Reflections on different perspectives of the ocean by PhD candidate Jennifer Whittingham

“The science can only happen if the waves and weather allow; we are at their mercy.”

— Field diary entry, Southern Ocean, Day 5

I wrote these words aboard the SA Agulhas II, my wrist swollen from carrying go flows, fingers nearly frozen from working through the night. It was 2am, we were at our first station, and despite all our preparation – the shower caps, the gloves, the arm covers, the hazmat suits – the ocean was in charge. What struck me wasn’t the R500,000 daily cost of delays or the frustration etched on scientists’ faces. It was the realisation that the ocean was actively deciding what we could and couldn’t know about it.

During my ethnographic fieldwork with oceanographers and indigenous knowledge holders along South Africa’s coastline, I’ve come to understand these moments differently. Not as obstacles to overcome, but as the ocean exercising what I call its hydro-epistemic agency, its active role in shaping human knowledge production. This piece reflects on how the ocean refuses, resists, and ultimately determines the boundaries of what becomes knowable.

Day 6 aboard the SA Agulhas II: “Seemingly overnight the cold, the snow, and the ice has come in. The windows have iced over, and it’s difficult to see out of the window.” I watched as machinery at the front of the ship iced over, crew members literally hacking away at it with hammers. This wasn’t a one-time thing, but a ritual repeated every few hours. In what I called the Southern Ocean’s “icy, icy chaos,” time itself seemed to bend. Days blurred together, schedules became meaningless, and the ocean set its own pace.

“Even a speck of dust will ruin the entire 25 litre sample,” the team leader warned us as we prepared the trace metal CTDs (Conductivity, Temperature, Depth). The stakes were impossibly high – contamination meant losing not just data but precious time and resources. Yet despite our precautions, despite the technology, the ocean found ways to intervene. The arm that lowered the CTD stopped working. Swells made deployment dangerous. Ice formations prevented access to study sites.

These aren’t just logistical challenges. Drawing on Karen Barad’s understanding that matter is “not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency,” I began to see these moments as the ocean performing its agency. The freezing that stops instruments, the swells that prevent sampling, the vast winter months when no vessel can safely collect data, these are active interventions in knowledge production. The ocean doesn’t simply react to our presence; it shapes what can become known. This resonates with Harry Garuba’s (2013) ‘animist materialism’, where the material world possesses its own force and capacity to act. Similarly, Stacy Alaimo’s ‘trans-corporeality’ reveals how ocean and instruments exist in constant material interchange, each transforming the other.

The Southern Ocean’s winter ‘data desert’ offers perhaps the clearest example of oceanic agency. This gap in oceanographic data isn’t simply about access. As my research documented, winter conditions create exceptional observational challenges that few research vessels brave, contributing to why Antarctic sea-ice projections have been assigned such low confidence ratings by climate scientists. The ocean actively creates conditions that resist systematic observation.

Indigenous knowledge holders along South Africa’s coast understand this differently. The Xhosa concept of uvalo embraces “a not knowing without confusion” (Magadla et al., 2021: 639), recognising that complete knowledge of the ocean is neither possible nor desirable. This principle acknowledges that some aspects must remain partial or beyond human comprehension. Unlike Western scientific traditions that frame incomplete knowledge as a challenge to overcome, Southern African traditions understand this partiality as ontologically significant, a form of respect for the ocean’s right to remain partially unknowable.

When some of the indigenous practitioners that I interviewed along the Pondoland coastline spoke of the ocean as emzini omkhulu (the great home), they position it not as an empty void but as a realm where ancestors dwell, where intergenerational moral obligations unfold. My fieldwork revealed how the ocean functions as a living archive, a repository of ancestral memory and spiritual presence, not only a body of water but an animated domain with its own imperatives.

The contrast with scientific approaches is profound. Marine science often operates on the assumption that with enough technology and resources, we can eventually map and model every aspect of the ocean. Yet my observations aboard research vessels revealed something different: the ocean as not simply an object of study but an active participant, dictating what can and cannot be done. This reframing has significant implications. If we accept the ocean as an agent, not just affected by human actions but actively affecting what humans can do and know, then our entire relationship to marine environments shifts. The question becomes not how to overcome oceanic resistance, but how to engage with an entity that exercises what might be called its own form of consent or refusal.

Throughout my fieldwork, I watched scientists negotiate with oceanic conditions that constantly shaped their work. The Southern Ocean’s material presence, its ice, its swells, its chemistry, determined what data could be collected and when. These weren’t obstacles to be overcome but manifestations of oceanic agency shaping the very possibility of knowledge production. As I reflect on those weeks at sea, watching researchers negotiate with an uncooperative ocean, I’m struck by how knowledge is always co-produced. The ocean shapes what we can know through its vastness that resists comprehensive surveillance, its movement that creates ephemeral geographies, its depths that remain largely inaccessible.

Perhaps learning to work with oceanic agency begins with accepting that sometimes, through ice and waves and impenetrable depths, the ocean actively decides what remains unknown. In those moments of enforced humility, when instruments fail, samples scatter, and time itself seems to bend, we glimpse a different way of understanding our relationship with the sea. Not as conquerors or cataloguers, but as participants in an ongoing negotiation where the ocean always has the final say.

References

Garuba, H. (2013). On animism, modernity/colonialism, and the African order of knowledge: Provisional reflections. Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge, 42-51
Kleinman, A., & Barad, K. (2012). Intra-actions. Mousse Magazine, 34(13), 76-81.
Magadla, S., Magoqwana, B., Motsemme, N., & Mohoto, L. (2021). Sex, gender and Uvalo/Letswalo centred spirituality: In conversation with Gogo Mapitsi Mohoto. Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 39(4), 634-643.