Anthropology Book Forum (E-Journal)

Shunmugan, Natalia Ann

English

Being Ourselves for You: There’s no Business like Ethnological Show Business

Ojani, Chakad

Anthropology against, of, and with data practices

Charles Cobb provides a transdisciplinary study on Native American landscapes in the colonial Southeast from a glocal perspective, to understand how indigenous communities experienced the impact of modernity (globalization, mercantilism, and Enlightenment) and actively participated in it

Marti Gil, Irene

A Glocal Perspective on Native American Landscapes

This book review treats Gustavo Barbosa's The Best of Hard Times: Palestinian Refugee Masculinities in Lebanon

Berk, Elizabeth

Liquifying Categories in a Palestinian Refugee Camp

Uimonen, Paula

  
Melody Jue. 2020. Wild Blue Media. Thinking through Seawater. Duke University Press, 240 
pp., ISBN: 978-1-4780-0612-1  
Keywords: ocean, media, diving, cognitive estrangement, milieu-specific analysis 
If you have immersed yourself in underwater worlds through scuba diving, you will probably 
find that Luc Besson’s classic film Le Grand Bleu (The Big Blue, 1988) resonates with you, 
reconnecting you with that exhilarating feeling of otherness. In Le Grand Bleu free-divers dive 
deep on one breath of air. And in the more recent Netflix film, Sous Emprise (No Limit, 2022), 
a woman also enters this competitive sport, thus breaking the male dominance in cinematic 
representations of free-diving. Although free-diving relies on divers holding their breath, they 
also use various techniques and technologies to control their immersion. And if you want to 
stay under the surface for longer than a few minutes, you also need air supply. The deeper and 
longer you are submerged in the ocean, the more sophisticated the technology. As humans are 
increasingly exploiting and extracting marine resources, more advanced technologies are being 
developed. Driven by the greedy quest for profit, the infrastructure that enables commercial 
saturation diving is quite remarkable, as captured in the recent Netflix documentary Last Breath 
(2019). While the film shows the dangers of deep sea diving, it is silent on the devastating 
environmental effects of deep sea mining. Such anthropocentric portrayals of the ocean are by 
no means exceptional, but in the Anthropocene they become particularly problematic. I am 
reflecting on these films to situate this review in some media representations of diving, which 
bring out the risks and dangers involved, while evoking feelings of fear as well as fascination. 
These films also show the otherworldliness of human immersion in the ocean. Because humans 
cannot live underwater. We are terrestrial creatures.  
In Wild Blue Media, Melody Jue relocates theory building into the ocean, using seawater to 
think through some epistemic foundations in media and literary studies. Through her 
methodology of conceptual displacement, she theorizes milieu-specific analysis, emphasizing 
the importance of considering how the observer’s milieu influences his/her orientation to the 
world, along with culture, class, gender, race, ability, age etc. Thinking through seawater, Jue 
elucidates the terrestrial bias in media theory, not as something false or incorrect, but building 
on Donna Haraway, she shows that the terrestrial milieu constitutes a situated perspective, 
which can be quite different from knowledge situated in the ocean. “The milieu of the ocean 
offers an epistemological check on human knowledge formation, presenting entirely different 
conditions for perception, sensation, and life than terrestrial environments” (p. 11).  
Through oceanic immersion of some key concepts in media theory, Jue shows the difference 
that milieu-specific analysis brings to terrestrial-based theories. The three core chapters of the 
book are each devoted to one concept: interface, inscription and database. This is followed by 
a chapter on underwater museums, which also summarises the main arguments. The chapters 
draw on close readings of texts and visual analysis, combined with scholarly engagements with 
theoretical work from a wide range of disciplines, as carefully explained in the introductory 
chapter that conscientiously situates the author and the book. 
For instance, in Chapter One, Jue takes breathing underwater as an analytical key for a 
phenomenological reading of the interface. While interface is typically thought of as a physical 
thing (computer screen, game console) in media studies, emphasising surfaces of interactive 
visual iconography, Jue starts with the human lung in scuba diving, extending her analysis to 
critical bodily experiences underwater, from pressure and proprioception, to nitrogen narcosis 
and tissue saturation. The analysis draws on the work of Jacques Cousteau, including his 
development of the aqualung, which he reflected on in terms of “our flesh feeling what the fish 
scales know,” thus formulating a sensuous epistemic (p. 45).  
After discussing interface in the context of media studies, Jue turns to literary theory, and the 
spatial metaphors of surface reading and depth. Here she uses the writings of Dr Sylvia Earle, 
a world-renowned oceanographer and ocean advocate. In Jue’s analysis, Earle’s experiences 
highlight gendered differences in the predominantly male world of early ocean explorers, while 
nuancing oceanic epistemics. In the Tektite II project in 1970, Earle led the first all-female team 
of aquanauts. The underwater Tektite habitat enabled them to spend much more time diving, 
since they did not need to worry about pressure and decompression. Earle’s reflections on 
saturation diving in terms of having an extended passport into an alien world is extended to an 
analysis of differences between land and sea. Jue uses the media concept of excommunication 
to describe what she calls an ontological condition of amphibiousness: “In diving, the human 
is excommunicated from the surface world the longer they reside at depth” (p. 63). She 
elaborates on the human-as-alien in the ocean in terms of liminality “the human figure is the 
liminal trespasser that can only temporarily belong to the ocean” (p. 64). To Earle, this sense 
of unbelonging instilled an epistemic humility that inspired her lifelong care for the oceanic 
other, her deep insights of ocean life compelling her to share her knowledge and protect the 
ocean, as depicted in the Netflix documentary Mission Blue (2014). 
Melody Jue argues for diving as a humanities methodology, and throughout the text, the reader 
is exposed to the ocean, through imaginary or literary diving. Whether through the words and 
images of early explorers such as Jacques Cousteau and Sylvia Earle, or Jue’s recollections of 
her own diving experiences, from her initial reflections when learning to dive in North Carolina 
to her epistemic insights when diving in Jason deClaire Taylor’s Underwater Museum in 
Mexico, Jue brings the reader into the ocean. In her concluding chapter, Jue elaborates on diving 
as a method of cognitive estrangement, arguing that diving makes visible terrestrial biases in 
theory making, offers a means of witnessing environmental change, and can function as an 
ethnographic practice. The methodological advantages of scuba diving are evident in emerging 
anthropological scholarship, as exemplified by current work on trash diving in Stockholm 
(Rodineliussen 2021). If anything, Jue’s sophisticated theorizing on diving as a method of 
cognitive estrangement and conceptual displacement should inspire more scholars to immerse 
themselves in the ocean. 
For anthropologists, the book’s subtitle Thinking through Seawater recalls Stefan Helmreich’s 
pathbreaking work on seawater as a theory machine (2011). In this foundational text, Helmreich 
advances theorizing of the ocean well beyond the nature/culture divide, concluding that 
“[s]eawater is both good to think with and here to live with, in multifarious actuality” (2011, 138). 
Melody Jue’s interdisciplinary approach builds on Helmreich’s work and he is acknowledged 
for having “generously read every inch of my writings about the ocean” (p. xiii). Indeed, her 
engagements with anthropological work, including Haraway, Helmreich, and Ingold, along 
with other disciplines, from ocean humanities to STS, make Jue’s scholarly efforts stand out, 
an impressively interdisciplinary work that is of great value across various disciplines.    
Jue’s sophisticated theorizing is combined with an ethical commitment to care for the ocean, 
and she refers to Wild Blue Media as a pre-activist book. Written at a time of climate change 
and environmental crisis, she draws on critical scholarship to underline the urgency of thinking 
through seawater. Jue’s book will hopefully inspire scholars and activists to immerse 
themselves into underwater worlds, and show people above the surface what a wonderful world 
of many worlds our pluriversal blue planet is. Water is Life. 
 
