Decolonising Governance: Archipelagic Thinking 9781351213035

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Lopo Homem (fl. 1497–1572), with Pedro Reinel (fl. 1485–1535), Atlas Miller, c. 1519, illuminated manuscript on vellum, 45 × 590 mm, feuilles 2 à 5. Courtesy of Bibliothèque national de France.

Decolonising Governance

Power may be globalised, but Westphalian notions of sovereignty continue to ­determine political and legal arrangements domestically and internationally: global issues – the legacy of colonialism expressed in continuing human displacement and environmental destruction – are thus treated ‘parochially’ and ineffectually. Not designed for dealing with situations of interdependence, democratic institutions find themselves in crisis. Reform in this case is not simply operational but conceptual: political relationships need to be drawn differently; the cultural illiteracy that prevents the local knowledge invested in places made after their stories needs to be recognised as a major obstacle to decolonising governance. Archipelagic thinking refers to neglected dimensions of the earth’s human geography but also to a geo-politics of relationality, where governance is understood performatively as the continuous establishment of exchange rates. Insisting on the poetic literacy that must inform a decolonising politics, Carter suggests a way out of the incommensurability impasse that dogs assertions of indigenous sovereignty. Discussing bicultural areal management strategies located in south-west Victoria, Maluco (Indonesia) and inter-regionally across the Arafura and Timor Seas, Carter argues for the existence of creative regions constituted archipelagically that can intervene to rewrite the theory and practice of decolonisation. A book of great stylistic elegance and deftness of analysis, Decolonising Governance is an important intervention in the related fields of ecological, ecocritical and environmental humanities. Methodologically innovative in its foregrounding of relationality as the nexus between poetics and politics, it will also be of great interest to scholars in a range of areas, including communicational praxis, land/sea biodiversity design, bicultural resource management and the constitution of post-­ Westphalian regional jurisdictions. Paul Carter is author of the acclaimed The Road to Botany Bay, an essay in spatial history (1987). His more recent books include Dark Writing, geography, performance, design (2008), Meeting Place, the human encounter and the challenge of coexistence (2013) and Places Made After Their Stories, design and the art of choreotopography (2015). Also a poet, his collection Ecstacies and Elegies was published in 2013. Through his design studio Material Thinking he has made signal contributions to the public art and design of Federation Square (Melbourne) and Yagan Square (Perth). Paul Carter is Professor of Design/Urbanism at the School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University.

Postcolonial Politics Edited by: Pal Ahluwalia, University of South Australia Michael Dutton, Goldsmiths, University of London Leela Gandhi, University of Chicago Sanjay Seth, Goldsmiths, University of London

‘Postcolonial Politics’ is a series that publishes books that lie at the intersection of politics and postcolonial theory. That point of intersection once barely existed; its recent emergence is enabled, first, because a new form of ‘politics’ is beginning to make its appearance. Intellectual concerns that began life as a (yet unnamed) set of theoretical interventions from scholars largely working within the ‘New Humanities’ have now begun to migrate into the realm of politics. The result is politics with a difference, with a concern for the everyday, the ephemeral, the serendipitous and the unworldly. Second, postcolonial theory has raised a new set of concerns in relation to understandings of the non-West. At first these concerns and these questions found their home in literary studies, but they were also, always, political. Edward Said’s binary of ‘Europe and its other’ introduced us to a ‘style of thought’ that was as much political as it was cultural, as much about the politics of knowledge as the production of knowledge, and as much about life on the street as about a philosophy of being. A new, broader and more reflexive understanding of politics, and a new style of thinking about the non-Western world, make it possible to ‘think’ politics through postcolonial theory, and to ‘do’ postcolonial theory in a fashion which picks up on its political implications. Postcolonial Politics attempts to pick up on these myriad trails and disruptive practices. The series aims to help us read culture politically, read ‘difference’ concretely, and to problematise our ideas of the modern, the rational and the scientific by working at the margins of a knowledge system that is still logocentric and Eurocentric. This is where a postcolonial politics hopes to offer new and fresh visions of both the postcolonial and the political.

Subseries: Writing Past Colonialism The Institute of Postcolonial Studies (IPCS) Edited by: Phillip Darby, University of Melbourne ‘Writing Past Colonialism’ is the signature series of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, based in Melbourne, Australia. By postcolonialism we

understand modes of writing and artistic production that critically engage with the ideological legacy and continuing practices of colonialism, and provoke debate about the processes of globalisation. The series is committed to publishing works that break fresh ground in postcolonial studies and seek to make a difference both in the academy and outside it. By way of illustration, our schedule includes books that address: • • •

grounded issues such as nature and the environment, activist politics and indigenous peoples’ struggles cultural writing that pays attention to the politics of literary forms experimental approaches that produce new postcolonial imaginaries by bringing together different forms of documentation or combinations of theory, performance and practice

From International Relations to Relations International (IPCS) Postcolonial Essays Phillip Darby Gender, Orientalism, and the ‘War on Terror’ Representation, Discourse, and Intervention in Global Politics Maryam Khalid Multicultural politics of recognition and postcolonial citizenship Rethinking the nation Rachel Busbridge Japanese Poetry and its Publics From Colonial Taiwan to 3.11 Dean Anthony Brink Domestic Spaces in Post-Mao China On Electronic Household Appliances Wang Min’an Decolonising Governance Archipelagic Thinking Paul Carter

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Postcolonial-Politics/book-series/PP

Decolonising Governance Archipelagic Thinking

Paul Carter

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Paul Carter The right of Paul Carter to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-8153-8049-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-21303-5 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction

xiii xv 1

Translations 1 Epiphanies 5 Illustrations 9 1 Exchange rates: figuring the archipelago Decolonising geography 18 Thinking back 20 Archipelagic definitions 22 Metaphorical illiteracy 24 Non-verificationist language 26 Symbolic understanding 28 Redefining the archipelago 30 The geography of energeia 33 Imagining relationally 35 Decolonising discourse 36 Archipelagic innovation 38 Governance as relationality 40 Crossing disciplines 43

18

2 From your own seashore: a philosophical geography Archipelagic thinking 51 Fluid reformations 54 Evolutionary theory 56 Sea levels 58 Archipelagic algorithms 60 Ethical islands 62

51

x Contents Ecstatic communications 64 The gulag at large 66 Dismemberment 68 Discursive doubling 70 Alternative vortices 72 Living syrrhesis 75 Mediterreanismo/malayalismo 77 3 Ocean connections: local knowledge and regions of care Biodiversity is a whitefella word 87 Is storytelling transferable? 89 Local systems, shared interests 90 Can comparison work? 92 Representing local interests 95 Five biodiversity vignettes 98 Comparable ontologies 99 The metaphor in common 102 Navigating eurocentrism 104 Practices of encounter 106 Consulting the experts 109

87

4 Affiliations after the flood: archipelagic poetics Incommensurability 117 The chaos of uncertainty 118 A mode of relating 122 Cyclonic errancy 124 Actors of the middest 127 Locating the unknown 129 States of readiness 130 Anti-seismic 132 Complex 133 The flood myth 134 Drifting, not drowning 136 Draining the archipelago 138 Incommensurability reconciled 139

117

5 Overflow: a model for culture-based regional development The first formation of waterholes 149 A story about relating 152 Of flows and catchments 153 Of regional fluency 155

149

Contents  xi The great meetings 156 Radicalism and separatism 158 Local self-representation 160 Regional governance failure 162 Relating to country 164 Gaining fluency 166 Laws of engagement 167 A region of care 170 Accidents and accidence 172 Overflowing 174 6 Bacan: biodiversity in the anarchipelago Biodiversity values 184 Civil society and its priorities 186 Customary societies and their interests 187 Amphibious capacity 189 Discursive reflection 191 Patterns of dispersal 193 The fetish of species 195 The Moluccas in the west 196 The priceless outside 198 Phantasmagorias 200 The imagination of coral 201 Hylomorphic 202 Beyond vicariance 204 A different origin story  205 Decolonising governance 208

184

Conclusion Unacknowledged legislators 220

220

Index

231

List of figures

3.1 South East Asia and Northern Australia. 88 5.1 Western Victoria, Australia. 150

Acknowledgements

Drafts of parts of Decolonising Governance occur in the following chapters: ‘Local Knowledge and the Challenge of Regional Governance’ and ‘Dry Thinking, Wet Places: Conceptualising Fluid States,’ both in Northern Research Futures, eds., T. Brewer, A. Dale, L. Rosenmann et al., Canberra: ANU epress, scheduled 2018; ‘Sea Level: Towards a Poetic Geography,’ in P. Darby (ed.), From International Relations to Relations International: Postcolonial Essays, London, Routledge, 2015, 141–158; ‘Lips in language and space: imaginary places in James Dawson’s Australian Aborigines (1881),’ in B. Richardson (ed.), Spatiality and Symbolic Expression: On the Links between Place and Culture, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 105–129; ‘Incontinence: the politics and poetics of passage,’ in K. Crane & R. Brosch (eds.), Visualising Australia: ­Images, Icons and Imaginations, KOALAS (Konzepte Orientierungen Abhandlungen Lektüren Australien Studien) ­series, WVT (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier), 2014, 181–197. Other parts of Decolonising Governance had their first airing in journals: ‘The Enigma of Access: James Dawson and the Question of Ownership in Translation,’ ‘Law and Its Accidents,’ a special symposium issue of the Griffith Law Review, vol. 22(1), 2013, 8–27; ‘Tropical Knowledge: Archipelago Consciousness and the governance of excess,’ Etropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics, 12.2 (2013), 79–95 and ‘Archipelago: The Shape of the Future,’ Antithesis, vol. 21, 2011, 11–25. I am grateful to the editors for welcoming these initial coastings. I am also grateful to Charles Darwin University, the Northern Institute and the Northern Research Futures alliance for welcoming me to join them on their voyage supported through the Australian Government’s Collaborative ­Research Network scheme, 2013–2017. I extend particular thanks to ­Michael Davis for his professional engagement with the project. The Frontispiece is reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque national de France. Publications such as The Golden Age of Maritime Maps, C. Hofmann, H. Richard and E. Vagnon (eds), Buffalo NY: Firefly Books, 2013, 180-193, reproduce its sumptuous colour. Alternatively, readers can enjoy images online by entering Atlas Miller (French) or Miller Atlas and googling ‘Images’.

Introduction

Translations Decolonising Governance: Archipelagic Thinking explores a new approach to region governance. It argues that even well-intentioned plans for culture-led or responsive regional development, or Indigenous-led inter-­regional cooperation or even ‘hotspot’ biodiversity conservation perpetuate neo-­ colonialist assumptions about authority, vesting them in the language of administrative prose and the cartography of territory. Posing three archipelagic regional governance scenarios – an Indigenous ocean management strategy for the Arafura and Timor Seas, a regional cultural development vision for the Western District of Victoria and an alternative environmental biodiversity plan for Wallacea (Indonesia) – Decolonising Governance notes that Indigenous peoples are regularly acknowledged, but integration of their knowledge systems into regional and global governance policy is one way. It links this failure of translation to poetic illiteracy, arguing that the decolonisation of environmental governance is inseparable from renewed metaphorical competence, the capacity to understand storytelling. The book reflects on the retreat of the hermeneutical sciences from their primary cultural function, the understanding of the knowledge invested in stories: when anthropology becomes a narrow social science, the challenge of polysemous meaning (essential to setting the rates of poetic exchange) is subordinated to the pragmatics of reducibility. In Decolonising Governance, the archipelago is a geographical concept. In this context, the book is a contribution to the evolving field of island studies, ocean studies and, in general, the turn away from nation-state territorialisations of the Earth’s surface. Unlike these, though, it argues that archipelagos have a significant ontological property: grounding the relationship between being and becoming in relationality, they are distinctively open, ordered systems. To continue the metaphor, if grounding carries with it terra firma associations, then archipelagic thinking ungrounds concept formation, finding meaning in the interest created when things are exchanged. The primacy of relating in the life world of the archipelago gives metaphor, or the carrying over of unlike concepts to form new crossings of sense, a

2 Introduction primary role in conceptualising and operationalising cross-cultural relations. Narrativising exchange defines the business of decolonised governance wherever regional and global communities seek to act locally in the imagined human interest. Deterritorialising the traditional association of decolonisation with the securing of Indigenous rights, Decolonising Governance extracts indigeneity from its colonial definition and presents it in the context of creative region cultural production or plural self-relating. Because Decolonising Governance is about a hyper-story – to adapt Timothy Morton’s notion of the hyper-object – it is obvious that it will meet with specialist objections, and that it must be reflective, carrying on a commentary with its own narrative that ensures its limitations are incorporated into the map of governance proposed. The hyper-story – decolonising ­governance – is an interdisciplinary one. It brings together normative concepts of rationality, non-normative or poetic economies of sense-making, anthropological descriptions of different local knowledges and the rhetoric of regional development. We should not expect an easy consensus to emerge: a multiplication of case studies would only amplify the opportunity for disagreement about details. Although I make the point that the archipelago, whether considered as an areal arrangement or as a way of thinking (or, of course, both) is defined by its ultimate ­i ndeterminateness – it gives full value to the free agency of the participant actors – it serves in the book to limit the scope for unproductive debate about what is missing: the archipelago establishes a reflective template within which all the local histories presented exist doubly, as concrete situations and as sites of immanence, growth or transformation. This double existence belongs to a discourse that seeks to bring into dialogue anthropological curiosity and political utopianism; in the practical sphere these meet continuously and unequally in the realm of internationalist master-planned development strategies, where environments and cultures under threat are recruited to supposedly universalist goods of cultural and environmental biodiversity. As a book about the negotiation of values, about the recognition of how values are produced and their producers valued, Decolonising Governance is centrally about the language of exchange. Although I want the discussion to be outward, facing, as it were, towards real seas and real forests, it has to be reflective, committed to acknowledging the way in which disciplines destroy each other as effectively as atomistic, reductionist ways of describing reality run down our capacity to inhabit the planet creatively. Pierre Bourdieu points out that the concept of rationality or rational agency (disengaging Indigenous knowledges and polities from these ‘hierarchical models that privilege Western modes of knowing, is also fundamental to the decolonisation process’1) ‘presents a normative model of what the agent should be if he wants to be rational (in the scientist’s sense) as a description of the explanatory principle of what he really does.’2 This creates an agonistic

Introduction  3 relation between disciplines; paradoxically, agreement to differ rationally is impossible and is condemned as encouraging a subversive relativism: The moral asset of the transcendental conception of communicative reason is also its greatest moral liability. It grounds the moral conviction of the indignant in their ferocious condemnation of their opponents for failing to adhere to the rigour of scholarship, the standards of argumentation.3 The key victim of this rigour – faithfully reflected in the administrative prose of legislation, executive orders and every kind of contractual arrangement – is the dimension of language that makes communication across difference possible: Its overriding emphasis on truthfulness and trustworthiness, forecloses the question of why irony, ridicule, joke, allegory, or for that matter, insinuation, indoctrination, propaganda, proselytisation, or even lie, could or should have no role to play in either the production or dissemination of truth.4 Another way to put this, critical to the way decolonising governance is discussed here, is that it discounts what is carried over in communication beyond the subject of the sentences: the fact that ordinary language is open to interpretation is how ‘the social (the many) comes to terms with itself and becomes (one with) itself.’5 Further, the pluralist politics that flows from this is irreducible: ‘The people is different from itself and divided within itself. As such, it is always miscounted and misnamed.’ Or, as Huen puts it, in what we might call archipelagic terms, ‘politics is possible (and indeed necessary) because “the people” is always more or less than itself, it is neither one nor many, but more or less than one.’6 At the heart of communication, then, the primary social contract, if you like, is a willingness to add value to what is received – to give back with interest; hence, the primary contract is ethical as it can be deliberately subverted. Modifying Marx’s definition, Greg Urban suggests that something else is carried over when a commodity is exchanged; besides the addition of ‘exchange value’ to ‘use value’ there is ‘cultural motion.’ Video purchasers, for example, are hardly likely to produce an identical video: However, insofar as they extract some of the culture contained in it, they may reproduce the plot through re-narration or in their own lives, imitate a hair or clothing style, reuse a catchy phrase, come away with a feeling or attitude, or acquire a sensibility about the world, any and all of which have been deposited in the video as cultural artifact.7 This is a conspicuously contemporary example of cultural interest adding, but Urban recognises its economic precedent in the kula ceremonial

4 Introduction exchange system famously studied by Malinowski.8 In Urban’s model the creative response is commodity-mediated and deferred: in a conversation where cultural capital is at stake, though, the ‘re-narration’ is instantaneous, inscribed into the discursive exchange. Possibly as a consequence of the verifactionist orthodoxy, we tend to think of this kind of value-adding as secondary, and to theorise it in ways that make it sound supplementary at best and gratuitous at worst. However, in the context of decolonising the discourse of governance, it is the reflective self-awareness in the language performance (or any other symbolic exchange) that allows a new place, meaning, understanding or purpose to be discovered. Myerhoff and Ruby point out how interpretation is fused into the performative act: in fact, encounter, as opposed to rote meeting, may be distinguished by this double aspect. Referring to a ‘system of signification (including that of an individual person) to reverse, or “bend back,” at the moment of encounter,’ they comment, ‘We become at once both subject and object. Reflexive knowledge, then, contains not only messages, but also information as to how it came into being, the process by which it was obtained.’9 Translated into the protocols of meeting in Indigenous societies, referred to here is the expectation that the messenger will introduce him/ herself, saying where they come from (family and country), for the story of the messenger is inseparable from the authority of the story to be told. But it would be curious to say that these diplomatic courtesies, so notably absent from the transcendental conception of communicative reason, are evidence of a ‘human capacity to generate second-order symbols or metalevels–­significations about significations.’10 ‘The withdrawal from the world, a bending toward thought process itself’ may be ‘necessary for what we consider a fully reflexive mode of thought,’11 but it is also the characteristic trope of irony or, less aggressively, whatever gestures are introduced into the exchange that serve to differentiate content and context, performance and performer, subjective and objective, and hence to allow for the emergence of something new. The project of decolonising governance is usually associated with the assertion of Indigenous rights,12 a problematic position when most Indigenous peoples have plural heritages and complexly residual cultural identifications. In any case, theoretical and practical advocacy for the recognition of Indigenous knowledge systems, Indigenous rights and sovereignty and, concomitantly, the dismantling of the ‘antics and oppressive practices’ of the ‘colonial oppressor’ that ‘continue to script the lives of the subordinate and colonised even as we resist such dominance’13 rarely address the problem of communication, that is the discursive reform needed if different knowledges are to speak to one another. This is also a challenge inter-­culturally, as it were: if a decolonising approach articulates local/Indigenous knowledges as situated, contingent, multi-sited, dispersed and intricately connected to place, person and identity formation, then how will they relate to one another? Valuing the multiplicity of local knowledges – dismantling the hierarchical model within which Indigenous knowledges are typically

Introduction  5 subjugated, marginalised or erased – may produce postcolonial disintegration rather than radical anticolonial integration. De Sousa Santos and colleagues state that ‘starting from the assumption that cultural diversity and epistemological diversity are reciprocally embedded … the reinvention of social emancipation is premised upon replacing the “monoculture of scientific knowledge” by an “ecology of knowledges.”’14 The logical conclusion of this emancipation is drawn by Arun Agrawal, who argues, in a development studies context that, if Indigenous and local knowledges are to play an important role, ‘we must go beyond the dichotomy of indigenous vs. scientific and work towards greater autonomy for indigenous peoples.’15 I have no quarrel with these ideals. In their context Decolonising Governance simply invites attention to the challenge of translation between Indigenous cultures: what is the operator or translator that makes an ‘ecology of knowledges’ a living generative system? But our context is more sullied, layered and cruelly complex. It involves the extraterritorial negotiations of deterritorialised peoples, and the navigation of so many self-interested cultural projections, that any call to simplify the decolonisation process, notably through the reverse stigmatisation of the coloniser, is doomed to remain utopian. No man is an island, and the meaningful existence of place-based cultures is inseparable from their multiplicity and their capacity to relate to other self-appointed planetary custodians. The issue is not the validity, whether cultural, ethical or scientific of local knowledges – a better phrase because it recognises an ecology of local knowledge holders including the immigrant, the displaced and the plurally loyal – but the capacity to establish exchange rates. The inward problem of antagonism between disciplines – in our case notably between the humanities and the social sciences – is replicated in the real world in the poor communication between, say, government and non-government agencies committed to land and sea conservation and the traditional custodians of those domains, whose relationship with nature, all too human, may be collectively egotistical and almost certainly only maps to western biodiversity ideals through what Lockhart calls a ‘double mistaken identity.’16 In any case, I am suggesting that in the matter of decolonising governance it is translation all the way down.

Epiphanies It is customary in social science texts, although not in writings coming out of the humanities, to disarm the reader with an opening anecdote. Reaching the subject matter of the book through a vivid recollection of natural beauty, Indigenous encounter or epiphanic revelation assures the reader that the author is a tabula rasa subject like themselves, coming to the world of puzzling contingencies without prior suppositions. It identifies the writer as a trustworthy witness, like Montaigne’s unlettered topographer, resistant to ideological parti pris. Of course, this is a journalistic sleight of hand as, a few pages on, one is invariably in the thickets of theory and disciplinary

6 Introduction disagreement. More fundamentally, this kind of introduction shortchanges the reader because it parodies the storytelling function, reducing it to a walk-on part in a discursive drama that henceforth will be conducted according to the abstractions of social, political or cultural theory. How, then, to personalise my motivation without reducing it to a kind of photo opportunity? It is protocol in most human encounters, and certainly in negotiating rights of passage or residence amongst Aboriginal peoples, to say where one comes from: the same, logically, applies to a book that purports to demystify the stratagems of communicative reason, calling for poetic ­re-­education – a new rapprochement, if you like, between social anthropology and textual hermeneutics – in the interests of governance transformation. Paul Ricoeur, whose book The Rule of Metaphor, is a vade mecum to our own poetic education, insists that poetic thinking – the symbol and the myth – ‘are the result of an occasion or occasions.’17 They embody what he calls a ‘reflective philosophy of the concrete.’18 What is the situation out of which this mythopoetic vehicle, the archipelago, arises? What, to borrow from Dietrich Bonhoeffer are the regions of care – ‘the times and places which in some way concern us…which confront us with concrete problems…The “among us”, the “now” and “here” is therefore the region of our decisions and encounters’ – that inform what follows?19 This last quotation comes from Ground Truthing (2010), a book subtitled (with a sense of irony) ‘explorations in a creative region,’ the region in question being a distinctive inland ecosystem stretching across western New South Wales, north-west Victoria and parts of southern South Australia. The object of this book was to illustrate a method of cultural analysis that demonstrated the existence of a poetic economy that could sustain a new model of regional self-governance. In many ways, the governance model outlined for the Western District of Victoria in Chapter 5 follows from this enquiry: as important as the demonstration of internal story lines drawing together Indigenous, colonial and postcolonial senses of place in the Mallee was the relationship of these story lines to other regions, either immediately adjacent (the Western District) or conceptually and metaphorically convergent. That book overlapped with a long place-making engagement with governmental and non-governmental agencies in Alice Springs, Central Australia. This sharpened my sense of the is/is not character of Indigenous place-making narratives, as well as my awareness of the connection between white settler ‘antics and oppressive practices’ and what I will call metaphorical illiteracy. It established for me the fact, later explored in depth in Meeting Place (2013), that the problem of translation lies at the heart of attempts to decolonise governance.20 As Mbantua Elder Doris Kngwarreye Stewart told me, talking about the Council destruction of trees, ‘For every damage we lose a life’; ‘after damage my ancestors come to me.’21 This is not simply a totemic identification story of the kind discussed in Chapter 1 – not just about the language of metaphor – it is about the ‘Ersatz economy’ of master planning, where picturesque representations are substituted for

Introduction  7 genuine relations. As Mrs Stewart said, ‘Why re-create when we already had the thing?’22 Alongside these experiences of the profound, and profoundly destructive, mismatch between white settler government cultures and Indigenous people’s ‘creative “drive”’ to make sense of their universe – writing in 1952, Stanner compared ‘the logos of the Dreaming,’23 characterised as ‘a network of enduring relations recognized between people … an intellectual and social achievement of a very high order’ comparable with ‘such a secular achievement as, say, parliamentary government in a European society’24 – there was a concomitant fascination with the landscape of translation. If the mythform of western democracy is the agora, centralist, rhetorically and socially hierarchical, its use value predicated on uncounted slave labour,25 and if its corollory is colonisation’s territorialisation of the globe and enslavement of natural and human resources, what would the other meeting place look like that corresponded to those alternative knowledge systems characterised as ‘situated, contingent, multi-sited, dispersed, and intricately connected to place, person and identity formation’? This question is taken up in Places Made After Their Stories, and in it, in the context of developing a bicultural sense of place culture at Yagan Square, Perth, the image of the string figure emerged: referring to our method, I wrote, A creative template is a technique for holding things apart together: in an urban context it enables us to see the public space as immanent, self-organising. In terms of heritage, it isolates the through lines or principles of change that materialize at certain times and places. The cultural, educational and symbolic significance of string figures in Australian Aboriginal cultures is widely documented: they are spatial mnemonics for the fundamental relationship between sky and earth; they can model family relations. They translate social laws into a lasting physical gesture: the sinews of the body are transformed into the ‘tension’ that tunes the good society.26 Obviously the spatio-political figure of the archipelago is implicit in the string figure. But here I simply wanted to document the zones of historical and actual non-meeting that shadow any project of drawing together. It occurred to me that one place where alternative geographies of encounter, different configurations of governance and the critical question of translation came together was in the management of oceanic environments. I had written about the colonial idealisation of the coastline as the metonym of exclusive territorial possession (and the consequent repression of cultural cultures, amphibious environments and their associated ‘hinterseas’ economies).27 Then I began to push out from the shore: practical engagement in the Chennai Adyar Poonga Ecological Restoration Plan (2006–2007),28 a recuperative ecology project in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, in 2007, overlapping with the design of a new cultural faculty called ‘Pearl’ for the new Darwin

8 Introduction waterfront, drew my attention to the problems traditional fishing cultures across the Timor and Arafura Seas, and even across the Indian Ocean, shared. Out of this was born the ‘Ocean Connections’ project, on whose work Chapter 3 is based. One manifestation of this research partnership was ‘Tidal,’ a program for bicultural environmental planning mediated through the discourse of tidal phenomena. Citing the Aboriginal Land Amendment (Inter-Tidal Waters) Act (2007) and the government-funded CSIRO’s response, the commissioning and funding of a Tropical Rivers and Coastal Knowledge project to record Indigenous social and cultural knowledge relating to water, we suggested that this offered an exceptional opportunity for translation: between epistemologies, environments, and even the human and physical sciences.29 A feature of ‘Tidal’ was the equal billing it gave to cultural production, expressly the potential of digital design techniques to integrate the hyper stories of oceanic rhythm and their human counterparts into the physical morphology and visitor experience of ‘Pearl’ – an ambitious extension of the ‘places made after their stories’ principle to architectural design. Such were the translations we imagined then.30 If there was an epiphanic moment in relation to the emergence of the archipelago, it occurred when, still optimistic about the realisation of ‘Pearl’, we began to dream a region of care: A critical sense of place is one that develops tools for calibrating the sentiers said to lend places their experiential drag. The pathways may be physical grooves, representable in plans, but they signify because they bear poetic associations, rhythmic, kinaesthetic, metrical and ultimately poetic dimensions. They are discursive in the etymological sense. In this case, what is called place emerges where sentiers meet, intersect, interfere with one another or cancel each other out. Place is not a meeting place of stories – themes that the heritage lobby can restore and reinterpret – but an arrest, or filtering, of passage … Sentiers give passage sense, just as passage scores places. Here, the first clue to the arrangement of things is the successive walls normally relegated to the status of scenography: the window, the jigsaw of divisions across the hotel grounds, the breakwater, the handsome curving wharf, the horizonal coastline of the Cox Peninsula with its refineries, and the horizon itself – I say ‘itself’ but the horizon is also seven-shelled with mother-ofpearl cloud laminations climbing into the dusky evening. If you Google Earth the region, passing from one scale to another, you discern that the geographical forms exhibit a Mandelbrot-like tendency to reproduce essential characteristics at different scales. The generalisation of this is a coastline that is not a line at all but an arrangement of permeable passages – promontories sinking to form necklaces of islands, the emergence of straits, alternative passages and new permeable barriers – spits, banks and shoals – created and uncreated by tidal fluctuations.

