Oceanization of Everyday Life

Keywords: Ocean science, oceanic turn, the Azores, oceanization, morality
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 13

Abstract

In the last decades, the ocean has fostered the diversification of moral undertones in scientific vocabularies. This has to do with the ocean’s central role in debates about climate change, pollution, biodiversity, sustainability, territorialization: the present and future of the world. In this process, and as part of the growing awareness of its role in humanity’s fate, ocean scientists reason about the ocean as much more than an aggregation of facts but fundamentally a material presence that is always more than itself – a kind of ecumenical “excess” to which humans must turn to for direction.
I explore this topic – which here I depict as the oceanization of everyday life – based on my fieldwork in the Azorean Island of Faial. In Faial, I studied the turning of the ocean from a bounded object of Catholicism into an “hyperobject” of science. With this conversion, the ocean has changed from a physical site that furthers divine protection and empowers Catholic priests, and became a supreme omnipresence that furthers the role of ocean scientists as social moral leaders. Faial may illuminate a broader phenomenon implicit to “oceanic turns”: the conceptual extension of the ocean beyond the bounds of materiality and location may elicit the extension of the realm of ocean science much beyond the ocean space. Ultimately, I explore why ocean scientists are emerging as “ecumenical ministers” in Faial (and beyond).