 
References 
Helmreich, Stefan. “Nature/Culture/Seawater.” American Anthropologist 113, no. 1 (2011): 
132-144.  
Rodineliussen, Rasmus. “Caring for Water: Underwater Waste, Trash Diving, and Publicity in 
Stockholm.” kritisk etnografi - Swedish Journal of Anthropology 4 no. 2 (2021): 67-81. 
Films cited 
Besson, Luc. 1988. Le Grand Bleu.  
da Costa, R., and Parkinson, A. 2019. Last Breath.  
Nixon, R., and Stevens, F. 2014. Mission Blue. 
Rosenthal, D. M. 2022. Sous Emprise.  
 
Paula Uimonen is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. She is 
specialized in digital anthropology as well as the anthropology of art, visual culture, world 
literature, ocean and water. Her current research project Swahili Ocean Worlds explores 
environmental and social sustainability in fishing communities in Tanzania, through multi-
sited and multisensory fieldwork. This collaborative research project is carried out with 
researchers from University of Dar es Salaam and funded by the Swedish Research Council 
(2022-2024). Paula’s recent open access publications include the article “Spiritual 
Relationality in Swahili Ocean Worlds” (2021, special issue on water in kritisk etnografi), the 
monograph Invoking Flora Nwapa. Nigerian Women Writers, Femininity and Spirituality in 
World Literature (2020, Stockholm University Press), and the book chapter “One World 
Literature with Chinua Achebe and Flora Nwapa”, in Claiming Space. Locations and 
Orientations in World Literatures (2021, Bloomsbury Academic).  
 
