Frontiers, oceans and coastal cultures : a preliminary reconnaissance

Abstract

Part I of this study examines the practical and symbolic connotations according the term "frontier" over time. Opening with its limited military-territorial usage in colonial North America, I consider this within the context of the theories of Frederick Jackson Turner, the later impact of those theories, and the redefinitions proposed by his later critics and defenders. In this process a fortified zone of cross-border conflict became a leading edge of agricultural settlement and, later still, an often distant border region. Within this last, pioneer-frontiersmen are usually prominent. Meanwhile the material, intellectual, spiritual and other cultural values of an established centre or metropolis are first asserted in often primitive and hostile conditions, only to later rebound to interact with the home metropolis. In Part II I investigate the extent to which the Turner and post-Turner concepts are applicable to the activities carried out on the oceans that cover some 70 percent of Earth's surface. Apart from the territorial frontier nature of many coastlines, I propose there is a more general "Oceanic Frontier" on which mariner-frontiersmen are the equivalents of their traditional counterparts on land. This Oceanic Frontier comprise three sub-frontiers: the coastline on land; the maritime (or adjacent) coastal waters; and the distant high seas or "oceanic" frontier per se . All exist in a symbiotic relationship that has a unique impact on the mariner-frontiersmen who exploit them, as well as on the coastal dwellers who support them. Finally, I suggest this results in essential cultural differences between inhabitants of such maritime frontiers and those of the traditionally agricultural, often initially peasant, cultures of the continental interiors.