Abstract Description
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The Indian Ocean is the youngest of the world’s oceans. The character of this great sea, trapped by continents to the north, without an escape route by water, and on all sides by lands teeming with people, speaks to this conference’s theme. How shall we understand the definition, the rise, and the future of the human? Three of five people in the global population live facing the Indian Ocean. A third of the world’s cargo passes through it. This is also the region which holds the bulk of the world’s fossil fuels. It is likely to be a region which experiences the early effects of climate change given on-going changes to the monsoon, sometimes seen as the lung of this great sea, as well as vulnerability to rising sea levels, especially when low-lying cities and settlements are taken into view. In this provocation, I build on a project-in-progress, which tracks the travels of environmental objects across this great sea to illustrate the way humans and nature have interacted over centuries. The provocation points to the uncertain pathways through which humans travelled in this arena of early globalisation; the unexpected natural things which proved durable in forging global economies, migratory webs or forms of communication; how the control of nature required the taming of the human body; and, how human senses and human imagination played a role in the triumph of romantic, enlightened and reasoned imperial science. If these travels, experiments, controls and flights of mind were central to the human’s mastery of the Indian ocean, how are we to work towards de-seating these inventive and tragic modes of being?
The Indian Ocean is the youngest of the world’s oceans. The character of this great sea, trapped by continents to the north, without an escape route by water, and on all sides by lands teeming with people, speaks to this conference’s theme. How shall we understand the definition, the rise, and the future of the human? Three of five people in the global population live facing the Indian Ocean. A third of the world’s cargo passes through it. This is also the region which holds the bulk of the world’s fossil fuels. It is likely to be a region which experiences the early effects of climate change given on-going changes to the monsoon, sometimes seen as the lung of this great sea, as well as vulnerability to rising sea levels, especially when low-lying cities and settlements are taken into view. In this provocation, I build on a project-in-progress, which tracks the travels of environmental objects across this great sea to illustrate the way humans and nature have interacted over centuries. The provocation points to the uncertain pathways through which humans travelled in this arena of early globalisation; the unexpected natural things which proved durable in forging global economies, migratory webs or forms of communication; how the control of nature required the taming of the human body; and, how human senses and human imagination played a role in the triumph of romantic, enlightened and reasoned imperial science. If these travels, experiments, controls and flights of mind were central to the human’s mastery of the Indian ocean, how are we to work towards de-seating these inventive and tragic modes of being?