1 Kalymnos and the Aegean Sponge Fishing Industry
The history of sponge fishing in the Aegean includes the story of rural communities that were restructured by a single industry on which entire island populations came to depend, until the industry all but disappeared in the twentieth century. In what follows, I will focus on the island of Kalymnos and on the Kalymnians who once dove for sponges as an occasional supplement to their agricultural subsistence, but would find their economy, culture, and daily lives re-imagined in the period of technology-supported mass commercial sponge harvesting that began with the industrial revolution. The combined forces of industrialization, globalization, and financialization not only served to normalize indebted subjectivity as a way of life on the island; they also reshaped gender identities and relations. My goal here is to demonstrate how the imagination of the island of Kalymnos, as a rural space harboring rural people, changed under the influence of the sponge industry. While sponge fishing has sometimes been seen as a form of agriculture, it produces subjectivities that are specific to diving and processing sponges – from wealthy merchant and indebted, disabled “mechanical diver” subjectivities to hardened female subjectivities, resigned to the effects of the industry’s capitalization.
Originally undertaken by naked divers, sponging was first conducted using the apnea or breath-hold method, or by means of frames – gagavas – dragged along the seabed, which gathered sponges but caused damage to the seabed. Harpoons were also used to hook sponges, which risked tearing them; “hooked sponges,” moreover, were less valuable than “virgin” sponges (Kalafatas 125). Even combined, these early methods for extracting sponges yielded small returns, so that sponge fishing remained only a part of a rural, agrarian subsistence economy that included raising goats and sheep, as well as limited agriculture for domestic consumption.
In the mid-nineteenth century, however, two factors significantly grew the trade. The first was a major increase in the global demand for sponges used in industrial applications such as casings for machinery and working with toxic substances, as well as for cosmetic and domestic use. Kalymnians went from apnea diving for a very few sponges to mass sponging that supplied “the industrial needs of the West, while fine soft sponges were marketed in London, Paris, Vienna, Saint Petersburg, and New York” (Olympitou 88; Fourt et al. 2). Supporting this global trade, specialized sponge merchant houses which served as points of sale and logistics management were established in major centers such as Paris and London.2
The second factor was the invention and development of the diving suit with a water-tight scaphander [σκάφανδρο] helmet made of metal with a glass
Importantly, the arrival of the diving suit in the Aegean transformed sponge diving from an occasional, supplemental activity undertaken by a rural community into the island’s central activity, which was much more lucrative than subsistence agriculture. To be more precise, in records from the nineteenth century it is noted that the total area of Kalymnos is “forty-nine square miles of rock,” of which “less than a fifth is arable land,” yielding only small quantities of vegetables, figs, almonds citrus fruits, grain and olives (Sutton 1998: 417).3 According to Kalafatas, Kalymnians call their island agono nisi – barren island – and “have a hardness of character that comes from ‘living on a rock.’” Anthropologist David Sutton likewise writes that the residents of Kalymnos “refer to their home as ‘the barren island” (Kalafatas 77; Sutton 2004: 417). Therefore, while rurality and the rural are often imagined as idyllic, close to nature, and romantically bucolic, this is hardly the case for Kalymnos. Indeed, the island’s ruggedness and the difficulty of eking out an existence “on a rock” at least partially accounts for how rapidly sponging intensified.
Yet, while the scaphander suit brought industry to the island, providing wealth for some and a way to earn high occasional wages for others, the suit was also known as Satan’s machine, and hated “as much as the head of Gorgon and Medusa” (Kalafatas 12). If the scaphander suit allowed the diver to remain under water for significantly longer periods of time, and to increase productivity by at least one hundred percent, pressure from investors and captains as well as international companies to increase the number of sponges harvested on each dive resulted in mounting casualties in the form of decompression sickness that caused paralysis or sudden death. Captains who forced divers to
Exacerbating the rate of disease and death among divers yet more was the occasional practice of recruiting sponge divers from “the dives of Piraeus, or life’s castaways, suffering from various diseases,” so that their health was often poor to begin with (Olympitou 35; Panagos 3). Given the high mortality rate and the high risk involved, and the fact that divers came from the ranks of the poor and “low-living,” heavy drinkers, and smokers, the dangers of diving and the extreme conditions at sea took their toll (Kalafatas 75). Hence, rather strikingly, while rural living is generally associated with healthfulness and the image of the sober, down to earth farmer or the hardy fisherman, sponge divers were associated with hard living when on land, as well as with early death and paralysis.