Introduction  9 At progressively smaller scales, the archipelago effect is reproduced in the constitution of coastal flora – the aerial root system of the mangrove swamp is a field of stakes that supports a colloidal medium (mud) able to stabilise land-sea relations. The oyster that finds a home in this humid environment carries out its own filtering operations. The branchiae or gills leach the salt water for nutrients and occasionally by a kind of fertile oversight admit grit that a process of nacreous inhumation transforms into pearl.31

Illustrations Here, recognising that ‘These stories of passage that makes a difference could be multiplied. They are essentially sites where the flux is inscribed with significance, where media incubate embryonic forms,’32 the irritation in the intellectual oyster was secreted that eventually grew, concentric ­layer-by-layer, to the present book. But no origin myth is entertained: just as Charles Darwin’s non-visit to Darwin has not prevented the emergence of a sense of place myth modelled after his life, so with Decolonising Governance, it is undeniably metaphorical. As, indeed, is its cartographical inspiration, the Lopo Homem charts of the Malay/Indonesian archipelagos and the Pacific Ocean as far as they were known to Portuguese navigators c.1519 (Frontispiece). If the archipelago is a reflective template laid over the hyper-story of decolonisation – a way of mapping some essential features and their relationship – then the jewel-like swarms of the Homem chart are a visualisation of the template, a further simplification of the hyper-story to its essential rhetorical appeal. Although I had carried these images around in my head for a long time, I came back to them in Darwin.33 As conceptual scaffolding, their value resided in their irreducible ambiguity: it was, and remains, impossible to say what they represent, a quality I found inestimably valuable in floating off my conception of the archipelago from what I took to be the literalist politics and poetics of the new sub-branch of the environmental humanities concerned with island studies. These representations of – what? – gaps in knowledge, expressions of wonder, fantasies of wealth or even some kind of optical distemper communicated an essential feature of the archipelago: its irreducibility, its resistance to translation. As a figure of translation where the work of relating (energeia) and the form of relating are indistinguishable, the challenge of interpretation is incorporated entirely into the everyday praxis of communication. There is nowhere else to stand – no outside – while, as for the inside, like the nesting of island within island, there is no end to the interest that can be found there. The Homem swarms are a good way of introducing dimensions of the archipelago that are not immediately apparent from the modern map. As an innovative but not entirely unique Renaissance cartographic,34 they serve as geographical place holders. In the absence of definite information, they

10 Introduction correspond to the rhetoric of rumour. In a geo-political context, particularly in the struggle between Portugal and Spain for control of the East Indies, they are ironic, playing on the other’s imperial desire, which they tempt, ridicule or frankly mislead. The psychology of this is apparent in Manuel the Second of Portugal’s 1519 renunciation of his claim on the Canary Islands: the agreement with the Spanish crown contained an article renouncing any claim to the Lost or Hidden Island. Even if it did not exist, there was a risk it might exist in the future, becoming a source of conflict. Equally, one has to suppose that a positive claim to the archipelago always contained within it a claim to whatever might be found there, a prospect deliciously illustrated in the Homem chart. Hence, aside from their psycho-political, and even international legal, suggestions, these imaginary swarms act as philosophical Gestalten: by this I mean they image the imagination’s pattern-making capacity. In poetic terms, their ensembles are pure metaphors, constellations or arrangements whose meaning is derived entirely from their interior ­inter-dependence. When organising Decolonising Governance into interleaved chapters of (approximately) theory and practice, I thought that the archipelago as a figure of speech could be considered successively from three points of view: the philosophical, the poetic and the political. In practice, like three islands changing their position in relation to each other as we voyage among them, the overlapping commonalities are easier to chart. As an anti-continentalist figure of organisation, archipelagos seem to be politically and environmentally emancipatory. Certainly, the archipelagic figure allows us to think (model, visualise) such fashionable topics as emergence, complexity and autopoietic self-organisation. Algebraic and topological formulations of the (idealised) archipelago reveal the island/sea opposition as a relic of continentalist thinking. Korčák’s island logarithm or Mandelbrot’s ‘island generator algorithm’ foreground attributes of scale and distribution. The fractal property of ‘autosimilarity’ has been found to illuminate the way cities develop ‘vortically, through region-forming mechanisms of feedback.’35 Transposed to the challenge of cultural and social innovation, ‘the capacity to create information based on the Mandelbrot vector’ is analogous to what in creative practice is recognised as ‘spontaneous improvisation in the moment.’36 The power of different but related intervals to generate new forms is recognised in fields as diverse as bio-­ geography-based optimisation theory, evolutionary linguistics, networked communication theory and risk management.37 In oceanographic studies, a similar picture emerges: archipelago systems optimise the conditions of probabilistic change and generate complexity. There is growing evidence that the mesoscale eddies (asymmetrical wakes, regional vortices) archipelagos produce modulate biological production and related biogeochemical fluxes. In studies of human group behaviour, polycentric consensus ­decision-making may manage intentional change best when power is archipelagically distributed. Interdisciplinary studies (of which Decolonising Governance is one) can be understood as spaces where no discipline enjoys

Introduction  11 central authority; ‘field theory’ applied to social psychology, Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and even recent models of cognition all invoke the archipelagic figure. Surely this is an invitation to go with the interdisciplinary flow. In contrast with continentalist systems and structures, hierarchical, statist and static, archipelagic thinking ‘flows along with the course of our worlds.’ It borrows from the ‘ambiguity, fragility and derivativeness’ of ex-slave island communities: then, ‘based upon archipelagos,’ it ‘opens these seas to us.’38 But there is a problem with these poetic interpretations of the archipelago. Characterising the archetypal archipelago of western thought, the numerous islands of the Aegean Sea, as a ‘Voronoi decomposition,’ Dimotakis derives from them the distinctive ‘memeplexes’ (or thought forms) of ancient Greek art, science and political philosophy.39 This neo-Pythagorean speculation is charming but also disturbing. As Gianni Vattimo points out, democracy is twinned with imperialism, freedom with slavery: while the term pélagos suggests the freedom of open horizons,40 the root arché shows a predilection for ‘unifying, sovereign and generalizing categories,’ and expresses itself psycho-politically in ‘a fundamental insecurity and exaggerated self-importance from which it then reacts into over-defensiveness.’41 In other words, as an anti-centralist metaphor, the archipelago remains ambiguous. It can model assemblages or rival autocracies.42 Antithetical human arrangements can be derived from the same geographical figure: on a map, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag may look like Filipino anarchist writer, Bas Umali’s ‘archipelagic confederation’ interlinking ‘politically and economically every community in the archipelago,’ and consisting of ‘networks of autonomous villages (­ barangays), together comprising regional assemblies in which translocal coordination could take place.’43 If everything, both philosophically and politically, depends on the way interlinking is negotiated, the practical value of developing an archipelagic poetics becomes clear. As a figure of relationality, an archipelago can be compared to any creative work, poem, painting, dance or building, that is a function of its internal relations. Although the narrative of the archipelago is perhaps infinite, as Thomas De Quincey concluded when he contemplated writing a general history of ocean navigation,44 its internal arrangements (the complex of islands, inter-island relations, their directions, sizes, topologies … not to mention the vortical inter-field of currents and the irregular topography of the sea bottom) can be mapped in terms of the exchanges between them; for, as members of the string figure, they are held together, held apart, by the tension in the web, and this is essentially a matter for mutual discussion and agreement, usually secured through a self-transcending system of economic exchange permitting an asymmetrical ‘culture flow’ that ensures the region remains emergent or creative. Like its politics, the poetics of the archipelago are underwritten by an idea of unfinish or excess: the literary inspiration of the Homem islands is a statement in Marco Polo’s Il Milione to the effect that beyond the China Sea lie 7448 islands, all of which

12 Introduction no one has ever seen.45 Yet it is my impression that a poetics provides, in this context, the ethical securing of the archipelago as it establishes the good exchange rate, those metaphors, as it were, or carryings over, that make sense, in comparison with those that simply eliminate a difference. In contrast with continental land masses, and their conceptualisations of the world, archipelagos critically shape knowledge. Descartes, in a passage we will come back to, comments, Nature also teaches me, by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on, that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit.’46 It is the same with the philosophical, poetic and political outlooks bred in the archipelago; they are intermingled with the environment and form a part of it. Elaborating on what Giambattista Vico meant by poetic, ­Edward Said explains that it is a quality of complementarity where different branches of knowledge co-exist: ‘the sinews between different branches bind these branches together despite an appearance of dispersion.’ Enlarging on this figure of speech, Said adds that ‘a perfect analogy’ for this ‘relationship of adjacency’ is ‘the set of relationships obtaining between parts of the human body.’47 But, if our goal is a poetic geography that combats what Michel Foucault called the landed quality of western knowledge, then Said’s thought should be transposed to the figure of the ‘body of water,’ the jointure of the sea rather than its skeletal apparatus of scattered islands and reefs.48 Merleau-­ Ponty frequently used a bodily image to explain the nature of his philosophical interrogation. He compared his focus of interest to the joints in the body. ‘The joints of our bodies, as distinguished from the bones, are themselves hollows of a specific kind.’49 That is, they operate in, they articulate, the spaces between substances (bones): focusing on these, ‘philosophy seeks to allow the way the world works to display itself by first subtracting from it the stuff of which it is made.’50 Here is a description of any archipelago which, obeying the subtraction logic of the Sierpinski cube, creates a region of holes. These three interdependent discourses are not identical: a critical archipelagic politics remains geo-politically plausible when it speculates that a scatter of islands can never incubate an imperial force because it lacks the continental land mass (the access to minerals and agricultural wealth) that would allow it to consolidate the capital reserves and technological repertoire necessary for an expansionist territorial policy.51 But a poet is free to imagine other states, and if, as Édouard Glissant feels, archipelagos possess a ‘collective yearning for expression,’ then a revolutionary poet might feel at home here.52 When I first looked at the Homem charts, I was reminded of the Chorus of Spirits in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound – ‘Like flocks of clouds in spring’s delightful weather, / Thronging in the blue air,’53 they are, in another guise, the wind that drives the emancipated Asia ‘Into a sea of

Introduction  13 profound, of ever spreading sound’: ‘through Elysian garden islets/By thee, most beautiful of pilots, / Where never mortal pinnace glided, / The boat of my desire is guided.’54 Ocean, too, has a distinctive motion. In the wake of Prometheus’s revolt against the Olympian tyranny of Jupiter – for which read the revolution that must overthrow the present governments of Europe in order to assert ‘the rights of man’55 – the Spirits that ‘come from the mind / Of human kind’ and mingle with its ‘serene and mighty motion,’ are borne along by a ‘whirlwind of gladness.’56 These comparisons of inward states to outward phenomena are, in Shelley, imagined as exact – Shelley’s philosophical novelty is, as Cian Duffy points out, to understand human history as a function of natural history.57 Shelley’s apprehension of a ‘perfect symmetry’ between inner and outer phenomena, where ‘the lights of nature and of mind entwine within the eye and call forth vision,’ ‘establishes him as among the first ecopsychologists, who “proceed from the assumption that at its deepest level the psyche remains sympathetically bonded to the Earth that mothered us into existence.”’58 Hence when, at the climax of the revolutionary allegory, ‘with loud and whirlwind harmony, / A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres’ appears,59 it is no mere illustration. It is a working model of a new society always more or less than itself, neither one nor many, but more or less than one. When I looked at the imaginary islands of the Homem charts, I recalled these lines: Ten thousand orbs involving and involved, Purple and azure, white, and green, and golden, Sphere within sphere; and every space between People with unimaginable shapes …60 At the heart of the ‘multitudinous’ orb’s ‘mighty whirl’ there sleeps ‘The Spirit of the Earth.’61 Here, certainly, a philosophical archipelago is envisaged62 but also a geo-political possibility – a world where, in effect, the diagrams laid out in Homem’s planisphere are wrapped up again to make a globe, a spherical geography with a different, decolonised governance – and the achievement of this interdisciplinary complementarity, this archipelagic adjacency where there is no edge and the beyond is inside, is poetic.

Notes 1 See Linda T. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous ­Peoples, Otago: University of Otago Press, 1999. 2 Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997, 140. 3 Chi W. Huen, ‘(Inter)disciplinarity as an A(nt)agonistic Field: The Possibility of an Anthropology of the Academy,’ Anthropological Futures Conference, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, June 12–13, 2010, 1–30, 4. 4 Chi W. Huen, ‘(Inter)disciplinarity as an A(nt)agonistic Field,’ 4. 5 Chi W. Huen, ‘(Inter)disciplinarity as an A(nt)agonistic Field,’ 6. 6 Chi W. Huen, ‘(Inter)disciplinarity as an A(nt)agonistic Field,’ 6.

14 Introduction 7 Greg Urban, ‘Supply and Demand: A Special Case of the Laws of ­Cultural ­Motion,’ Anthropological Futures Conference, Institute of Ethnology, ­Academia Sinica, Taiwan, June 12–13, 2010, 1–28, 7–8. 8 Greg Urban, ‘Supply and Demand: A Special Case of the Laws of Cultural ­Motion,’ 2. 9 Jay Ruby and Barbara Myerhoff, ‘Introduction,’ in J. Ruby (ed.), A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982, 1–35. 10 Jay Ruby and Barbara Myerhoff, ‘Introduction,’ 2. 11 Jay Ruby and Barbara Myerhoff, ‘Introduction,’ 2. 12 See for example Linda T. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies; Marie Battiste and James Youngblood Henderson, Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: A Global Challenge, British Columbia: UBC Press, 2000; Ladislau M. Semali and Joe L. Kincheloe, ‘Introduction: What Is Indigenous Knowledge and Why Should Be Study It?’ in L. M. Semali and J. L. Kincheloe (eds.), What Is Indigenous Knowledge? Voices from the Academy, New York and London: Falmer Press, 1999, 3–57; Juanita Sherwood, ‘Do No Harm: Decolonising Aboriginal Health Research,’ unpublished PhD, University of New South Wales, 2010; Margaret Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations and Contexts, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009; Martin Nakata, Disciplining the Savages, Savaging the Disciplines, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007. 13 Marlon Simmons and George Sefa Dei, ‘Reframing Anti-Colonial Theory for the Diasporic Context.’ Postcolonial Directions in Education 1(1), 2012, 67–99, 68. 14 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Joiio Arriscad Nunes and Maria Paula ­Meneses, ‘Introduction: Opening up the Canon of Knowledge and Recognition of Difference,’ in B. de Sousa Santos (ed.), Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond ­Northern Epistemologies, London and New York: Verso, 2007, vii–lxii, xx; see also Michael Davis, ‘Producing a Critique: Writing about Indigenous Knowledge, Intellectual Property, and Cultural Heritage,’ unpublished PhD, University of Technology, Sydney, 2010. 15 Arun Agrawal, ‘Dismantling the Divide between Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge.’ Development and Change 26(3), 1995, 413–439, 413. 16 James Lockhart, ‘Double Mistaken Identity: Some Nahua Concepts in Postconquest Guise,’ in Of Things of the Indies, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, 98–119. 17 David M. Rasmussen, Mythic-Symbolic Language and Philosophical Anthropology: A Constructive Interpretation of the Thought of Paul Ricoeur, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971, 123. 18 David M. Rasmussen, ‘Mythic-Symbolic Language and Philosophical Anthropology,’ 123. On the geographical application of this, see Paul Carter, Dark Writing, Geography, Performance, Design, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008, 25–28. 19 Paul Carter, Ground Truthing, Explorations in a Creative Region, Perth: UWAP, 2010, 116, quoting Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans. N. Horton Smith, London: SCM Press, 1960, 24. 20 Paul Carter, Meeting Place, the Human Encounter and the Challenge of Coexistence, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, whose thesis is summarised with great eloquence by W. E. H. Stanner: ‘To go near is always a sort of offer.’ (W. E. H. Stanner, After the Dreaming and Other Essays, Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009, 217.) 21 Paul Carter, Places Made after Their Stories, Design and the Art of Choreotopography, Perth: UWAP, 2015, 107. 22 Paul Carter, Places Made after Their Stories, 108.

Introduction  15 23 W. E. H. Stanner, After the Dreaming, 72. 24 W. E. H. Stanner, After the Dreaming, 66. 25 See, for example, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World, trans. A. Szegedy-Maszak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, 173. 26 Paul Carter, Places Made after Their Stories, 343. 27 See Paul Carter, ‘Dark with Excess of Bright: Mapping the Coastlines of Knowledge,’ in Dark Writing, 49–78. 28 Fostered and led by the Pitchandikulam Bio Resource Centre, the plan invoked the concept of ‘recuperative ecology,’ proposing to ‘involve the citizens in an exercise in self-reflection and practical action,’ stating, when we destroy a river we increase our thirst and lose some of our soul … as biodiversity is diminished so we are diminished … the restoration is offered as a contribution to making the lives of the people of Chennai more whole. So the people are to be understood ecologically, as a living culture that needs renewal: wisdom, order, beauty and creativity are common to both. (Adyar Poonga Draft Ecological Restoration Plan, 2010, courtesy of Joss Brook, Pitchandikulam Forest Consultants, Auroville) 29 Paul Carter, ‘Tidal: A Research Partnership between COFA (University of New South Wales) and the Darwin Waterfront Corporation in Association with Centre for Creative Place Research,’ 1–5. Unpublished. Courtesy of the author. 30 A brief account of the Pearl project is given in Places Made after Their Stories, 72. Findings of ‘Ocean Connections’ are published as ‘Local Knowledge and the Challenge of Regional Governance’ and ‘Dry Thinking, Wet Places: Conceptualising Fluid States,’ both in T. Brewer, A. Dale, L. Rosenmann et al. (eds.), Northern Research Futures, Canberra: ANU Press, 2018. 31 Paul Carter, Diary, July 2009, unnumbered. A version of this later appeared in ‘Polyhedral: Recycling Boundary Ecologies.’ International Review of Information Ethics, 11, October 2009, 45–51. On colloids, see another place-making proposal, ‘Solutions: Storyboarding a Humid Zone,’ in Dark Writing, 173–203. 32 Paul Carter, Diary, July 2009, unnumbered. 33 In a public artwork called ‘Zipcode,’ I recreated the distinctive ‘open zip’ graphic Homem used to represent passages between islands in the ground pattern of a walkway. See www.darwin.nt.gov.au/sites/default/files/file/agendas-minutes/ attachments/cou2nd10agnattachmentatoitem13_3colour.pdf. 34 Similarly drawn clusters can be found in a number of roughly contemporary charts – Nicolo Caveri, ‘World Chart,’ Genoa, c.1504–5; Vesconte de Maggiolo, ‘World Map,’ Naples, 1511; Piri Re’is, ‘Chart of the Ocean Sea,’ Gallipoli, 1513 – but they entirely lack Homem’s exuberant horror vacui. (See Kenneth Nebenzahl, Atlas of Columbus and the Great Discoveries, Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 1990, 40, 60, 62.) 35 Francesco Careri, ‘Transurbance,’ in P. Barron and M. Mariani (eds.), Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale, London: Routledge, 2014, 107–109. 36 Arnold Keyserling, The I Ching and the Five Stages of Creative Time, 1999, no page references, quoted www.laetusinpraesens.org/docs00s/cardrep2.php. 37 For example, Manuel Castells (ed.), The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural ­Perspective, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 2004. 38 Édouard Glissant, Poétique IV: Traité du tout-monde, Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1997, 31. 39 Paul Nicholas Dimotakis and Panagiotas Papspiros, ‘The Step of Kouros.’ Physics Issue 1 International 6(2), 2015, 89–95, 90. A Voronoi diagram is the partitioning of a plane into regions based on their distance from points within the plane.

16 Introduction

40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50

51

52 53 54 55

56

An archipelago or any cluster of islands treated as points presents a natural candidate for Voronoi partition or decomposition, and ‘real’ archipelagos are frequently used by mathematicians to test and illustrate refinements and variations. (See for example L. Mestetskiy, ‘Representation of Linear Segment Voronoi Diagram by Bezier Curves,’ www.graphicon.ru/html/2014/papers/83-87.pdf, which applies the author’s method to create a Voronoi Diagram for the Malay Archipelago.) Massimo Cacciari, L’arcipelago, Milano: Adelphi Edizioni, 1997, 13. Gianni Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference: Philosophy after Nietzsche and Heidegger, trans. G. Blamires, London: Polity, 1993, 5. Manuel De Landa, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity, London: Continuum Press, 2006. Marco Cuevas-Hewitt, ‘Sketches of an Archipelagic Poetics of Postcolonial ­Belonging.’ Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture 11(1), 2007, 239–246. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Boston, MA: James R. Osgood and Company, 1873, 214. In truly archipelagic fashion, the number of islands and the extent to which they are known varies from one edition to another. However, at all times a definite figure is offered. See The Travels of Marco Polo, New York: Dover Publications, 1993. In Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, the Venetian, trans. W. Marsden, London: J. M. Dent, 1908, 329, the number is 7440, and so on. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 56, AT 80–81, quoted by ­Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 1. Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, London: Granta Books, 1997, 351. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, cited by Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun (eds.), Sea Changes: Historicising the Ocean, London: Routledge, 2004, 2. See Jerry H. Gill, Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1991, 66. Jerry H. Gill, Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor, 66. Further on this, see Paul Carter, ‘Sea Level, Towards a Poetic Geography,’ in P. Darby (ed.), From International Relations to Relations International: Postcolonial Essays, London: Routledge, 2016, 141–158. In a widely-read colonial ethnography, Crawfurd had early on argued that the impossibility of accumulating significant mineral wealth or centralized man power meant that ‘The Indian islanders can never effect conquests on more civilized neighbours.’ (John Crawfurd, History of the Indian Archipelago, 2 vols., Edinburgh: Archibald Constable & Co, 1820, vol. 1, 13.) Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, trans. J. M. Dash, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989, 120. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Prometheus Unbound,’ in T. Hutchinson (ed.), Act I, l. 665, Poetical Works, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, 223. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Prometheus Unbound,’ Act II, Scene V, ll. 84, 91–93, ­Poetical Works, 242. ‘The rights of man in the present state of society are only to be secured by some degree of coercion to be exercised on their violator.’ Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Declaration of Rights,’ in B. Woodcock (ed.), The Selected Poetry and Prose, Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2002, 557. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Prometheus Unbound,’ Act IV, 93–94, 98, 85, Poetical Works, 256.

Introduction  17 57 See Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 11. 58 Mark Lussier, ‘Wave Dynamics as Primary Ecology in Shelley’s Prometheus ­Unbound,’ Romanticism on the net 16, novembre 1999, para 2. 59 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Prometheus Unbound,’ Act IV, 237–238, Poetical Works, 260. 60 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Prometheus Unbound,’ Act IV, 241–244, Poetical Works, 260. 61 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Prometheus Unbound,’ Act IV, 253, 265, Poetical Works, 260. 62 See, for example, Thomas A. Reisner, ‘Some Scientific Models for Shelley’s ­Multitudinous Orb.’ Keats-Shelley Journal 23, 1974, 52–59.

1 Exchange rates Figuring the archipelago

Decolonising geography Decolonising governance means, among other things, decolonising geography; within a remapping of the world, it involves reimagining human relations and the terms of encounter; the content of the relations negotiated and navigated also undergoes reappraisal – can what is related be separated from how it is related?1 In this chapter some key disciplinary points of reference are mapped before sailing out into a differently imagined place of uncertain crossing. First, some conventional decolonising strategies are summarised. Next, the analogy between their goals of democratic governance, particularly associated with the reclamation of environmental ties, and the ­geographical figure of the archipelago is discussed. This introduces our thesis, that the archipelago is not simply an instance of geographical reimagining that shifts attention away from continentalism – the colonialist mindset that identifies territorial expansion with land theft and treats the ocean as the necessary externality of empire – but a challenge to think metaphorically. The archipelago is not only the illustration of a new governance order, one that is topologically sophisticated, inscribes difference into the heart of communication and which models perhaps radically rethought forms of federalism and cosmopolitanism: thinking the archipelago means thinking figuratively, achieving a poetic and rhetorical literacy able to withstand the verificationist criteria of bureaucratic institutions and the reductionist logic of planning. To engage in any significant exchange with Indigenous cultures and knowledge systems that does not collapse into renewed calls for simple withdrawal into autonomy (a utopian objective), the governance principles and practices conveyed in stories, and the social occasions of their performance, need to be grasped. Conventional decolonising strategies promote Indigenous knowledge and mount a powerful critique of colonialist, neo-colonialist and, indeed, contemporary neo-liberal mindsets and world views. They are sometimes linked to the emergence of various kinds of blue sea thinking, associated with a revived environmental humanities, and often focused on the islands, island clusters and oceanic connections – an alignment influentially

Exchange rates  19 promoted by Édouard Glissant. Cultural and environmental decolonisation meet in a broad embrace of the deep ecological principles sometimes associated with Gaia philosophy. However, any review of these different strands in contemporary decolonising theory rapidly exposes a remarkable gap or oversight: the absence of decolonised representations of land and sea corresponding to the dynamic and evolutionary political systems said to characterise decolonised polities. Representations are graphic: the history of cartography is the politics of drawing lines. But, more subtly, representations are rhetorical and buried in the conventions of discourse. Most decolonising discourses continue to predicate the politics of identity on territorial and environmental divisions established by western, scientific mapping. Even within the history of cartography radically different ways of representing coastlines, islands, passages and ports exist; in older mapping conventions, relationality is visualised and even rates of relative movement; elements aggregate into creative regions. The elimination of these speculative elements coincides with the disappearance of metaphorical concepts from the language of administrative prose, a development conveniently attributed to Jeremy Bentham’s theory of fictions. The language employed to conceptualise, legalise, plan and implement the theories and practices of decolonisation remains resolutely verificationist, any metaphorical statements deriving ‘whatever properly cognitive meaning they have from the literal statements they are seen to replace’:2 ‘local knowledge’ is privileged, but its translation into ‘action plans’ is invariably at the expense of its mythopoetic logic. Advocates of new, decolonised governance arrangements remain tied to planning cultures, and associated assumptions about the function of procedural infrastructure, that perpetuate the silencing of the subaltern. Linear reasoning, whose segmentation of narrative into a sequence of self-­contained steps, prevents the emergence of complexity (all that is understood by the conventional narrative plot) and treats the relations of traditional knowledge holders – the stories, for example, of human and non-human interdependence that underwrite customary law – as non-­ scientific and primitive: planning elites and custodian communities talk past one another Western governance systems (across legislature, judiciary and executive) take language literally, employing an ‘atomistic, reductionistic model that sees the world as constituted by discrete institutional entities and problems, approaching these problems largely in isolation from one another,’3 while non-western conceptions of law and order are relational and dynamic, qualities that tend to locate emancipation not in the law book but in the place of human encounter and exchange. The persistence of rhetorical geographies that inscribe colonialist concepts of territory and sovereignty into post- or de-colonising discourse is due to a kind of geo-topological naivete. In the view of many Indigenous writers, educationalists and activists, the key to self-decolonisation lies in the embrace of local/Indigenous knowledges, characterised as situated, contingent, multi-sited, dispersed and intricately connected to place, person and

20  Exchange rates identity formation. However, the edges of these knowledge cultures remain largely unmapped: the fractal nesting of lawful patternings that link kinship to seasonal cycles to observational astronomy, while internally relational and dynamic, remains a world unto itself. This impression is false, yet it is the model of local knowledge that circulates in bi-cultural planning circles and fosters a renewed isolation. When local knowledges are held in the scale of globalisation, the tendency is, first, to insist on a plurality of world views and, second, to identify de-colonised governance with autonomy. Santos and colleagues urge, ‘starting from the assumption that ­cultural diversity and epistemological diversity are reciprocally embedded … the reinvention of social ­emancipation is premised upon replacing the “monoculture of scientific knowledge” by an “ecology of knowledges.”’4 Arun Agrawal argues, in a development studies context, that if Indigenous and local knowledges are to play an important role, ‘we must go beyond the dichotomy of indigenous vs. scientific and work towards greater autonomy for indigenous peoples.’5 Such formulations tend to beg the question of ­relationality – or, to put it another way, simply defer the identification of authority with universality. As Karen Litfin notes in another context, tackling the inheritance of western imperialism and its continuing reductionist logic implies ‘modalities of governance rooted in a systemic understanding of interdependence.’6 Yet, she acknowledges, Gaia theory has little to say about ‘the thorny problems of practical politics.’7 One reason for this is that a systems theory of ‘interdependence’ underrates differential regionality, imagined here as the creative negotiation of neighbourhood relations and the recognition of interzones of probable states of co-existence;8 such regions may be extra-territorial, distributed, essentially composed of passages.