 
© 2022 Paula Uimonen  
 
 


Wild Blue Media

Colonial, Decolonial, Anticolonial – the How in Doing Scienc

Rodineliussen, Rasmus

Colonial, Decolonial, Anticolonial – the How in Doing Science

JUAN M. DEL NIDO, 2022, Taxis vs. Uber: Courts, Markets, and Technology in Buenos Aires, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 238 pp., ISBN 978150362967

Frey, Bronwyn

Late-Capitalist Reasoning and the Foreclosure of Disagreement

von Essen, Erica

Teaching and learning interspecies etiquette in the city

Review of:
Eds. by Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman, 2022, Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form, Durham: Duke University Press Books (Theory Q), 360 pp. ISBN: 978147801602

Rehnström, Rebecka

 
1 
 
Eds. by Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman, 2022, Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, 
Form, Durham: Duke University Press Books (Theory Q), 360 pp. ISBN: 9781478016021 
 
Keywords: Queer Kinship, Queer Theory, Kinship Theory, Black Kinship, Indigenous 
Kinship, Trans Kinship, Kin 
 
In this volume edited by Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman, the authors build on and 
challenge kinship as it has been researched and theorized while arguing for the relevance of 
kinship research to queer, trans and critical race theories today. The various topics through 
which kinship is explored in this book also importantly encourage new routes for theorizing 
kinship, both as a concept and lived/sensed experience. The volume considers kinship’s 
linkages to issues that all too often have been obscured or overlooked by kinship researchers – 
issues such as colonialism, slavery and racialization as well as the linkages to nationalism. 
Intersections of queer, Black and Indigenous lives and experiences are thus central to this 
volume, lives and experiences which have been invisible yet foundational for how kinship has 
been shaped and understood by dominant (white, colonial) narratives. The forms that the 
narratives in this volume take and analyse move between ethnography, fiction, history, 
imagination, memories, stories, and storytelling. While taking various routes, they unite 
through desire as a moment of departure from where kinship is explored. As Bradway and 
Freeman stress, kinship has always been connected to desire, and not always a desire to connect 
– at times a desire to disconnect (3). It is thus also about movements, how (Black, Indigenous, 
queer, trans) kinship moves between but also beyond time, space, place, bodies, selves, 
memories, violence, hopes and imaginations but also beyond kinship itself. 
 
The volume consists of 12 main chapters organised under three sections. The editors emphasize 
a fluidity to the chapters as they could easily be positioned within other sections. The fluidity 
also refers to the previously mentioned importance of form for this volume, form as both 
something kinship is analysed as and through. The whole book works to answer questions on 
 
2 
why kinship still matters and why now, questions which the introduction considers when laying 
the foundation for the upcoming chapters. In the introduction, we are presented with three key 
concepts – “kincoherence,” “kin-aesthetics” and “kinematics.” The essays give a “conceptual 
frame” to address “the kincoherence, kin-aesthetics and/or kinematics of queer kinship” (18). 
(Kin)coherence/(k)incoherence helps to understand the “temporal dimension of kinship” – how 
kinship remains a “horizon of violence and possibility.” It works to trouble what kinship binds 
and unbinds (3, 11). Kin aesthetics, in turn, is to understand processes of figuration and form; 
kinship as embodied and material, but always in transformation (4, 5). Lastly, kinematics 
addresses kinship as movements – not only beyond the normative but “within, across, and 
between” configurations of kinship (13). The volume closes with an epilogue in the form of an 
interview with Kath Weston, author of “Families we Choose,” a significant work within queer 
kinship research. Weston addresses queer kinship as embedded social practices, as 
transformations rather than structure or form. The interview spans between the then and there 
and the now and here of queer kinship to discussions on how queer kinship research opens up 
possibilities for academic routes that may not be obvious in their ties to kinship theory. 
 
The essays of part one of the volume, Queering Linages, address temporalities of kinship 
beyond linear genealogy. In Judith Butler’s essay, the presumed distinction between natural 
(blood) and fictive kinship ties is in question as Butler focuses on belongings beyond 
bloodlines. Specifically, the regulation of “race” through kinship and how this reproduces 
racialised violence through time. In Brigitte Fielder’s chapter that follows, which analyses 
queer genealogies of interracial kinship, “mixed-race self-begetting” is explored “as a queer 
act of self-reproduction.” The essay discusses the (queer) potential found in the aesthetic as 
well as the racial reproduction happening through the aesthetic (disputing a reduction of “race” 
to biological reproduction). In Dilara Çalışkan’s essay, temporality is approached through 
intergenerational memory across time and space among trans mothers and daughters in 
Istanbul. In these mother-daughter bonds, memory is a tool for survival (in various ways) and 
also that which much shape these kinship bonds. Part two of the volume, Kinship, State, 
Empire, works on the de/anticolonial, the beyond/outside of the colonial bondage – thus also 
contesting the Eurocentric research. Joseph M. Pierce opens the section by exploring 
indigenous kinship through the concept of “kinstillations.” It is a call to return to Indigenous 
ways of being “in good relations” – to the land, to spirits, and to ancestors across time. Pierce 
emphasises Indigenous kinship as something you do rather than have, as “a reaching” (98). 
Kinstillations is like “reaching for the stars,” a simultaneous reach for the future and travel to 
 
