Rose (Rosabelle) Boswell is a DSI-NRF South African Research Chair in Ocean Cultures and Heritage. She leads a multi-country project on coastal cultural heritage in southern and Eastern Africa. She has an MA Anthropology from UCT and a PhD from Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. She is author of Le Malaise Creole: Ethnic Identity in Mauritius (Oxford: Berghahn 2006), Representing Heritage in Zanzibar and Madagascar (Addis Ababa: Eclipse 2008); Challenges to Identifying and Managing Intangible Cultural Heritage in Mauritius, Zanzibar and Seychelles (Dakar: CODESRIA 2011) and Postcolonial African Anthropologies (co-edited with F. Nyamnjoh Pretoria: HSRC Press 2016), Things Left Unsaid (2019), Pandemix (2020), Between Worlds (2022), Lover Brine (2024); [lead editor] The Palgrave Handbook of Blue Heritage (Palgrave, Macmillan); Ocean Beings and Coastal Worlds (both 2024). She has conducted anthropological research in Mauritius, Madagascar, Seychelles, Zanzibar, South Africa, Kenya and Namibia. She is especially interested in sensory ethnography, restorative justice and the facets of decoloniality. Her most recent endeavour is a science-to-community project entitled The Blue Values Journey.  

Sensing the Sea for an Anthropology of the Global South

Water plays a critical role in the shaping of identity and history in the southwest Indian Ocean region (SWIOR). In this chapter, it is proposed that the ‘global South’ is a differentiated space and place (Lovell, 1995) where diverse watery elements (the sea, rivers and monsoon rain) in island society, shape human history and identity. Continuing with my interest in sensory ethnography and the role of the senses in shaping human experience, I propose that as part of the global South and for the Small Island States [SIDS] of the SWIOR, both the sea and associated waterways offer a paradigm for social behaviour and experience. Seas and rivers are watery ontologies that reveal how people of the global South have reshaped identity and meaning to become more resilient to hardships presented by both a capitalist . The following chapter draws on formative experiences in Malawi and segways to field research in Mauritius, Seychelles and Lamu, Kenya, adopting a narrative, biographical style to share both anthropological fieldwork and experiences of these bodies of water, as media via which to convey history, discourse, power and human cultural relations in the SWIOR. A hopefully valuable contribution of the chapter is that a significant contribution of anthropologies of the global South to the world, is the displacement of anthropocentric knowledge and cognition, and a reassertion of the value and diversity of the visceral, as articulated, for example, by the sea.

In person at Main Campus in Green 104, and live streamed to Hopkins Marine Station