Abstract

Farming sea cucumbers for export to China is an emerging form of mariculture in Tanzania. It is encouraged by the government’s Blue Economy development paradigm, which aims to raise income in fishing communities while protecting the ocean. This paper interrogates sea cucumber farming in Kaole, a coastal fishing community where humans and sea cucumbers have coexisted for many years, although the jongoo bahari has lived as a wild creature in the ocean, not as a commodity in bounded farms. The paper probes the relationship between humans and sea cucumbers, focusing on interdependencies in the politics of care in a pluriversal multispecies world in the making (Escobar 2020, Ingold 2018, Puig de la Bellacasa 2018). It also explores the web of shifting political and ecological relations that are entangled in the practices and politics of domestication in the political ecology of blue growth (Barbesgaard 2018, Swanson et al 2018). The paper draws on ongoing fieldwork for Swahili Ocean Worlds (2022-2024), a research project carried out in collaboration with researchers from the University of Dar es Salaam, supported by the Swedish Research Council/Development Research. See swahilioceanworlds on YouTube and Instagram, and the project website.

Bio

Paula Uimonen is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. She is specialized in digital anthropology as well as the anthropology of art, visual culture, world literature, water and the ocean.

Her first article from the Swahili Ocean Worlds research project was published in a special issue on water in kritisk etnografi, the Swedish Journal of Anthropology: “Spiritual Relationality in Swahili Ocean Worlds” (Uimonen and Masimbi 2021). 

Her open access publications on world literature include the monograph Invoking Flora Nwapa. Nigerian Women Writers, Femininity and Spirituality in World Literature (2020, Stockholm University Press), and the book chapter “One World Literature with Chinua Achebe and Flora Nwapa”, in Claiming Space. Locations and Orientations in World Literatures (2021, Bloomsbury Academic). She has also co-edited a volume on visual digital heritage, Connect to Collect: Approaches to Collecting Social Digital Photography in Museums and Archives (2020, Nordiska Museets Förlag).