Collector mobilities: Embodiment practices, relationality and sensoriality among seaweed collectors in southern Chile

Abstract

New approaches to mobility studies have arisen in recent years, though most have focused on practices and experiences in metropolitan contexts. This research aims to expand the theoretical framework with its application in an eminently rural and archipelagic environment, where daily mobility responds to space-time frameworks associated with natural cycles, such as collection, shellfish gathering, fishing and agriculture. We propose the concept ‘collector mobilities’ to designate the socially produced, embodied, relational and sensory forms of movement through which luche harvesting and its associated practices (including post-harvest processing and domestic rhythms) are organised, experienced, and given meaning. (popularly known as luche (nori)) an activity that has expanded in southern Chile's Los Lagos Region in recent years. Based on in-depth interviews and meetings with women and men engaged in this activity in the municipalities of Ancud and Calbuco, it argues that these ‘collector mobilities’ are an incarnate, relational and sensory practice where experience and knowledge intermingle. The activity is precisely sustained thanks to the positive sensory networks generated by memory and interaction with nature. While structural factors such as the distance traveled and the time required to collect or sell the seaweed, poor road quality, the lack of transport, poor connectivity or seasonality stand out, it provides a sensitive dimension for these mobilities. Indeed, the body and its performativity, sensoriality, places and non-human beings are some of the elements that shape these collector mobilities.