Karin Amimoto Ingersoll

Seascape Epistemology: An Embodied Knowledge of and Movement through the Sea

The ocean is in us, as Tongan scholar, Epeli Hau’ofa, states. It is intertwined with our histories and genealogies. The ocean becomes both a metaphorical and physical body through which we can re-imagine conceptions of our selves and our relationships with the surrounding world. In this presentation, I will explore how notions of the sea-scape can be expanded into a methodology about the movement of bodies, knowledges, and ways of being-in-the world. I will discuss how Native Hawaiians travel, physically and philosophically, through the ocean today to engage a conscious involvement with the planet and with each other. This way of knowing and being is what I call a seascape epistemology; an approach to knowing presumed on a knowledge of the sea, which tells one how to move through the sea, and how to approach life and knowing through the movements of the world. There is a poetics of experience in seascape epistemology, an embodied connection of “being-in” the sea that is an aesthetic interaction, a process, and production of forms with political and ethical implications.

I will use the Native Hawaiian ocean-based knowledges (or oceanic literacies) of surfing and navigation to illustrate how embracing a seascape epistemology creates a counter-politics to the dominant thought-worlds that impose rigid systems upon our identities, spaces, and places. I intend to illuminate, for example, that islands become mobile when engaging the oceanic literacy of navigation, as opposed to the western narrative that they are fixed geographic sites. Moving with and inside the seascape enables non-linear movements which influences how we inhabit and shape the Earth with our bodies, our emotions, our minds, and spirits.