social science discourse, much has been done in the way of creatively translating and operationalizing lifeworld approaches into research processes, while simultaneously guiding researcher ethics and reflexivity
While fisheries-related accounts of diverse “peoples of the sea” have often depicted an anthropos-centric bias, we further explore what inclusionary forms of more-thanhuman lifeworld research could be further pursued in ways that more expansively engage with the newly emergent sub-fields of multi- and interspecies ethnography
Summary
Jean Rhys’ novel, set in nineteenth century plantation Jamaica, offers a postcolonial feminist retelling of the tragic tale of “Bertha” Mason, Edward Rochester’s mad wife, who remains locked away in an unforgiving turret of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. In the latter Victorian novel she is dragged out, fighting tooth and claw, more harpy-like than animal, more mythological than misplaced
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