Karen Carr has written a magnum opus. Shifting Currents is, as its title indicates, a world history of swimming, but it ends up as a world history through swimming as well.[1] Carr’s encyclopedic knowledge and vast intellectual scope reach from literally the origins of life—but more specifically the beginning of modern hominid life in the evidence from early humans and Neanderthals—to the 21st century. The book’s temporal range is matched by its geographical breadth. No part of the earth is left untouched by Carr’s deft analysis; no country or culture has been ignored in what is clearly the result of years of careful and in-depth research.[2]
Carr’s contention throughout the book is that swimming has been with humans and their evolutionary cousins from the beginning. Early humans may not have been fully aquatic (17), but they waded and had a relationship with water that was intricate, intimate, and lasting. This relationship began and persisted despite the disadvantages for swimming that came with the upright stance of modern humans. Human children learn crawling and walking naturally, but infants will drown when dropped in the water. Swimming is a skill, and thus itself culture and evidence of cultural tradition and transmission. If so, then swimming is early evidence for the existence of hominid culture altogether: clamshells and fishbones dating to 140,000 years ago are suggestive of early swimmers, while finds from Paleolithic Italy demonstrate that Neanderthals “were diving 3-4 metres (10-13 ft) down to the bottom of the Mediterranean bay on which they lived” (18). Neanderthals and humans must have learned to swim and transmitted this knowledge to their kinship groups and children. Swimming, from among the earliest points in human prehistory, is culture.
Swimming as culture is critical to Carr’s account, since the thread that runs through her work, from her analysis of ancient records of swimming to today, is that swimming has been made to mean something across time and place. Amid many meanings, Carr argues throughout that swimming has been made to establish “cultural identity” (7). Specifically, she understands the history of swimming as implicated in the construction of Whiteness (9), and she demonstrates how swimming has been used to establish the lines between colonizer and colonized, often as swimmer and non-swimmer (9). A critical aspect of this argument is that of all the evidence for swimming across the globe, one area lags and, for great periods of time, evinces a complete absence of—or indeed refutation—of swimming: Europe and northern Asia.[3] Across diverse European and Asian cultures, water was imagined as dangerous, swimming as immoral or unclean, and therefore societies in these areas encountered the rest of the world (violently and through conquest as they often did) with an antipathy to swimming; moreover, they imported this antipathy with them and swimming began to be used to explain differences and hierarchy. This argument ebbs and flows throughout the work, and in some sections is more strongly argued than in others. Still, amid the veritable museum of swimming that this book represents—with evidence from dozens of linguistic traditions, from literature, documents, art, material culture, etc.—Carr makes clear that learning to swim, types of swimming (even the strokes themselves), swimming outfits, and swimming places are not neutral. They are, and have been for thousands of years, implicated in discourses of class, race, and gender. If swimming is culture, then, like all elements of culture, it is wrapped up in contestations of power.
As a Classicist, I am not equipped to assess the vast array of multicultural and multilinguistic evidence that Carr brings to bear. What I can do, however, is point readers to some of the more fascinating insights in this book, privileging at least to some degree those from or rooted in Classical Antiquity, especially since the risk of a work like this one, with so many details, is that readers may lose the forest for the trees. Indeed, the only minor criticism I would offer of Carr’s work is just that: the plethora of information—delightful, surprising, and informative in its own right—sometimes distracts from the argument about race and swimming. At times, that argument fades, though, to be sure, the reader does not mind since the writing style is so lucid and the content so rich. Following Carr’s details and immersing oneself in this world history are delights in themselves, so my review here indicates points of interest without suggesting that this book does not deserve a reader who reads from start to finish or one who tracks her argumentation carefully.