Thinking back A first step to breaking down these unilaterally imposed binaries is no doubt thinking back, understood directly as adopting and owning a speaking position that is not simply political but geopolitical, articulate and situated. Critiquing hegemonic, dominant Eurocentric narratives, Walter Mignolo introduces the concepts of ‘locus of enunciation’ and ‘border thinking.’9 A locus of enunciation is a ‘place of speaking’ that displaces and dislodges previous loci of enunciation. This allows new and different perspectives to be articulated, as well as the critique of established orders of knowledge and discourse.10 In a similar vein, Nakata has discussed the notion of a Torres Strait Islander peoples’ ‘cultural standpoint,’ which is ‘visible and given voice: “this is who we are.”’ In Nakata’s framework, this ‘cultural interface’ is as much a ‘theoretical’ space as it is a physical or geographic one and is the way that Torres Strait Islanders can position themselves (culturally, politically, socially) in relation to others.11 Mignolo’s ‘border thinking’ offers a kind of relational epistemology: situated on, outside or in-between discursive borders, it offers an ‘other logic,’ a way of thinking from the perspective

Exchange rates  21 of subalternity. It ‘goes with a geopolitics of knowledge that regionalizes the fundamental European legacy, locating thinking in the colonial difference and creating the conditions for diversality as a universal project.’12 Speaking back in this way suggests to Jeff Popke a new incarnation of an old governance model or, as he puts it, ‘an alternative reading of cosmopolitan ethics.’ Citing Mignolo, he suggests, a cosmopolitan ethics ‘begins with the recognition of… “epistemic colonial difference” within the Eurocentric traditions of modernity.’13 Popke finds in Argentine/Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel’s ‘transmodernity’ the possibility of ‘a worldwide ethical liberation project in which… modernity and its denied alterity, its victims, would mutually fulfil each other in a creative process.’14 Popke considers that an ‘ethical liberation project requires, to begin with, that we acknowledge and work to cultivate alternative geographical imaginations.’15 But the examples he gives are not geographical in any recognisable sense: they are different ­community-based knowledge systems and associated environmental practices that by themselves ‘risk becoming isolated examples of local particularity.’16 Even Santos’s quoted call for ‘a cosmopolitan politics networking mutually intelligible languages of emancipation’17 begs the question: how? A decolonised governance model has to navigate between extreme isolationism and the boundless, globalised community of interests supposed by Santos. It has to be a filter between local and global in both directions; as a translator, it inscribes difference into the act of translation: it is able to discern similarities, or the basis of comparability, between customary systems of law that are, on the face of it, incommensurable. Above all, and most prudently, it has to keep in play the subtle relationship between a geography differently imagined and a geo-politics in practice. To take this last point: if we try to imagine the geographical figure that corresponds best to the idealised model of decolonised governance – decentred, interdependent, localised and pluralised (accommodating a constellation of speaking positions), as well as relational and dynamic – the organisation of islands conforming to what is called an archipelago immediately swims into view. The figure of the archipelago immediately allows us to visualise a way out of the binaries already encountered: it suggests a creative region unlike the nation state, defined relationally around shared responsibility for the ocean; resisting the simple enclosure of the cartographic boundary, reconceptualising the connections between islands, its identification involves what Stratford et al. call a fundamental shift: dislocating ‘static island tropes of particularity’ and foregrounding ‘fluid island-island inter-relations rather than the binaries of mainland/sea/island,’ they advocate a ‘counter-mapping’ that frames islands as part of an assemblage of ‘practices, representations, experienced and affects.’ The ontological shift consists in placing movement at the heart of the definition, in, say, the measure of rates of exchange. However, in this argument an important elision has occurred: the archipelago has, at the moment of its discovery, been defined in a way that makes it a metaphor of decolonising governance.18 The ‘counter-mapping’ of a ‘metageographical

22  Exchange rates concept’ leaps over any explanation of how ‘fluid inter-island relations’ occur in practice, assuming instead that the restitution of the subaltern speaking position, together with the supposed existence of ‘mutually intelligible languages of emancipation’ will bring about a kind of natural identity ­between decolonised peoples and decolonised geographies.

Archipelagic definitions Apart from the brutal fact that most archipelagic clusterings, from the Caribbean to the South China Sea, have historically fostered colonial tyranny, economic exploitation and human enslavement, the immediate elevation of the archipelago to a ‘metageographical concept’ sacrifices the variety of island groupings known to exist: at their extremes the mighty Canadian archipelago contains islands large enough to be continents, besides boasting its own inland sea, while the politically contested Spratly Islands in the South China Sea represent an extreme type of exploded archipelago, containing approximately four square kilometres of land spread over a vast area of more than 425,000 square kilometres. In comparison with the mountainous island chains of Indonesia, the majority of Polynesian, Melanesian and Micronesian archipelagos consist of atolls, islets and even intertidal reefs. The so-called Archipelago Sea off southern Finland is said to crowd in no less than 50,000 islands ‘if the number of smallest uninhabitable rocks and skerries’ is taken into account; in contrast, the smallest archipelago in the world, Tristan da Cunha, is said to consist of only four islands. If we extend the investigation temporally as well as spatially, we find another kind of destabilisation: the country in which this book is written is, according to its nation-state apologists, an almost ideal ‘island continent.’ Leaving aside the white settler anxieties that underwrite this paradoxical geographical figure, this formulation overlooks Australia’s archipelagic history, referring here not to the assemblage of offshore islands that fall within Australian federal jurisdiction but to exploratory hypotheses regarding ‘the interior.’ South Australian explorer Charles Sturt hypothesised ‘that the north and northwest coasts of the Continent were once separated from the south and east coasts by water,’ adding, I have stated my impression that the current from the north, passed through vast openings both to the eastward and westward of the province of South Australia, that it is as necessarily follows, that that province must also have been an island.19 A reasonable corollory was that ‘the interior was occupied by a sea of greater or less extent.’20 His theory of a westerly or south-westerly current flowing through the interior seemed to Sturt confirmed by the orientation of the sand ridges which, he thought, could not be aeolian in origin but must have been thrown up along the line of a former ocean current: ‘They

Exchange rates  23 exhibit a regularity that water alone could have given.’ The ‘low interior,’ he therefore suggested, was formerly a sea-bed, since raised from its sub-marine position by natural though hidden causes; that when this process of elevation so changed the state of things, as to make a continuous continent of that, which had been an archipelago of islands, a current would have passed across the central parts of it, the direction of which must have been parallel to the sandy ridges…21 Similar hypotheses have been confirmed in, for example, the Galapagos, and serve to make a primary point: archipelagos are associated with the intellectual challenge of organisation. They lay out in space and time some of the fundamental preoccupations of western metaphysics: the mystery of the relationship between the One and the Many, the enigma of inductive logic and its limits, the estimation of rates of change and the development of the calculus and, in our era, the challenge of modelling (mathematicising) complex systems. As already indicated, their philosophical significance has less to do with representing fluid relations – which, politically at least, can operate across any terrain – and more to do with such properties as edgelessness, innumerability and, inherent in any swarm formation, the fact that in the archipelago there are no islands. Described here is a metaphysical object, if not a metageographical one, for the good reason that as a figure of organisation the archipelago poses the question of relationality: fluid relations or, indeed, any kind of inter-island transfer cannot be assumed; rather, the ambiguously double constitution of the archipelago poses the fundamental question of exchange rates. If we say an archipelagic region only emerges when islands become ports, or openings to the other – entirely closed islands cannot participate in archipelagic culture – then the navigation of the spaces in-between becomes everything. In philosophical terms, we are concerned with the challenge of mutual intelligibility – the communication across difference that manages to overcome the paradox of singularity and unity and, associated with this, the confederation of incommensurable local knowledges. Poetically, we confront the terms of communication as such. Traditionally, the figure of speech charged with carrying meaning over from one place to another is metaphor, literally to carry over or bear across the sense of one word to another. At first glance, in the archipelagic environment, where the setting of exchange rates may constitute the entire content of trade (not simply the framework), discourse as a whole may be metaphorical. Politically, as already indicated, as an open-ended decision-making structure, a stochastic region where probabilities outweigh certainties and contradictory positions not only co-exist but are essential to the distribution of governance, the archipelago may turn out to be nothing other than the extraterritorial project of public space.

24  Exchange rates In a book that argues that politics – the way we decide things – is inseparable from poetics – the way we talk about them – and that this argument represents a distinctive principle of decolonised governance, the discussion of archipelagic thinking under three separate headings is obviously distorted. Is the problem of archipelagic definition that the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea encountered political or conceptual or both? Is the older tradition (found in the Dutch and Portuguese charts of the sixteenth century) of representing archipelagic clusterings as shoals of glittering jewels a matter of graphic poetics or an ideological wish-fulfilment designed to foster mercantile expansion? The role attributed to archipelagos in the theory of evolution has informed contemporary optimisation theory, whose algorithms of migration and mutation seem to formalise the narrative content and structure of the oldest Mediterranean and Polynesian epics of island foundation and archipelagic expansion. In determining whether any archipelagic cluster becomes Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag or incubates Epeli Hau’ofa’s ‘sea of islands,’ the poetics of connectivity, for example, are value neutral in comparison with political will. In Decolonising Governance, poetics are identified with the praxis of everyday life, particularly as it expresses itself through local or place-based knowledge and the regions of care woven from this; but, again, it is obvious that in a decolonising context where different local knowledges find common cause, the problem of translating between possibly incommensurable cultural systems involves a philosophical attitude, one that acknowledges the politics embedded in the process of finding equivalences. Hence the triad – philosophy, politics, poetics – exists in a continuously self-reforming feedback loop, and the impurity of the distinctions signifies the metabolism of archipelagic thinking. For one positive feature of the archipelago that can be asserted both as a geographical fact and as a tool of visualisation is its identification of knowledge with emergence, and both with a growing mesh of relationships that resist atomisation and evolve towards complexity.

Metaphorical illiteracy To turn, then, to the subject of this chapter, the call to metaphorical literacy, which, it is argued, underwrites the tripartite characterisation of ­archipelagic thinking here, and whose absence from decolonising discourses is the single greatest factor inhibiting the emergence of new political assemblages, extraterritorial regions of environmental care and resilient ­cosmopolitan cultures of difference. In the forum of policy development and implementation, whether conducted internationally, nationally or regionally, Indigenous communities (‘stakeholders’) figure with increasing frequency, ­assertiveness – and frustration. Frustration stems from the seeming incapacity of technocratically trained agents of western government to understand the embodiment of Indigenous law – and legitimacy – in social and environmental relationships that are vouchsafed in story and

Exchange rates  25 rededicated in enactment. A corollory of this cultural illiteracy is a failure of communication at the most elementary level of understanding meeting purpose and protocols: the expectation of mutual recognition leading to the negotiation of reciprocal ties is entirely ignored. Instead, a pre-identified problem is presented for resolution, and even where an on-going consultative framework is offered, its agenda remains resolutely focused on the mechanics of translating policy into planning, and both into a set of projects on the ground. Even the most benevolently inclined, grassroots literature of devolved responsibility in the interests of promoting sustainable living environments remains trapped inside the logico-linguistic assumptions of administrative discourse used to govern subject peoples and consumer societies, themselves the legacy of utilitarianism, whose role in the modernisation and bureaucratisation of government can be measured through the impact of Mill’s Considerations of Representative Government (1861) and his antecedent interest in improving East India Company management practice. Logico-linguistic because, as J. S. Mill wrote, developing further Bentham’s theory of ‘fictions,’ ‘Grammar […] is the beginning of the analysis of the thinking process. The principles and rules of grammar are the means by which the forms of language are made to correspond with the universal forms of thought.’22 The fitness of the ‘forms of language,’ whether these referred to the parts of speech, to the sentence or to discourse as a whole, depended on their internal coherence: ‘words were only understandable as part of a linguistic system and not with reference to any outside criteria of truth.’ Unless they had a literal meaning that could be defined and paraphrased, they could not be legitimated and used. The adaptation of this demystification to the instruments of government is obvious in Emmanuelle de Champs’s remark, ‘the majority of Bentham’s writings on language deal with ways of knowing it in order to control it,’ and, very succinctly, ‘meaning is fixed by the will of the legislator through language.’23 Now, this demystification of language was not without its own mystifications; nor was it necessarily inimical to the goals of democracy: as a second reformation, it aimed to wrest control of authority from vested interests (whose metaphysical ‘fictions’ of rights were self-serving) and to democratise the exercise of power through the rationalisation of communicative logic. Yet paraphrase – the criterion Bentham used to reduce every linguistic formulation to its essential relation to his pleasure principle or to expose it as a ‘metaphysical imposture’ – ultimately rested on poetic logic, as the literal sense of words was usually based on an etymological method of explanation. In other words, interpretation – the traditional function of the humanities – remained at the heart of this programme of language reform, and the Lockean commitment to tracing every immaterial fiction back to its material origin in a sense impression left open the possibility that some might be irreducibly complex. Be this as it may, the instrumentalisation of language in the interests of extending rational control over societal functions paid little attention to these foundational sleights-of-hand, and the ‘analysis of the  thinking process,’

26  Exchange rates itself a linguistic application of inductive reasoning, was extended to every aspect of human behaviour. An important effect of substituting explanation ‘in the manner of a natural scientist’ for interpretation ‘in the manner of the historian’ – to adopt Wilhelm Dilthey’s distinction24 – was to inaugurate a new communicational culture, one rapidly consolidated in every transaction between coloniser and colonised. Any commitment to understanding psychological individualities was replaced by an imperative to paraphrase, to reduce complex discursive constellations to atomised sensory equivalents. In an environment defined by the will of the legislator, the exercise of understanding, ‘the process by which we come to know something of mental life through the perceptible signs which manifest it,’25 implied the erosion of control predicated on explanatory reductionism. To put it in Ricoeur’s terms, the agents of bureaucracy – technicians, scientists, planners – and the proliferation of communication managers their operations seem to demand, refuse, or have lost the ability to read – or, in face-to-face meeting, to listen. In Ricoeur’s argument, a text – and this could be the testimony of traditional knowledge holders – ‘awaits and calls for a reading.’26 That is, it solicits attention and intends an obligation. If it is not ‘closed in on itself but opens out onto other things’ – a supposition that utilitarian theorists of language after all also shared – then to read is ‘to conjoin a new discourse to the discourse of the text.’27 It is precisely this ‘conjunction,’ however, that is refused: in a traditional introduction, you might be expected to identify your mob and where you come from, as it is understood that the dialogue about to unfold will not be a repetition of fixed positions closed to each other but exhibits instead ‘an original capacity for renewal.’28 However, western legislators and their executives never think to say who they are or where they come from. How, in consequence, can the sense of the interaction – the sens, or direction in which meaning lies, ever be opened up?29

Non-verificationist language Hence, a re-education is necessary, a reorientation of interests, one that Decolonising Governance aims to signpost. The resistances to attitudinal change are entrenched in our educational cultures and the politico-­ managerial elites they train. Institutional change would mean, at the very least, a radical reappraisal of the role of the humanities – which, even in their present beleaguered state, continue to represent themselves as distinctively hermeneutical sciences – and of their disciplinary separation from the social sciences  – a split that grows irrevocable in the early Victorian period and which, despite the intermittent building of interdisciplinary bridgeheads, largely fails because of – as we will see here – metaphorical illiteracy on both sides. Some idea of the radical change envisaged can be expressed anecdotally, as it were, through juxtaposing a famous anthropological crux with Bentham’s sensory derivation of the meaning of the abstract noun (or ‘fiction’) obligation. The Bororo people of Brazil became famous in

Exchange rates  27 anthropological discourse because of their statement that they were Scarlet Macaws, a statement whose is/is not content seeped into European intellectual culture as a kind of test case for the explanatory power of scientific reasoning. The Bororo’s is an obligation culture: ‘divided into two exogamic moieties (Tugarege and Ecerae), it is literally through the other (someone of the opposite moiety) that an individual exists socially and can, through ritual, become visible to society.’30 ‘Reciprocal exchange between clans and moieties is present in all aspects of Bororo life.’31 Fulfilling ‘the obligation of reciprocity … strengthens harmony among the village members.’32 An example is the exchange of macaw feathers at funerals: ‘Each [of four species of] macaw is an important aroe of a different clan, and the right of the clan’s members over it is symbolically represented by the profuse use of each bird’s feathers in their ornaments’;33 ‘a Tugerege funeral ritual is always performed by members of the Exerae moiety … feathered pieces belonging to members of one clan can only be worn by members of the opposite moiety.’34 In other words, concepts here are typically defined relationally, the etymological sense of our word symbol operating here rather literally as it were.35 Presented in this context, the poetic logic of the Bororo statement is perhaps reasonable – yet it defies reason in any verificationist sense. The story starts with Karl von den Steinem’s 1894 study, and ‘The Bororos give one rigidly to understand that they are araras [scarlet macaws] at the present time, just as if a caterpillar declared itself to be a butterfly’ – a statement that he could not compute. Logical thought was predicated on clear distinctions (and equally clear relations) – Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction. What kind of thought could generate this sort of self-contradictory statement? It was an instance of what Lévy-Bruhl called prelogical thought, explaining ‘to the mentality governed by the law of participation there is no difficulty in the matter,’ but what was that ‘law’?36 As the story circulated in Europe, explanations of it grew increasingly primitivist: Durkheim and Mauss took it as an instance of a ‘general mental confusion’ found in ‘the least evolved societies known,’ explaining that ‘There is a complete lack of distinction between him and his exterior soul or his totem.’ For ‘the primitive,’ they generalised, ‘the principle of generatio aequivoca is proved. The Bororo sincerely imagines himself to be a parrot.’37 Carl Jung stared even more deeply into the human past: ‘The more we approach unconsciousness, the more indistinct things become, till finally they are only dimly visible and everything means everything else.’38 The logical conclusion of this reasoning is Peter Winch’s view that the way in which humans experience the world is structured by the categories and structures of their language, and therefore translation between different cultures is impossible.39 That is, where explanation fails understanding must be withheld. Of course, there have been other interpretations: Thomas Hylland Eriksen introduces a note of commonsense when he suggests ‘the totems are metaphors for each clan’: ‘the Bororo by no means contradicted themselves, but rather spoke metaphorically,’40 and Michiel Leezenberg at last emphasises context: ‘the Bororo utterance in its ritual context can be

28  Exchange rates called neither deviant nor metaphorical in the sense we are familiar with.’41 It should be understood ‘in terms of what Vygotzky calls complexes, viz. groupings of objects in terms of contextually varying attributes that are not yet perceived as abstract classificatory principles.’42 Here the metaphorical is eventually recuperated for functionalism, but its logical and even operational inferiority remains unquestioned.

Symbolic understanding The point of this anecdote is not to impugn anthropological intelligence but to draw attention to more fundamental systemic problems of attitude, perhaps ontologically tied to the identification of truth with the integrity and unity of the sovereign ego, but certainly embedded in western epistemological function, where ambiguity can literally not survive logical analysis. In our world, knowledge seems inseparable from hierarchy, from the subjugation of complexity and the contortion of its powers to the service of our will. A key element in formulating decolonising methodologies is to dismantle the hierarchical model within which Indigenous knowledges are typically subjugated, marginalised or erased. Valuing their trans–regional multiplicity is also a shift away from hierarchical models that privilege Western modes of knowing, is also fundamental to the decolonisation process.43 But one has to say that these structural discriminations operate internally as well, as the prejudice against metaphor illustrates. The Bororo understand birds to mediate between here and ‘the unknown upper world,’ feathers therefore signifying spiritual as well as physical flight. The macaws’ habitat signifies doubly, as food source and as ‘spiritual residences of Bororo ancestors.’ Nesting sites likewise signify doubly.44 Radiating symbolic networks of this kind are fractal in a way, self-same at different levels, scales and dimensions of reality. Significantly, their comprehension presupposes a metaphoric intuition, at ease with a world constituted of dynamic transformations, of part-things fulfilled in their realisation of their obligations. Can our sciences recognise this? A poetic phenomenology can indicate the principles that bind parts together, but the much-vaunted environmental turn in the humanities has yielded no studies of this kind. Within the social sciences, a lack of reflective awareness hampers progress, the frameworks of consensus and the structuration of research programmes remain intact. Overall, it is an epistemic mindset that Jeremy Bentham uncannily anticipated when he explained, In the case of obligation, […] the root of the word, employed as a sign for the designation of that idea […] lies in a material image, employed as an archetype or emblem: viz. the image of a cord, or any other tie or band, (from the Latin ligo, to bind), by which the person in question is bound to a certain course of practice.45 Here, to be obliged is to be enslaved not related.

Exchange rates  29 As Louis Marie Chauvet writes, paraphrasing Heidegger, ‘The reverse journey of metaphysics unmakes little by little what metaphysics had made. The journey does not dissolve it; rather, it unknots it. It unties it, to “reconnect” and “re-read” (legein/legere-ligare) it another way.’46 But what can it mean to realise that humans are not ‘masters of language,’ that ‘it is language that governs them’47 unless the intuition of a prior relationality exists? As a discourse of emancipation, Heidegger’s reverse journey singularly fails to open towards others; instead of finding itself in the midst of a plurality of roads all on their way elsewhere, he drives metaphorically into the forest – and the metaphor and their associated etymological reverie remain unexamined – not surprisingly, as what George Steiner calls Heidegger’s ‘language mystique … his oracular hermeneutics’ and his call for ‘an encounter in depth with the language-centre of Being itself’ doesn’t leave much room for comparison, let alone dialogue across difference.48 Less oracularly, and more critically, a discourse able to translate between different beings, has to find a way through the double-binds I have identified. Perhaps it shouldn’t be so difficult: to find a satisfactory enunciation of Bororo logic – qua contemporary Indigenous ontologies g­ enerally – one need look no further than Ricoeur’s elucidation of ‘the “tensional” character of metaphorical truth,’49 which, building on a distinction he makes ‘between two senses of the verb to be, the relational and the existential,’ finds in the ‘impossibility of the literal interpretation’ of ‘is’ concealed an ‘is not.’50 Or, as Ricoeur explains later, ‘Being-as-means being and not being.’51 Identifying the ‘split reference’ in the verb to be loosens, as it were, the ‘paradox of the copula … is/is not.’52 When I read this, I find it hard not to imagine it in physical terms. I am reminded of a meditation on the ontological implications of seaside dwelling, living by the sea as people ‘of/f the boundary,’53 or of American Australian scholar Nancy Victorin-Vangerud’s definition of archipelagic identity in terms of ‘the communal, even cosmological ontology of “interbeing”, where people remain responsive and accountable to each other, other beings, the land and the sea.’54 As we try to understand what Ricoeur means, these associations turn out to be metaphorical in a heuristic sense, and not merely illustrative, pointing towards the meaning of what Ricoeur calls ‘living metaphor,’ figures of speech defined precisely by their presentation of an idea that ‘forces conceptual thought to think more.’55 A ‘living metaphor,’ Ricoeur suggests, picking up a remark of Aristotle, makes things appear or represents ‘things as in a state of activity.’ The poet ‘represents everything as moving and living; and activity is movement.’56 The poet who is the master of phusis, or nature understood as the principle of growth, might be characterised as reaching ‘this source of the movement of natural objects, being present in them somehow, either potentially or in complete reality.’57 But, to return to the archipelagic figure, isn’t this also a description of being among islands? For all told, the islands lie without and within one another, just as when in summer time and before the coming of the west winds, many fishing

30  Exchange rates boats take to the sea. And once you have entered the sea, before and aft, starboard and port, everywhere the same, your view ends in an island, so that at first you are in doubt what course you should take through them.58 So, in a passage we will come back to, the second-century CE orator Aelius Aristides writes on entering the archetypal archipelago of the Cyclades, expressing the sensation that here, in this situation of endless becoming, his old grammatical training and adherence to Nomos, the Law, is utterly overthrown. In a recent study of Aristotle’s theory of metaphor, Matthew Wood quotes a passage from the Rhetoric that illuminates how representations make things appear: ‘things are set before the eyes by words that signify energeia.’59 According to Wood, Aristotle distinguishes energeia from kinesis: as a mode of representation, metaphor is not simply a conceptual movement or carrying over defined in terms of two points and the transition between them: as a living metaphor in Ricoeur’s terms, exhibiting true energeia, it is a process of actualisation or realisation without end, ‘like the vital and perceptive processes of living beings.’60 In the Metaphysics, this leads to another distinction: where motion can only be narrated in the present tense, energeia as a continuous state of self-actualisation in which becoming and being fuse, implies the perfect tense, a state of activity already complete.61 In any case, the concluding point is that the most effective metaphors mobilise understanding precisely by allowing ‘the compared thing to be imagined as though it were moving.’62 This is why ‘it is action (energeia) which constitutes the metaphysical foundation of metaphoric resemblance.’63

