![]() Anthropology, which got its start on islands, now focuses on the seas between them. Archaeology has moved offshore, revealing previously unknown aspects of prehistory that had been lost to rising sea levels. She wrote in 1951 that humans were destined to return to the sea from which they had emerged eons earlier, but this time they would do so “mentally and imaginatively.” This cultural turn to the sea began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and by now there is a vast trove of writing, painting, and music that awaits examination under the rubric of what English professor Steve Mentz would like us to call the “blue humanities.”Ī shift in attention from land to sea is under way in several fields simultaneously. Rachel Carson, who did as much as anyone to open up the marine sciences, was inspired by the arts and literature. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, fiction has been imagining undersea worlds that explorers were unable to reach. Yet large numbers of people know the sea in other ways, through the arts and literature. “More is known about the dark side of the moon than is known about the depths of the oceans,” writes the sea explorer David Helvarg. As a science, oceanography is still in its infancy. In studying the sea, we are returning to our beginnings.Īlthough fully half of the world’s people now live within a hundred miles of an ocean, few today have a working knowledge of the sea. In the nineteenth century, painters began to treat the sea as a subject worthy of attention in its own right, creating “seascapes.” / Photo courtesy Art Resource, NY ![]() Among the Waves by Ivan Aivazovsky (1817–1900).
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