Univ., Diss.--Helsinki, 2006.

This thesis explores animic and perspectivist notions in the context of Nordic Seamanship with a biocultural framework. It examines the history, cosmologies, terminology, practices, physiology and phenomenology of Nordic crafts and arts of boat building, rope-making, seafaring and fishing. Rope-making, its molecular basis and the social organization in a boat reveal the way in which physical and social bodies coalesce in the harmonies of the differing intentionalities of their constituents, forming symmetric hierarchical structures, which are at the basis of Nordic egalitarian and individualistic society. Through the enskillment in seafaring and fishing, we explore the perspectival transformations involved in nausea; the development of sea-legs (the attunement to the rhythms of the sea), fishiness (empathy with the fish) and the meiths (a system navigation, perception and theorization of the coastal environment), showing the role of normal microbial biota in the perception and interactions with the environment. Based on the experience at sea, it is suggested that the ontologies developed through the interactions of seamanship constituted a cosmology that influenced the development of the Medieval Perspectivist theories in Natural Philosophy, Norse poetry and hermeneutics, which were means of secularization of pagan knowledge in the Nordic conversion to Christianity. Elaborating on some aspects of medieval perspectivist theory through their comparison with Amerindian animic theories and the biology of the eye it is suggested that its morphology entails an entoptic (inner-vision) microscopy, affording a means of visual perception and interaction with microbial entities. Finally, with the aid of a Treponema pallidum, a transatlantic traveller with a copious Amerindian mythology, it is shown that animic notions about spirits, dwarves and gods are coherent with an ecological physiology that takes into account microbial sociality and their role, both in health and in disease, in our metabolism, perception and relations with the environment in particular ecological communities. In so doing, it demonstrates that animic perspectivist ontologies are compatible with a naturalism that takes into account intentionality as a generalized physical property constituent of beings and things, and therefore sociality as generalized characteristic of the interactions between beings/things in the environment.

The ideology of home—essentially the notion that "a woman's place is in the home"— tends to shape the expectations and assumptions of both men and women regarding the interests and abilities of women on the water. In "At Home Afloat: Gender and Domesticity in Northwest Coast Marine Travel Accounts," I analyze those expectations and their effects in a regional context. Reading accounts by female boat tourists between 1861 and 1990, I question the ways that gender influences the roles women play at sea, the spaces they occupy on boats, and the language they use to construct their experiences, their surroundings, and their contact with native peoples. In this dissertation I show women—traditionally forbidden in marine environments —participating in Northwest Coast steam tourism from its initiation, and influencing steamship company promotional language. I trace a history of women who enter the local recreational boating community and alter it with their home-making skills and their demand for "houseboats," and I map how domestic ideology can divide the built space of the boat into gender-specific territories. Women who labor in marine occupations (fishers, towboaters) cope with the limitations of a "masculine" environment. My work shows how female tourists, who typically cruise as "mates" with their captains/husbands, cope with these same limitations while bearing the added responsibility of answering to the patriarchal head of household; as a result, women who gain access to boats through their domestic abilities can be "ghettoized" in the galley. This project hypothesizes that "feminine discourse" (shaped by the Victorian cult of the home), together with the limitations of steamship transportation, led nineteenth-century female boat travellers to portray native women as "counterfeit ladies" and to seek homescapes in the mixed land/seascape. After the turn of the century-with the rise of the myth of the disappearing Indian, and the growing popularity of small-boat cruising—female boat tourists use feminine discourse to question their own position as outsider in the native world. Finally, I show that although literary works rely on seascape metaphors to symbolize woman's escape from the "social moorings" of gender expectations, these travellers tend to depict themselves in traditional domestic roles and find the waterscape largely "indescribable." Their accounts focus on "enfolding" nature into the ship's household, and emphasize female connections to the land.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2008. / Title from file title page. Dr. Christine Skwiot, committee chair; Denise Z. Davidson, committee member. Electronic text (186 p. : col. ill.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed August 5, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 180-186).

The ideology of home—essentially the notion that "a woman's place is in the home"— tends to shape the expectations and assumptions of both men and women regarding the interests and abilities of women on the water. In "At Home Afloat: Gender and Domesticity in Northwest Coast Marine Travel Accounts," I analyze those expectations and their effects in a regional context. Reading accounts by female boat tourists between 1861 and 1990, I question the ways that gender influences the roles women play at sea, the spaces they occupy on boats, and the language they use to construct their experiences, their surroundings, and their contact with native peoples. In this dissertation I show women—traditionally forbidden in marine environments —participating in Northwest Coast steam tourism from its initiation, and influencing steamship company promotional language. I trace a history of women who enter the local recreational boating community and alter it with their home-making skills and their demand for "houseboats," and I map how domestic ideology can divide the built space of the boat into gender-specific territories. Women who labor in marine occupations (fishers, towboaters) cope with the limitations of a "masculine" environment. My work shows how female tourists, who typically cruise as "mates" with their captains/husbands, cope with these same limitations while bearing the added responsibility of answering to the patriarchal head of household; as a result, women who gain access to boats through their domestic abilities can be "ghettoized" in the galley. This project hypothesizes that "feminine discourse" (shaped by the Victorian cult of the home), together with the limitations of steamship transportation, led nineteenth-century female boat travellers to portray native women as "counterfeit ladies" and to seek homescapes in the mixed land/seascape. After the turn of the century-with the rise of the myth of the disappearing Indian, and the growing popularity of small-boat cruising—female boat tourists use feminine discourse to question their own position as outsider in the native world. Finally, I show that although literary works rely on seascape metaphors to symbolize woman's escape from the "social moorings" of gender expectations, these travellers tend to depict themselves in traditional domestic roles and find the waterscape largely "indescribable." Their accounts focus on "enfolding" nature into the ship's household, and emphasize female connections to the land. / Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies / Graduate

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1991. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 473-513) / Microfiche. / ix, 513 leaves, bound 29 cm