In contrast to those natural swimming cultures that Carr traces elsewhere, swimming in ancient Greece, while ancient (Odysseus swims, of course, in the Odyssey), was not integral to Greek culture. Carr suggests that Greeks emulated Egyptian and north African swimmers and swimming cultures that contrasted with their own broad fears of swimming and water (124). For the Greeks, swimming became marked as an emblem of sophistication and distinction; distinction, in the most important sense, as a cultural marker that distinguished Persians and Greeks in the aftermath of the early fifth-century Persian Wars. Herodotus reports that Persian soldiers and their allies died as they waded into the water in the aftermath of Marathon and in the shipwrecks of Salamis. It is in the fifth century that we hear of the Greek proverb that the uneducated can neither read nor swim (102). Unlike the North African cultures they emulate, Greeks and Romans understood swimming as something unusual: swimming required lessons, special places (pools, for example), and technical equipment. Swimming was not widespread in Greek and Roman culture, or, at least, swimming was understood as not widespread: upper-class Roman children, for example, learned to swim in formal lessons and therefore regarded swimming as an elite activity even as they knew of many low-class swimming workers in the Mediterranean (e.g., fisherman and divers). Thus, the ideological map that Classical writers tried to produce that made swimming and Greek or Roman identity overlap ends up not reflecting the reality that, complicated by gender (on which, for antiquity, see Carr’s discussion of women and swimming at 103-105), class, and race (ancient Greece and Rome, of course, not being ethnically or racially homogenous societies at any time), is much messier (119). This messiness was exacerbated by the residual fear of the water that permeated Greek and Roman culture and which was exported by them with their conquest of the Mediterranean basin and beyond.
From Greece and Rome, Carr moves to medieval Europe, and a world in which swimming retained its elite character, or at least was imagined to retain it. Still, she suggests that actual Europeans were not swimming as much as their heroes in fiction, who could swim in a leftover kind of emulation of ancient elites. This lingering interest in swimming, however, was not long-lasting, especially in light of the changes that were brought to Europe and Asia through the military victories of Central Asian peoples. As Carr puts it, cutting edge in medieval Europe and Asia meant doing things the Central Asian way, and “that meant staying out of the water” (154). Carr’s analysis in this chapter is illuminating and goes beyond swimming: Central Asia was a cultural innovator that pushed inventions and novelties into Europe and Asia, from Arabic numerals to glass lenses, new musical instruments—and, of course, a fear of dangerous water and a rejection of swimming as an elite skill. This new and highly valued cultural knowledge coincided with the most famous drowning of medieval Europe, that of Frederick Barbarossa (1190 CE). In the aftermath of the Barbarossa story (which travelled quickly around Europe), swimming in Europe lost its elite status, and even in fiction that was influenced by ancient Greek and Roman models, heroes became worse swimmers or lost certain swimming skills they had previously possessed. Climate change may have affected swimming as well, since the “Little Ice Age” began in the late medieval period. Given the dramatic crop failures and changed climate, Carr points out that it is “small surprise that these wet, cold, hungry people also lost interest in going swimming” (197). It’s this European swimming culture, where swimming was backwards, servile, dangerous, and overwhelmingly non-European (which soon came to mean non-White), that was in place when, in the aftermath of bloody Reconquista, European colonizers—first Spanish then others—turned to Africa and then the so-called New World. Swimming, which was frequent and normal in Africa and the Americas (not to mention among Pacific Islanders), was suddenly understood as a hallmark of “natural” servile status, akin to “savagery,” and a reason why these peoples could be subjugated, abused, and dispossessed of their lands, resources, and humanity (on which, see 201 and throughout the following chapters).
Carr’s book continues from this point to trace the strange relationship between swimming, water, and witchcraft (a practice she argues originated in Russia and Ukraine), and then to the return of swimming as an elite and then middle-class practice in 18th and 19th century. This swimming practice was not a belated recognition of Indigenous and Black swimming culture. Rather, swimming became embedded in capitalist economies, a specialized skill with its own equipment, magazines, trainers, specialized places and times, etc. not unlike the way in which it was integrated into ancient Greek and Roman culture. Swimming lessons, familiar to so many readers of this review, tackle swimming as a skill to be learned for safety and health, though rarely for fun. Even this phenomenon, Carr suggests, is changing as swimming falls out of fashion or falls victim to cost-cutting in educational programs and municipalities around the world.
The book ends with an explicit and emphatic assertion of a polemic that has run implicitly throughout: that is, that decolonization and antiracist action could decouple swimming and power and refute the logic of Whiteness that has made swimming mean elite and White today, even as it has previously meant servile and Black in the past. Swimming could, in this decolonized future, return to its origins as a “fun social activity” that, while as much part of identity as any part of culture, was divorced from hierarchy and focused on pleasure and people.
Notes
[1] The epilogue makes this clear: swimming reveals that so much of what is “understood” about the past is wrong; that progress is not inevitable; it defies the idea that certain places are “sources” of culture and others “receivers” (353).
[2] Carr explains that she set out to write the book when she realized that no such work existed and that the work is the result of eight years of work. Moreover, she stresses that it comes from her own love of swimming, something which comes through at many times in the book (9).
[3] Carr is unsure why; she posits the last Ice Age as a precipitating factor (49).