Redefining the archipelago This discussion goes well beyond what is necessary to demystify Bororo ontology. Conceptualising the relationship between people and birds as a kind of action ecology – where an appreciation of ‘the ecological interdependence of the physical environment and its biological diversity’64 (an action completed, as it were) – is inseparable from rituals of self-actualisation that stretch from the child’s naming ceremony to the rituals of burial: ‘The two most important Bororo rites of passage are metaphors of a spiritual bond that that exists between the Bororo and nabure [red macaws]’65. The idea that metaphors are movement forms bringing into conjunction objects in motion, imagining and mapping as it were the dynamics of their meeting is certainly valuable in putting to rest primitivist assumption about totemic identification. It lets us see through the Platonic participation that LévyBruhl attributes to them. Ricoeur objects to the ‘law of participation’ which explains the relationship of the Many to the One, or of people to a totem, godhead or spiritual unity on now predictable grounds: if ‘To participate means, approximately, to have partially what another possesses or is fully,’66 then the problem of difference – the communication of the act of creating difference – is left unexplained: to give back to mimesis, or representation

Exchange rates  31 by analogy, its full autopoetic energy, it must serve ‘To present men “as acting” and all things “as in act”’ – and this ontological function of metaphor means that it can enact ‘the communication of an act’ by an analogy that is not proportional or representational but indexical.67 Or, as Wood puts it in his reading of the Metaphysics, ‘mere static similarity between two things is not a sufficient indication of a causal relationship between them.’68 But, obviously, the more significant implications of this detour into metaphor are methodological: they expose the inadequacy of verificationist criteria in evaluating cultural discourses that are a priori dyadic, is/is not, and whose production is metabolic, representing a change that is both stable and continuous. Suppose that a sense of obligation did not leave one vulnerable to enslavement or equally vulnerable to wistful arcadianism, but led out into new eco-erotic conservation stratagems;69 suppose that the etymology of cord revealed another sense – the strings of a lyre, tensely stretched, their vibration heard as the sense of action. Stratford et al. addressed their call to move beyond sea/land and island/ mainland studies, and to embrace a ‘third set of relations: those pertaining to island and island,’70 to researchers in the humanities and the social sciences. And this may explain the ambiguous status of the ‘archipelago’ in their proposal, which oscillates between signifying literally and metaphorically, sometimes as a geographical referent recognisable to geographers, sociologists and, indeed, development banks, sometimes as ‘fluid cultural processes, sites of abstract and material relations of movement and rest, dependent on changing conditions of articulation or connection,’71 whose conceptualisation is of most use to writers and philosophers. Acknowledging that ‘theoretical and empirical archipelagic relations exist,’ they imagine their intermingling in a new interdisciplinary research conversation.72 But, while the interests of this new ‘critical practice’ are clear enough, the method is not: the different meanings of the ‘metageographical concept’ in the social sciences and the humanities is unresolved. In a more recent paper, ‘Imagining the Archipelago,’ Stratford puts her ‘critical practice’ into practice: on the one hand, she promotes a geo-political shift based on the physical existence of a multitude of ‘insular associations’ in the US sphere of influence that scarcely figure in American political ideology or cultural self-awareness. To direct attention away from ‘American continentalism’ is simply to promote the study of the neglected and dispersed: it doesn’t require imagination. The many islands and island groups she cites are not organised archipelagically in any recognisable sense. On the other hand, she proposes to consider the islands captured within the US exclusive economic zone under the UN Law of the Sea Convention as a distinct and novel ‘complex space,’ ‘a geographical imaginary comprising island states and isthmuses’ to be imagined ‘archipelagically.’ In this ­s econd proposal, a physical distribution is scooped up and arranged into an artificial figure of thought, an illustrative metaphor for thinking ‘in terms of figurative and literal assemblages, or mobilities, and multiplicities … along the fluid

32  Exchange rates borders of island, archipelagic, oceanic and hemispheric studies.’73 No evidence is offered of a critical relationship between the cultures of these islands and inter-island communities and the metaphorical interpretations she places on them; her ‘figurative’ assemblages apply equally elsewhere, or not at all (except in the mind of the pattern maker) and to this extent seem utopian. Whether as a physical arrangement – an areal clustering, topological region or culturally distinct ecology – or as a metaphysical organisation of inter-island communication, identified with the work of the imagination (fluid, combinatory, inherently relational) – this account skirts the challenge of metaphoricity itself or what we might call the is/is not nature of the archipelago. While communication between the parts of the archipelago can be assumed to underwrite its identity, the nature of this communication cannot be assumed; in fact, the archipelago is a significant thought form in decolonising discourse precisely because it poses the question of exchange rates, or, in rhetorical and poetic terms, the nature of metaphor, how one thing crosses over and becomes another while the things compared retain their difference and potential for further growth and individuation. This becomes clear when we return to those properties of the archipelago briefly touched on earlier: edgelessness, innumerability and the absence of islands. These mathematical or topological properties give geographical expression to what we have already found is an essential characteristic of living metaphor, its energeia, or power of actualisation or realisation without end. If the macrocosm of the archipelago is without edge, so is the microcosm – the individual voyage between two ports, which, imagined in the manner of a medieval periplus, resembles an endless coastal circulation composed entirely of the fluctuations of exchange rates. The thought that archipelagos cannot be numbered is an old one: I associate it with Marco Polo’s already mentioned statement – illustrated by generations of speculative cartographers – that ‘Beyond the China Sea there are 7448 islands,’ a statement, incidentally, that recalls us to the fact that the least empirically verifiable fictions may also be the most precise. As for the absence of islands, this can be explained metaphorically: if the archipelago is a living metaphor, it is a system of moving parts where there can be no fixed or static components. In making a comparison – ­navigating exchange rates between different parts – masters of metaphor not only mobilise one concept and bring it across the strait to make the other stand forth more strongly, they cause both concepts to mobilise; drawn across drawn across each other, their stronger appearance (the way they are set before the eyes) is a function of their relative motion: If the thing that is to be compared is already a thing that moves, metaphors and similes can still place that thing before the eyes by comparing its movements to another thing that moves to a greater extent (more quickly, more powerfully).74

Exchange rates  33

The geography of energeia Is this merely a linguistic analogy for the absence of islands? Or a phenomenologically accurate insight into the movement of natural objects and what it feels like ‘being present in them somehow’? Wandering islands populate myth and literature; etymologies typically treat islands as ancestral vessels inexplicably run aground. In his Mediterranean breviary, Predrag Matvejević reminds us that the Greek word for island, nesos, comes from an Indo-European root meaning that which sails or travels. Perhaps with ­particular reference to the ribbon of islands off the Illyrian coast and the turbulent currents associated with them, the Croatian word for island, otok, is derived from a verb meaning to flow or glide away; ostrvo, another term for island, ‘more Serb than Croat,’ comes from a word meaning current.75 These are not simple etymological fantasies: they have their counterpart in geographical onomastics. ‘Before the cape canoa,’ Roger Barlow wrote, ‘is a rocke that stondeth a litle above water and that is called canoa, but when thei see it there is no daunger, and beionde it ij leges is the porte of Cartagena.’76 A rock can become a canoe when it is aligned with the mariner’s interests. ‘One trait most islands share is the anticipation of things to come: even the smallest looks forward to the next boat, to the news it will bring, to some scene, some event.’77 But this might define the engine of desire that orders the archipelago as a whole, an energeia that cannot be contained, a state of being that constantly moves. The most comprehensive reversal of land/sea statics and dynamics occurs in the Carolinian concept of etak where ‘the canoe is the stationary point, while the sea and islands are mobile, traveling past the wa’a [canoe], hence “moving islands.”’78 According to Ingersoll, the Pacific voyager’s centre ‘is never fixed in physical location when voyaging; it is a location within his na’au that guides him through ka moana [the open ocean]. Created is an ideology of travel where one’s roots can have routes’:79 created, too, is a seascape where islands in a Eurocentric sense do not exist. Analogy or act, one thing is clear: archipelagic understanding that ‘resemblance assembles [ressembler … c’est rassembler]’80 involves indexical thinking, or imagination. Rather than regulate borders or, for that matter, simply go with the flow, it aims at self-actualisation; otherwise, ‘Why should we draw new meanings from our language if we have nothing new to say, no new world to project?’81 Psycho-spatially, as it were, it is the parallax effect of islands appearing to cross behind and before one another during the voyage. This sense of relative movement, serving to bring before the eyes of the voyager their own (moving) place within the changing constellation of surroundings, expresses perhaps the ‘value of passages … in which everything is pulled together through imagination.’ Interestingly, the line drawn out in this way performs like metaphorical energeia: it creates ‘a relationship rather than a gap’ but the emergent identity is ‘assembled within the movement of the ocean as ke kino [body] moves through it, meshing the two together.’82

34  Exchange rates Energeia is not only a feature of identities imagined relationally; it can describe the cartography of commercial expansion. An illustration of this is found in Tomé Pires’s Suma Oriental, subtitled in its English translation ‘an account of the East, from the Red Sea to Japan, written in Malacca and India in 1515–1525.’ Malacca, he writes, in recommending the new colonial acquisition to the Portuguese monarch, is a city that was made for merchandise, fitter than any other in the world; the end of monsoons and the beginning of others. Malacca is surrounded and lies in the middle, and the trade and commerce between the different nations for a thousand leagues on every hand must come to Malacca.83 ‘A city … made for merchandise,’ it is constitutionally open,84 a fact reflected in its linguistic diversity: in the port of Malacca very often eighty-four languages have been found spoken, every one distinct … and this in Malacca alone, because in the archipelago which begins at Singapore and Karimun up to the Moluccas, there are forty known languages, for the islands are countless.85 The dependence of Malacca on the work of movement, its ontologically relational existence, is also reflected in the way it is represented in contemporary charts. In Lopo Homem’s atlas (c. 1519), for example, the coastlines of the Malaccan Straits, as well as those of major trading partners (Sumatra, Java), are composed of openings, scalloped headlands and bays alternating with equidistant gaps that do not appear to correspond to actual geographical features (estuaries, gulfs) but seem to represent instead potential ports (or, etymologically, possible trading opportunities).86 They are, in practical terms, sailing directions. Luís Filipe F. R. Thomaz observes how: ‘In Portuguese maps the Archipelago is not viewed as an amorphous space, but rather as a seaborne world polarised along certain axes, which are the main lines of communication and trade.’87 The image of the archipelago presented by the Portuguese naturally enough foregrounded: small features, such as the mouths of rivers, capes, reefs, islets which could become either a danger for sailing or which were an important reference point for sailors, are always accurately represented, quite ­often regardless of the scale of the map.88 However, the commercial energeia that defines the archipelago as boundless and innumerable is perhaps best conveyed discursively, at the scale of sentence structure and choice of tense. Take this brief passage from the Suma, describing the region of Sulawesi: There is an infinity of other islands. There is no reason to say more, only that all have gold and slaves and trade with one another, and the

Exchange rates  35 small ones do this in the larger ones that have been mentioned, and the larger ones trade with Malacca, and Malacca with them, spending and bartering the merchandise.89 Energeia is expressed here as a continuous growth in trade. As an economic region in ‘a continuous state of self-actualisation, in which becoming and being fuse,’ the present tense of ever expanding, ever more profitable trade and barter ‘implies the perfect tense’ of resources already in circulation (slaves, gold), a state of activity already complete. The mercantile energeia is distinctively archipelagic because ‘There is an infinity of islands’ and ‘There is no reason to say more.’ As the number of islands is incalculable, it is both constant and inconstant; the interest its illimitable wealth generates will always exceed representation.

Imagining relationally When the distinctive features of the archipelago are identified, insights of equal value to the social sciences (or at least economic geography) and the human sciences (or at least decolonising critiques of the colonial archive) surface. When the topological properties of the archipelago are ­recognised – constitutive features shared with the operation of metaphor, whose explanatory power far exceeds anything derivable from the additive conception of relations pertaining to island and island – they invite an ontological shift in both disciplinary fields. In building metaphorical literacy, the archipelago occupies a unique place in reality. Simultaneously rhetorical and geographical, in both cases a figure of organisation that brings before the eye complexity, it projects a new world imagined relationally. This is true discursively but also locatively, performatively and environmentally. Discursively, it implies a new attitude towards reading, one where poetic language asks conceptual thought to think more. Viewed discursively, concept formation does not replace metaphoricity but exists in a constant feedback loop: the emergence of fixed semantic centres out of the incessant trading across semiotic regimes is inseparable from the endless off-centring of these emergent forms of authority: hence the proposition of the universe of discourse as a universe kept in motion by an interplay of attractions and repulsions that ceaselessly promote the interaction and intersection of domains whose organising nuclei are off-centred in relation to one another; and still this interplay never comes to rest in an absolute knowledge that would subsume the tensions.90 In anti- or non-colonial thought this is common sense. Locatively: Langani Marika of north-east Arnhem Land explains, ‘We sing from the shore to where the clouds rise on the horizon,’ adding ‘this is why we always have to live here. So that we can see the water going out and coming in ….’91 When the virtually stable and the endlessly fluctuating marry in the song, the coast

36  Exchange rates is reconfigured as a current. An ontology of flux is established as prior to any continentalist notions of fixity. Performatively: A Marri-Ammu language wangga (song) about the Sea Breeze Dreaming (Tjerri), recorded at Wardeye (Port Keats, north-west Kimberley), runs in English, ‘Oh, brother Sea Breeze, he is eternally making himself active right here and now.’92 To explain this better, Ambrose Piarlum, a leading wangga dancer, ‘stood up and danced its meaning. By rotating a cloth held in his hand … he performed in that place and in that moment the self-manifesting nature of the Tjerri’s wind ­activity.’93 Translated into performance is energeia’s distinctive fusing of present and past tenses: ‘What we were witnessing right there and then was an enactment of how Sea Breeze has manifested throughout eternity.’94 Socially: in illustration of the fact that in Yolngu culture we are told that ‘The perceptions of water are fluid and ambiguous depending on context and a person’s ancestral affiliation reflecting the many faces of those looking at it,’95 Fiona Magowan reports that a woman from the Rirratjingu clan (Dhuwa moiety) told her that ‘Where Rirratjingu water stops and joins to Lamamirri water, there are clouds that go up and you see the foam going into the sky.’96

Decolonising discourse By now I hope the connection of the archipelago with innovation has become clear. In the context of decolonising disciplinary formations, this does not refer simply to the better recognition of complex situations: it refers to a renovation in discursive assumptions and attitudes. As regards the terms on which UN sponsored agencies, nation states and their subordinate bureaucracies come to the table of decolonising negotiations, willing at last to recognise, for instance, that international environmental law … consists of a myriad of separate regimes for hundreds of issues ranging from toxic waste exports to fisheries management, is itself rooted in an atomistic demarcation of the planet into sovereign nation-states, and drawn to entertain a Gaian democratisation of global governance – oriented toward purposes of sustainability and justice, and modeled on a network vision of participatory governance and forms of leadership that empower people. The prevailing command-and-control culture in business and politics would be replaced by a culture of dialogue. Autopoiesis, or self-making, would take on new meaning …97 these will acknowledge at last the isomorphism between the way the meeting is conducted and the way the future world is run. In terms of subject positions, an archipelagic decentring occurs that goes beyond repositioning the voice of the subaltern. Sium, Desai and Ritskes, for example, ‘recognize that, despite our certainty that decolonization centres Indigenous

Exchange rates  37 methods, peoples, and lands, the future is a “tangible unknown”, a constant (re)negotiating of power place, identity and sovereignty.’98 Here, Nakata’s ‘cultural interface’ becomes a ‘practical space’ for mapping a new relationality. But the realisation of this potential depends on incorporating archipelagic thinking into the foundational contract of good will between the parties, which means, in its most profound sense, the re-narrativisation of discourse, the return of temporal consciousness and an awareness of the historicity of the occasion and the conditions of mutual understanding that the dechronologising structuration of western planning instruments has long repressed, stigmatising an awareness of the ‘tangible unknown’ as a sign of weakness and lack of control. For the archipelago, with its principle that ‘Beyond the China Sea, there are 7448 islands all of which no one has seen,’ insists that the new order unfolds in time, concretely, assembled within the movement of the waves, and within a space that is internally illimitable. In rehabilitating story as a means of bringing the Law before the eye, making the ordering principles of complexity simple, we come to the crux of the challenge facing decolonising discourses of power. Recentring governance in customary law, where human relations and human/non-human reciprocities are told through stories – mythic accounts of creator figures whose interactions generate in their retelling polysemous interpretations of present reality – is often assumed to mean the uncritical elevation of mythopoetic mechanisms of sense-making over the ‘scientific’ language of government descended from utilitarian principles. While I think it is a mistake to attribute ‘loss of biodiversity, soil desertification, collapsing coral reefs and more’ to ‘a mythopoetic vision that human progress must be achieved through material consumption and the ceaseless expansion of markets,’99 this remark reminds us that storytelling is value neutral. Unless a prior theory of relationality informs it, one we derive from the properties of the archipelago, it merely produces a competition between myths. Mythopoetic invention – the critical evaluation of received myths – occurs, as Harry Slochower observes, ‘in periods of crisis, of cultural transition’ ‘when the literal account of the legend could no longer be accepted.’100 Mythopoetic innovation occurs when traditional explanations fail and a new understanding is demanded: by contrast, the vision to which Bollier refers to is ideological, as it ‘effects a narrowing of the field in relation to the possibilities of interpretation which characterised the original momentum of the event.’101 As the instrument of domination, ideology is the enemy of interpretation: ‘the dissimulating character of authority,’102 its claim to legitimacy depends on the censorship of dissent. Myth under tyranny operates similarly. The pre-condition of redescription is the demystification of myth: as a reinterpretation of received accounts, mythopoesis is interpretation as hermeneia, which, as Eugene Vance claims ‘In Greek thought … signified not so much the return, by way of exegesis, to a kernel of hidden meaning within a shell, but more the act of extroversion by the voice, the natural instrument of the soul.’ In other words, interpretation as a poetic act of recreation: ‘It is an active and prophetic productivity which is not connoted by the Latin term interpretatio. For the Greeks, the poetic

38  Exchange rates performance of rhapsodes was a “hermeneutic” performance.’103 In this spirit the Tjerri wangga is performed, the seeming paradox of ‘the tangible unknown’ begins to make sense and the energeia of the archipelago grows. To return to the new place of law-making or covenant-setting, the key obstacle to decolonising governance, the metaphorical illiteracy of the ceding powers, finds expression in the dechronologisation of discourse, the assimilation of prophecy to planning, and of both to an algebraic logic of structurally identical, discrete phases designed to minimise the risk associated with decision-making. While policy shifts occur, changes at the level of thematics, the hierarchical interdependency of legislature and bureaucracy remains remarkably stable, and the same structuration of change as self-contained, self-accountable projects occurs throughout the masterplanning chain. This is not the place to go into the fallacy of what Popper calls ‘Utopian social engineering,’ but its historicist mindset,104 and the corollary, the myth of linear causality,105 remain largely intact; paradoxically, the proliferation of ‘ad hoc measures,’ which are a sign that the ‘system’ is failing, and ought to be a wake-up call, have the opposite effect. As centralised power attempts to maintain itself in power,106 its arbitrary interventions exercise a significant dampening effect on the exercise of that ‘independent creative imagination,’ which, Popper maintains, is essential in the ‘formulation of theory.’107 The elimination of non-linear change from the description of reality is, in another register, a failure to see what narrative offers when, in addition to ordering events sequentially, it ‘constructs meaningful totalities out of scattered events’108 that involve the reader in finding a point of view and participating in the configuration of meaning. Ricoeur’s critique of Structuralist attempts to dechronologise narrative applies equally to the western bureaucratic encounter with Indigenous governance cultures: it is the internal evolution of the plot that enables the reader/listener to participate in an unfolding meaning, and to gain understanding; deny this internal non-linear time consciousness that holds many possibilities in play, and the primary mimesis – the story’s representation of our own historicity – is closed out. This is not simply a theoretical point: in the circumstance of political and diplomatic encounter, the Structuralist stratagem of pre-emptive temporal isolation and self-­ enclosure expresses itself in the convention of excluding from the negotiation the place from which those attending come (their people, their place, their story), and proceeding as if we did not ‘belong to history before telling stories or writing history.’109 The irony is that the forum of change changes nothing inside the room; it merely maintains the regulatory status quo or, as Nicholas Williams writes, ‘no new information ever comes into a system exhibiting linear change, they are utterly tautological and never say anything new.’110

Archipelagic innovation What would the new order look like? Here our figure of speech undergoes a primary inversion: the archipelago is no longer a geo-political formation

Exchange rates  39 we wish to promote and defend: it is a configuration we wish to produce, one that may find its home in the ‘metageographical concept’ represented by physical archipelagos, but may be equally at home in any ‘complex situation’ characterised by continuous auto-poetic self-production. Here, the fractal character of the archipelago may be a metaphor of learning, a figure of the creative imagination itself when applied to the practical challenge of securing sustainable social and environmental relations. Discussing the possible applications of fractal geometry to the social sciences, a recent paper speculates that ‘Metaphorically the transition between levels may be described as cognitive rebirth.’ By ‘levels’ is meant the phenomenon in ‘dissipative systems’ of iterative self-same reproduction at different scales; ‘cognitive rebirth’ could apply to experiences of spiritual conversion but also to the resolution at a higher level of seemingly incommensurable value systems. The application of the Mandelbrot set supports a process where, as in the development of a narrative plot, changes at one level are ‘portentous at another’ and ‘any phenomenon occurring at a new level of intervention gives up potentially valuable information for understanding another.’111 But could this be more than an illustrative metaphor in the weak sense of the term? Perhaps in the archipelago it acquires a strong, methodological sense. Benoit Mandelbrot himself has developed a fragmentation fractal for a dispersed system that appears to yield useful information about real world island groupings:112 in theory, archipelagos are dissipative systems particularly well suited to the ‘individual and collective navigation of a complex reality.’ In this metaphor is the energeia of the system, portentous at the levels of image, sentence and narrative as a whole: it is isomorphic to these different levels and corresponds to what Kathleen Forsythe has called the isophor, where ‘The experience itself is evoked through the relation.’ Writing, ‘Forsythe has postulated the development of an epistemology of newness in which learning is the perception of newness and cognition depends on a disposition for wonder leading to this domain of conception-­ perception interactions,’113 our author wonders whether her vision of the isophor as a ‘dynamic constructing ability that involves conception and ­perception – unfolding and enfolding, that this gives rise to the coordination of actions in recursion which we know as language’ resonates with ‘formal representation’:114 in short, is it just an analogy? But, in the archipelago at least, discourse and the associated cultures of decision-making appear to be generative in exactly this way. As a diagram of this possibility (see Frontispiece), the treatment of Marco Polo’s 7448 in the Homem and Reinel chart is suggestive. In contrast with the adjacent coastlines, depicted like open zips, the multi-coloured shoals of oval, scalloped and sometimes suggestively unicellular islands caught in the continental slip stream are conspicuously closed. They present the paradox of separateness assembled into a collectivity. Marco Polo wrote, ­‘No-one can describe all the marvellous things there are in them, of gold and silver, of spices and precious stones.’ This anticipates Pires’s description  of the  islands  around  Sulawesi,

40  Exchange rates rich in gold and slaves; it also anticipates his trope of wonder, again associated with what lies both geographically and rhetorically beyond description. These closed islands symbolise the paradoxical object of mercantile enterprise: they must be reached, but to remain desirable they must remain out of reach. They belong to the perfect tense of a wealth already perfectly achieved. But they are also prophetic of new economic worlds to come: they are necessary hypotheses, rationalising new voyages and signify the transformation of the South China Sea into a future orientation. They are graphic representations of ‘the disposition to wonder’: Herman Melville prefaced his ten stories of the Enchanted Isles with a passage from Canto XII, Book II of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Sir Guyon, the knight of Temperance, is en route to the island Bower of Bliss, presided over by Acrasia, or intemperance. Past the Gulf of Greediness and the Rock of Vile reproach, ‘At last farre off they many Islands spy, / On every side floting the floods emong.’ Tempted to visit them, the good knight is warned by his ferryman, ‘those same Islands, seeming now and than, / Are not firme land … but straggling plots, which to and fro do ronne / In the wide waters.’ Like the islands of the Cresques chart, they look ‘faire and fruitful,’ ‘the tall trees with leaves apparelled, / Are deckt with blossomes dyde in white and red.’115 These are ‘The wandring Islands,’ whose temptation is to make us wonder who and where we are. Spenser takes a dim view of ‘The faire Enchauntresse’ in her ‘Bower of Bliss,’ but in another incarnation, they conform to Tasso’s theory of the ‘verisimilar marvellous,’ a category of marvels that ‘applies to events that seem marvellous because their causes are hidden from us.’116 The cause is only hidden because it is multiple, on every side, emerging as the navigator passes between islands. The navigator is readers who do not find the ‘plots’ ‘straggling’ but formative in displaying them to themselves, one point of view precariously maintained among many. The Greek term Akrasia was explained as meaning a lack of power or, its corollory, the power taken back by the people, democracy. In English it has traditionally been translated as ‘a want of continence or self-­ restraint.’ In colonial propaganda, Indigenous people are incontinent either because they lack power or because they lack the will to form government.117 In an archipelagic context, metaphoric incontinence is the beginning of decolonisation, not only of the subaltern voice but of the human body and its natural and passionate secretions.

