Abstract

This essay is an abridged and revised version of the keynote lecture «The Corporeal Life of Commerce at Sea» given by Laleh Khalili at the 9th Ethnography and Qualitative Research International Conference at the University of Trento on 9 June 2023. Drawing on ethnography aboard container ships as well as literary and scholarly works, the essay reflects on the lives and bodies of modern seafarers in the Western Indian Ocean and considers the quotidian life of labour, tedium, longing and camaraderie aboard ships today. The essay shows that in order to think about commerce at sea, we have to locate the Arab world’s economy in a global network of capital accumulation, and to seek in the macropolitical sweep of history the human-sized, the everyday, the embodied experience, and the affective lives of the people who make such commerce possible