Oceans as Highways of History: How Seas Shaped Cross-Cultural Encounters

The interaction between people of different cultures is a key process that drives many of the developments and changes in world history, and the world’s oceans have played a central role in fostering such interactions and encounters. For some peoples, the oceans have been seen as limiting barriers due to a lack of knowledge of seagoing technologies. Other groups, however, have seen the vast waters of the Earth as pathways to new peoples, places, goods, ideas, and diseases. Because the ability to traverse the seas is not common to all groups of people, arrival from across the oceans has often intensified cross-cultural encounters by magnifying differences between groups that have not had prior contact.

The physical environment of the ocean even lends itself to understanding what happens when people from different cultures come into contact with each other. In his 1986 reflection on history in the islands of the Marquesas, Greg Dening offered the metaphor of “islands and beaches” to describe cross-cultural encounters. According to Dening, people create metaphorical islands using their own understandings of the world, and when two groups encounter each other, there is a beach that must be crossed.

This metaphorical beach between two cultural islands serves as a space with new possibilities and understandings. Symbols, language, customs, and actions are all negotiated on these metaphorical beaches between cultures so that one side can make their intentions and desires known to the other. Participants in these encounters draw on their own culture and what they perceive of the other culture in order to communicate. Because of the complexities and nuances that inform culture, however, crossing these beaches can be characterized by misunderstandings and, in many cases, violence.

As numerous seafarers utilized the ocean waves to find new groups with whom to interact, the metaphorical beaches between different cultures were often the physical beaches themselves. Just as a physical beach shifts and changes where the ocean and the land meet one another, so, too, do people shift and change as they interact with someone from another culture. The result is that the beach itself (both physical and metaphorical) becomes a liminal space where a new culture can be created by both groups that exists outside the everyday culture of either group. Those who participate in the negotiated culture of the in-between beach are affected in different ways, whether they realize it or not.

In crossing these metaphorical beaches, people, objects, and ideas take on new meanings and alter relationships between and among different cultures. A pennant, shell, or piece of metal that has significant cultural value to one side of an interaction can be infused with new meaning because of the transfer between different cultures. At the same time, something with only utilitarian appeal to one culture, such as a tool or weapon, can be transformed into an object of cultural significance by crossing through this zone of contact. Those who return to their homes after such encounters bring with them new understandings of the world and what lies across the oceans. Michael Johnson

FURTHER READING:Campbell, Ian. 2003. “The Culture of Culture Contact: Refractions from Polynesia.” Journal of World History 14 (1): 63-86.

Dening, Greg. 1980. Islands and Beaches. Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas, 1774-1880. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.