RODINELIUSSEN, RASMUS. 2024, Underwater Worlds: An Ethnography of Waste, Pollution, and Marine Life, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 248 pp., ISBN  978-3-031-63372-0

Keywords: Aquabiopolitics, Environmental Anthropology, Marine Pollution, Scuba Diving, Underwater Ethnography, Waste

Rasmus Rodineliussen’s Underwater Worlds is a vivid and thought-provoking ethnography that plunges into the complex entanglements of underwater waste, pollution, marine life, and our recognitions. At a time when oceanic crises are more urgent than ever—especially in light of the 2024 global coral bleaching event—this book offers a timely reflection on how we manage and respond to human-induced changes in marine ecosystems. While it doesn’t focus specifically on coral reefs, it sheds light on the practical, multispcecies efforts in navigate the broader impacts of climate and oceanic transformation.

Bridging environmental anthropology, political ecology, and science and technology studies (STS), Underwater Worlds contributes to critical conversations about waste, contamination, and the multispecies politics of water. Through immersive ethnographic work in scientific expedition and laboratory practices with marine scientists, and interactions with trash divers in Sweden, Brazil and Thailand, Rodineliussen weaves a compelling narrative. He captures the material, emotional, and political dimensions of waste in aquatic environments, showing how scientific practices, technologies, materilaities and multiscpecies engagements with the ocean shape our understanding of marine ecologies. The ultimate aim, he proposed, is to explore ‘how waste and pollution in the underwater world can be rendered visible, knowable, and relatable to humans’ (p.4).

Reading this book as an anthropologist and diver myself, I found it deeply resonant, especially the experience of submerging oneself into an environment that is both unknown and yet intimately connected to human actions (Sangkhamanee 2024). Rodineliussen captures the paradoxes of the underwater world—the invisibility, the fragility, and the unsettling evidence of human negligence. The embodied sensation of moving through near-zero visibility, touching objects before seeing them, and the eerie silence of the depths are vividly brought to life in his text.

Rodineliussen’s engagement with “aquabiopolitics” emerges as a central analytical framework, drawing from Foucault’s biopolitics and extending it into the submerged spaces of marine, nonhuman governance. The concept underscores how marine life, from jellyfish to microbes, is enrolled in human projects of environmental management, technological intervention, and ecological conservation and care. This aquabiopolitics, as Rodineliussen argued, is a ‘politization of marine life’ wherein provide a space of legitimization for humans ‘to kill or let some life die in favor of other (human) life’ (p. 30). This conceptual lens enriches broader anthropological debates on human-nonhuman relations by shifting attention to submerged ecologies, challenging terrestrial biases (Jue 2020, Raycraft 2020) in social theory where land-based politics often centered around the governability and exploitation over other, and among, humans.

The book is structured in two parts. The first section focuses on marine scientists’ engagements with underwater ecologies, detailing their methods of technologically mediating the oceanic unknown. This portion is particularly illuminating in its d