3 
the past. From here we move to the topic of surrogacy in Poulomi Saha’s essay. Saha analyses 
postcolonial India’s attempt to ban commercial surrogacy, queer kinship’s ties to the politics 
of the global neoliberal market, and the ways that surrogacy is being transformed within this 
market. The individual agency within surrogacy, Saha argues, is transformed into a form of 
contract mediated by the form of family that deems feelings of generosity and gratitude as 
compensation for the surrogate. Mark Rifkin also addresses governmentality. In this chapter, 
Rifkin addresses how Indigenous social logics contest the equal sign between family and 
kinship uniformity. Indigenous forms of relationality, Rifkin argues, enable a move to queer 
non-neoliberal governance. In the following essay, Aqdas Aftab works with black trans-fiction 
to decolonise trans-interiority and find the “elsewheres” that support Black trans lives. Aftab 
takes the gaze from the fetishized (Black, trans) body to the interior and the “ecstatic kinship” 
found within. Here memory and imagination hold “utopic and ecstatic work” rather than the 
future (169). Juliana Demartini Brito analyses kinship performances among activists taking 
part in the mass protests that followed the murder of Black, lesbian politician Marielle Franco 
in Brazil. The phrase used by activists, “Marielle Presente,” both speaks of the presence and 
absence of Marielle – linking activists through time, grief, and desire as well as tradition and 
change. Moving on to part three, Kinship in the Negative, a section that rethinks queer 
belonging and unbelonging by building on and expanding traditions of queer negativity and 
anti-social thesis. Christopher Chamberlin’s essay “Akinship” (“a-kinship”, “akin-ship”) 
emphasises racial production as the very structural cause of kinship. Heteronormativity takes 
part but kinship is “always the absolute repudiation of Black kinship.” “Akinship” speaks of 
the social impossibility of Black kinship. The “negative” in the essay by Leah Claire Allen and 
John S. Garrison is towards the link between queer kinship and the “chosen family”. The 
authors do not contest lived experiences but how narratives of queer friendship have been 
absorbed by neoliberal ideals. Natasha Hurley, in turn, contests dominant narratives on 
childlessness. “Kidless lit” speaks of other narratives and meanings found within our relating 
to “other people’s children.” Kinship is here analysed through cross-generational relationships 
that make “kin not population” (referencing “Making Kin Not Population” from 2018, edited 
by Adele E. Clarke and Donna Haraway), thus moving beyond family/reproduction norms 
(251-253). The last essay by Aobo Dong returns to blood as kinship, shaped through 
martyrdom, oath, sacrifice, and violence among Chinese blood brotherhoods. Blood here 
produces kinship bonds through death (as survival and resistance) rather than birth. 
 
 
4 
This book moves the reader, not only along the routes the authors take but beyond these. Even 
when walking along paths paved by many, we always walk with a different view as the 
“landscapes” we move through and within continue to change. For me, the major take from 
this volume is not necessarily the arguments (important and thought-provoking as they are, 
with their strengths as well as limitations). Rather it is how it inspires the reader to not only 
think of kinship as a concept and what this concept does, but to think of kinship in terms of 
narratives and heritage – whether dominating, contested and/or possible. In times when the 
future may feel more uncertain and precarious than ever, it also reminds us of the potential 
there is in memories and imagination – that which is already here. Kinship, to draw from 
Çalışkan when analysing the notion of “home,” can help to find our archives “of feelings and 
emotional and temporal investments” (78). The book is primarily an important creative and 
analytic contribution to contemporary queer, trans, critical race and kinship theory. 
Nevertheless, it is also of value for those who explore narratives and form as well as belonging 
and heritage “beyond” kinship relations. As Weston illuminates, when exploring kinship, it 
can, if we are open to it, take us on unexpected routes.  
 
Rebecka Rehnström is a PhD student at the University of St Andrews. Her research interests 
lie within feminist and queer anthropology with a specific focus on material and visual culture, 
LGBTQ+, activism and performance. Her current research is on queer urban future and heritage 
narratives among LBTQ+ women and genderqueer people in Scotland. 
 
 
 
© 2022 Rebecka Rehnström 
 


Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form

Microcosms of power dynamics: The hidden world of pharmaceutical testin

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