European Society for Oceanists 2022 Conference

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Session Detail (parallel)

Ocean Power: Fluid Transformations and Revaluations in Oceania

Coordinator(s)

Matteo Aria, Tamatoa Bambridge, Francesco Lattanzi, Alexander Mawyer

Session presentation

Any sea or ocean is shared between the shores that border it, when, far from being an obstacle, it is viewed and experienced as a linkage. ESfO’s presence in Corsica reminds us that the ancient Mediterranean world imagined the “Mare nostrum” as sea that connects peoples which was also a “Mare medi-terraneum” or sea in the middle of lands. Epeli Hau’ofa famous 1992 call to Oceania’s peoples to re-engage “Our sea of islands” resonates with such views. ESfO 2022 in Ajaccio is a fitting time and place to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Hau’ofa’s call and to examine its contemporary legacy in a fluid context characterized by globalization, urgent environmental challenges, and the transformations of international maritime law, among others. This panel, an initiative shared between the convenors together with Matteo Gallo (University of Verona and associate CREDO) and Serge Tcherkezoff (CREDO) welcomes any proposal linked to the broad theme of how the ocean, imagined, engendered and experienced by Oceania’s peoples, transforms and fluidly co-articulates contemporary meaning in different Pacific ontologies and perspectives. We anticipate discussions engaging a variety of entangled issues (the following list is by no means limitative): the knowledge, material culture, and cosmologies of the ‘peoples of the sea’ connected to the seascape; the arenas of maritime and coastal communities’ heritage and their attempt at creating “protected maritime areas”; the contemporary dynamics of navigation practices in Oceania; Indigenous discourses and practices born around cartography and bordering projects which assumed a central role in national (and colonial) imaginaries; changes in migration in Oceania in the Anthropocene; deep connections between seascape, landscape, and skyscape; life stories including the representations, practices of incorporation, and the experiential dimensions linked to them.

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

Boundary making and unmaking in Māori claims to the sea

Fiona Elisabeth McCormack (University of Waikato)

Marine environments appear antithetical to boundaries; the fluidity of water, rising oceans alongside the tenacity of human and non-human species whose migrations defy enclosure, suggest the complexity of bordering this four-dimensional nature. Nevertheless, conceived as culture, the sea is subjected to multiple and overlapping boundaries, an intensity that is spectacularly fractious in the colonial settler societies of Oceania. This paper traces the troubled development of aquaculture space in Aotearoa over the last three decades, suggesting that current Māori claims to their seascape under the Marine and Coastal Area Act (2011), are reflective of resistance to exclusion and the long durée of Indigenous boundaries; being constructed around reciprocal kin relationships and genealogical connectedness. The privatisation of ocean space, an economic bordering apparent in ITQ fisheries and aquaculture enclosures in Aotearoa, commercial and aquarium fisheries in Hawaii, articulates with indigenous economies and ways of connecting to the ocean in old and new ways.

Tokelau ways of being with the ocean

Hoem Ingjerd (University of Oslo)

Tokelau’s maritime environment is currently legally protected by a fisheries zone. Differences in the ways in which Pacific powers and Pacific island states relate to the ocean are discussed in this paper, through a tracing events of significance in Tokelau’s recent past. The events are related to qualitatively different ways of defining and relating to the sea. From early attempts to establish a trans-Pacific cable line, to ban on ocean travel between the atolls during the 2nd world war, the rights of use of Tokelau’s seascape has been contested. How current political institutions in Tokelau deal with multiple pressures, ranging from intensified trade with fishing quotas to issues related to climate change, will be presented through a focus on shifting conceptualisations of the ocean itself.

Recentering Oceanic Margins: Pacific Cultural Geographies

Paul D'Arcy (Australian National University)

This paper argues that the Austronesian Pacific continues to exist in practice as well as academic discourse alongside the Independent, British, French, American and Chinese Pacifics. It is a Pacific with a deep, environmental focus, now revived and enhanced by climate change concerns and greater political freedoms in the post-colonial Pacific. So much so, that we propose that Taiwan can be appropriately described as Outermost Oceania, the western boundary of the oceanic Austronesian world bordering that of the Chinese world. While Roger Green’s classic archaeological divide between Near Oceania and Remote (read oceanic) Oceania works for explaining initial colonisation, it still proposed ocean distance between islands as a barrier. A close examination of the enduring history of exchanges in recorded and archival traditions shows an expansive world that challenges standard western political discourse correlating substantial resource bases and centralised, coercive power with nautical projection. Broadly consensus-based Austronesian societies of only a few hundred members had voyaging ranges the width of continental Europe and the Mediterranean. These voyaging spheres operated in cultural worlds deeply embedded in, and dependent on, their oceanic environments.

