Sailor's progress: Maritime tradition and political economy in the career of an Irish-American merchant seaman

As an interpretive, experimental ethnography, this dissertation approaches an occupational culture in the poetics and politics of one former seafarer and raconteur reflecting on the contradictions of social and industrial progress in maritime in the first half of the twentieth century. This approach to an historically distant and spatially dispersed culture explores the propositions (1) that the larger, impersonal forces of political economy in maritime are inscribed locally in cultural process and (2) that maritime culture and community is enacted in discursive practice and, in this case, maintained in unreconstructed representations of a past career.;As a study in maritime folklore, the dissertation examines resources of maritime tradition, including traditions of resistance, and views personal narratives and sailors' yarns as cultural capital in the production and preservation of an occupational identity. In the context of technological restructuring in the industry and amidst strident ideological competition over the political-economic interests of seamen and the meanings of who and what makes a sailor, one's promotion and enactment of traditional resources represented political power, authorized members to speak on behalf of sailors' interests, and authenticated personal experience and occupational identity. Competence or mastery in discourse forms and the extent to which other competent members engage in this discourse is shown in this study to determine the privilege and viability accorded to sailors' claims.;Focusing on the self representations of a veteran from Ireland's revolutionary decade (1912-1922) who shipped out on American vessels between the two World Wars, became a founding member of the National Maritime Union of America in 1936-7, and was expelled from the union in the anti-Communist purge of the late 1940s, the dissertation privileges a singular voice that represents descriptively and symbolically individual and collective experience. Through personal narrative, traditional discourses peculiar to this occupation, and other discourses interpreted generically as oral history and life history, this informant engages his past and promotes an identity as sailor and agent of social transformation in the progress toward industrial unionize and cultural solidarity.