In this presentation, I briefly presented the objectives of my doctoral thesis and then I discussed the material I used in my research. Finally, I opened up, how I interpreted the research material and some results that the interpretation produced. The objectives of my research were to look at the manifestation of the self and the self-understanding of Finnish sailors in the work communities of steamships carrying cargo. Central to it is sailors’ subjective experiences of working and living on an ocean liner, and how they understand themselves. I focus on the so-called lived experiences and try to find out how sailors lived their identities.

My research material consists of memories written by sailors as replies to two questionnaires published in 1963 in Finnish and Swedish languages by the predecessor of the present unit of Ethnology. The main purpose of collecting the data was to recover information based on the sailors' own experiences of work community of the ship and what kind of work they did on board of the ship and how they worked. The events described in my study take place roughly between 1910 and 1955.

Through subjective experiences and their remembrance, these answers form a close relationship with the reality of ship life in which the respondents have lived and acted. I was especially interested in those responses, written from the perspective of the first-person singular one. This was also the main criterion for choosing 46 responses of the total amount of 157 answers. Other demanding criterion applied to the ship. I was interested in the work communities of steamships, which have been studied very slightly in general.

My orientation to the topic of research is phenomenological. At the heart of it is the idea of a sailor as embodied subjectivity, that is constituting in his inner time reality, shaped by the sedimentation of his previous experiences, but also his own actions and intentions. 

Central to my research is a sailor’s experience of himself as an individual working on board an ocean liner, and how he understands himself. From this point of view, the sailor's self is the object of his own scrutiny, which he reflects on, and compares with other people, but can also change. His self-understanding, that is, how he understands himself and his own position in different situations, is intertwined with this process. However, the more fundamental identity of the acting self manifests in the way he views other people and the world around him. It is also reflected in his attitude towards himself, and in the way he objectifies himself. 

The seaman manhood, as experienced in my research, manifest in the subjective, internal experiences of the repliers, such as perceptions or feelings and emotions. There are also different bodily experiences. The things remembered in descriptions of this kind appear as sensory memories related to smells, heat, humidity and cold, for example. The material of the ship, steel, also plays a central role in these sensory observations: it rusts, rusts stinks, steel gets wet and has been worked in different ways, and surface treated with painting, massing and insulating.

Communal, intersubjective relationships can also be inner relationships of an individual's own experience, such as “being bad” or “hot spots” and submission to the power of another.