The Whale in the Cape Verde Islands: Seascapes as a Cultural Construction from the Viewpoint of History, Literature, Local Art and Heritage

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The large role of Cape Verde islanders as labor on the whaling voyages will be familiar to an Anglophone readership, but this article draws on Portuguese-language source material to explore the emotional and cultural context and show what meaning the involvement had for Cape Verdeans themselves.  It also considers the long-term impact of whaling on the culture and imaginary of Cape Verde, extending up to the present day.  The researchers found whale bones integrated into the vernacular architecture; whale references in place names on the island; whale bone art and artifacts in abundance, including a living tradition of arts and crafts.

The strengths and weaknesses of this article stem from the same choice: It takes a very broad approach, illuminating many topics, time periods, and types of source material in a small space, yet the risk is that the analysis within any one portion of it may not run very deep.  The strength, of course, is that it shows relationships between themes, methodologies, and sources that may take on a different meaning when discussed together. The article weaves a rich tapestry linking past and present, vocational activity and artistic representation, historical records, objects preserved in museums, and forms of commemoration such as postage stamps.  The illustrations/photographs are clear and well-chosen.

The authors draw on a variety of theoretical frameworks, without necessarily giving preference to one; the “sea of islands” term from Epeli Hau’ofa (mentioned but not cited) deserves explication here, as the reference will not be self-evident to some readers, and it is important.

Regarding natural history expeditions with an eye to profitable natural resources, perhaps it worth noting the activities of Joseph Banks on behalf of Britain, and also Spanish expeditions in the same spirit and in exactly the same time period, the parallels are interesting. See Paula De Vos, “Natural History and the Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain,” Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 40, No. 2 (Winter, 2007), pp. 209-239; Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

If we bring up emotion (as in the closing lines of the article), it is best to ask critically: Whose emotions, and in what context? It may sound odd to suggest but, when it comes to analyzing emotion (even one's own), it may be wisest to be a bit unsentimental. In the case of the whale bone craft shops, there are different possible ways to read these objects and their creators; the authors prefer an optimistic interpretation (lines 283-285), yet what about the possibility that whale bone art from Cape Verde is part of a neocolonial exchange in which an “authentic” craft object is commodified and made intelligible to a metropolitan buyer?  Tourists and other visitors to Canada can purchase certified craft objects made of bone or stone by Inuit or other First Nations peoples (on a similar principle, for instance a walrus sculpture carved from a piece of walrus tusk), often for very high prices and in art dealerships located far from the place of origin.

It would even be possible to use this “colonial-to-neocolonial” trajectory to connect different sections of the article (an early phase involving the extraction of natural resources and manual labor; a later phase, associated with the search for the exotic and the culturally authentic in the era of inexpensive tourism and “banal mobilities,” in which the desirable export becomes craft objects that nostalgically evoke an earlier era). These craft objects are more desirable because they are also a memento of an endangered species / “charismatic megafauna.”  These kinds of interpretations will occur to many readers, so if this is not the authors’ conclusion, then it would be helpful to offer a pre-emptive rebuttal to it (“although it might appear…”).

If, instead, the focus is on the Cape Verdeans’ own emotions and experience in crafting these objects, it would be more effective if the fieldwork had included interviews with the craftspeople, and quotations from them could appear in the article. There is no discussion of price, nor is there a discussion about what percentage of the objects are sold by the makers, on site, versus what percentage of the crafts are exported to dealers in Lisbon or elsewhere.

There is an ample literature in anthropology about globalization and the ways that the “locals” have adapted to the tourists and to market forces. The sale of crafts is surely part of this larger picture.

One article down those lines (though not about crafts) is Beth E. Notar, “Producing Cosmopolitanism at the Borderlands: Lonely Planeteers and "Local" Cosmopolitans in Southwest China,” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 3 (Summer, 2008), pp. 615-650. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25488227

Line 49: typo-- truly, not “trully”

Line 68: no animal better known (not “best”)

Line 109: “in front of”: not sure how to render this correctly in English, but probably “despite”

Line 128: “knowing natural richness and resources usefulness” – better in English: assessing the value of the natural resources

Line 129: in English we would say specimens rather than natural elements

Line 185: are esteemed by them, not ”for them are estimated”?

Line 188: despite (or) although, not eventually

Line 219: in detriment of a pecuniary salary: unclear, is this a reference to working not for fixed wages, but for a share in the voyage’s profits?

Line 249: dissimilarity: unclear, is the intended word dissonance or conflict or tension?

Line 276: typo-- greatly, not grealty

Line 290: caption for Figure 5, evoking (or) evocative of, not reminding

Line 452: culturally resigned: not sure what the intended meaning is here

Author Response

We are grateful for all the comments and corrections. They were all taken into consideration. In detail, we corrected all the typos referred to, and changed some wording. All the references that were suggested were considered and included in the text and in the bibliography list. We looked again to ‘our’ own emotion and restructured the final sentences of the discussion. Also, we add some more information to the Rabelados section and their relationship to tourism. While we do not think this is a neo-colonial enterprise, although we are not sure (we did not conduct any interviews, in fact), we do know that the production and selling of the art is totally local and does revert to the community which is trying to open up more. These new aspects are now highlighted in the text and a new reference was added.

Reviewer 2 Report

I think the article is really interesting and well metologically based. It has a strong human or cultural geography approach and addresses the issue of landscape construction through literary examples, material culture and museum display. Whale fishing reveals the social, economic and cultural reference system and takes on landscape value.
I only recommend to insert a map of Cape Verde and to insert the main bibliographical references to the concept of cultural landscape.

Author Response

The authors thank for the review and included a map of the Cape Verde Islands according to the referee suggestion.