The result of these technical and physical aspects of the early days and later the “Golden Age” of industrial sponge fishing was that an enormous swath of the island’s male population returned from six-month sponging expeditions paralyzed in at least one part of their body, if they returned at all. According to figures published by the Greek government, in just twenty-four years between 1886 and 1910, there were 10,000 deaths and 20,000 cases of paralysis in the Aegean (Warn 37). Kalafatas estimates that between 1866 and 1896, on the island of Kalymnos alone, three hundred young men died of the bends and six hundred more were paralyzed (16).
2 Financing the Industry
Where the financing of the industry is concerned, the introduction of the diving suit, along with the increased industrial and domestic demand for sponges in the West, led to the organization of large-scale sponge-fishing expeditions, involving multi-member crews, a group of boats including a “deposito” for the crew’s supplies, and on-board areas large enough to process sponges. This kind of modernization and expansion also necessitated a shift to modern banking, which supported a complex web of investors and specialized instruments of credit, while investors entered into agreements based on projections of future yields and speculation on the market value of their product once processed.
Captains were usually under contract, either with a merchant or money lender. After 1949, the money lender became Agricultural Bank of Greece, thus taking over a system of investment and lending that had previously been managed by families and extended families. And while some captains owned their
Overall, the new conditions that came with the industrialization and modernization of the Kalymnian sponge fishery were: “more intense monetisation leading to bank loans, greater visibility and commercialisation of the product, (the introduction of seasonal workers from other islands into the island’s sponge-fishing labour force), less-specialized workers, and reduced remuneration” (Panagiotopoulos 21). As Olympitou has explained, this cluster of events and agents formed a dense network that supported the person who recruited Kalymnians, as well as marginalized and unemployed young men from the port of Piraeus, and it paid their travel expenses to the island; the loan-shark grocer who rented squalid rooms to the recruits and charged exorbitant rates; and the rich merchant-investors in sponge-fishing groups. Hence, when the recruiting season began every year, divers found themselves “trapped in a collaborative network of exploitation,” torn between their debts and readily available jobs on the sponging vessels (Olympitou 343).
Concerning the divers, who were required to expose themselves to the dangers enumerated above and to endure incredible hardships for six months of the year while at sea, one might ask what kind of financial arrangement would entice them to do so. Quite obviously, poverty and the opportunity to quit subsistence farming to become a wage earner was one reason men became sponge divers. Likewise, occasional laborers who were recruited in ports like Pireaus and who were living a down-and-out urban existence seized any opportunity to improve their lot. Perhaps rather remarkably, those who signed on as divers were generally both aware and accepting of the dangers involved in sponging. Hence, in a 2005 interview, former diver Michalis Lampos explained that “[i]f you go into this kind of garden, this is the cabbage you get” (Olympitou 264).
The monetary enticement to enter this undersea garden was known as the platika and was probably the greatest motivation to go sponging at the risk of paralysis and death. The platika was a large up-front payment made to divers at the height of the “Golden Age” of the sponge fishery and there were various kinds of platikas, which often included a percentage of the diver’s projected
3 Sponging and Gender: Rural Masculinities
Sponge divers were famous for their unwholesome, reckless lifestyle, typified by what Michael Herzfeld has called the “poetics of manhood” and the notion of “performative excellence” – the ability “to foreground manhood by means of deeds that strikingly speak for themselves” (Kalafatas 87). A description provided by one diver in an interview is illustrative of Campbell and Bell’s discussion of how rurality helps to “constitute notions of masculinity” in context-specific ways (540):
After the diver was dressed in the 172-pound diving suit, he crossed himself and jumped overboard, sometimes with the embellishment of a one-and-a-half twist. No other diving group in the world … jumped from a diving vessel into the water in deep-sea gear, and for good reason: it risks fouling lines, breaking hoses, or suffering concussion with the 35-pound brass helmet.
