Asia-Pacific Environment Monographs, No. 13. Acton, Australia: ANU Press, 2018. xiii, 250 pp. (Tables, figures, maps, coloured photos.) US$37.00, paper. ISBN 9781760462161.
In the first chapter of this admirable volume, John R. Wagner, Jerry K. Jacka, and their co-authors situate the anthology within the recent emergence of an anthropology of water and its sub-field of river ethnographies. Charting an interpretive waterscape for such studies, they delineate an explicitly ontological and epistemological framework, which situates rivers and other fresh water sources as key ethnographic subjects with social lives to elucidate. Each of the eight subsequent chapters expresses this approach by turns ethnographically rich, textually delightful, theoretically stimulating, and ecologically troubling.
Edvard Hviding (chapter 2) explores the relationship between freshwater, saltwater, land, and people around the Marovo Lagoon of New Georgia in the Solomon Islands. He outlines a powerful classificatory duality in Marovo culture between freshwater bush kin groups and saltwater ocean kin groups. New Georgia’s rivers both bound adjacent kin-based puava territories and interconnect successive ecological zones from mountaintops to gardens to shores to open ocean. Here the ecological impact of extractive industry appears for the first time in the volume, as Hviding discusses logging licensed by bush puava far inland causing lagoon silting which kills seafood resources in saltwater puava. He narrates a journey to the inner bush at the source of the Piongo Lavata River, which leads into a stimulating discussion of ambivalences in the management of Marovo’s growing crocodile population. Carlos Mondragon (chapter 3) explores the waterscapes of the Jordan River system in the living milieu of North Santo in Vanuatu, elucidating their role in the construction and contestation of layered topogenies. A symbolic analysis of origin narratives among extended kin groups links them to watery localities and ancestral beings. This topogeny is overlaid by North Santo’s Christian landscape, emphasizing each layer’s processual construction and historical specificity. Finally, a tertiary layer of regional identities emerges from community-level political, church, and developmental microhistories of the twentieth century.
Alexander Mawyer’s (chapter 4) account of Mangareva in the Gambier Islands, French Polynesia, focuses on the historical ephemerality and indeterminacy of watercourses and freshwater lenses. Mawyer is as concerned with the contemporary relevance of historical waterscapes as Mondragon, but here it is rather the absence of historic ancestral springs—of water in dry streambeds, and of the transmission of cultural geographies—that is problematized. Although humanity has had a profound impact on Mangareva’s environment, Mawyer uses an interesting lexical analysis to show that freshwater has always been an uncertain and fluctuating feature of the island’s geography. Jerry Jacka (chapter 5) provides a moving Marxist critique of the devastating impact of Porgera goldmine’s riverine waste disposal upon the lives of Ipili-speaking people in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. He effects a close analysis of Porgeran concepts of ipane (“grease,” flowing vitality) to integrate ancestral origin pools, vitality-imparting water beings, and clean flowing water with local constructs of cultural identity and wellbeing. Jacka compellingly shows how the mine is creating ever-wider economic disparities between local constituencies; how it is poisoning, emically and etically, the water for more than 160 km downstream; and how it is destroying the ipane of the land.
Marama Muru-Lanning (chapter 6) documents the socio-political biography of the Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest river and a tupuna awa (river ancestor) for Māori in the north of the North Island. Muru-Lanning traces Waikato’s historical and economic relationships with each Māori iwi and hapu in turn. A troubled history of pakeha appropriation of alluvial farmland, Māori resistance, and British military suppression ultimately led to the 1903 Crown seizure of title over the entire river. This enabled Waikato’s exploitation for hydroelectricity generation, which has undergone increasing privatization since the 1980s. Although the last ten years have seen the emergence of Māori-Crown co-governance, Muru-Lanning synthesizes a seemingly irreconcilable range of contemporary Māori opinions on the present situation: How can one sell or buy shares in one’s ancestor? Eilin Holtan Torgersen’s (chapter 7) discussion of the Wailuku River on Hawai‘i’s Big Island resonates with Mawyer’s chapter in emphasizing a powerful ontological and symbolic dichotomy between salt and freshwater. Equally, like Muru-Lanning, she recounts a troubled history of the Wailuku’s degradation by cash cropping, hydroelectric damming, and tourist saturation. By studying interactions at the rivers popular beauty spots, she documents tense encounters between locals (Maohi, European, and others) and tourists—revealing a complex negotiation and contestation of localness, respect for indigenous sensibilities, and concerns over the archipelago’s increasing Americanization.
Focusing on Eastern Iatmul relationships with the Middle Sepik River in PNG, Eric Silverman (chapter 8) emphasizes the river’s flux in course and boundedness—rendering the valley that Veronica Strang has called a fluidscape. He foregrounds its instantiation of dialogical cultural principles for locals: masculine lands and feminine waters, provision and devastation, purification and pollution, tradition and futurity. Logging by nebulous multinationals and the ambivalent dangers and value of the crocodile resurface here as themes reiterating this ambiguity. In the closing chapter, John Wagner provides an account of Kamu Yali village near the mouth of several rivers on Nasau Bay in Morobe Province, PNG. Wagner relativizes the dichotomy made by other contributors between coastal and river peoples, asserting that the people of Kamu Yali are emphatically both. He offers an insightful discussion of “the river as agent” and constructs a rich ethnographic representation of Kamu Yali’s constituent communities through the social biographies of four rivers, highlighting differential traditional resource claims, tensions with neighbouring ethnic groups, and the recent impact of cash fishing and discoveries of chromite deposits in the area. He closes the volume with an evocation of rivers as cultural symbols which are mimetic: of historicity, of cultural fluidity, and of our capacity to forget and wash away as much as remember.
In sum, this volume is a wonderfully enriching read. There is a great deal of value and contemporary relevance for every reader—whether interested in Oceania’s remarkable geographical and cultural complexity, concerned with the fate of the region’s delicate ecological balance, or invested in the twenty first-century reconciliation of multicultural ontologies.
Andy Mills
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom