Naomi Mireles
Professor Pressman
ECL 305
14 April 2024
Unveiling Terracentric Vocabulary and Its Relevance in Contemporary Marketing
The deterritorializing preface in Ocean by Steve Mentz reveals how common word associations are deliberate choices and prioritize land over the ocean. Attention is brought to linguistic biases that favor terrestrial environments and overlook the importance of the sea. Steve Mentz’s Ocean teaches readers to recognize terracentric vocabulary and its influence. This insight can be applied to the contemporary marketing and selling of universal happiness, meditation, and spirituality, as showcased in my object of study. Analyzing the specific language of “grounding” as good and spiritually centered favors an individual way of viewing and being. This language also excludes a large non-western demographic and their practices of well-being and values.
Terracentric vocabulary is a term used to describe language and cultural attitudes that center on land-based perspectives at the expense of the Ocean. This includes languages that emphasize the importance of stability and the centrality of land-based environments. The commonness of this language allows for neglect of the Ocean and how it shapes human roles, identity, and history. Some other examples of terracentric vocabulary often used in messages of spirituality and well-being that associate positive attributes with the land environment are grounding, rootedness, and stability. Terracentric vocabulary also reinforces cultural narratives and biases that favor land-based lifestyles over maritime and submarine cultures and industries.
The Deterritorializing Preface by Mentz gives an overview of terracentric vocabulary and how we recognize land as familiar, and ocean as alien. In this preface, there is a portrayal of the Ocean as dynamic and ever-changing which is characterized by its vastness and responsiveness to external features. My object of study: an ad for a meditation class where grounding and centering techniques are taught, is a perfect example of how Mentz’s insight is applied to contemporary marketing practices. Spirituality has been around for a fairly long time, this is an ideology that to many is synonymous with well-being, and mental and emotional health. From our terra-centric standpoint, this has led to various forms of thinking that only favor Western practices and tie together land-based ways of thinking as the only correct form of being
In this advertisement, grounding is explained as an act or technique in which you will “feel unshakeable in the face of controversy and release negative emotions.” There is comfort established in feeling “stable” and “grounded,” both terracentric terms. Being grounded alludes to a state in which you are rooted. The act of being rooted confines you to one place, there is no going forward or backward, only linear progression. In a state of not going backward or forward, I question: is there room for genuine spiritual well-being and growth? Success in the Western world is measured in linear progress. Contrary to success in the Western world, emotional and spiritual growth is not always linear progress.
Ocean by Mentz offers the readers a paradigm, both metaphorically and literally, “nothing stays on the surface forever.” If focusing on terra-centric language as “ground,” were to shift to ocean-centric language, what would happen to what we know about being grounded and rooted? Like our metaphors, we must be flexible and adaptable to ever-changing circumstances, instead of firmly grounded. Not one thing will remain stable or fixed for its entirety. Embracing fluidity and change rather than rigid structures invites us to shift from terra to Oceanus. The unfamiliarity of shifting from terra to Oceanus would not be a bad thing, on the contrary, it may expand our thinking and perspectives of how we view Western and non-Western values and practices. The featured article, The Blue Humanities by John R. Gillis, shares with us that in the Western world, the Ocean was always viewed as a means of transport, “they used the sea merely as a highway to get to the next landfall.” (Gillis) The rise of the blue humanities is a late recognition of this prolonged attitude towards the Ocean by Western Culture. For centuries, even Western explorers on the Ocean were learning more about land than the Ocean, it “was a discovery more by sea than of the sea.” (Gillis). This perspective of the Ocean was not a global one, many cultures and societies, mainly coastal ones have always recognized the Ocean as more than just a passage or an abyss.
Analyzing the advertisement by Totally Meditation allows us to recognize the marketing patterns used for advertising spirituality in Western society as land-based. Everything in this ad is heavily terracentric, from the language to the green color, even the water pictured is green. Extreme land-based marketing excludes cultures and practices that are ocean-centric. Cultures such as the previously mentioned island and coastal communities have always had strong ties to the ocean in their everyday lives and cultural practices and traditions. In these cultures, the Ocean provides sustenance, connects people with their past, and inspires cultural values and traditions. These groups are widely indigenous communities and many of their origin stories begin in the ocean, which guides the harmonious relationship between humans and the Ocean. Unlike Western society, these indigenous communities, such as native Hawaiians, Samoans, and other Indigenous Islander cultures view themselves as stewards of the Ocean. People residing in these communities and cultures would not relate to these terra-centric forms of happiness and well-being.
The terracentric marketing approach shares broader implications for how our Western society has developed and remains in a terracentric environment. An environment that excludes and is hostile towards non-western, ocean-centric ideologies and cultures. There is not only one correct or positive practice of spirituality and well-being, as our terracentric language and this advertisement suggest. Ocean by Mentz allows us to recognize how land-based language has narrowed our perspective and influenced many factors in our everyday lives, such as self-help and spirituality. Recognizing the use of terracentric language in our everyday lives, such as in marketing approaches, is the beginning of reframing our current terracentrism to non-western, ocean-centric. The unfamiliarity of ocean-centric culture and perspective would allow us to reimagine how we see spirituality and being “grounded,” to something more fluctuating and ever-changing, inclusive and welcoming to non-terracentric thinking.
Works Cited
John Gillis, “The Blue Humanities” (Humanities: The Journal of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Web. 2013)
“Live Event Aug 23: Centering & Grounding.” Totally Meditation, www.totallymeditation.com/live-event-aug-23-centering-grounding/.
Steve Mentz, Ocean (Bloomsbury, 2020): “Deterritorializing Preface” (pgs. xv-xviii).