(Kalafatas 71)
The divers’ bravado and the “poetics of manhood” that went with taking on enormous risk for a large platika, in combination with the seasonality and undependability of sponge fishing, particularly in the twentieth century, made for a culture in which divers went on rampages, bought expensive clothing, drank, and gambled away their platika. This became a significant aspect of how the island was imagined by Kalymnians as well as travel writers. Sponge divers are reported to have worn “tight black trousers and peaked black caps, with bright cummerbunds wound around the waist and a coloured scarf twisted about the shoulders of their clean white shirts” (Clift 157), and the most fortunate divers were known for showing off the temporary wealth the platika brought them in the form of “gold watches with glinting fobs that dangled from velvet vests” (Kalafatas 23). Divers’ culture thus manifested a new form of rural masculinity on the island, with inner contradictions such as weakness and strength, wealth and poverty, as well as fearlessness and early death. If,
4 Sponging, Debt, and Class
Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, sponging on a massive scale prompted the transformation of a rural community into a mono-industry to supply the needs of a global market and a globalizing world. The sponge fishery’s rapid growth was underwritten by instruments and networks of credit, including the platika, which lured divers in particular into what more often than not turned out to be a life of pain and permanent indebtedness. In The Making of Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato asks, “[w]ith what kind of machinery does debt produce the subject?” (39). In the present case, the answer is relatively straightforward. The scaphander diving suit turned human subjects into “mechanical men,” while the value of the platika had to be returned in sponges and interest paid by the end of the season, keeping the diver-subject limping along from one debt to the next. As Lazzarato writes, moreover,
[t]he debt economy combines [subject formation] and labour, in its classical sense, such that ethics and economics function conjointly. The modern notion of “economy” covers both economic production and the production of subjectivity. Traditional categories rooted in 19th and 20th-century revolutions – labour, society, and politics – are now informed and in large measure have been redefined by debt. (11)
So, the kind of laboring subject that came with the modernization of the sponge fishery and the shift to a debt-intensive economy as described by Lazzarato – the loans, speculation, the platika – formed the indebted sponge-fishing subject.
The centrality of the fishery after its expansion, along with the economic structure that underpinned it, also created a new financial class, and a social schism that expressed itself in town planning and geography. For example, in the mid-nineteenth century, the town of Pothia began to take shape on a level plain, along the coast, and on the two facing steep slopes. The neighborhoods established on these slopes – with small properties laid out in amphitheatrical
Half a century later, in her travel narrative of living on the island in 1954, Charmain Clift offers a clear picture of how the industry restructured Kalymnian society and family, in her account of sixty-six-year-old diver Emmanuele Manglis and his investor cousin Anthony from the wealthy side of the Manglis family:
[Emmanuele] was a diver for twenty-five years and was brutally crippled. … His cousin Anthony Manglis represents, in a sense, the other side of the Kalymnian coin. … He stands for the mercantile, the prosperous, the respectable …. He is a man of considerable wealth and commercial talent, handling the very considerable Vouvalis estates …, merchandising sponges in the markets of the world …. One finds oneself inevitably lingering on the absolute separateness of the lives of these two branches of the family. It is, in a way, a perfect example of the great schism which ruthlessly divides all the life of Kalymnos. (93)5
Not only did the sponge fishery, as the mono-industrial base of modern Kalymnos, restructure economic and family relationships and inject money into the social structure of the island that caused it to harden along class lines, it also became part of Kalymnians’ “cultural singularity,” and of how this rural community was imagined. This reimagining is exemplified by “The Dance of the Mechanical Diver,” an apocryphally “traditional” sponge diver’s dance invented by Theofilos Klonaris, a Kalymnian graduate of Sports and Physical Education, who first presented the dance with the culturally significant Dora Stratou ensemble in 1952 (Olympitou 333–334). The dance mimics a semi-paralyzed “mechanical diver” who has been slightly “hit” by the machine, and who leads
Perhaps more interesting than the fact that this purportedly “traditional dance” was invented in the 1950s is the fact that it was incorporated into local tradition – into how Kalymnos is imagined. As such, “The Dance of the Mechanical Diver” demonstrates how various social, political, economic, and cultural imaginations shape contemporary notions of rural life, and how those imaginations affect the way people, inside and outside the rural, make sense of it, while shaping the rural and mobilizing it politically and economically as a means of dealing with the island’s difficult past. And while new victims continued to be made by the fishery when the dance was being performed, it requires flexibility, skill, and strength on the part of the lead dancer who pretends to be paralyzed. Given that the “stricken” or paralyzed diver is the star of the show, one might see “The Dance of the Mechanical Diver” as destigmatizing disability caused by decompression disease.