Governance as relationality As a figure of relationality, the archipelago depends on relating: it signifies the collective capacity to pass from one state to another. Its recognition sets the stage for decolonisation. Imagining a history of oceans as a record of all the voyages ‘eternally running up and down it, and scoring lines upon its face,’ Thomas De Quincey concluded that an accurate account would approach infinity, its graphic equivalent, where most tracks blended, would be ‘an undistinguishable blot.’ The archipelago is the narrative machine that

Exchange rates  41 teases out this jumble of lines, the loom on which, once strung and made tense again, the cross-weaving of a new historical pattern can begin. The emergent string figure mediates between the local and the beyond through the extension of a creative region. Here it is possible that opposite traditions of self-definition and world navigation can find a meeting place. It begins in the resolution of incommensurable traditions of the cord, tie, or line that signifies, alternatively, the assertion of exclusive property (and its corollary, enslavement) or the principle of connection. In the archipelago Leonardo’s relational notion of perspective – his perception of ‘the body of the atmosphere’ as ‘full of infinite pyramids’ is the ordinary experience anyone sailing through a fleet of islands where repeated triangulations ensure the vessel keeps to its course. In place of linear perspective, conceived as the dominance of the observer over nature, a multilinear tissue of lines is grasped: objects qua islands radiate straight lines which, although ‘they intersect and cross they never mingle together, but pass through all the surrounding air, independently converging, spreading and diffused.’ This relational perspectivism, which I have associated with the experience of Venice, is inherently democratic for the viewpoints these pyramids represent ‘are all of equal power (and value); all equal to each, and each equal to all.’ The geographical illustration of Leonardo’s insight is the fretwork of lines drawn throughout the Homem and Reinel charts where a symmetrical arrangement of compass roses, each radiating a quiver of rhomb lines or loxodromes, produces where they intersect a true Euclidean reverie: a simple array of orthogonals, a splay of narrow wedges or drawn-up pyramids miraculously generates an inexhaustible variety of five-, six- and seven-sided polygons. There is another phenomenon of these criss-crossing lines: the production of a class of near coincidences, a mesh of lines nearly vanishes into a single point but not quite, and in the wake of their near meeting minute triangular slivers trail. Elsewhere, three lines surprisingly meet in an otherwise overlooked sea; the flamboyant pennants of Portuguese galleons oddly coincide with and wrap round these mythical staves. The islands hang in these lines like fish in nets, jewels on necklaces or utopian diatoms of the digital mind. As a figure of thought, the archipelago fuses the conceptualisation of meeting with its representation: the experience of constantly altering relative positions not only demands a different geographical and pictorial language, it displaces continentalist or statically conceived definitions of observer consciousness (and mutual isolation). The line ceases to be an uninterrupted grasp of the object of desire, a cord that binds Subject and Object, and becomes instead a lead towards other incommensurable realities whose distance no longer causes a fury to close up the gap and destroy what lies in the path but produces instead an opposite effect. In an early meditation on Descartes’s Meditations, Simone Weil wrestled with exactly these questions. She realised that her grasp of the world presupposed motion, which she idealised as ‘the straight line.’ But she also conceived this line as the intermediary between self and world. Then it was the work of activating it and combining it

42  Exchange rates with other ‘lines’ – a work that corresponded to the multitude of straight-line movements in the world that formed the sense i­ mpressions – that constituted what she called the work of ‘practising geometry.’ The most original part of her meditation is its recognition that a geometry with a point of view, as it were, can constitute pure extension and at the same time keep in play both direction and obstacle. That is, it can engage with the idea that the constituents of space as pure extension may be hidden from one another and the observer.118 The corollary of this spatial meditation was her later ethical insight: ‘To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.’119 Now contrast this with the philosophy of utyerre expounded by Akertarenye elder Margaret Kemarre Turner, who was born in the Harts Range region north-east of Alice Springs.120 Apmereyanhe, our language-Land, is like a root or a tie to us. It holds all of us. The only way that we can translate into English how we see our relationship with the Land is with the words “hold,” and “connect”. The roots of the country and its people are twined together.121 In contrast with De Quincey’s ‘undistinguishable blot,’ this system of interconnections is organised, ‘like a big twirl of string.’122 The name given to the tie is utyerre, a word that covers the way humans relate, in space and time, through kinship and bloodlines, across generations, the way plants radiate rhizomatically. But the key thing is that utyerre is a story, a line that goes somewhere: Utyerre contains something running through it. It carries a message … Like that string comes from your father, or your parents. You gotta follow your straight line, where your string is, where your bloodline lays in the country. Like what country you’re tied to. What is really your connection. What line, what stream runs in from you to there.123 This is the Law as learning, as existential education: no distinction between place and plot, life world and legal identity. Utyerre is the principle of connection but also of similarity: the reflection of someone in the water that seems to bring them over is utyerre.124 It is also the principle of multiplication: ‘A person’s relationship lays, stretches out, where it lays to. But also it can stretch and stretch and stretch in all directions.’125 And, finally, utyerre is an archipelagic principle of relationality: ‘The Land next to you is a relationship though utyerre. Two homelands next door to each other are like two living things laying, one on this side, one on that side.’126 And this applies generally, throughout Margaret Kemarre Turner’s country: ‘the spirit of each country goes deep into the ground and joins up with spirits of all those other countries in apmereyanhe to make one big root down there.’127

Exchange rates  43

Crossing disciplines Now, in a way, we have already embarked on the theoretical project of decolonising governance as, in the sharpest terms we have contrasted two systems of relationality by presenting both of them as stories: Simone Weil’s story, Margaret Kemarre Turner’s story. These are not stories in any trivial sense: they are ontological narrativisations of how we relate to one another. They come from very different traditions but, within the creative region of the archipelago, imagined here simultaneously as a physical region and a system of poetic logic, analogies are perceptible. Considered from a strictly theological position, the evolution of Weil’s thought informs the metaphysics of presencing. In relation to the Realpolitik of colonialism it is, as Edward Said might say, ‘mere literature.’ A similar stigma attaches to Turner’s philosophy of language land: within the anthropological subset of social science discourse, it can only be of local interest. When, however, the energeia common to both as acts of storytelling, acts of continuous presencing and re-presencing, emerges, something changes. And the first thing is the academic mythologisation of speaking positions, and its political expression in the hierarchical classification of different knowledges: in the act of relating, these myths fall away. Describing the legacy of colonialism in Alice Springs, community psychologist Craig San Roque explains, ‘Between the Tjukurrpa and the European dream’ there is ‘a region of psychic pain.’128 Referring to year-long conversations I have had there, and to the attitude parties brought to the challenge of re-encounter and decolonising governance, I have previously invoked Jacques Rancière’s notion of the ‘emancipated spectator’ where ‘the theatrical privilege of living presence’ is questioned and all are brought back ‘to a level of equality with the telling of a story.’ This relational levelling can create ‘the institution of a new stage of equality, where the different kinds of performances would be translated into one another.’ And critically, letting go of authority becomes the precondition of weaving new ties, as it is a matter of linking what one knows with what one does not know, of being at the same time performers who display their competences and visitors or spectators who are looking for what those competences may produce in a new context, among unknown people.129 Envisaged here is also a cross-disciplinary place where the negotiation of exchange rates is rendered possible through the medium of mythopoetic innovation. Rather than speaking of a non-linear plot, we should imagine a multiplex field of episodes which, like moving islands, are always crossing each other’s paths, exchanging news, the value of the story residing precisely in its spread. Such a place of interpretation demands disciplinary r­ enovation. Milman Parry’s field-recording trips to Serbia and Bosnia-­Herzegovina in

44  Exchange rates 1933 and 1934 enabled him to do what a study of the Iliad and the Odyssey did not permit: We can learn not only how the singer puts together his words, and then his phrases, and then his verses, but also his passage and themes, and we can see how the whole poem lives from one man to another, from one age to another, and passes over plains and mountains and barriers of speech, – more, we can see how a whole oral poetry lives and dies.130 In effect, apart from its fascinating field reports, Parry’s study challenged an entrenched disciplinary divide: here, humanities and social sciences coalesced in the understanding of a poetic tradition as a system of self-­ governance: Parry found that ‘the singing tradition of both the Moslem Southslavs and their Christian brothers is the same.’131 For, as already said, the process of decolonising governance not only involves a new thematics in which the powers-that-be suddenly find strategic value in ceding control; it requires an ontological regrounding of the knowledge systems that underpin their claim to rationality. In relation to these mythic substrates in the organisation of knowledge as power, mythopoetic innovation does not swap one myth for another but insists on the role a reflective attitude to myth-making has in decolonising governance. The reflective attitude expresses itself in the renarrativisation of discourse: storytelling. Mythopoesis is about staging the mythmaking propensity itself. If myth is where time turns into space, Jean-Luc Nancy writes, the moment of mythic inscription ‘is not just any scene: it is perhaps the essential scene of all scenes, of all scenography or all staging; it is perhaps the stage upon which we represent everything to ourselves or whereupon we make appear all representations.’132 Here, the interruption of Tradition is critical as it exposes the myth.133 As Mattioli explains, ­‘Nancy’s interruption of myth is what denotes the lack of myth-­ making; myth no longer has the power to fashion the world. Myths no longer make, instead they themselves are re-made and re-fashioned.’134

Notes 1 The literature on geographical imagination and imagining grows apace. Key references for relationality include David Harvey, Social Justice and the City, ­London: Edward Arnold, 1973; Doreen Massey, ‘Geographies of Responsibility,’ Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86(1), 2004, 5; Derek Gregory, ‘Geographical Imagination,’ in D. Gregory, R. Johnston, G. Pratt, M.  Watts and S. Whatmore (eds.), The Dictionary of Human Geography (5th edn), Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 282–285. 2 Matthew Stephen Wood, ‘Aristotle and the Question of Metaphor,’ PhD Thesis, Department of Philosophy, University of Ottawa, 2015, 8, paraphrasing A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. 3 Karen Litfin, ‘Principles of Gaian Governance: A Rough Sketch,’ in Eileen Crist and H. B. Rinker (eds.), Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion,

Exchange rates  45 and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010, 195–219, 196–197. 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Joiio Arriscad Nunes and Maria Paula Meneses, ‘Introduction: Opening up the Canon of Knowledge and Recognition of Difference,’ in Boaventura de Sousa Santos (ed.), Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies, London and New York: Verso, 2007, xx. 5 Arun Agrawal, ‘Dismantling the Divide between Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge,’ Development and Change, 26(3), 1995, 413–439, 413. 6 Karen Litfin, ‘Principles of Gaian Governance: A Rough Sketch,’ 198. 7 Karen Litfin, ‘Principles of Gaian Governance: A Rough Sketch,’ 207. 8 See, for example, Joe Painter, ‘Cartographic Anxiety and the Search for Regionality,’ Environment and Planning A, 40, 2008, 342–361. 9 Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse: Cultural Critique or Academic Criticism?’ Latin American Research Review, 28(3), 1993, 120–134. See also Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 200, 18. 10 Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse: Cultural Critique or Academic Criticism?’ 123–124. 11 Martin Nakata, Disciplining the Savages, Savaging the Disciplines, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007, 142. 12 Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, 71. 13 See Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Prophets Facing Sidewise: The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,’ Social Epistemology, 19, 111–127, 118 and discussion in Jeff Popke, ‘Geography and Ethics: Spaces of Cosmopolitan ­Responsibility,’ Progress in Human Geography, 31(4), 2007, 509–518. 14 Enrique Dussel, ‘Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentism,’ Nepantla, 1, 2000, 465–478, 473. Quoted by Jeff Popke, ‘Geography and Ethics: Spaces of Cosmopolitan Responsibility,’ 515. 15 Jeff Popke ‘Geography and Ethics: Spaces of Cosmopolitan Responsibility,’ 515, citing Andrew Cumbers and Paul Routledge (eds.), ‘Alternative Imaginations’ in special issue of Antipode, 36, 2004, 818–828. 16 Jeff Popke, ‘Geography and Ethics: Spaces of Cosmopolitan Responsibility,’ 515. 17 Jeff Popke, ‘Geography and Ethics: Spaces of Cosmopolitan Responsibility,’ 515, citing Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘Towards a Multicultural Conception of Human Rights,’ in M. Featherstone and S. Lash (eds.), Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, London: Sage, 1999, 214–229. 18 See, for example, Jonathan Pugh’s interesting application of Elaine Stratford, Godfrey Baldacchino, Elizabeth McMahon, Carol Farbotko and Andrew ­Harwood, ‘Envisioning the Archipelago,’ Island Studies Journal, 6(2), 2013, 113–130, in his article ‘Island Movements: Thinking with the Archipelago,’ ­Island Studies Journal, 8(1), 2013, 9–24. 19 Charles Sturt, Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia, London: Smith, Elder, 1849, 2 vols, vol. 1, 33. 20 Charles Sturt, Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia, vol. 1, 34. 21 Charles Sturt, Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia, vol. 1, 381. 22 Emmanuelle de Champs, ‘The Place of Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Fictions in Eighteenth-Century Linguistic Thought,’ UCL Bentham Project Journal of Bentham Studies, 2, 1999, 1–28, 14. 23 Emmanuelle de Champs, ‘The Place of Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Fictions in Eighteenth-Century Linguistic Thought,’ 27.

46  Exchange rates 24 Paul Ricoeur, ‘What Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding,’ in J. B. ­Thompson (ed. and trans.), Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, 145–164, 150. 25 Paul Ricoeur, ‘What Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding,’ 150. 26 Paul Ricoeur, ‘What Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding,’ 158. 27 Paul Ricoeur, ‘What Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding,’ 158. 28 Paul Ricoeur, ‘What Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding,’ 158. 29 Paul Ricoeur, ‘What Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding,’ 161. 30 Sylvia Caiuby Novaes, The Play of Mirrors: The Representation of Self as ­Mirrored in the Other, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997, 143. 31 Ruben E. Reina and Kenneth M. Kensinger, The Gift of Birds: Featherworking of Native South American Peoples, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania ­Museum of Archaeology, 1991, 35. 32 Ruben E. Reina and Kenneth M. Kensinger, The Gift of Birds: Featherworking of Native South American Peoples, 36. 33 Ruben E. Reina and Kenneth M. Kensinger, The Gift of Birds: Featherworking of Native South American Peoples, 37. 34 Ruben E. Reina and Kenneth M. Kensinger, The Gift of Birds: Featherworking of Native South American Peoples, 35. The status of the Bororo in modern Brazil is ambiguous: the Indian Statute believes the indigenous people of Brazil, Bororos, c­ annot function alone and need to be a part of Brazilian society. The Constitution, on the other hand, believes the Bororos are the original inhabitants perfectly capable of functioning away from society with their own recognized culture and land. (Matthew Roozeboom, ‘Bororo Integration into Modern Society, Global Indigenous Struggles since 1900,’ http://thestudio.uiowa.edu/historycorps/exhibits/show/ indigenousstruggles1900/bororo) 35 The literal meaning of symballein is ‘to throw together.’ A group might break a slate of burned clay into pieces and circulate them within the group. When the group was reunited, the pieces were joined together, and reciprocal ties reaffirmed. (See Jonathan Matusitz, Symbolism in Terrorism: Motivation, Communication, and Behaviour, Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, 1.) 36 Quoted by Bradd Shore, Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture and the Problem of Meaning, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 28. 37 Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification, trans. R. Needham, London: Cohen & West, 1963, 6. 38 Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928–1930, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, 528. 39 Quoted in Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, London: Pluto Press, 1995. Viewed June 2005, 14, http://folk.uio.no/geirthe/Smallplaces.html. 40 Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to C ­ ultural Anthropology. 41 Michiel Leezenberg, ‘Metaphor and Literacy,’ viewed March 15 2004, www.cs.rug.nl/OZSL/accolade/abstract9413.html. 42 Michiel Leezenberg, ‘Metaphor and Literacy.’ 43 See L. T. Smith 1999 and also Boaventura de Sousa Santos et al., 2007. 44 Ruben E. Reina and Kenneth M. Kensinger, The Gift of Birds: Featherworking of Native South American Peoples, 37. 45 Jeremy Bentham, Chrestomathia, eds. M. J. Smith and W. H. Burston, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, 272n. Quoted by de Champs, 18.

Exchange rates  47 46 Louis Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, trans. P. Madigan and M. Beaumont, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995, 55. 47 Louis Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, 55. 48 George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought, from Hellenism to Celan, New York: New Directions, 2011, 204. On Heidegger’s ‘Non-Thematised Use of Metaphor,’ in Der Satz vom Grund, see Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. R. Czerny, K. McLaughlin and J. Costello, ­London: Routledge, 2003, 334ff and 368ff. 49 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 302. 50 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 293. 51 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 362. 52 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 362. 53 Originally ascribed to John Havea, but I have been unable to confirm this. 54 Nancy Victorin-Vangerud, ‘Thinking Like an Archipelago: Beyond Tehomophobic Theology,’ Pacifica, 16, June 2003, 153–172, 165–166. 55 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 358. 56 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 362. 57 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 364–365. 58 P. Aelius Aristides, The Complete Works, vol. 2, trans. C. A. Behr, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981, 259. 59 Matthew S. Wood, ‘Aristotle and the Question of Metaphor,’ 183. 60 Matthew S. Wood, ‘Aristotle and the Question of Metaphor,’ 192. 61 Matthew S. Wood, ‘Aristotle and the Question of Metaphor,’ 193. 62 Matthew S. Wood, ‘Aristotle and the Question of Metaphor,’ 235–236. 63 Matthew S. Wood, ‘Aristotle and the Question of Metaphor,’ 236. 64 Ruben E. Reina and Kenneth M. Kensinger, The Gift of Birds: Featherworking of Native South American Peoples, 37. 65 Ruben E. Reina and Kenneth M. Kensinger, The Gift of Birds: Featherworking of Native South American Peoples, 37. 66 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 323. 67 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 48. 68 Matthew S. Wood, ‘Aristotle and the Question of Metaphor,’ 328. 69 Following directly, as J. Baird Callicott speculates, from Kayapo and Bororo identifications of personal potency with natural fertility: the Bororo food code ‘has the nature of a contract or covenant in which, if human society carries out its obligations to bope [the nature spirits], they in turn will ensure fertility, natural plenty and a long untroubled life.’ (Earth’s Insights: A Multicultural Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, 155.) 70 Elaine Stratford et al., ‘Envisioning the Archipelago,’ 124. 71 Elaine Stratford et al., ‘Envisioning the Archipelago,’ 122. 72 Elaine Stratford et al., ‘Envisioning the Archipelago,’ 125. 73 Elaine Stratford. www.fas.nus.edu.sg/geog/documents/archive/Elaine_Stratford. pdf. 74 Matthew S. Wood, ‘Aristotle and the Question of Metaphor,’ 235. 75 Predrag Matvejevic, Mediterranean, a Cultural Landscape, trans. M. H. Heim, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, 163. 76 Roger Barlow, A Briefe Summe of Geographie, London: Hakluyt Society, 1932, 173. 77 Predrag Matvejević, Mediterranean, a Cultural Landscape, 17. 78 Karin Animoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology, ­Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016, 140.

48  Exchange rates 79 Karin Animoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology, 140. 80 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 366. 81 Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 181. 82 Karin Animoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology, paraphrasing Kanaka navigator Nainoa Thompson, 143. 83 The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires and the Book of Francisco Rodrigues, ed. and trans. Armando Cortesao, London: Hakluyt Society, Second Series, No. LXXXIX, 1944, 2 vols, vol. 2, 286. 84 The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires and the Book of Francisco Rodrigues, vol. 2, 286. 85 The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires and the Book of Francisco Rodrigues, vol. 2, 269. 86 The Atlas consists of eight maps 41.5 × 59 cm and two maps, 61 × 117 cm on parchment leaves. It was made by Pedro and Jorge Reinel, Lopo Homem ­(cartographers) and António de Holanda (miniaturist). The geographical ­areas depicted in the atlas are the North Atlantic Ocean, Northern Europe, the Azores Archipelago, Madagascar, the Indian Ocean, Insulindia, the China Sea, the Moluccas, Brazil, the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean. 87 Luís Filipe F. R. Thomaz, ‘The Image of the Archipelago in Portuguese Cartography of the 16th and Early 17th Centuries, South-East Asia,’ in P. K. ­K ratoska (ed.), Colonial History: Imperialism before 1800, London: Routledge, 2001, 42–59, 59. 88 Luís Filipe F. R. Thomaz, ‘The Image of the Archipelago in Portuguese ­Cartography of the 16th and Early 17th Centuries, South-East Asia,’ 43. 89 The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires and the Book of Francisco Rodrigues, vol. 1, 228. 90 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 357. 91 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 357. 92 Allan Marett, Songs, Dreamings & Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005, 27–28. The singer is now deceased: Marett names him, explaining elsewhere, ‘wangga singers have proud reputations, and they do not want me to conceal their names, but I name such people only with permission.’ (13). 93 Allan Marett, Songs, Dreamings & Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia, 28. 94 Allan Marett, Songs, Dreamings & Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia, 28. 95 Fiona Magowan, ‘A Sea Has Many Faces: Multiple and Contested Continuities in Yolngu Coastal Waters,’ in L. Taylor et al. (eds.), The Power of Knowledge, The Resonance of Tradition, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005, 74–85, 80. 96 Fiona Magowan, ‘A Sea Has Many Faces: Multiple and Contested Continuities in Yolngu Coastal Waters,’ 80–81. The Lamamirri clan is of the Yirritja moiety. 97 Karen Litfin, ‘Principles of Gaian Governance: A Rough Sketch,’ 206. 98 Amun Sium, Chandni Desai and Eric Ritskes, ‘Towards the “Tangible ­Unknown”: Decolonisation and the Indigenous Future,’ Decolonization: ­Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 2012, i–xiii, i. 99 David Bollier, ‘The Commons as a Model for Ecological Governance,’ 2014, viewed August 10, 2016, www.bollier.org/blog/commons-model-ecological-­ governance (My italics). 100 Harry Slochower, Mythopoesis: Mythic Patterns in the Literary Classics, ­Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1970, 15. 101 Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 228. 102 Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 229. 103 Eugene Vance, ‘Translation in the Past Perfect,’ in C. McDonald (ed.), Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. P. Kamud, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988, 135–139, 136.

Exchange rates  49 104 ‘Historicism, which is closely associated with holism, is the belief that history develops inexorably and necessarily according to certain principles or rules towards a determinate end.’ (See ‘Social and Political thought – the Critique of Historicism and Holism’ in the entry got Karl Popper, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, viewed 8 November 2008, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/.) 105 The use of linear causality seems to me the main obstacle to dealing adequately with complex systems. Industries and business have fostered it for too long. It is, besides greed, the main cause of the environmental problem. It is not yet fully seen that complexity needs a more elaborated causality concept. (Rupert Riedl in Darwinism & Philosophy, V. Hösle & C. Illies (eds.), Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2005, 141.) 106 John Gray, ‘The Liberalism of Karl Popper,’ 1976, 5, reprinted in Philosophical Notes, No. 9, Libertarian Alliance, 1988, viewed 14 February 2008, www. libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/philn/philn009.pdf. 107 John Gray, ‘The Liberalism of Karl Popper,’ 5. 108 Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 278. 109 Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 294. 110 Nicholas Williams, ‘Psychological Entropy,’ New Alchemy, 5, 2003, viewed 25  November 2017, http://web.ukonline.co.uk/phil.williams/psychological entropy.htm. 111 Citing Moshe S. Landsman, ‘Toward a Fractal Metaphor for Liberation of Palestinian Women,’ Radical Psychology, 2(1), Spring 2001. The same author speculates, The fact that fractals are borderline phenomena may foster conceptualization of strategies for social change. (A. Judge, ‘Sustainability through the Dynamics of Strategic Dilemmas in the light of the coherence and visual form of the Mandelbrot set,’ 2005, www.laetusinpraesens.org/docs00s/cardrep.php.) Decolonising governance might be another candidate for this way of ­conceptualising multilevel social and political change. 112 Brian H. Kaye, A Random Walk through Fractal Dimensions, Weiheim: Wiley, 1994, 355. 113 A. Judge, ‘Sustainability through the Dynamics of Strategic Dilemmas in the Light of the Coherence and Visual form of the Mandelbrot Set,’ quoting Kathleen Forsythe, ‘Cathedrals in the Mind: The Architecture of Metaphor in Understanding Learning,’ in R. Gibbs Jr. and S. J. Gerard (eds.), Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, 1999, 175. 114 A. Judge, ‘Sustainability through the Dynamics of Strategic Dilemmas in the Light of the Coherence and Visual form of the Mandelbrot Set,’ quoting Forsythe but again without page references. 115 Edmund Spenser, ‘The Faerie Queene,’ Book II, Canto XII, Poetical Works, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965, 132. 116 Michael Murrin, Trade and Romance, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014, 20. 117 U.S. medical interventionism in the Philippines involved sanitary engineering and the mass inculcation of personal and communal hygiene: ‘excremental colonialism,’ the training of Filipinos in the hygienic disposal of feces, simultaneously coded Filipinos as irresponsible, incontinent, and, metonymically, as the lower body itself. (Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006, 138.) In ‘Filth, Incontinence and Border

50  Exchange rates Protection,’ Farida Tilbury juxtaposes a 2005 initiative of the Australian Federal government ‘to improve continence in the Australian population’ (it included a public toilet mapping exercise!) and the language associated with the Tampa Affair, where the admission of refugees was identified as a form of incontinence, and refugees therefore classified as human filth. (Farida Tilbury, ‘Filth, Incontinence and Border Protection,’ M/C Journal, 9(5), November 2006. ­Accessed August 6 2009, http://journal.media-culture.org.au/ 0610/06-tilbury.php.) 118 Simone Weil, ‘Science and Perception in Descartes,’ in Formative Writings 1929–1941, ed. and trans. D. T. McFarland & W. Van Ness, London: Routledge 1987, 23–96, 77. 119 Simone Weil quoted by Wendy Farley, Eros for the Other: Retaining Truth in a Pluralistic World, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, 71, note 8. 120 And previously discussed in a different context in Paul Carter, Places Made ­after Their Stories, Design and the Art of Choreotopography, Perth: UWAP, 2015, 122. 121 Margaret Kemarre Turner, Iwenhe Tyerrtye – What It Means to Be an ­Aboriginal Person, Alice Springs: IAD Press, 2010, 15. 122 Margaret Kemarre Turner, Iwenhe Tyerrtye – What It Means to Be an ­Aboriginal Person, 15. 123 Margaret Kemarre Turner, Iwenhe Tyerrtye – What It Means to Be an ­Aboriginal Person, 16–17. 124 Margaret Kemarre Turner, Iwenhe Tyerrtye – What It Means to Be an ­Aboriginal person, 17. 125 Margaret Kemarre Turner, Iwenhe Tyerrtye – What It Means to Be an ­Aboriginal Person, 17. 126 Margaret Kemarre Turner, Iwenhe Tyerrtye – What It Means to Be an ­Aboriginal Person, 18. 127 Margaret Kemarre Turner, Iwenhe Tyerrtye – What It Means to Be an ­Aboriginal Person, 19. 128 C. San Roque, ‘Coming to Terms with the Country: Some Incidents on First Meeting Aboriginal Locations and Aboriginal Thoughts,’ in M. T. Savio Hooke and S. Akhtar (eds.), The Geography of Meanings, Psychoanalytical Perspectives on Place, Space, Land and Dislocation, London: International Psychoanalytical Association, 2007, 29. 129 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Emancipated Spectator,’ viewed 8 May 2011, www.chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=952% 3Ajacques-ranciere-the-emancipated-spectator&catid=234%3A07-31-theaterof-accomplices&Itemid=414&lang=en. 130 Milman Parry, ‘Ćor Huso: A Study of Southslavic Song,’ in A. Parry (ed.), The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, Oxford: ­Oxford University Press, 1987, 441. 131 Milman Parry, ‘Ćor Huso: A Study of Southslavic Song,’ 443. 132 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. P. Connor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, c.1991, 44–45. 133 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 52. 134 John Mattioli, ‘Past Inscription: The Mythopoetics of Angkarn Lalyanapong,’ Explorations in Southeast Asian Studies, 5(1), Spring 2004, viewed 17 August 2009, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2256/ae1acceb5bbbf51089509278a38ee1b30edd .pdf.