Moana Nui and Mare Nostrum: Ontologies of place/land and water in Western and Pacific traditions

A. - [Chris]tina Engels-Schwarzpaul (Auckland University of Technology - Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau)

Whether the sea connects or separates depends on many factors. The first 11 lines of the Solo o le Va (Samoan cosmogeny) describe the quality of oceanic waves, frothing, crashing, swelling, scuttling and speaking. This indicates an ontology pervaded by water, “the liquidity of those metaphors” perhaps permeating people’s very being (Fogu 2010: 1). By comparison, European ontologies hinge on qualities of firmness, and matter was traditionally thought to consist of locally bounded particles. Only more recent waves of quantum mechanics bring movement to matter. European languages are still shaped by a Newtonian paradigm and separating and solidifying different agents, actions and objects fail to render interconnections. Written in English, Epeli Hau‘ofa’s work nevertheless changed the perceptions and expectations of Moana peoples. Crucially, he invoked the ocean’s vastness not as emptiness but as a connected and connecting field. To take up this characteristically Moana view in the Mediterranean may assist a shift in perception and action: Europe may cease valuing the “vast blue plaque” (Rinelli, 2016: 45) as isolation from unwanted contacts and, instead, recognize it as an energy field that has shaped and nourished its own culture.

This paper traces connections between histories of internal Mediterranean relations and those of colonization beyond in metaphors and imaginaries; navigational knowledges, practices and tools; strategies and technologies of connection and separatio

Glimpses of Polynesian Ancestral Navigation: A View from the Archive

Lars Eckstein (University of Potsdam)

Anja Schwarz (University Potsdam)

What can we know about how Tupaia and his ancestors imagined, experienced and engaged the ocean? There is some indication that precolonial Polynesian voyaging drew on an epistemology that is related to, but also quite distinct from the Micronesia-derived system of the voyaging revival. The aim of this paper is to bring together accounts of the ongoing traditions of navigation in Taumako in the Western Polynesian outliers (as conveyed by Mimi George) with new archival insights related to Tupaia, the Ra’iātean tahu’a who sailed with Cook. Whilst hardly congruent, there are surprising correspondences between the two: This concerns, for instance, the prominence of wind positioning and wind work; the importance of seasons and calendrics; and the respective calibration of astronomical knowledge.

Seas of Words: The Language-Culture Nexus of Marine Spaces

Alexander Mawyer (University of Hawai'i-Manoa)

This paper focuses on the language-encoding of marine space and places as a potential contribution of contemporary linguistic research in Oceania to the diverse issues engaged by this session, such as Indigenous epistemologies, fluid ontologies, biocultural and other sorts of linkages between human and more than human domains, the transmissions and translations of the past into the present, as well as dynamics and enactments of agency by Oceanian communities over marine resources and Ocean considered broadly. We complement and extend recent work on spatial language in Oceania (Pappas and Mawyer 2022), particularly because of the region’s place within the disciplinary histories of spatial linguistics and linguistic anthropology. Among other centering observations, we draw attention to the role of language in the cultural dimensions of Ocean places and ontologies, in the ethical dimensions of Ocean engagements, and in the political dimensions of Ocean potencies.

From the “Pacific” to Pasifika : reappropriation of identities

Serge Tcherkézoff (Aix Marseille Uni+CNRS+EHESS--Australian Nat Uni)

In the Western view, the "Pacific" has been a "sea", an "ocean", an "oceanic" region, from the "discoverers" of the 16th century to the geographers of the 19th century. When the inhabitants of this region entered into dialogue with the West, they reversed the perspective: Hau'ofa claimed in 1993 that Oceania is a « sea of islands ». He preferred "Oceania" to "Pacific", having chosen to see in the first term, more than in the second, the human habitat. Others, later, will humanize entirely the term by appropriating it linguistically to designate the people, the populations: the communities "Pasifika". Sometimes, this latter term is debated and preference can go to a linguistic base originating entirely from the languages of the region: moana. There is further step. In this evolution, the Pacific (or Oceania) did not speak for itself. Today, another major transformation is taking place: the Pacific will be a person and will delegate a power of representation to others to speak on his/her behalf. This is the struggle for the Pacific to become a "legal person" in its own right. This paper will trace a history that stretches from 1520 (and even 1513) to nowadays and present the associated debates.

A sea of jurisdictions. Paradoxes of sovereignty in Tuvalu

Nicola Manghi (University of Turin)

Tuvalu is a microstate located in Western Polynesia. Among the smallest countries on Earth, the archipelago is often discussed in relation with the existential threat that global warming poses to its low-lying territory. Was it to be engulfed by rising sea levels as scientists predict, in fact, Tuvalu would be the first State to disappear due to a physical loss of territory.
Framing of Tuvalu as a model of endangered statehood is problematic, though, as it reduces statehood to the materiality of a territory and sovereignty to the legal sanction of a geological state of affairs, thus naturalizing the institutional status of Tuvalu and obliterating its contingent history. Moreover, such accounts stereotype the ocean into playing the role of a negative force set to extinguish Tuvalu from the world map, misunderstanding its relevance within Tuvaluan practices of world-making.
Such talassophobic narratives can be countered by emphasizing the role that the sea plays in the political reality of Tuvalu. Jurisdictions are continuously been drawn from/upon the sea of islands of the Pacific, long misunderstood as smooth by Western thought, and Tuvalu is a quintessential example of such institutional ingenuity. By conceptualizing the sovereignty of Tuvalu in terms of an event to be reproduced and prolonged, rather than those of a state to be enclosed and protected, my paper aims to make room for Tuvaluan history and agency in speculations concerning the fate of the country.