At the same time, however, the centrality of the paralyzed dancer normalizes criminal industrial negligence as an acceptable and regular occurrence – part of the island’s cultural heritage, richly imagined for tourists and Kalymnians alike. The dance seems to suggest that semi-paralysis, in the context of sponge diving, comes with the territory – with “the poetics of manhood.” Hence, as Zotos wrote in his report on the island in 1903, the mildly paralyzed “were so numerous that dragging one’s leg was considered a sign of bravery or knowledge of the profession” (19). Similarly, Sofia Giannatou claimed that it is only in the tradition of Kalymnos and the sponge fishery that men may cry without being considered weak (258).
5 Debt and Gender: (In)visible Women
As Campbell and Bell have noted, various forms of rural masculinity “promote the invisibility of women,” and the (in)visibility of Kalymnian women is yet another aspect of the island’s rural cultural singularity. Part of the island women’s invisibility is accounted for by divers’ frequent habit of extravagantly spending their platika before the sponging expedition, leaving behind wives and children in extreme poverty. The negative impact of the industry and the platika on households was then worsened by the loss of the men who never returned, or returned paralyzed and constituted a further economic burden and added strain on what was already an exceedingly difficult life on Kalymnos. It was not until 1960 – when the sponge diving industry was only about twenty years away
At the same time, however, during the six months the men were absent, women were, to a great extent, responsible for affairs both domestic and public. In the face of these challenges, the women of Kalymnos famously became “tough like men” (Olympitou 462). Indeed, a character in Ion Dragoumis’s novel The Sponge Fishermen (1898/1899) contemplates the endless hardships of the diver’s wife – the majority of which are attributable to the industry – as she decides never to marry a diver:
She would never marry a diver. Never. To stay three or six months completely alone, not knowing if her husband is coming back? And then, what if he does come back and he gets drunk? To have him come home late at night and beat her? And what if he dies at sea and never comes back? Then she will wear black just like Kyra Georgaina, the neighbourhood laundress.
(qtd. in Olympitou 325)
Clift claimed that “the primary function of a Kalymnian woman is reproduction, at which, heaven knows, she acquits herself honourably. She will have a baby a year for as long as she is capable” (52; see also Sutton 2004: 417). This was written in the 1950s, when, as the author claims, even little girls know “by imagination or experience, the weight of the responsibilities ahead of them,” over and above child-rearing and domestic tasks (Clift 52). These would be agricultural activities – viticulture, arboriculture, harvesting, threshing, and beekeeping, as well as the gathering of tree branches from the surrounding mountains for kitchens, bread making, and washing (Flegel 38) – and these were constant duties (Olympitou 308). Tasks outside the home – such as gathering branches – often forced women to make their way into secluded areas of the island, and nineteenth-century archival documents record various kinds of
In periods of intensified sponge-fishing or manufacturing activity, moreover, the shortfall in the male labor force was bridged by female labor, for which women were paid considerably less than their male counterparts. The types of paid employment open to women were few, employment was occasional, and women were paid day wages for jobs such as sorting and trimming sponges. Women also worked in the tobacco processing warehouses that were built at the end of the Ottoman administration, while the class divide to which the industry gave rise meant that many women whose husbands worked as divers and crew hands on sponging expeditions served as maids in the houses of wealthy Kalymnians and sponge merchants on Kalymnos, in Asia Minor, and abroad, exposing them to further risk of being attacked and raped. In addition, the wives and children of sponge fishermen were compelled to serve at the residences of the few wealthy captains throughout the winter, either to work off their husband’s debt or to ensure that their men would be hired again the following year. It is important to keep in mind, finally, that when husbands came back paralyzed, Kalymnian women became primary caregivers to full-grown men and their children, while also filling the role of sole family provider, along with the hardships just enumerated.
In the discussion of divers and indebtedness above, I referred to Lazzarato’s work on the “making of the indebted man” as a means of understanding how and why the modern sponge fishery created subjectivities permanently indebted to the industry from what were formerly rural subjectivities. In the case of divers, the platika insured that they often returned with more debt, trapping them in a Sisyphean cycle from which it was difficult to escape. When divers died, their debts were born by wives who passed the remainder on to their children at death, so that debt was carried forward for generations.
Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago’s critique of Lazzarato’s account of the “making of the indebted man” as grounded in the assumption of a “universal subjectivity of the debtor-creditor relation” is highly pertinent to the Kalymnos sponge diving industry. As a corrective to the concept of the “indebted man”
(1) a particular form of moralization directed toward women and feminized bodies; (2) a differential of exploitation due to the corresponding relations of subordination; (3) a specific relation between debt and reproductive tasks; (4) the concrete impact of sexist violence, to which debt is connected; and (5) fundamental variations in possibilities “for the future” involving financial obligation in the case of feminized bodies.
(Cavallero and Gago 4)
One could hardly find a better example than Kalymnian women to illustrate Cavallero and Gago’s elaboration of the specificity of woman and indebtedness, over and above Lazzarato’s universal subject. Kalymnian women struggled to fulfil their husbands’ various shortfalls and manage their debt obligations; hence, their “possibilities for the future” were determined for them. Besides being responsible for reproduction and caregiving, they were also vulnerable to sexual violence as a direct consequence of their indebtedness. And while working as domestics in the homes of wealthy investors as well as sole caregivers in their own households, Kalymnian women were certainly subject to a “differential of exploitation” attributable to the degree of their subordination, which included being paid less for processing sponges on an occasional basis. As far as a particular form of moralization directed toward women is concerned, one need only think of the tradition of keeping “daughters locked up in their houses” in order to keep them from bringing shame on the family through even the hint of premarital sexual behavior, which would also diminish their marriageability (Sutton 2004: 422). In addition to highlighting this gender dimension of indebtedness, the case of Kalymnos makes clear that the shift from rurality to mono-industry inflects the figure of the indebted man and the indebted woman in ways specific to each, including through the extended absences of the men, and the victims made by the scaphander suit.
6 Into the Present
Following the development of the synthetic sponge beginning in the 1930s, the demand for natural sponges rapidly decreased, as did work for divers. By the 1970s, the divers’ flamboyant, reckless behavior became defunct and with it a once celebrated part of their masculinity, of the local culture, and of how
In 1986, Mediterranean sponge beds were severely diminished by a disease that caused the sponges to crumble, rendering them worthless and resulting in a reduction from 30,000 tons harvested in 1986 to 3,000 tons in 1992 (Sutton 1998: 24). In 1999, the disease returned, destroying most of the remaining sponge-bearing beds in the Mediterranean. Intensive overfishing over the course of roughly two centuries, as well as climate change and sea pollution have also contributed to dramatically decreased sponge reserves. The story of Kalymnian sponging, then, is yet another example of how the capitalization of rural spaces and practices can be socially and environmentally damaging. Here, heteropatriarchal and capitalist epistemes of extraction, domination, mastery, and progress have led to the demise of the very industry that spongers sought to develop. Unsurprisingly, by the early 2000s, only about 10 sponge-fishing caiques were left in Kalymnos, with crews of 25–30. As of 2010, based on data provided by the Union of Kalymnos’ Sponge Fishermen, there were 15–17 vessels with 100–120 people, and an annual production of about 4 tons.8
The arrival of the synthetic sponge and the large-scale depletion of Mediterranean sponge beds caused a second momentous shift in virtually every aspect of life on the island, and Kalymnians were forced to migrate or diversify. Already in the 1980s, the local, once entirely rural community began to promote diving for tourists and, more recently, rock climbing. The island’s population has “turned to tourism as an alternative development strategy to meet these changes just like farmers in many other peripheral parts of Europe” (Brandth and Haugen 14). The island is now dependent on a different kind of economy defined by a new model of indebtedness, based on the constant consumption and waste production that comes with tourism, and the degradation of a landscape dotted with resorts. This has also affected the imagination of Kalymnos. With the promotion of tourism, the island is re-imagined as a post-production, service-based experience economy, which is destined
As Vassilis Panagiotopoulos imagines it, “the island of Kalymnos, [is] a land of extreme and eternal poverty” (Olympitou XI). Kalymnos was a rural Aegean Island, restructured by the sponge fishing industry, with its “man-eating machines,” which created new wealth and new historical conditions that became “part of a cycle of rebirth, evolution, and decay” (Olympitou XIII). The economics and politics of indebtedness entailed in the evolution of this cycle created or hardened class and gender divides, and introduced modern banking and specialized instruments of credit. The financialization of the industry resulted in various forms of indebtedness and indebted subjectivities: deceased divers’ families indebted to captains; captains indebted to investors, and so on, as well as a macro debt owed to the Mediterranean, which is now almost depleted of sponges.