2 From your own seashore A philosophical geography

Archipelagic thinking Drifting towards something I tentatively called ‘archipelagic thinking,’ I suddenly found myself in the wake of a new interdisciplinary formation. I felt like Baudin meeting Flinders on Kangaroo Island, realising that his territorial ambitions had been anticipated. The Zeitgeist of the ‘spatial turn’ had not only drawn attention to the role maps play in politics but suggested that less visited regions of the map harboured alternative political histories and social arrangements. They even challenged thinking. The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea defines an archipelago as a group of islands, including parts of islands, interconnecting waters and other natural features which are so closely interrelated that such islands, waters and other natural features form an intrinsic geographical, economic and political entity, or which historically have been regarded as such. The emphasis here was on defining a new kind of semi-permeable state: An archipelagic State may draw straight archipelagic baselines joining the outermost points of the outermost islands and drying reefs of the archipelago provided that within such baselines are included the main islands and an area in which the ratio of the area of the water to the area of the land, including atolls, is between 1 to 1 and 9 to 1. Sovereignty is limited as international access to archipelagic sea lanes and air routes is also guaranteed.1 The application of the Convention had some surprising arithmetical effects: ‘under the former island-after-island principle Indonesia had a coast line more than three times the length of the equator’: redefined as a polygon, its circumference was considerably diminished. On the other hand, there were immense geometrical gains: ‘Under the archipelagic concept Indonesia has gained an additional 98,000 square kilometres of internal waters enclosing a total of 666,000 square kilometres.’2 These decolonising negotiations, while obviously of vital interest to the newly emerging states of the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, did not disturb the old land/sea dichotomy: for instance

52  From your own seashore rendering the seas in-between islands and surrounding them as internal to the state, ‘The archipelagic concept consolidated the Indonesian land mass into one nation state.’3 And while the trope of distributed powers and multiplied but reconciled differences has been skillfully deployed by generations of politicians,4 the essential thought about the archipelago is that it can be assimilated to the nation state idea of a separate and separating territory. De Freycinet commented to Flinders, ‘If we had not been kept so long picking up shells and catching butterflies in Van Diemen’s Land, you would not have discovered the South Coast before us.’ Putting scientific interests first, and frequenting the zone of maximum zoological transition was, in effect, a first step towards a different, distinctively coastal sense of place. Beaches and scientific enquiry went together: an earlier instance reported in John Forrest’s A Voyage to New Guinea and the Moluccas and captured in an illustration, ‘The View of the Island of Ouby from Freshwater Bay on Batchian,’ suggests something else, a distinct island-hopping propensity associated perhaps with a curiosity to aggregate instances and multiply differences.5 In Forrest’s engraving a ‘native’ stoops to collect a giant clam, an instance of colonial exploitation perhaps, but more essential to the mise-enscène is the canoe pulled nearby on the reef: a coastal view of the world is a waterborne one, a product of voyaging among islands. Unless an unreflective repetition is aimed at, a growing experience of different coastal units inevitably leads to some attempt at classification – regionalisation, grouping, relating. For a more famous zoologist visiting Batchian, Alfred Russel Wallace, the emergence of a new biogeographical consciousness was also tied to the production of coastlines. Visiting an island off Batchian’s north coast, Wallace reflected on the rarity of good ‘collecting-grounds’: In some places there is no virgin forest, as at Djilolo and Sahoe; in others there are no open pathways or clearings, as here. At Batchian there are only two tolerable collecting-places, – the road to the coal-mines, and the new clearings made by the Tomōré people.6 But these sites, road and clearing, provided edges ideal for research, spaces shaped to the questing intellect as they posed the erotic charge of difference in full view. And then local coastlines (paths, forest edges) had, if they were not to remain scattered islands in consciousness, to be joined up: a step Wallace took pre-emptively when he rearranged the material in his journal into five sections, corresponding to a fivefold division of the Malay Archipelago, explaining, ‘I have found it impossible to give such an account as I desire of the natural history of the numerous islands and groups of islands in the Archipelago, without constant reference to these generalizations….’7 As regards the new spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, it has graduated from continental to island studies, and now attempts to conceptualise alternative orders of human co-existence archipelagically, but consensus about the character of archipelagos is hard to come by: maybe

From your own seashore  53 fragmentation of viewpoint is inherent in the topic. What John Crawfurd thought of the Indian, aka Indonesian, archipelago may be generally true:8 such continental outliers as islands, atolls and all sporadic groupings of dispersed geological flotsam constitute a minor geography that cannot compete for attention with the statist and static conceptualisations of human reality emanating from land. If, as Jonathan Pugh remarks, ‘being static is the main enemy,’ then ‘archipelago thinking’ inevitably ‘emphasises more fluid tropes of assemblages … mobilities, and multiplicities associated with island-island movements.’9 It is easy, though, for multiplicity to incubate greater inwardness and separation. Discussing island drumming groups, Henry Johnson draws on the double sense of the Japanese term ‘shima,’ which in Amami and Okinawa not only means ‘island’ but also sometimes refers to ‘community’ or ‘village,’ to identify the existence of ‘islands within an island.’ Interestingly, an archipelagic context may intensify isolationism: drawing on Howell’s (2005) work on Japanese geographies of identity, ­Johnson argues that in this archipelagic arc of island identities there are not only national, regional, cultural and island borders but also internal island borders that create a further level of ‘island’ community.10 But is this isolationism or political resistance to colonisation? When Bougainville named Île de Pentecôte,11 he located it within a group he called ‘the Great Cyclades,’ after the Aegean island group associated in classical literature with Pythagorean harmony. William Wales, sailing with Cook eleven years later in 1777, perceived another kind of perfection: The shores of Whitsunday Island are bold, without inlets… the land high and Mountainous; but exhibits the most beautiful Prospect I ever saw, being cultivated up to the very summit, and divided into rectangular Fields by Fences which appear like Hedges from ye Ship, so that one could scarce help imagining one’s self in sight of England, with an extensive view of enclosed fields before one. But these outside archipelagoes archipelagos, projections of romantic science where idealised islands form idealised arrangements, have no resonance with insiders: Large islands seldom have a name; an enquirer pointing to the island as a whole, is given the name of the district or village to which he points or perhaps that of some islet between him and the mainland; or he may take the name of a man for that of a place.12 North and South Rago (Pentecost Island) were colonised respectively from Aoba and Ambryn,13 which helps explain why linguistically Pentecost is two islands – Raga’s closest affiliates being the languages of south Maevo and East Ambae, immediately to the north-west, while Sa is closely related to North Ambrynese.14

54  From your own seashore

Fluid reformations Bacan, Wallace’s Batchian, is another case in point: its four coastal communities hail from different directions and originating islands; multiple immigrations and a fan of sea lanes converge historically on each port – an accurate chart of Bacan’s cultural territory might invert the closed figure that represents the island and resemble a clustering of loxodromes, those porcupine quivers of lines spreading their orthogonals across renaissance charts. Archipelagic thinking from the inside views islands from the outside, as fluttering ribbon coasts, inlets in journeys that originate elsewhere; instead of identifying origins with islands, archipelago dwellers are likely to regard islands as anti-genealogical sites of mere spatial coincidence, where voyagers without any prior knowledge of one another chanced to wash up and subsequently became neighbours. When island studies do not seek to valorise the sentimental islomania memorably evoked by Lawrence Durrell, they insist on the islander’s double identity, a psychological as well as cultural capacity for ego integration that reconciles self-reliance and ­inter-dependence, but this need not produce a distinctive kind of thinking. No doubt, as Matvejević muses, islands and islanders look forward to things to come,15 but does this imply an interest in the outside world, and one’s relationship to it? One of Katriina Siivonen’s informants in her study of the Southwest Finland archipelago told her, I know myself that you must have the feeling that you can take a rowboat and row even to China from your own seashore, it is not necessary to see the water, but you must know that it is there, and you should preferably also be able to see it.16 For the sake of the argument, I will call this classic archipelagic thinking. While insularity is not wholly incompatible with archipelagic life, it presupposes a degree of movement; however, whether this lies in the future or the past may be a moot point – Columbus, for example, thought his future lay in Cathay, but the dynasty he expected to visit had long before died out: an unreachable past propelled him forward. Matvejević, as noted, finds etymological evidence for the wandering of islands, but in the same passage he goes on to suggest that word stems in Slav languages with the general sense of to flow are transposed from land where, indeed, they continue to ‘exist as toponyms.’17 To preserve the movement inherent in the archipelago as a figure of thought, it is necessary to consider its distinctive topology: historically, the fantasy of the Finland islander finds extravagant anticipation in the Homem-Reinel charts of the Atlas Miller where the sea lanes leading to Cathay are filled with shoals of jewel-like islands. The literary authority for these zoomorphic figures – they suggest unicellular creatures seen through a microscope – is Marco Polo’s already cited enumeration of islands, where

From your own seashore  55 crystallisation is a function of fantasy. The archipelago is an extension of islands without end with the peculiarity that expansion or partitioning occurs inside the figure, a recognisably fractal property exploited in the Voronoi Diagram. Hayward has argued that recent studies perpetuate the notion of the archipelago as a ‘terrestrial aggregate’ and proposes a new term, aquapelago, defined as ‘an assemblage of the marine and land spaces of a group of islands and their adjacent waters’ and as a social unit existing in a location in which the aquatic spaces between and around a group of islands are utilized and navigated in a manner that is fundamentally interconnected with and essential to the social group’s habitation of land and their senses of identity and belonging.18 An analogue for his idea is the Japanese term ‘tatoukai’: ‘The initial ta signifies “lots of/many”’ tou = islands and kai = sea.’ Used in relation to areas such as Japan’s ‘Inland Sea,’ ‘the image of ta-tou-kai seems to be a sea with clusters of islands,’ even if, Hayward thinks, no ‘profound holistic inter-­ relation of terrestrial and marine environments’ is implied. But Hayward exaggerates: disillusioned by the nationalistic agenda of the 2009 International Conference on Small Islands and Coral Reefs, which deployed the same geographical conceptualisations used in the older UN declaration, he declares the term archipelago calcified. But this is not true: it has simply been politically appropriated. As he recognises, citing Epeli Hau’ofa’s characterisation of the Pacific as a ‘sea of islands,’ decolonising definitions also circulate. His miscegenated etymology cannot really be defended:19 his ­notion of chiasmatic assemblage is best achieved by considering the archipelago dynamically as a movement form. As Lawrenz & Huffman comment, As metaphor the first virtue of “archipelago” is that it necessarily implies a constant if moving perspective on something observed from without, at a distance. It is a sea-going rather than a land-locked term. Its second virtue is that the objects in sight are separated and so separately accessible, each across an ambivalent, liminal margin of ebb and flow. Approach from the sea, to islands or anything like an island, evokes the story of exploration, and with it the core anthropological event of encounter.20 Mariners at least know not to become fixated on archi as a land-based term meaning chief or principal: ‘A common term among seamen for the Archipelago,’ Smyth’s 1867 Sailor’s Wordbook reports, is ‘arches.’ Referring to Crawfurd’s Indian Archipelago, the sailors used to say they were entering the ‘the Indian Arches,’ as if in the action of movement the old foot of reason was pluralised as columns of islands you sailed among.21 Promoting the virtues of ‘archipelagic thinking’ as the articulation of a global creolisation process, Édouard Glissant contended, ‘The entire world

56  From your own seashore is becoming an archipelago.’ ‘For Glissant, actual archipelagos such as the Caribbean are exemplary sites for understanding the complex new relations that ambivalently and chaotically join together all the hitherto unconnected parts of the world.’ Nowadays, this postcolonial political and cultural utopianism clearly discloses its regional origins: it is not the archipelago in general but the Caribbean archipelago in particular that is ‘situated between the solitary confines of the islands that constitute it and the expansive territory of the mainland toward which it points, relating the one to another while retaining its own indeterminately distinct identity.’22 Mistaken for outliers of Marco Polo’s 7448, the Bahamian archipelago or chain began its western existence as indications of a nearby mainland (China). Further mapping of the Gulf of Mexico quickly revealed that the islands shortly to form the West Indies were not an archipelago in any south-east Asian sense but two arms of a nebula centred on Haiti/ Dominican Republic, one arm hooking east and south, the other bifurcated towards Cuba and along the north-west chain of the Bahamas. It is possible that this configuration influenced the speculative arrangement of islands in the Homem-Reinel chart’s rendering of the East Indies, where the Pacific Ocean is represented as a circumference of islands circling a largely empty equatorial zone, the islands themselves, perhaps for political reasons, immured between Asia and (where America was found) Ptolemy’s Sinus Magnus.23 In these early formulations, land surrounds sea: archipelagic life forms divide and multiply in a Petrie Dish surrounded by the walls of continental empire. Glissant’s ‘indeterminately distinct identity’ is in this sense a function of the extraordinary political forcelines of rival empires seeking to warp out and chain an ideal congregation of islands to the outlines of empire. The near omnipresence of ‘the expansive territory of the mainland’ creates a legal-political conundrum for archipelagic states. Suppose that island or a multi-island states seek to expand, not in a colonising way but in order to create a stronger regional federation. On the present continentalist definition of an archipelagic state that Hayward objects to, they ‘would lose their right to draw straight archipelagic baselines around their original territory if they entered into a federation with a continental state, since the new federated state would no longer exclusively consist of archipelagos and other islands.’24 Theoretically, then, an extra-territorial federation between archipelagos or their constituent parts could give expression to the new relations chaotically joining ‘all the hitherto unconnected parts of the world’ by not negotiating with mainlands, and, ironically, the right to do this would be enshrined in a topological loophole created by land-locked thinking.

Evolutionary theory Historically, the obvious contribution of archipelagic thinking has been to the theory of evolution; in Wallace’s classic formulation, the ‘Malay archipelago’ favoured the discovery of ‘development’ – a tropical exfoliation of

From your own seashore  57 species and types – because it possessed a near infinity of coastlines, linear zones that at once separated island from island and offered a landing place or site of re-assembly. The relationship between its fertility of invention and its anti-continental nature was captured by Wallace when he wrote: The absolute extent of land in the Archipelago is not greater than that contained by Western Europe from Hungary to Spain; but, owing to the manner in which the land is broken up and divided, the variety of its productions is rather in proportion to the immense surface over which the islands are spread, than to the quantity of land which they contain.25 It is not simply the extent of the surface. If the islands were too thinly spread, in a hyper-sporadic way, communication between them would be attenuated not intensified. It is an optimal relationship of coastlines to sea between that creates opportunities for transfer and transformation. With this important topological proviso, in the development of thought, in the development of progressive political systems – and in the development of biological diversity and complexity – the ‘sea between’ is everything. It is the immanent zone where new ideas, new laws and new species can, and perhaps must, come into being. However, development may be recursive rather than linear, made of bifurcations rather than replacements.26 Ali and Aitchison reflect on the fact that over the course of the past 700,000 years, the sea level has undergone ‘a significant drop every 100,000 years or so, falling to between 90 and 130 m below the present level and staying that way for several thousand years’ for the evolution of the creatures of the Galapagos. 630,000 years ago Darwin would not have found the islands ‘about 50 or 60 miles apart’: He might not have found them so “differently tenanted” either. The radical alterations to archipelago’s geography caused by this cyclical coalescence and isolation of islands is likely to have complicated the evolutionary history of several iconic Galapagos species, notably the land iguanas, lava lizards, leaf-toed geckos and racer snakes.27 Consider the two distinct species of snakes that occupy the core islands. When sea levels were low, around 138,000 years ago, the common ancestor spread out: The subsequent rise in the oceans created two isolated populations that evolved into Pseudalsophis slevini to the west and P. dorsalis to the east. At the next low-point, 20,000 years ago, the two species came into contact once more. When the sea started to rise again, this may have provided the isolation necessary for another round of divergence (with scientists recognizing two closely related subspecies of P. slevini and three subspecies of P. dorsalis).28

58  From your own seashore

Sea levels This reflection alerts us to another hypostasis lurking in archipelagic thinking: the sea. In romantic science archipelagos are under the creative jurisdiction of Hölderlin’s Poseidon: ‘out of your waves with music infuse my soul, that over your waters fearlessly active my mind, like the swimmer, may practise the quickening joy of the strong, and learn the divine language of Chance and Becoming.’29 According to Wilhelm von Humboldt the extraordinary development and dissemination of Kawi and its related Malayan-Polynesian languages reflects the ‘stronger connection’ that Malayans have with different cultures, because ‘They inhabit merely islands and archipelagoes, which are spread so far and wide, however, as to furnish irrefutable testimony of their early skills as navigators.’30 The physical archipelago is a geographical analogue of language as discourse, as a to and fro of communication born of the necessity to relate across difference and distance. It is this archipelagic distribution of speech communities that, in his view, stimulates the growth of language. The archipelago is not a stable polyglot set of islands: it is an evolving interlingual discourse, where tongues are constantly morphing, innovating and migrating. Languages will be favoured that relate easily, which travel well, and good travelling means in this context having a formal or intellectual impulse that lends them a sense of direction (or self-regulation) and a freedom to self-modify. In fact, the ­basis of communication will be a languaging or universal crelisation creolisation that anticipates Glissant’s theory: to represent the hubbub of different speakers, interests and the ever-changing relations of power and affect driving the Brownian Motion of discursive intercourse, the grammar needs to be able to mark different voices, different relationships to past, present and future, as well as marking the middle ground of probable subjunctive states. For these reasons, Humboldt identified the capability of languages to foster human progress with the sophistication of the accidence they had evolved. Invoking ‘a pure principle in lawful freedom,’ Humboldt found the flexible combination of purity and responsiveness he associated with the languages best adapted to communicating the human spirit in the phenomenon of inflection. The affixes and suffixes that signified self and other, singular and plural, subject and object, agency, ownership of the past and design on the future were the hinges of sociability, enabling language to create a common place where differences could be discursively inscribed and regulated. It is a remarkable conception not only of language but of society – anticipating Nancy Victorin-Vangerud’s remark – An archipelagic imagination seeks fluid boundaries without reducing any one subject to ‘the Same’. The image opens up a horizon where one’s identity is constituted in and through the communal, even cosmological ontology of ‘interbeing’, where people remain responsive and accountable to each other, other beings, the land and the sea.31

From your own seashore  59 But the free exchange leading to human growth depends on the supposed passivity of the sea as a medium of communication, an obedient collusion famously illustrated in the wish-fulfilment naming of the Pacific Ocean. Sea levels are critical to the creation, recreation and dissolution of archipelagos; most archipelagos do not stake out abyssal depths but inhabit amphibious regions where, paradoxically, the infinity of possible sea paths is directly proportioned to inaccessibility. The recognition and exploitation of shallows may have more civilisational significance than command of the deeps. Reaching the Spice Islands, Antonio Pigafetta exclaimed, It need not cause wonder that we were so much rejoiced, since we had passed twenty-seven months less two days always in search of Maluco, wandering for that object among the immense number of islands. But I must say that near all these islands the least depth that we found was one hundred fathoms, for which reason attention is not given to all that the Portuguese have spread, according to whom the islands of Maluco are situated in seas which cannot be navigated on account of shoals, and the dark and foggy atmosphere.32 The shallower the sea, the more difficult the approach, but let the mean sea level fall or the tide recede excessively and the formerly impregnable island first extends its territory and then is easily taken. Ruskin famously attributed the rise of Venice (‘built, on a clouded cluster of islands’) to the three foot fall of the tide: Had deeper currents divided their islands, hostile navies would again and again have reduced the rising city into servitude; had stronger surges beaten their shores, all the richness and refinement of Venetian architecture must have been exchanged for the walls and bulwarks of an ordinary seaport. Eighteen inches higher, the high tide would have made water access to the palaces impossible; eighteen inches lower, the ebb tide would have done away with ‘the entire system of water-carriage for the higher classes … The streets of the city would have been widened, its network of canals filled up, and all the peculiar character of the place and the people destroyed.’33 And, anticipating a later chapter, we can note that these quicksand regions have their own poetics. The Tuamotus are seventy-eight distinct coral reef atolls, stretching 930 miles north-northeast of Tahiti. From a distance the islands come and go from sight, thus the Dangerous Archipelago and Labyrinth nicknames. Before satellite navigation these reefs were the cause of numerous shipwrecks. Since being first populated 1,000 years ago, their names have included Pakamotu, ‘Cloud of Islands,’ Puamotu, ‘Dangerous Islands’ and Tuamotu, a Tahitian name meaning ‘Distant Islands.’ In a similar vein, ­Hermann ­Melville fictionalised the Galapagos group as the Enchanted Islands.

60  From your own seashore

Archipelagic algorithms As a universal level conditioning alternating fragmentation and recurrent consolidation, the sea is an archipelagic algorithm. Archipelagos trail away into infinity. Beyond a certain program of addition they become numberless. Either they become ubiquitous and cease to be a region; or, within the region the individual constituents of the archipelago themselves turn out to contain archipelagos, a fractal constitution where, as Benoit ­Mandelbrot speculates, ‘it is almost sure that no continent is ever reached, and that the nesting of islands within lakes within islands continues without bound.34 Such a situation could perhaps be indicated, however: in Finnish, for instance, there exists a word Saaristoinen meaning ‘an area with many archipelagos,’ although whether this area would itself prove on closer inspection to be simply nested within a larger island must remain a moot point.35 In 1938 Korčak claimed that all the islands of the world could be described by one numerical relationship. He discovered experimentally that if one plotted the logarithm of the number of islands greater than or equal to a stated size, A, against the logarithm of A, one obtained a linear relationship. Mandelbrot questioned the claim that ‘the slope of the dataline for all archipelagos was the same,’ arguing that the slope of the line varied from ‘one group of islands to another.’ He defined instead ‘a new type of fractal dimension which is a measure of the fragmentation of the system,’ a concept that can be illustrated by imagining the construction of a simple island system. In this ‘we start with a square and divide the top side of the square into eight intervals,’ each interval generating either side a very small island, or eight islands per side, We then construct a small off-shore island, which has a coastline equal to that of the original side of the square. This pattern is called the ‘island generator algorithm’. If we carry out this construction all round the original mother island, we obtain a square with four satellite islands. ‘We can now construct the system in which the main island has four large islands and 48 smaller islands ….’36 In developing a distinctively archipelagic thinking, the value of this experiment may lie in the generation of intervals rather than islands. With the subtraction logic of the Sierpinski Cube in mind, fractalisation processes of this kind can be said to create a region of holes. Considered as a topological structure, a hole prevents an object from shrinking to a point. An intuitive geographical expression of this is the typical 7448 island drawn on the Homem-Reinel chart, which consists of a circumference of openings: these

From your own seashore  61 discontinuous, atoll-like fringes predicate their reality on discontinuity. The possibility of reaching them depends on their openness. Were they to close up and become an island, they would, paradoxically, disappear. A more productive way to think about the distinctively ambiguous (and amphibious) field of water-filled islands is in terms of regional crowds or swarms, internally and externally connecting. An algebraic topologist writes, some crowd movements are much more naturally described in terms of holes than of crowd members – holes can split, can merge, can move through a crowd, can disappear on reaching the boundary. Holes could themselves be regions within the outermost boundary of the crowd, and holes might not be completely empty of bodies, just relatively sparsely occupied, suggesting that holes are one end of a spectrum of density of occupation. Varying parameters of what constitutes a hole provide a sequence of slices through representations of a crowd which can lead to topological descriptions that may well be analogous to some scientific phenomena that visualization has already been used to explore.37 This dynamic account of region formation disturbs the self-same-acrossscales orthodoxy of fractal geometry; it suggests non-conformity across different scales, the capacity of local events to generate regional reconfigurations that are not predictable. In any case, holes are understood to be loci of turbulent transformation and not simply the gap between adjacent bodies. From a psycho-topological point of view, inspired by Kurt Lewin’s theories, their value is evidently constructive: the structure of the individual’s ‘life space’ – ‘constituted of regions with boundaries between them’ and defined by the ‘neighbourhood relation’ between them38 – can evidently be transferred to the way communities construct ‘sense of place.’ An obvious case in point would be the way in which an island community constructs its identity archipelagically. Here a distinction that Kullervo Rainio makes is important: Lewin described the psychological process as locomotion of the person from a region to another in topological space. The direction of locomotion was determined by the resultant force. Lewin did not make any distinction between the cognitive and behaviour locomotion. DPM ­[Discrete Process Model] makes this distinction. According to it, there occur cognitive transitions from a cognitive (mental) state to another and behaviour transitions from a behaviour (observable) state to another.39 Inter-zones are, according to this distinction, cognitive states or possibilities: mental maps symbolising spatial arrangements with a charged social value. The archipelago exists as a stochastic probability within the calculations of everyday island life.

62  From your own seashore

Ethical islands Archipelagic thinking involves an ethics of communication, a point strikingly clarified by Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago where ‘islands of incarceration shared a way of life and complex social network in which people, goods and information were exchanged, but as islands they were detached from the society around them.’40 Here, ‘dispersed institutions are able to have an identity because the physical distance that separates them is trumped by the social distance that detaches them from their immediate environment but unites them with each other.’ Of course, counter instances of archipelagic political organisation can be cited. Contrast this constellated island metaphor with the anti-centralist ‘archipelagic confederation’ promoted by Filipino anarchist writer, Bas Umali: a structure that connects and interlinks politically and economically every community in the archipelago, without the need for a centralised state. It would consist of networks of autonomous villages (barangays), together comprising regional assemblies in which translocal coordination could take place. These regional assemblies in turn would constitute an archipelago-wide assembly.41 An archipelago might, it seems, promote antithetical impulses, towards enforced shared isolation or towards merging and emergings of every kind. Cuevas-Hewitt argues that a distinctively archipelagic political organisation, a ‘territory without terrain,’ depends on evaluating ‘the sea between – the site of multiple relationships that are never fixed, but constantly in flux.’42 The antithesis of this is, he considers, an obsession with islands. The ‘nation-state-centric view of the world’ imagines it as ‘composed of discrete, bounded entities’: ‘it sees only islands of order, forgetting that there is a whole ocean out there that mixes the things of the world.’ But this is a distinction (and an argument) we have already heard and in the end suggests that the archipelago is neutral as a political model. Clearly, the archipelago that is not calcified is a system of passages or rates of exchange, whose regulation is, in the first instance, determined by navigated senses of right and wrong that precede, or even seek to elude, political institutionalisation. Archipelagic thinking, so often assimilated to decolonising discourse (as if the connection were inevitable), also benefits from an historical reality check. Jean-Luc Nancy, for example, speaks of a politics of linkage, or archipelagic passage, in which the triad necessity (being), possibility (theory) and reality (practice) are reconfigured: the politics of linkage … does not privilege the real either as that on which practice should act or as the action of practice … Between the reality of any fixed community and the possibility of a free subjectivity, the ‘act of trying’ is always neither possible nor real, neither active nor

From your own seashore  63 passive. Like a decision, it remains to be repeated in order to have occurred. And what it acts upon is unities that are other knots in turn (i.e. other knottings neither simply possible nor simply real) in the process of being tied up and coming untied, and with which it – passively also – finds itself tied up).43 This is a beautiful description of the way that identities might be formed in archipelagos. Hence, according to Vanja Hamzic, ‘the world’s largest archipelagic state’ (Indonesia) exhibits a distinct ‘cultural and spiritual plurality’44 – The turbulent tides of trading, migration and warfare have raged along their shores for centuries, moulding syncretic ethnoscapes, wherein an islandic self is dynamically negotiated between the allegiance to local narratives and the need to adjust to foreign winds, be they of Indic, Arab, colonial European or some other more or less distant origin.45 Adjustment is not imposed: it reflects a relational cast of mind, an inclination to connect, in which meaning (the interpretation of events) is always deferred or caught in passing. The meaning of such communities (of being), Librett writes of Nancy’s model, the act of its interpretation is thus the ‘passing on’ of meaning in two principal senses: it ‘passes on’ or transfers or defers meaning from one moment to the next in the process of an endless unfolding; and in it meaning ‘passes on’ or dies in being reborn, since interpretation constitutively interrupts and infinitely postpones the arrival of meaning as such.46 This is a sophisticated version of ‘the language of Chance and Becoming.’ This difference at the heart of seeming doubled identity is, of course, written into all communication. Dell Hymes argues that even where two people speak ‘the same language,’ they do not speak entirely the same way, or with the same language horizon: ‘Probably it is best to employ terms such as field and network for the larger spheres within which a person operates communicatively.’47 But the archipelagic analogy implicit here was already explicit long before when Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote, Nobody means by a word precisely and exactly what his neighbour does, and the difference, be it ever so small, vibrates, like a ripple in water, throughout the entire language. Thus all understanding is always at the same time a not-understanding, all concurrence in thought and feeling at the same time a divergence. The manner in which language is modified in every individual discloses, in contrast to its previously expounded power, a dominion of man over it. Its power may be regarded (if we wish to apply the term to mental forces) as a physiological efficacy; the dominion emanating from man is a purely dynamical one.

64  From your own seashore In the influence exerted on him lies the regularity of language and its forms; in his own reaction, a principle of freedom.48 Obviously, this is an archipelagic conception of communication.

