European Society for Oceanists 2022 Conference

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Session Detail (parallel)

Oceanic temporalities, multi-species entanglements in the Pacific

Coordinator(s)

Carlos Mondragon, Simonne Pauwels

Session presentation

The object of this panel is to focus on the current state of environmental anthropology in Oceania from a perspective that brings together issues of temporality, seasonal fishing and agricultural activities and socio-environmental entanglements. The issue of Oceanic temporalities returns us to the long but frequently marginalised discussion about traditional calendars, ritual and non-ritual cycles, and seasonal change, but seeks to do so from a viewpoint of multispecies dynamics and environmental change. For over a century indigenous calendars have often been framed as complex but static schema that pull together a number of elements loosely associated with the broader realm of “traditional environmental knowledge”. In this panel we want to invite novel, critical, ethnographically-informed and dynamic perspectives of calendars and socio-environmental cycles by considering how they may reflect aspects of Oceanic temporalities in relation to ancestral presences and spiritscapes, multispecies engagements and other cyclical environmental relations and perceptions.

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

Leviathan's Families: Whales in Colonial Pacific Societies

Ryan Tucker Jones (University of Oregon)

Pacific histories, as scholars such as Damon Salesa claim, must be narrated along genealogical lines. And, as many Pacific societies claim kinship with whales, it follows that these animals should also find a place in Pacific histories. This paper investigates the possibilities of constructing interspecies Pacific histories by examining colonial histories from Aotearoa to Alaska in which whaling was often a prominent feature.

Whaling often divided humans from each other, and from whales; violence and exploitation marked colonial whaling ventures, while overhunting decimated whale populations, especially since whaling often targeted mother-child cetacean bonds. However, this paper attempts, though an integration of indigenous knowledge and Western community biology, to recast these histories. Cross-cultural kinship bonds, often encouraged by women, were essential to form stable whale-hunting communities. At the same time, whales’ social bonds appeared to some commentators as models for human societies and even as potential sources of cross-species communities. Seen through the lens of kinship, we can detect the ways that whaling also created new cross-cultural and inter-species forms of kinship. Seen in this way, colonial whaling points the way towards new understandings of the Pacific's cross-cultural histories, one which recognizes deep commonalities between opposite ends of the oceans and surprising commonalities between its largest mammalian inhabitants.

When the existing make the law: ecological and diplomatic upheavals of Kasua ecological subsistance activities

Florence Brunois-Pasina (LAS/College-de-france)

In this communication, I wish to address the ecological and ethological upheavals of human beings foresters since the latest logging to terrible earthquake intervened in 2018 which literally upset interspecific ecology between Kasua and beings non-humans with whom they cohabit on their territory tribal for centuries in the region of Mount Bosavi in New Guinea. Not only the calendar of activities subsistence is seen to be profoundly altered, but no longer fundamentally their know-how, which must face changes in ethological behavior and territorial areas observed by existing ones. This communication will thus emphasize the interspecificity of social dynamics and its paradigmatic implications.

Temporalities and socio-environmental entanglements: the “weight of the ancestors” in the Belep islands

Lara Giordana (University of Turin)

This paper focuses on the traditional calendar that regulates yam cultivation and gives rhythm to social life in the Belep islands (Kanaky New Caledonia). Socio-environmental entanglement and interdependence of species are central to Kanak ecology. Terrestrial, marine, and aerial species, humans, animals, plants, and ancestors meet and interact in the island space/time. The yam calendar effectively displays this interdependence based on two temporal principles: synchronicity and circular flow. Synchronicity pairs different species that act at the same time, while individuals and generations intertwine in the circular flow of time (and substances). In this temporal and bodily flowing the ancestors play a fundamental role. The aim of this paper is to point the creativity of the yam calendar in two ways: if in the past this calendar has been a tool to mediate social and cultural change, today it appears as a sophisticated device to detect environmental change in the Belep islands.

Ethnography of a marine worm, Palolo viridis. Renewal and relationship to the outside world.

Simonne Pauwels (Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, EHESS)

In the South Pacific, the breeding season of the marine worm Palola viridis, balolo in Fijian, is a significant annual event for many societies. This paper examines two original ethnographic cases, one in East Fiji, the other in the West. In both cases, balolo is ritually harvested to contribute to the renewal, both at sea and on land; however, the social unit of reference is not the same. In the east, balolo is part of the vanua cosmology, while in the west it is part of the yavusa. The women of the former ritually attract the balolo from across the reef, like a foreign chief or a distinguished guest. In the second, the ritual work of the traditional priest brings out the balolo within the reef. The social organisation, as a vanua around a “stranger king,” or as a yavusa around a “brother,” reflects this different relationship to the outside world and to the source of its renewal.