The 'collision' between James Cook, Tupaia and Adam Smith

Francesco Lattanzi (Sapienza Università di Roma)

Matteo Aria (Sapienza Università di Roma)

Within the framework of the “global history”, this paper combines the theoretical reflections regarding James Cook, Tupaia, and Adam Smith, with the ethnographical observation on ‘Tuia-Encounters 250’ commemoration, organized in 2019 in Aotearoa-New Zealand and which marked 250 years since the first onshore encounters between Māori and Pākeā.
The “collision” between the three comes true with the simultaneous birth of cartography and economy, disciplines which became autonomous at the end of the 18th century and that claim to make the world objective. These new scientific fields produced depersonalized abstractions such as nautical maps, market, and money. In reverse, as shown by recent studies (Eckstein L., Schwarz A., ‘JPH’ 2019), the map produced by Cook and Tupaia also manifests the sharing of knowledge.
The biography of this particular map proves the importance – already hoped for by Fernand Braudel – of enhancing the differences in the use of the sea, and its innumerable ways of appropriation. Accordingly, we will deepen the contemporary imagery of the voyaging navigation heritage in French Polynesia, starting from the ‘Tuia-Encounters 250’ commemorations. These ceremonies do not exclusively tell a part of Tupaia’s biography; they are also the opportunity to deal with the identity value attributed in French Polynesia to voyaging navigation heritage, and its current protagonists as the pirogue ‘Fa’afaite’.

Ethnographic fieldwork in micro-Pacific islands: Futuna and Aniwa, Polynesian outliers of south Vanuatu

Marc Tabani (CNRS - Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique)

I will examine some specificities of ethnographic enquiring among social groups living in two tiny islands in south Vanuatu. Aniwa and Futuna have in common to be “Polynesian outliers”. With less 400 inhabitants each, a huge majority of their native population is living on other islands, especially on Efate near the capital Port-Vila. Both societies are in exchange relations with social groups from Tanna, the populated and hegemonic neighbouring island, whose population claims to be strictly Melanesian. Despite the creation of a colonial divide between Melanesians and Polynesians, the bases of the respective pre-colonial traditions of all these societies are very similar.

Due to their small number, people of these outliers share some astonishing psychological traits: a permanent concern to avoid conflicts or to keep them quiet, a sometimes constrained solidarity, a strong discretion in social relations. These traits that are pronounced with regard to foreign observers. But even more specific are the relations they maintain with their exchange partners in Tanna, characterized by strong cultural influences of the former on the latter, which have historically profoundly transformed the heart of their society. Oral traditions collected over these last twenty-five years, tend to reveal how far Polynesian outliers' people succeeded in taking control over Tannese natural resources, and what cultural technology they could have employed to strengthen their influences.

Ka‘imiloa, Hōkūle‘a and other "Vessels of Potential:” Watercraft as symbols and tools in promoting pan-Ocean(ian)ism

Lorenz Rudolf Gonschor (University of the South Pacific)

Oceania is a watery space, famously referred to by ‘Epeli Hau‘ofa as “Our Sea of Islands” and by Anote Tong as consisting of “Large Ocean States.” For centuries, Oceanians sailed across this space, thanks to a maritime technology unsurpassed for most of global history. While the impact of contact brought a decline of traditional navigation, Oceanians quickly started using Western watercraft to continue building and maintaining connections. It is thus not surprising that during the 19th century, Western-style ships owned or built by Islanders became prestigious symbols of their communities. In this paper I am focusing on one of them, the Hawaiian navy ship Ka‘imiloa, which was commissioned by King Kalākaua in 1886 specifically to promote a project to politically unify Oceania to ward off Western imperialism. As Oceania’s most developed native state in the 19th century, the Hawaiian Kingdom has been termed a “vessel of potential” by Kamanamaikalani Beamer, a concept I am expanding and specifying to characterize literal such vessels like the Ka‘imiloa. With the advent of decolonisation and the cultural renaissances that happened in its wake, the focus of identity symbolism has shifted back towards traditional Oceanian watercraft, functional replicas of which began to be built throughout Oceania, the most iconic one being the Hōkūle‘a launched in 1975. Meanwhile, Western-style ships maintain prestige in other ways, continuing important roles in connecting island communities.