From ‘where am I?’ to ‘where is that?’ Rethinking navigation
From ‘where am I?’ to ‘where is that?’ Rethinking navigation
Chapter Four continues the discussion of techniques and technologies with a focus on orientation and navigation. The chapter draws on Tim Ingold’s and James Gibson’s descriptions of orientation as a process of movement through the landscape to find affordances. The chapter describes the techniques used locally for finding position from the 1960s onwards: dead-reckoning, and the use of radar, depth sounders, Decca, and GPS. Challenging anthropological accounts of ‘Western’ navigation that assume Westerners always rely on charts and instruments and that these alienate people from direct relations with their environment, the GPS chartplotter shows the perpetual importance of the subjective and experiential aspects of orientation in a digital age. The chapter argues that alienation is instead produced by relations of ownership and exploitation, and that the chartplotter facilitates the centralisation of fishing knowledge with the skipper and the employment of low-waged migrant workers as crew. While authors such as Edwin Hutchins describe navigation as answering the absolute question ‘where am I?’, the chapter proposes that the aim of navigation is usually to answer the relational question ‘where is that?’
Keywords: Navigation, Orientation, Technology, Anthropology, GPS, Edwin Hutchins, Tim Ingold, James Gibson, Radar, Decca, Affordances, Depth sounder
Manchester Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