Ecstatic communications But is it anything more than a metaphor? David Tomas, who takes a more upbeat view of the echoic mimicry characteristic of these communicational environments, finds from his studies of cross-cultural encounter in the Indian Ocean, ‘the existence and dynamics of a transient, sometimes humorous, often dangerous, and periodically cruel intercultural space – generated in situations governed by misrepresentation or representational excess.’49 Such ‘transcultural spaces’ are predicated on chance events, unforeseen and fleeting meetings, or confrontations that randomly direct activity originating from either side of geographic or territorial, natural or artificially perceived divides that separate and distinguish peoples with different constellations of customs, manners, and language.50 Certainly an archipelagic sensibility is proposed here but how benign, really, is this place of meeting when the cargo of transcultural spaces has consisted historically mainly of slaves. In the archipelago of resistance, different human beings do not run together: they attempt to run away. The mimic Gulag is, for example, the defiant establishment of autonomous mulatto states in the Guianas or Brazil. The prototype of this broken-off communication is not a Whitmanesque sailor, fraternally at home everywhere but the Christian slave described in Pigafetta’s journal. What is known of Henrique? After M ­ agellan’s violent intervention in the inter-insular war between Mattan and Cilapulapu, and the subsequent slaying of the man Pigafetta eulogises as ‘our mirror, our light, our comfort, and our true guide,’ it seems that his slave refused to go on playing the native informant. One of the new commanders had to tell him in a loud voice that, although the captain his master was dead, he would not be set free or released, but that when we reached Spain, he would still be the slave of Madame Beatrix, the wife of the deceased captain-general. And he threatened that if he did not go on ashore he would be driven away. What was Henrique’s reaction to this news? Feigning to take no heed of these words, [he] went on shore and told the Christian king that we were about to depart immediately, but that, if he

From your own seashore  65 would follow his advice, he would gain all our ships and merchandise. And so they plotted a conspiracy. Then the slave returned to the ships, and he appeared to behave [more cunningly] than before.51 This cunning extended to toponymy; that is, double-speak also haunted the history of the voyage. As in language, so in geography places could be pidginised, a style of seeing simplicity serving to conceal rather than disclose important interests and locations. According to Glissant, ‘creolisation carries in itself the adventure of multilingualism along with the extraordinary explosion of cultures. But this explosion does not mean their scattering nor their mutual dilution. It is the violent manifestation of their assented, free sharing.’52 However, writing about Vanuatu, the largest linguistic archipelago in the world, where a population of 225,000 people speaks 113 languages, Dan McGarry tells a different story. The early plantation pidgin formed of several local languages and English gradually became naturalised as Bislama, a first language or creole. But the outcome was not an ersatz universal English. Instead, a new obliquity emerged and ‘Where English writes the road map, Bislama only gestures’: ­‘metaphor, natural imagery, obliqueness and inference lie at the heart of self-­expression in Bislama.’ In a world of ‘thatched roofs and bamboo walls,’ ‘a milieu with a nearly complete lack of privacy,’ communication has to counter being overheard. Ambiguity must be managed. Deliberate vagueness is required.53 What McGarry calls ‘pidgin poetics’ also applies at the beginning of the colonial encounter: Suzanne Romaines writes it has been pointed out that in ‘The process of pidgin formation …members of the new contact community make guesses about what their interlocutors will understand, and “right” guesses are incorporated into the grammar of the developing contact language.’54 Rightness is contextual, a consensus of guesswork  – a situation that applied overwhelmingly where Pigafetta obtained the names of the Moluccas and other places from local pilots, from ‘prisoners,’ ‘hostages,’ from a Malay-speaking Christian slave, Manoel, not to mention Henrique of Malacca, originally of Sumatra. According to Bausani, ­efforts to interpret Pigafetta’s place names and wordlists have been hampered by bad transcription. A passage transcribed as the peoples of ‘Ende, Tanabuntin, Crevo, Chile, Bimacore, Aranaran, Moin, Zzunbava, Lomboch, Chorun and Java the Great… call it not Java, but Jaoa,’55 should be corrected: Tanabuntin should appear as ‘Tanabutun’; Crevo, Chile as ‘Crenochile’; Aranaran as ‘Arauaran’; Moin as ‘Maiu’; and ‘Jaoa’ as ‘Giaoa.’56 Written like this, the great majority of Pigafetta’s words turn out to be normal Malay.57 But this retrospective clearing away of a sea of false islands cannot erase centuries of map-making in which largely mythical places have been listed: whether the mis-transcriptions preserve an original mishearing or introduce a new one, cartographical pidginisation serves to conceal the true significance of what has been found there.

66  From your own seashore

The gulag at large In short, how plausible is any argument that assumes the emancipatory direction of archipelagic spatial arrangements? How securely is this ethically informed mode of relating installed in contemporary governance arrangements? From a continentalist perspective, archipelagoes are one geographical condition among many. Thinnings out of connection, they suggest exceptions to the rule. Accidental formations in more senses than one, they are, as Crawfurd maintained, inherently disabled in the struggle for territorial power. Prone to the proliferation of internal archipelagos, their cultivation of private constellations that even ignore the physical arrangement of the islands suggests a deferral of arrival and definition that, while fine in mathematical actuality, is unsatisfactory in terms of sustaining ethical, legal and social contracts. They present the paradox of a state that falls apart without a centre that can no longer hold: where is the historical immanence, the inevitable Orphic fragmentation exploding outwards that leads (mythically at least) to reconstitution as the singing Cyclades? A multiplied solipsism inhibits, rather than improves communication: the propaganda of expansion (religious conversion, military protection, wealth generation) preaches continental assimilation: just as missionaries launch a jihad against local divinities, so distant imperial powers ridicule attachments to the sea in-between. We know why this is: placing the sea outside the provisions of international law, it suits the interests of the most powerful navies. It is an old convenience, of course, to identify seizure and control with civil enlightenment: Hence William Strachey’s defence of English activities in North America – ‘the Law of Nations … admits yt lawfull, to trade with any manner of people … the Salvages themselves may not impugne, or forbid the same in respect of Common fellowship and Community betwixt man and man.’58 It is sobering to find that Antony Anghie’s recent Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law unfolds its argument that colonialism was central to the constitution of international law and sovereignty doctrine without a single page of discussion of sea rights or maritime law. Perhaps this is in deference to Grotius’s argument in Mare liberum that the sea cannot become private property, ‘because nature not only allows but enjoins its common use.’59 However, this argument is clearly self-interested. Anghie argues that the colonial focus of international law is clear in the distinction it makes between ‘the civilized and the uncivilized.’60 It is the same distinction that Grotius makes. Quoting Johannes Faber, he explains that the sea remains in the primitive condition where all things were common. If it were otherwise there would be no difference between the things which are “common to all”, and those which are strictly termed “public”; no difference, that is, between the sea and a river. A nation can take possession of a river, as it is inclosed within their boundaries, with the sea, they cannot do so.61

From your own seashore  67 Interestingly, in Grotius’s scheme, the coast occupies an ambiguous legal position. While the shore can be occupied, the offing cannot ‘because the sea, except for a very restricted space, can neither easily be built upon, nor inclosed.’62 However, if the sea could be enclosed, it would be enclosed. The only reason for keeping it open is to facilitate commercial expansion, a development that in the modern period always carries with it a colonising inflection; after all, to trade is to connect and what society can develop its full potential in isolation? Neutralisation of oceanic domains – pacification in advance of ­colonisation – may inconvenience a few, but it benefits the many: the hyper-­ connectivity that renaissance maps begin to document, and which finds its contemporary fulfilment in social media produces an archipelagisation of relations which first congeal in an absolute fusion (sans boundaries), then, like the occasional reversal of the earth’s magnetic poles, flips over into the extremest atomisation and loss of common interest. But, in this regard, how is the archipelagic state better? Perhaps Indonesia exhibits a distinct cultural and spiritual plurality. But isn’t it just as likely to be a very large Gulag Archipelago? In a recent quaint, if poignant, instance of this, Indonesian MPs proposed housing asylum seekers trying to reach Australia on Indonesia’s uninhabited islands. In this way, one minister explained, ‘the asylum seekers “don’t disturb the public.”’63 The proposal may be less Gulag like than it appears: ‘waves of refugees and asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq and Myanmar continue to flow in’ (note that metaphor and the information that ‘Most have travelled across continents in crowded leaky boats that are liable to capsize’),64 and the island of Galang proposed for the scheme accommodated up to a quarter of a million refugees during the Vietnam War. In other words, a kind of traditional benevolence is implied. The root of this penitentiary utopianism appears to be Indonesia’s desire to cooperate with the Australian government, whose blanket refusal to take any asylum seekers arriving by sea creates a new kind of Gulag, an archipelago of regional powers that aims as far as possible to arrest the ‘waves.’ When the movement form of hope inherent in the archipelago is frozen like this, an emergent figure becomes a state of emergency. Solzhenitsyn’s characterisation of Stalin’s labour camp system as an ‘archipelago’ seems to reinforce the view that distributed powers, or groups of bodies, have no necessary connection with freedom. The name for his book was suggested to Solzhenitsyn by a former inmate of the Solovki Camp, located in the Solovki Archipelago. In another famous book, Solzshenitsyn’s The First Circle, Stalin’s forced labour camp system is compared to Dante’s ‘Inferno’: the concentric levels of Hell narrowing to the immobile circuit of Lucifer located at the centre of the earth is the physical antithesis of the horizontally organised, open and far-flung archipelago. The fact that Solzhenitsyn can use antithetical figures to describe the same system suggests that they are used rhetorically – and not, as Ricoeur would say, with the ambition of systematic deployability. Although a geographical

68  From your own seashore metaphor is used, no concerted working out of the analogy is attempted: the trains that transport the prisoners are the ‘ships of the Archipelago’; the transit prisons and distribution camps are ‘the ports of the Archipelago’; the arrested people are known as ‘streams’ or ‘waves,’ ‘sent out of sight by sewage-disposal canals … they are flung onto the islands of the muddy Archipelago.’65 Similarly, when, for example, Foucault takes up the term ‘Gulag’ as a shorthand for centralised incarceration, he seems to mean by it nothing more (or less) than a system of state-sanctioned violence whose authority is so diffused that it cannot be destroyed by attack at any one point, and such authoritarian states could as easily be characterised as labyrinths from the point of view of anyone wanting to understand their logic and find a path of escape.66 In this case, the labyrinthine and inescapable archipelago is a kind of negative communicational form, a constellation of black holes.

Dismemberment But even if we can rationalise Solzhenitsyn’s influential figure of speech, it has to be admitted that, historically, the colonial archipelago has thrived on fragmentation. To adapt Mandelbrot’s dictum, the division of wholes into parts, and of whole parts into further parts, continues without bound.67 The communicational protocols that emerge from this self-same divisionism preserve the symmetry of the original violent tearing apart. The political order born of this internal fragmentation will be an order of convenience based on the look-alike appearance of the dismembered elements but will not represent any kind of decolonising breakthrough. In the dismal context of twinned human enslavement and territorial conquest, Glissant’s rhapsodic rhetoric of archipelagic decolonisation – where living ‘flows along with the course of our worlds,’ borrowing from ‘their ambiguity, fragility, and derivativeness’ and which ‘accepts the practice of detour, which is neither escape nor renouncement’68 – is dangerously close to the kind of delirium to which the extremely traumatised are prone. The forced labour camps of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago were anticipated three centuries earlier in the development of slave plantations in Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States.69 When Columbus reached the Caribbean, he imagined he was on the outskirts of China, sailing into Marco Polo’s 7448 islands. The peri-Indonesian island drifts of the Atlas Miller may recall the gemology of Paradise, ‘carnelian, chrysolite (peridot), moonstone (diamond), beryl (gold topaz), onyx, jasper, sapphire, turquoise (garnet), and emerald,’70 a proposition consistent with Columbus’s speculation that on his third expedition in 1498 he had found the Garden of Eden somewhere near the mouth of the Orinoco,71 but the immediate human fate of the islands, estuaries and hinterlands of interest to the European colonisers was to suffer greater detachment than before; as ‘islands of incarceration’ where summary execution was the price of trying to escape, the ‘chain’ of slave ports and the hinterlands of

From your own seashore  69 slave plantations were an archipelagic Hell whose power depended precisely on maximum isolation and minimum inter-communication, and the colour of this colonial system was blood, literally through human torture and metaphorically through the bloodstained traffic in sugar. This alternative slave archipelago is a product of a violent morcellement or dismemberment that begins in West Africa where the Portuguese had, first of all, to enslave their own humanity. Graduating from the use of ‘enslaved interpreters’ to the employment of grumetes, ‘African seamen hired from the maritime groups associated with the Banyun-Bak and Biafada-Sapi trade networks,’72 the Portuguese reckoned they could do the business themselves: men ‘permitted to live ashore in African communities to expedite trade came to be known as lançados, from the Portuguese se-lançar (‘throw oneself’).’73 Then, in a further hypocritical refinement, they went native, threw in their lot with their African hosts being called tangomaus, ‘which in Portuguese and Luso-African usage usually connoted “renegades” or “outcastes.”’ Many of them, Fr. Barreira reported, go naked, and in order to get on better with the heathen of the land where they trade by appearing like them, they score their whole body with an iron blade, cutting until they draw blood and making many marks which, after they have been anointed with the juice of certain plants, come to resemble various designs, such as figures of lizards, snakes or any other creatures they care to depict.74 Rendered invisible by their self-disfigurement, ‘The tangosmaus make their way through the whole of Guinea…trading in slaves and buying them wherever they can obtain them, (but) without inquiring into the moral position, that is, whether they have been enslaved justly or otherwise.’75 Here is a system of separation that exaggerates existing class divisions and associated power arrangements. An analysis of lançado technique that ignores human suffering could easily romanticise their trickster ability to float between communities and identities, almost as if they exhibited a kind of proud ‘interbeing’; but obviously, from the point of view of democratic engagement or even confederate co-existence, said to characterise the political archipelago, this has to be interpreted ironically. Yet, throughout the foundational period out of which Glissant’s emancipatory poetics emerge a diabolical archipelagisation was operational, one that operated fractally, in a self-same way at every scale. The cutting out of men from their living societies in West Africa, their further separation, isolation and containment in the Caribbean Gulag – this had its non-­metaphorical counterpart in the discipline of the slave body. Olaudah Equiano describes how the survivors of the trans-Atlantic passage were, preparatory to being sold, put in ‘separate parcels.’76 This preliminary morcellement held, however, an even more sinister, literally Procrustean sequel, whose violence the French word expresses:

70  From your own seashore On Montserrat I have seen a negro-man staked to the ground, and cut most shockingly, and then his ears cut off bit by bit… Mr D. told me… he once cut off a negro-man’s leg for turning away… I believe he ­[another Christian master] had not a slave but what had been cut, and had pieces fairly taken out of his flesh: and after they had been punished thus, he used to make them get into a long wooden box or case he had for that purpose, in which he shut them up during pleasure.77 These terrible events dramatise the obvious point that slaves, whatever political theorists might have to say, were not simply the necessary other of civilised leisure; they were not even colonised natives whose prior existence must (however grudgingly) be acknowledged. Except as the currency of capitalism, they had no existence at all, and certainly no rights that had been forfeited or could hypothetically be restored. In 1774 a freed slave, kidnapped back to the West Indies by his former master, was, ‘according to custom,’ Equiano states, ‘staked to the ground with four pins through a cord, two on his wrists, and two on his ankles, was cut and flogged most unmercifully, and afterwards loaded cruelly with irons.’78

Discursive doubling The postcolonial sequel to these dismal beginnings in dismemberment is not Glissant’s carnivalesque, the easy, edgy, fluid adventure of creolisation, but the awkward cobbling-together of wounded and mutilated parts: recombination as the scar of violent scission. Political discourse will consolidate an is/is not ambiguity but in the cynical key of an Odysseus when he tricks Polyphemus by answering ‘Nobody’ to the Cyclops’ question ‘Who is there?’ Different worlds will not mingle and flow; rather a glass architecture of mirroring doubles flourishes in the manner of the pragmatic rapprochement achieved between Nahua and colonial Spanish political cultures, described by Lockhart as based on ‘double mistaken identity.’ Lockhart suggests that double mistaken identity was socially productive because ‘extensive convergences’ existed ‘between European and central Mexican societies.’ Each side was able to operate for centuries after first contact on an ultimately false but in practice workable assumption that analogous concepts of the other side were essentially identical with its own, thus avoiding close examination of the unfamiliar and maintaining its own principles.79 The example Lockhart offers of a ‘convergence’ that was not an ‘identity’ concerns socio-political organisation. The Nahua city-state-sized entity (altepetl) presented ‘many analogies to the Hispanic municipality-­province.’ Lockhart shows how this seeming similarity enabled both parties to interpret the changed distribution of powers in terms of continuities and

From your own seashore  71 modifications within their own traditional socio-political frameworks. In an odd way the lack of mutual understanding fostered difference rather than leading to its suppression. While the Indigenous altepetl was organised in a ‘cellular’ way, being ‘divided into a certain number of independent and equal subentities,’ the Spanish city-province was organised around a ‘pronounced nucleus and was strongly hierarchical in the sense that the organisations of all kind stretched out from the dominant centre.’80 A society bound by shared misconceptions may be the typical offspring of colonial morcellement: discussing the colonial fetishisation of the term fetish, Wyatt MacGaffey writes, ‘This phantasm originated in the intercultural spaces of the Guinea coast, inhabited symbiotically by Europeans and by Africans alienated from their own societies … As such it persists into modern times, where it has been called “a dialogue of the deaf.”’81 In other words, who is to say that these mimic-archipelagic states are less politically flexible, psychologically complex and socially advantageous than those imagined by theorists of the postcolonial. ‘Slavery is the law of life … No revolt is possible, nor is any refuge to be found from it … Our cowardly love of freedom – which, if we did have it, would frighten us because of its strangeness and cause us to repudiate it – is the true sign of the weight of our slavery’:82 thus the nostalgic monarchist, Fernando Pessoa, but the neo-­ colonial tyrannies springing up in many parts of our contemporary world rather prove his point. True, they justify their ethnic cleansings by appealing to emancipatory narratives dear to Enlightenment apologists for the nation state, but is an archipelagic discourse really well-founded enough to offer genuine resistance? Hasn’t Hayward got a point when he wants to substitute aqua for archi? – Arché, the term philosopher Gianni Vattimo says embodies the ‘violent thinking’ descended from the Greeks: ‘With its predilection for unifying, sovereign and generalising categories, and with its cult of the arché, it manifests a fundamental insecurity and exaggerated self-­i mportance from which it then reacts into over-defensiveness.’83 Even discursively, the evidence is ambiguous: Humboldt’s image of human progress embodied in the diversification and mobilisation of languages might produce archipelagic relationality; equally, though, increased powers of combination could simply indicate harder slave work. The Roman grammarian Varro likened grammar and syntax to social relations: ‘As among men there are certain kinships, some through males, others through the clan, so there are among words.’84 On this analogy, a word like ‘and,’ ‘but’ or ‘if’ has no function except to connect other words – it is ‘barren… produces nothing from itself,’ and the operation of this class of word can be compared to ‘a house where there is only one slave [where as a result] there is need of only one slavename.’85 Finally, in this antithetical archipelago, consider the suggestion made earlier, that archipelagic communities characteristically recognise the stranger-immigrant, locating their origins (in an anti-nation-state way) with arrival from somewhere else. If we follow the etymological surmise of Émile Benveniste, even this claim falls flat: ‘in the ancient civilizations, the status

72  From your own seashore of slave puts him outside the community.’ The slave is always ‘introduced into the city from outside.’ ‘Identified with the stranger,’ ‘they were called by specific names of places,’ in this regard no different from any other item of imperial trade named after its place of origin or manufacture. ‘Notions of enemy, stranger, guest… – semantically and legally – in the Indo-European languages show close connection.’86 Looked at in this way, the island names that the slaves gave Pigafetta were names of places that served to put subaltern geography in chains: they had no existence beyond the work they did in building and profiting the factory of empire.

Alternative vortices Having discussed ‘archipelagic thinking’ and its elevation of the casually flung apart and fluidly inter-related to a metaphor (and perhaps a practice) of decolonised governance, and its antithesis – colonising rites of cutting up, flinging apart and separatist incarceration, whose legacy is, at best, an Empedoclean miscellany of parts locked in an endless cycle of Strife and Love – a Hegelian synthesis seems to beckon. But Vattimo warns against that: suppose that ‘archipelagic thinking’ can offer a relief from dry, continentalist thinking, and its dry antinomies, where will it take us – to what new country? Relieved of the excess power that comes from a metaphysics that imposes on reality violent categories, the new citizen can entertain a ‘distracted perception’ whose weak modality, to continue in Vattimo’s language, ‘involves a dissolution of the subject with all the violent characteristics (those of master and slave, for example) attributed to him by the metaphysical tradition.’87 Yet, opening the links of seeing and thinking in this way is not an end in itself. As Vattimo himself asks, what can it mean to be freed for the multiplicity of experience, if this liberated man continues to be imagined on the model of the subject who has ‘returned to himself’ at the end of a wandering itinerary that still covertly follows the dialectical guidebook, a subject who has finally realized the unity of event and meaning, the ‘beauty’ of Hegel’s Aesthetics, the perfect coincidence of internal and external?88 A first step is to rematerialise and collectivise the itinerary: there never was a solitary male navigator except in the west’s heroic mythmaking. Noting (against Glissant) that the archipelago is ‘not intrinsically a figure of emancipation,’ Leopold Lambert argues that the archipelago is the event of revolt: in 1871, the Paris Commune ‘was not thinking of itself as a citadel surrounded by a hostile territory, but rather as an island among others – other cities in France like Toulouse, Marseille or Saint-Étienne also succeeded to declare their commune for a little while …’ The contemporary equivalent is any local site of revolt – Sidi Bouzid, Tahrir, Douma, S’derot Rotshield, Dawwar Al-Lu’Lu, Puerta del Sol, Zuccotti, Oakland, La Petite

From your own seashore  73 Patrie, Natal, Bayda, Taksim, Megaro Tis ERT are named – ‘islands’ whose ‘limits do not cease to be redefined.’ It is this continuous self-production that fuels the growth of an extra-territorial political community: Elsewhere, other islands are formed and, despite the fact that each develops its own identity, dialogues between them are effectuated and thus, they can acquire the status of political archipelago. The ‘sea’ that separates them is a region of flux. Fast fluxes, slow fluxes, just like the ocean, they constitute the ambient milieux of these islands whose name of occupation informs about their ‘sedentary’ nature. One has to understand this term, not as the absence of movement or as a permanence, but rather as the space of a constructive intensive movement that lasts as long as the island exists; in other words, as long as bodies form a political community on this territory.89 One way to break the deadlock between positive and negative evaluations of the archipelago as an incubator of growth, change and decolonising forms of organisation – or their contrary – is to take account of what laissez-­faire economists call neighbourhood effects or spillovers, to recognise that the kind of externality alluded to in the expression ‘fast fluxes, slow fluxes’ is, in fact, integral to the archipelago’s formation, explaining why, as Mandelbrot noted, one group of islands is different from another. As we found before, one area in which the positive evaluation of archipelagos prevails is evolutionary biology, and a brief summary of the assumptions used in modelling bio-evolutionary processes quickly opens up an entirely new possibility that archipelagos are not primarily composed of islands and seas but of asymmetrically forming and decomposing vortices. ‘Biogeography is the study of the distribution of animals and plants over time and space. Its aim is to elucidate the reason of the changing distribution of all species in different environments over time.’ The domain known as biogeography-based optimisation assumes an environment like the archipelago, where every possible solution to the optimisation problem is an island. Each solution feature is called a suitability index variable (SIV). The goodness of each solution is called its habitat suitability index (HSI), where a high HSI of an island means good performance on the optimisation problem, and a low HSI means bad performance on the optimisation problem. Improving the population is the way to solve problems in heuristic algorithms. The method to generate the next generation in BBO [biogeography-based optimisation] is by immigrating solution features to other islands and receiving solution features by emigration from other islands. Then mutation is performed for the whole population in a manner similar to mutation in GAs [genetic algorithms].90

74  From your own seashore In the domain of evolutionary robotics and stochastic global optimisation an ‘asynchronous island model paradigm’ or archipelago is found useful: ‘An archipelago is defined by the islands it contains, but also by their geographical location which determines the possible route the individual can take.’91 The graph of the possible migration routes is called ‘the migration topology,’ and the adventitious drift of animal and plant populations supposed by Darwin is recast as an ‘evolutionary strategy (or global optimisation problem).’92 In short, for modelling convenience, the archipelago can be a regular figure (a ring, for example), but in this case where there is no obvious difference between one island in the ring and another, the motive force of migration has to be introduced artificially as it were by introducing the concept of asynchronicity.93 In reality, the concept of optimisation hovers ambiguously between an idealised spatialisation principle where migration and mutation are modelled through immigration/emigration across a geometrically ­conventionalised figure and a nature-derived recognition that any ­m igration presupposes a preferred migration route, an externally determined driftlane, necessarily localised in time and space, asynchronous and directional. Hence, Habitats with a high HIS have a low species immigration rate and have a high emigration rate, because on one side they are already nearly saturated with species, but on the other side they have many opportunities to emigrate to neighbouring habitats, as animals ride flotsam, fly or swim to neighbouring islands.94 In reality, nature-derived intelligent algorithms have to take account of drift if their probabilistic evolution models are to offer ‘a good solution of the optimization problem.’95 This conclusion, painfully arrived at in BBO is, of course, the central hypothesis of weather forecasting where the externality of the Coriolis force bending westerlies and trade winds oppositely in different hemispheres is the basis of long-term prediction. The best-known historical effect of this global oceanic and atmospheric drift system is its inhibition on Portuguese exploration to India: preserving the representational conventions of the early sixteenth century, the cartographics of the Homem-Reinel chart also allude to the time at which European navigators successfully immigrated.96 Islands of any kind and arrangement rise out of a ceaseless flux: oceanic currents are slow spirals whose interaction with resistant boundaries – with coasts, with variations in sea bed depth, with other currents – ­produces shear instability. Flowing around an island, air or water breaks up into widening wakes whose fringes generate a pair of counter-rotating vortices. These ­quasi-steady recirculating wakes may persist for days in the atmosphere and are continuously produced in the sea. They are essential evolutionary drivers as ‘oceanic vortices, which drift over long distances, participate in the transport of heat, momentum, chemical tracers, and biological species

From your own seashore  75 across ocean basins and contribute to the mixing of oceanic water masses.’97 Sometimes, the counter-rotating wake pattern is unstable and a transition occurs to a state in which vortices of alternating sign are periodically shed downstream to form a vortex street. The imprint of vortex streets in cloud layers downstream of mountainous islands is occasionally captured in satellite images.98 In fluid dynamics the stabilisation of vortex streets (‘repeating patterns of swirling vortices caused by the unsteady separation of flow of fluid around blunt objects’) can be seen in the characteristic profiles of estuarine beach edge or the slow-winding effluxions at the mouth of a river. Perhaps the easiest place to observe these interface phenomena is by the sea: waves are caused primarily by a velocity difference, and breaking waves are a moving image of vortex formation, stretch and redistribution into secondary eddies and smaller isotropic vortices. The American poet A. R. Ammons meditated on this dynamic surface, and derived from it a different religion: the water level was not what it was because of a single command by a higher power but because of an average result of a host of a­ ctions  – ­runoff, wind currents, melting glaciers. I began to apprehend things in the dynamics of themselves – motions and bodies … a new ‘de-denominated’ religion. Another poet, Andrew Zawacki, paraphrases Ammons’s conception of ‘sea level as a living, kinetic organism, an event beyond scenery – not an object for the eye but rather an “I” in its own right, a self-directing dynamic around which the human would be consigned, peripherally,’ and relates it to Evelyn Reilly’s characterisation of ecopoetics as a search for a language congruent with a world that is not filled with objects or subjects, that is not ‘the context,’ nor ‘the setting’ for subjects or objects, but that is a permanent state of flux between subject-objects and object-subjects.99

