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Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems*
MICHAEL N. PEARSON
University of Technology, Sydney
| A recent review of two new edited books on maritime history concluded that "both works reveal how much is left to be done in global historical exploration of the world's oceans and the recognition of oceans and seas as valid categories of historical analysis."1 My claim is that an attempt to specify the nature of littoral societies is central as we try to advance our exploration of seas and oceans. |
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This article will be consciously tentative and problem oriented. It makes the case that there is such a thing as littoral society, that is, that we can go around the shores of an ocean, or a sea, or indeed the whole world, and identify societies that have more in common with other littoral societies than they do with their inland neighbors. Location on the shore transcends differing influences from an inland that is very diverse, both in geographic and cultural terms, so that the shore folk have more in common with other shore folk thousands of kilometers away on some other shore of the ocean than they do with those in their immediate hinterland.2 Surat and Mombasa have more in common with each other than they do with inland cities such as Nairobi or Ahmadabad. Yet this is not yet widely accepted. In a complaint against the dead hand of area studies and its effects on academic work, Erik Gilbert recently pointed out that one can get a grant to compare Zanzibar and Gambia, but not to compare Zanzibar and Aden or Calicut.3 |
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Three criteria will underlie my discussion. Location on or near the shore is an obvious matter. However, both occupation and culture are more difficult. Many aspects of both do indeed show the classic characteristics of littoral society—that is, a symbiosis between land and sea—but other parts do not. It is this mixture of maritime and terrestrial influences that makes a study of littoral society a paradigm for maritime history in general.
There are important gradations along the strand, from wholly aquatic people to those who move easily between land and sea, and indeed may, despite their physical location, draw much more from the land than the sea in terms of both livelihood and culture. The extent of the hinterland varies—as Fernand Braudel had it, a thousand frontiers—depending on the question or problem being posed. When we look to the sea, we need to separate out the coastal zone from the deep water. Philip E. Steinberg usefully differentiates between "land-like territorial waters and a non-territorial deep sea."4 This then is the littoral: the coastal sea zone, the beach, and some indeterminate frontier on land. |
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The place I am thinking of is not only the beach, for this is a very narrow zone and has no permanent people. The beach is the very narrow strip where the tide has an effect, what the Australian novelist Tim Winton called "the distinct ink line where the water meets the shore —the ever-contested margin of high water."5 W.J.Dakin describes the seashore as "that narrow strip of land over which the ocean waves and the moon-powered tides are masters—that margin of territory that remains wild despite the proximity of cities or of land surfaces modified by industry." It is a magic place, "one of the most delightful and exciting areas of the earth's surface—the seashore, that marginal strip where the sea meets the land, and which is covered and uncovered by the tides. From the dark ocean abysses to the mountain-tops, from the desert to the luxuriant jungle there is no place with more variety and flexibility of life than where the tides ebb and flow."6 |
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