The technological advancement of the diving suit produced a specialized diving subject – a “mechanical man” adhering to a specific “poetics of manhood” – who helped usher in a new kind of modern, indebted rural masculinity on the island, accompanied by a modern, indebted rural femininity. Ultimately, on the island, it was the notion of rural subjectivity as agricultural subjectivity that was replaced by an imagination of the divers as still rural subjects (certainly from the perspective of Greece’s urban centers), but modernized rural subjects, who were also globalized. Thus, the history of the sponge fishing industry on Kalymnos illustrates how rural subjectivities cannot be thought narrowly as only agricultural or only non-modern/non-globalized. Not in the present, and also not necessarily in the past.
Throughout this chapter, I refer to the divers as men because, with the exception of sponge merchant Fortis Mastoridis’s pregnant wife Evgenia, who put on the suit for a crowd of “proud island men” apprehensive to do so, the divers in the scaphander suits were always men and it was considered bad luck for women to set foot on a sponging boat (Olympitou 87). The story of Mastoridis’s wife is well-known and particularly interesting given the notion that “farming masculinities” involve the ability to “control the elements by means of big machines” (Warn 32; Olympitou 87; Kalafatas 167; Brandth and Haugen 13, 16).
Importantly, until the invention of various kinds of synthetic sponges – viscose, rubber, plastic – in the 1930s and 1940s, animal sponges were the only kind available.
Although agricultural production was limited, it does appear that some of the total yield was exported. Rough estimates based on census information gathered at various junctures in the nineteenth century suggest that there were approximately 50 farmers, 100 families raising livestock, and 8,000 sheep and goats on the island (Olympitou 13).
Manuscript 2729/1976, Angeliki Georgiadou, p. 121, CFS (Olympitou 353).
For an interesting and well-justified critique of Clift’s colonializing, romanticizing, and mildly denigrating gaze, see Previti et al.
Testimony of Giannis Koutouzis to Evdokia Olympitou, 25/8/2003 (59). This practice makes its appearance in individual recruitment documents starting from the years of Italian occupation. See, for instance, doc. 44, 21/9/1919, MC Minutes 1919–1922, MAK. On the same topic, see also Warn 68. After World War II, captains deposited the advance payments with the Port Authority and, during the divers’ absence, these payments were paid in monthly installments to the divers’ families.
The figure of the klaofora [woman carrying branches] – and, more specifically, the sponge fisherman’s widow – present throughout written and oral accounts is a deep memory of what ultimately amounted to the enslavement of the women of Kalymnos. Katerina Giannatou argues that a statue of the klaofora should be erected on Kalymnos, in honor of the mothers whose willpower and sacrifices made it possible for their sons to study so that they would not be forced to turn to the sponge fishery for their livelihood.
More recent estimates suggest that the annual haul is around 2 tons, but the precise number is difficult to ascertain. Most “Greek” sponges are now imported from the Caribbean or Tarpon Springs, Florida.