Of Winds, Worms and Fertility: Palolo rituals in Timor-Leste and across Oceania

Carlos Mondragon (El Colegio de México)

This paper will focus on indigenous calendars, environmental practices and ritual feasting in relation to the Meci festival in Timor-Leste. ‘Meci’ is the name given to the Palolo worm in the Fataluku language of Timor, and the Meci festival takes place when Palolo spawn along the nearshore of the settlement of Loré, on the southeast coast of Timor. The spawning of the Meci is a key environmental marker of the local agricultural and ritual calendars, as well as an important event for the renewal of social bonds across regional language and kin groups. My ethnographic research aims to place Meci in the regional context of ritual/calendrical events related to Palolo spawning across other localities of Eastern Indonesia – notably, west Sumba and Ambon. Finally, I will also discuss the broader frame of Palolo research across the Western Pacific, with a view to proposing an initial comparative synthesis about the current state of knowledge on human-Palolo relations.

Volcanic ancestors as kin: disaster management and the unmaking of mountains

Siobhan McDonnell (Australian National University)

In her essay on modernity and the Anthropocene, environmental anthropologist Debbie Bird Rose challenges us to think through the practices of ‘unmaking’ the fragmentation that is taking place in the world around us--- stripping people from jobs, creating processes of individualisation, removing the fabric of community and relational webs of multispecies connection. Beginning with this provocation, this paper explores the 2017-2018 evacuation of 11,700 people from Ambae Island due to volcanic activity, thousands of whom are still unable to return. In this process of evacuation all Elderly people, and people designated as ‘disabled’, were forcibly removed from Ambae island and relocated to the neighbouring island of Santo.

In this paper I argue that the modernist logic of disaster management sees the volcano simply as a threat. By contrast, this ethnography will focus on the accounts of the family who are the caretakers of the ancestral beings who inhabit the volcano. In their accounts the volcano is inhabited by ancestors who form part of a relational web of care. The principle caretaker being an Elderly woman who expresses deep concern about her initial evacuation from the island, and her ongoing inability to return and care for the beings that inhabit the Monaro Vui Volcano. Until such time as she can return, the volcano will remain unsafe for all.

Life and its fluidities on Mugaba (Rennell, Solomon Islands)

Mia Browne (University of St. Andrews)

On Mugaba (Rennell, Solomon Islands) the qualities and quality of life is given by different kinds of movement, flows and sequences. Take Lake Tegano for example: Water flows (mimigo) in and out through springs (mala) and passages (aba) with high tide (honu) and low tide (masa). Tu’umatangi (wind positions) can bring hot (bebega) or cold (gogohi), stormy (atua) or calm (magino) weather. Tagatupu’a (history stories) such as Tu’umatangi (wind positions), ta’unga ite maahina (moon counting) and te hakasahenga o na hetu’u (star counting) give a fluid account of life and its movements. When it is cold and dry and the ubo trees along the lake blossom, a sign that fish at the sea should be momona (fat). Matangi mai gago (wind from below) brings rain, and upo (eel fish) then travel through aba out of Tegano, onto Aotearoa. Even when there is no breeze, you can tell the wind direction from the curve of the milky way.

Tagatupu’a (stories) and hanohano (intergenerational ‘going’) also describe how people “come out of place.” They give an account of tupuna (grandparents), what they did and where, and how other living and non-living entities and features came to be. If well-being is qualified by the right kinds of movement, what happens when winds “blow all about,” stories are no longer straight, people are not as big as their tupuna, and even time is described as accelerating? This presentation will explore Rennellese articulations of the fluid qualities of life on Mugaba.

Environmental relations and temporality in the Valle of Mākua, O’ahu, Hawai’i

EMANUELA Borgnino (University of Torino)

The proposed paper focuses on ecological restoration and Indigenous ecocultural practices in the Valley of Mākua, on the island of O’ahu, Hawai’i. Mākua is a valley, currently occupied by the US military, where different collectives form and clash around environmental protection, institutional appropriation, and sovereignty claims. Rocks, humans, lizards, trees, winds, rivers, clouds, and ancestors participate in multiple reciprocal and interdependent relationships. Reading the environment as the product of those who lived before us, acknowledges the space/time as a relevant realm to investigate in the human and other than human relationships. The landscape human beings experience today is “ontologically” the product of the relationships they have with past genealogies. By holding together, a temporality that recognizes the cult of ancestors but also the cult of descendants the paper aims to investigate the continued formation and negotiation of the multispecies entanglement and spiritscapes of the Valley of Mākua.