Feeding bodies. Analysing the everyday life experiences in the sealer industry in Antarctica (Nineteenth century)

MARÍA JIMENA CRUZ

Cambridge

Conferencia; Historical Antarctic Sealing Industry Conference; 2016

Scott Polar Research Institute

In this presentation I seek to discuss new ways to approach the everyday life of the groups of people that were part of the sealing industry during the XIXth century. In order to achieve this, I am going to present the results of an analytical model that I developed to think new ways in which people incorporate, relate and generate memories of this everyday contexts.This model has as a starting point, the idea that a way to study the experience of different groups can be through the integration of two different but at the same time complementary dimensions. On the one hand, I consider the body ?defined through the phenomenological approaches, as a fundament of the experience-. On the other, I consider alimentation ?understood as a series of stages that are performed by all human groups and that are incorporated and reproduced through the body. As I mentioned before, this model was applied to the groups of people that were part of the sealer industry, more specifically to the ones that were part of the voyages made around the world with the purpose of finding and hunting the fur seals. At the same time, two different, but complementary moments formed these voyages ? the life on the ships and on the land. In this presentation, I focus on the land context, more specifically, the campsites located on the Byers peninsula of the Livingston Island, South Shetland, Antarctica.