Dizzy Rhythms

This paper develops a perspectival ethnography with Shetlander trawlers fishing in the North Sea and the North Atlantic. We elaborate an ethnographic approach based on Amerindian epistemologies to revisit the parallel between seasickness and cultural shock, casting light on the perceptual and physiological transformations underlying enskilment at sea and enabling perspectival exchanges. The paper describes how the sea’s intricate rhythms affect our perception, emotions, and modes of interaction. It explores the process of becoming with crews through experiences of seasickness, finding your sea legs, landsickness, and losing yourself to oceanic feelings. Shetland fishers emphasize the role of our guts in generating conditions to overcome nausea by developing metabolic stability, becoming actively involved, and developing a working rhythm. We intimate that nausea is the experience of the superposition of rhythmical motions underlying transformations through empathetic processes, thereby affording perspectival exchanges. Our insights suggest that we overcome seasickness not by resolving cognitive dissonance but by actively transforming our body and its movement while developing in an empathic context.