Living syrrhesis Here is a convergence of philosophy and poetics. But before lapsing into language, as it were, it is important to appreciate the horizonless synthesis of land and sea, turbulent, endlessly migrating, mutating and overflowing as biological communication, as information flow. According to Michel Serres, it is information flows, communication, all the way down: Dolphins and bees communicate, and so do ants, and winds, and currents in the sea. Living things and inert things bounce off each other

76  From your own seashore unceasingly; there would be no world without this inter-linking web of relations, a billion times interwoven.100 This is not Platonic but pre-Socratic, or Ionian, that is, it promotes a materialism of flux, something like the ‘flowing together’ that Serres evokes with his living syrrhesis, that combines sea and islands. In a completely new sense, the organism is synchronous for meanings and directions, for the continuous and discontinuous, for the local and the global; it combines memory, invariance, plan, message, loss, redundancy, and so forth. It is old, mortal, and the transmitter of a new cycle.101 What is this organism, which, it seems, must overwhelm the ‘dry land’ of reason? Freud’s unconscious is not inside us but everywhere or, rather, it is wherever energy has yet to be translated into information. Repression in this reformulation serves to filter ‘an ocean of noise’ for what can inform ‘the tiny island of reality’ called the ‘rational.’ We are language creatures and our bodies process the noise of nature for information. It is not that nature, with its storm and stress, is not always with us; rather, biologically, we are drawn to separate ourselves, to self-organise, watching the ‘packages of chance… come crashing at our feet, like the surf at the edge of the beach, in the forms of eros and death.’ We are indeed blind to nature’s ‘destructive randomness’ – Save for exceptional instances, we perceive almost nothing of this intense chaos which nonetheless exists and functions, as experiments have demonstrated conclusively. We are submerged to our neck, to our eyes, to our hair, in a furiously raging ocean. We are the voice of this hurricane, this thermal howl, and we do not even know it. It exists but it goes unperceived.102 The maelstrom of vortical violence is not unexpected, simply unperceived and the best that the human mind can hope for is to achieve the strange glory of the maelstrom itself, ‘virtually stable turbulence within the flow.’103 This Heraclitean sense of flux can coexist with an idea of growing complexity. In the digital philosophy movement, for example, nature computes; that is, the data are forms of information processing. In this case computation is an analog of natural complexity, and the algorithm (or information) is, as it were, in the data. Natural phenomena are thus the products of computation processes. In a computational universe new and unpredictable phenomena emerge as a result of simple algorithms operating on simple computing elements such as, e.g., cellular automata, and complexity originates from the ­bottom-up driven emergent processes. Cellular automata are equivalent to a universal Turing machine.104

From your own seashore  77 But this general assertion of emergent process begs the question of stimulating causes, the particularities of circumstance, the chaotic dynamics, that serve as actualising catalysts, optimising the probability of creative turbulence producing new migrations and mutations. What is the relationship between the radiating opportunities for emigration, ecological adaptation and long-term evolution that the archipelago affords and the direct association of bifurcation points with chaos – ‘the higher the chaos the more the chance for new patterns or new functionalities. Chaos brings in higher chance for differentiation’105 – a situation where stabilisation is achieved through ‘increased complexity.’106 Lying in driftlanes, archipelagos (in the plural) may be the decisive places where spatio-ecological and chrono-­evolutionary processes intersect. The phenomenon of ‘genetic drift’ in isolated populations is well-known, but what of the prior environmental drift that determines the arrival of a new species on an island? Noting that ‘Two adjacent sites may rarely exchange migrants if located on different sides of an oceanographic front and two distant sites may be well connected by a strong current between them,’ White et al. propose a ‘seascape genetics’ that tests for ‘environmental drivers of spatial genetic structure.’107 They conclude, It is likely that there are many situations where a stepping-stone model is an inadequate framework for describing the gene flow of marine species. A conventional stepping-stone model assumes that diffusion dominates ocean circulation over equilibrium population genetic time scales. However, ocean flow simulations with even simple but real coastlines can generate complex spatial patterns of connectivity whose spatial and temporal average departs considerably from expected Gaussian dispersal kernels based on homogeneous flow conditions.108 In another permutation on this externality-driven model of archipelagic structures and their distinctive formations, it is to be noted that the archipelagos themselves evolve: in the case of the Hawai’ian islands, the progression or migration of spiders down the island chain is tied to the geological appearance of the islands themselves.109

Mediterreanismo/malayalismo Can bio-evolutionary studies have any relevance to human history? Have they any implications – even if they’re metaphorical – for the interpretation of archipelagic cultures? A contrast has emerged between closed and open systems, between those that territorialise inwardly and those that drift and are progressive extra-territorial bridgeheads to further expansion. The first expresses the spirit of mediterreanismo, the idea that the archipelago breeds in the middle of land; the second instantiates the dynamics of ceaseless change, the proliferation of difference – it illustrates the spirit of malayalismo. Extravagant claims have been made for the Greek model. In a spirited

78  From your own seashore anthropogeographical speculation, P. N. Dimotakis and P. Papaspirou, for example, contend that the rapid emergence of the distinctive ancient Greek arts and sciences (described as the ‘memeplexes’ ‘of the genre of Tragedy, of Physical Philosophy, of Astronomy, of Mathematics and of Democracy, as well as the basis for Science’) was a product of a ‘hellenopoietic space … composed by the deep synergy between the geosphere, the biosphere and the noosphere.’ At the heart of this space was the Aegean Sea: the geological relief of the hellenopoietic space is extremely rich, it can be understood as a complex Voronoi decomposition of the geological background, which is fractal in nature. This decomposition defines a patchwork made by habitable and non-habitable places, as well as the complex archipelagos of the numerous islands of the Aegean Sea.110 According to this theory, those complex archipelagos of the Aegean Sea (pluralised in this account) form an ‘abstract network’ whose creativity is directly related to ‘the weak links of this network.’ It is the fractal, almost random form of the geographical relief of the hellenopoietic space [that] comprises such a dynamic factor for the birth of the Hellenic civilization … the populations living within this natural environment are obligated to confront the fractal, chaotic complexity of their environment [and] develop complex commercial societies, perfect the art of Sailing and are pushed into a vast colonization attempt.111 In this, the archetypal archipelago, an embayment of the Mediterranean Sea, measuring some 610 kilometres north-south and 300 kilometres east-west, is identified with the birth and growth of western civilisation as a whole. Cultural innovation is directly correlated with the non-linear mathematical properties of the basin: chaos, or fractally characterised environments, and the impulse to the rationalisation of complexity are coeval. However, the efficiency of the hellenopoietic sphere was, as we saw, dependent on an externality: slavery. And this is not just a moral quibble: in western thought and practice, it defines the possibility of government and political self-­ determination. Vidal-Naquet makes the point that ‘for the slave-holding city a time without slaves is outside of history; it is in a pre-civic earlier or a postcivic later and even, to a great extent, before or after civilization itself.’112 As an example of malayalismo, one might cite the diversity of Polynesian sociopolitical formations: The founding populations that arrived at Mangaia, the Marquesas, and Hawai’i shared a common set of cultural notions in Ancestral Polynesian society … Yet the societies that had emerged by the time of Captain Cook’s famous voyages at the close of the eighteenth century were remarkably different. Mangaia was politically organized as a relatively

From your own seashore  79 small-scale chiefdom in which the exercise of power was overtly militaristic. The Marquesas were divided into multiple independent chiefdoms that frequently raided and skirmished among each other, without achieving archipelago-wide political hegemony. Hawai’i consisted of several competing large-scale polities, each occupying one of or more islands, and its political organization has been characterised as an emergent ‘archaic state.’113 However, much the same could be said of the city-states forming the ancient Greek-Mediterranean diaspora, even neighbouring jurisdictions embracing strikingly different cultural settings and political arrangements. Besides, slavery is encoded in many ways. Eighteenth-century Europeans visiting Pacific Islands tended to characterise them as sexual paradises: The concepts of premarital and extramarital sexual activities were absent, and it was probably true of Hawai’i, as it was said to have been true of much of Polynesia, that ‘there are no people in the world who indulge themselves more in their sensual appetites than these.’114 This accorded with social revolutionary thought, suggesting a human enlightenment far in advance of Europe.115 But nothing came for free: ‘Under the kapu system, there were forms of bondage and slavery, human sacrifice and infanticide.’116

Notes 1 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982, Articles viewed April 15 2010, www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/unclos_e.pdf. For this and previous quotations, see Articles 46, 47, 52 and 53. 2 Helen F. Fletcher, ‘The Archipelagic State and the Full Recognition of Indonesian National Independence,’ Indonesian Quarterly, vol. XXII, no. 2, Second Quarter, 1994, 103–113, 108. 3 Helen F. Fletcher, ‘The Archipelagic State and the Full Recognition of ­Indonesian National Independence,’ 111. 4 Greg Acciaoli has argued that Soeharto’s New Order used the myth of a maritime way of life among all the peoples of the archipelago across vast stretches of time to create a sense of identity that was effective because it sidestepped the practical political problems of life on land (Greg Acciaoli, ‘Archipelagic Culture as an Exclusionary Government Discourse in Indonesia,’ Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, vol. 2, no. 1, 2001, 1–23, 5–7). See also discussion in Robert B. Cribb and Michele Ford, ‘Indonesia as an Archipelago: Managing Islands, Managing the Sea,’ in Indonesia: Beyond the Water’s Edge: Managing an Archipelagic State, Robert B. Cribb and Michele Ford, eds. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008, 1–27, 7. 5 Discussed and illustrated in Paul Carter, Dark Writing, Geography, Performance, Design, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008, 59–60 and Figure 11. 6 Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, 346. 7 Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, 29–30.

80  From your own seashore 8 John Crawfurd, History of the Indian Archipelago, 2 vols, Edinburgh: Archibald Constable & Co, 1820, vol. 1, 13. 9 Jonathan Pugh, ‘Island Movements: Thinking with the Archipelago,’ Island Studies Journal, vol. 8, no. 1, 2013, 10. 10 Henry Johnson and Sueo Kuwahara, ‘Locating Shima in Island Drumming: Amami Ōshima and Its Archipelagic Drum Groups,’ Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures, vol. 7, no. 1, 2013, 14–38, viewed­ October 18, 2017, www.academia.edu/6735420/LOCATING_SHIMA_IN_ISLAND_DRUMMING_Amami_O_shima_and_its_Archipelagic_Drum_Groups. 11 One of 83 islands that make up the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. 12 Robert H. Codrington, The Melanesians, Studies in Their Anthropology and Folk-Lore, Oxford: Clarendon, 1969, 4. 13 Robert H. Codrington, The Melanesians, Studies in Their Anthropology and Folk-Lore, 83. 14 Margaret Jolly, Women of the Place, Kastom, Colonialism and Gender in Vanuatu, Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994, 15. 15 Predrag Matvejević, Mediterranean, a Cultural Landscape, trans. M. H. Heim, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, 17. 16 Katriina Siivonen, ‘An Archipelago of Identities,’ presentation at BSRS, Mare Balticum, University of Turku, October 18, 2008, 1–43, 14. 17 Predrag Matvejević, Mediterranean, a Cultural Landscape, 180. 18 Philip Hayward, ‘Aquapelagos and Aquapelagic Assemblages,’ Shims: The ­International Journal of Research into Island Cultures, epublications@SCU, vol. 6, no. 1, 2012, 1–11, 5. 19 If, as Fulvio Salvadori states, pélagos signified to the ancient Greeks ‘la vasta estensione di acqua,’ then the neologism is a tautology, dissolving, rather than resolving, the land/sea relationship. (Fulvio Salvadori, Mediterraneo, Via a ­Occidente/Méditerranée, La voie de l’Occident, Grenoble: Centre National d’Art Contemporain, 1993, 9.) 20 See Frances Lawrenz and Douglas Huffman, ‘The Archipelago Approach to Mixed Method Evaluation,’ American Journal of Evaluation, vol. 23, no. 3, 2002, 331–338, where encounter inevitably morphs into evaluation as, in the archipelago, we have yet to know where phenomena fit and, in this context, might speak of multiple choice islands (335) or ‘relationships between the islands of data’ (336). 21 William Henry Smyth, The Sailor’s Word-Book, London: Blackie & Son, 1867, see entry for ‘Arches’. 22 These summaries come from a review article by Chris Bongie, ‘Reading the ­A rchipelago,’ JStor, vol. 73, no. 1/2, 1999, 89–95, 89. 23 According to a recent account, ‘despite its apparent aim of disclosure, the ­Atlas Miller hides more than it reveals.’ The proposition is that the Atlas was ‘an ­i nstrument of geographic and geopolitical counter-information … the graphic expression of the Portuguese strategic vision of the globe intended to counter the vision upheld by Castile.’ The argument is that the peculiar “neo-Ptolemaic” concept it features, with the sea as stagnon (the oceans surrounded by land, the New World as a continent, the mythical Austral Land, etc.), suited the Portuguese in c. 1519 because it suggested that it was not possible to sail westwards across to the other side of the planet, i.e. to do what was attempted first by Columbus and subsequently achieved by Ferdinand Magellan. (Alfredo Pinheiro Marques, see www.moleiro.com/ infoplus.php?p=AM/en, viewed September 26 2015.) 24 Jenny Grote Stoutenberg, Disappearing Island States in International Law, ­Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2015, 183.

From your own seashore  81 25 Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, 16. 26 As Darwin’s geological mentor, Sir Charles Lyell, surmised in 1832: ‘To the ­geologist, the Gangetic islands, and their migratory colonies, may present an epitome of the globe,’ he wrote, speculating that the cycles of volcanic upthrust and subsidence rendered the inhabitable earth a constantly turbulent coast line, or chain of islands, that only ‘migratory colonies’ were adapted to navigate. (Principles of Geology, London: John Murray, 3 vols, vol. 2, 204.) 27 Henry Nicholls, ‘How Sea Level Influenced Evolution in the Galapagos,’ April 24, 2014, viewed September 16, 2017, www.theguardian.com/science/ animal-magic/2014/apr/24/sea-level-evolution-galapagos. 28 Henry Nicholls, ‘How Sea Level Influenced Evolution in the Galapagos.’ The mechanism, known as gene flow, that allows genetic material to move between species and contribute to the development of new species is a function of individual genetic variation. See News Staff, ‘Scientists Unlock Genetic Secrets of Galápagos Finches,’ Science News, February 12, 2015, viewed March 14, 2016, www.sci-news.com/genetics/science-genetic-secrets-galapagos-finches-02488 .html. 29 Friedrich Holdërlin, Selected Verse, trans. Michael Hamburger, Penguin: ­London, 1961, 96. 30 See M. Mirak-Weissbach, ‘Wilhelm Non Humboldt and the Study of the Kawi Language,’ EIR, vol. 25, no. 46, November 20, 1998. 31 Nancy Victorin-Vangerud, ‘Thinking Like an Archipelago: Beyond Tehomophobic Theology,’ Pacifica, vol. 16, June 2003, 165–166. 32 The First Voyage Round the World by Magellan, translated from the accounts of Pigafetta by Lord Stanley of Alderley, New York: Burt Franklin, 1874, 124. Whereas Wallace notes, we find that all the wide expanse of sea which divides Java, Sumatra, and ­Borneo from each other, and from Malacca and Siam, is so shallow that ships can anchor in any part of it, since it rarely exceeds forty fathoms in depth. (Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, 23) 33 The allusion is to Livy’s account of the piratical adventures of the Spartan Cleomenes, c.302–301 BC. 34 Benoit B. Mandelbrot, ‘An Explicit Fractal Model of Percolation Cluster,’ Annals of the Israel Physical Society, 1983, 60–80, 69–70. 35 Katriina Siivonen, ‘An Archipelago of Identities,’ 3. 36 For this and previous quotations, see Brian H. Kaye, A Random Walk through Fractals Dimensions, Weiheim: Wiley, 1994, 353–354. 37 John Stell, pers. comm., October 20, 2016 38 Kullervo Rainio, ‘Kurt Lewin’s Dynamical Psychology Revisited and Revised,’ Dynamical Psychology, 2009, 1–20, 4. 39 Kullervo Rainio, ‘Kurt Lewin’s Dynamical Psychology Revisited and Revised,’ 12. 40 Robert B. Cribb and Michele Ford, ‘Indonesia as an Archipelago: Managing Islands, Managing the Sea,’ 7. 41 Marco Cuevas-Hewitt, ‘Sketching Towards an Archipelagic Poetics of Postcolonial Belonging,’ Budhi, vol. 1, 2007, 239–246, 242–243. 42 Marco Cuevas-Hewitt, ‘Sketching Towards an Archipelagic Poetics of Postcolonial Belonging,’ 244. 43 Jeffrey S. Librett, ‘Interruptions of Necessity: Being between Meaning and Power in Jean-Luc Nancy,’ in On Jean-Luc Nancy: The Sense of Philosophy, D. Sheppard et al., eds. New York: Routledge, 1997, 103–139, 124–125. 44 Vanja Hamzić, ‘Unlearning Human Rights and False Grand Dichotomies: Indonesian Archipelagic Selves beyond Sexual/Gender Universality,’ Jindal Global Law Review, vol. 4, no. 1, August 2012, 157–170, 158.

82  From your own seashore 45 Vanja Hamzić, ‘Unlearning Human Rights and False Grand Dichotomies: ­Indonesian Archipelagic Selves beyond Sexual/Gender Universality,’ 158. 46 Jeffrey S. Librett, ‘Interruptions of Necessity: Being between Meaning and Power in Jean-Luc Nancy,’ 129. 47 Dell Hymes, Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding of Voice, London: Taylor & Francis, 1996, 32. 48 Humboldt. On Language, On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and Its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species, ed. ­Michael Losonsky, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 25–64, viewed ­August  14, 2007, www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/ vhumboldt-wilhelm.htm. 49 David Tomas, Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings, Boulder, Co: ­Westview Press, 1996, 1. 50 David Tomas, Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings, 1. 51 The First Voyage Round the World by Magellan, 95. 52 Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, trans. J.M. Dash, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1989, 46–47. 53 Dan McGarry, ‘Pidgin Poetics,’ Vanuatu Daily Post, 2009, viewed February 18, 2012, http://scriptorum.imagicity.com/2009/03/07/pidgin-poetics/#more-157. 54 Sarah Grey Thomason and Terrence Kaufman, Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, 174. 55 The First Voyage Round the World by Magellan, 150. 56 L’Indonesia nella Relazione di Viaggio di Antonio Pigafetta, ed. A. Bausani, Roma: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente/Centro Italiano di Cultura, Djakarta, 1972, 58. 57 L’Indonesia nella Relazione di Viaggio di Antonio Pigafetta, 17. 58 Quoted by A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance, New York: Berghahn Books, 2008, 63. 59 Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea, trans. R. Hakluyt, see chapter 5, viewed February 4, 2013, http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile= show.php%3Ftitle=859&chapter=66169&layout=html&Itemid=27. 60 Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, chapter 2. 61 Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea. 62 Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea. 63 Referring to a report in The Jakarta Post for 20 November, subsequently reproduced at www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refdaily?pass=52fc6fbd5&id= 547c21fb8, where it was viewed November 21, 2015. The ‘kind offer’ was ­w ithdrawn. See Jewel Topsfield and Nicole Hasham, ‘Indonesia Denies Offering Australia an Island to House Refugees,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 21 ­November 2015, viewed October 1, 2017, www.smh.com.au/world/indonesia-offers-­ australia-an-island-for-refugees-20151120-gl47jz.html. 64 www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refdaily?pass=52fc6fbd5&id=547c21fb8. 65 Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 108. More recently, the isolation of the camps, which is the key point of Solzhenitsyn’s metaphor, has been questioned: New work emphasises a more dynamic and interactive relationship between the Gulag system and the rest of Soviet society. Scholars have coined new metaphors to characterise this relationship – revolving doors, porous boundaries, mirror images, and continuums. (David R. Shearer, ‘The Soviet Gulag: An Archipelago?’ Kritica, Explorations in Russian and European History, vol. 16, no. 3, Summer 2015, 711–724, 711.) 66 While Solzhenitsyn’s metaphorical pairing island/archipelago is primarily quantitative, implying a multiplication of horrors, Foucault’s capillaries/

From your own seashore  83 social body metaphor is primarily spatial, connoting the spreading of discipline across a larger area. See Jan Plamper, ‘Foucault’s Gulag,’ Kritika: Explorations in ­Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 3, no. 2, Spring 2002, 255–280, 270. 67 However, the ambiguity of the archipelago in this divide-and-conquer strategy is clear as, in relation to trade imperialism, it may be both a catalyst of enslavement and a point of resistance and diversification. A case in point – strikingly well documented (see George E. Brooks, Landlords & Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000–1630, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993) – is the economic, social and cultural nexus between the Cabo Verde archipelago and western Africa, established in the 1460s as ‘the advance base for Portuguese and lançado trade with Senegambia and the Upper Guinea coast.’ (43). Over the next century, trade filtered through the archipelago, producing new associations as well as new divisions: economic exploitation ‘fostered the development of a threefold social structure (white landowners and traders; their African slaves; and free and enslaved Luso-Africans), but maritime communities ‘acquired invaluable knowledge of western African languages, social institutions, and cultural practices from families and associates and from captives brought to the archipelago for local use and resale and shipment to Europe and the Americas.’ (160) These centripetal/centrifugal forces of translation and isolation mapped physically onto the geography: while the ‘seafarers’ of São Tiago dominated African trade, the settlers of Fogo to the west ‘specialised in agriculture,’ as early as the 1530s exporting cotton to western Africa (150); the Cabo Verdean salt trade was centred on Maio to the east; as for the colonists of Santo Antão and São Nicolau, they seem to have turned their backs on imperial commerce: few African captives came to their islands; they produced few commodities for African trade and ‘lived largely isolated from other Cabo Verdeans.’ (151). 68 Édouard Glissant, Traité du tout-monde, Poétique IV, Éditions Gallimard, 1997, 31. Translated by Sabu Kohso. (‘Cine-activism in an Archipelagic World,’ viewed April 4, 2016, www.bordersphere.com/new/cine_text.htm.) 69 Accurate figures are hard to come by; however, an upward estimate of the number of people who died as a direct result of incarceration in Stalin’s labour camps is ten million; calculations of the number of people sold into slavery through the trans-Atlantic slave trade produce a similar figure. 70 Kelley Coblentz Bautch, A Study of the Geography of 1 Enoch 17–19, ‘No One Has Seen What I Have Seen,’ Leiden: Brill, 2003, 117. 71 Commercially promising as well as theologically plausible: ‘As the Book of Genesis and Ezekiel reported, there were gold and precious stones in the vicinity.’ (Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979, 61.) 72 George E. Brooks, Landlords & Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in ­Western Africa, 1000–1630, 136. 73 George E. Brooks, Landlords & Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in ­Western Africa, 1000–1630, 137. 74 George E. Brooks, Landlords & Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in ­Western Africa, 1000–1630, 191. 75 George E. Brooks, Landlords & Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in ­Western Africa, 1000–1630, 191. 76 Olaudah Equiano, Equiano’s Travels: His Autobiography, ed. P. Edwards, ­London, Heinemann, 1967. 77 Olaudah Equiano, Equiano’s Travels: His Autobiography, 134, 138. 78 Olaudah Equiano, Equiano’s Travels: His Autobiography, 136. 79 James Lockhart, ‘Sightings: Initial Nahua Reactions to Spanish Culture,’ in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. S. B. Schwarz, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 219.

84  From your own seashore 80 James Lockhart, Of Things of the Indies, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, 99. 81 Wyatt MacGaffey, “Dialogues of the Deaf: Europeans on the Atlantic Coast of Africa,’ in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. S. B. Schwarz, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 219. 82 Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. A. Mac Adam, New York: ­Pantheon Books, 1991, 48. 83 Gianni Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference: Philosophy after Nietzsche and Heidegger, trans. G. Blamires, London: Polity, 1993, 5. 84 Marcus Terentius Varro, Varro on the Latin Language, trans. R. G. Kent, ­London: Heinemann, 1938, 2 vols, vol. 2, 373–374. 85 Marcus Terentius Varro, Varro on the Latin Language, vol. 2, 379. Varro makes the further point that slaves lack their own proper names, deriving whatever name they have from the context of their enslavement. In Structuralist linguistics, the phoneme plays the same role – according to Jakobson; it has no character of its own, operating within any language purely as a signifier of difference, as a building block of words and sentences without its own identity (name). 86 Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, trans. E. Palmer, Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1973, Book 3, chapter 5. 87 Gianni Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference: Philosophy after Nietzsche and Heidegger, 5–6. 88 Gianni Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference: Philosophy after Nietzsche and Heidegger, 84. 89 Leopold Lambert, ‘The Political Archipelago: For a New Paradigm of Territorial Sovereignty,’ The Funambulist, July 22, 2013, viewed March 5, 2014, http:// thefunambulist.net/2013/07/22/politics-the-political-archipelago-for-a-newparadigm-of-territorial-sovereignty/. 90 Dawei Du, Dan Simon and Mehmet Ergezer, ‘Biogeography-Based ­O ptimization Combined with Evolutionary Strategy and Immigration ­Refusal,’ IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, 2009, 1009–1014. 91 Christos Ampatzis, ‘A Life in the Galapagos: Migration Effects on Neuro-­ Controller Design,’ in Advances in Artificial Life: 10th European Conference, ECAL 2009, eds. G. Kampis, I. Karsai and E. Szathmary, Berlin: Springer, 2011, Part 1, 197–204, 199. 92 Christos Ampatzis, ‘A Life in the Galapagos: Migration Effects on Neuro-­ Controller Design,’ 199. 93 Christos Ampatzis, ‘A Life in the Galapagos: Migration Effects on Neuro-­ Controller Design,’ 201. 94 Bo Xing, ‘Novel Nature-Derived Intelligent Algorithms and Their ­Applications,’ in Artificial Intelligence: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools and Applications in ­Antenna Optimisation, eds. Management Association, Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2017, 1488–1521, 1497. 95 Bo Xing, ‘Novel Nature-Derived Intelligent Algorithms and Their Applications,’ 1497. 96 ‘Agulhas Current,’ viewed September 16, 2017, www.wikizero.com/en/Agulhas_ Current. The Agulhas Current, flowing southwards along the eastern coast of South Africa, long prevented the Portuguese from sailing into the Indian Ocean. More importantly, in terms of differential drifting, aggregation and regional differentiation, The Agulhas acts as an oceanic convergence zone. Due to mass continuity this drives surface waters down, resulting in the upwelling of cold, nutrient

From your own seashore  85 rich water south of the current. Additionally, the convergence tends to increase the concentration of plankton in and around the Agulhas. Both of these factors result in the area being one of enhanced primary productivity as compared to the surrounding waters. 97 X. Carton, ‘Oceanic Vortices,’ in Fronts, Waves and Vortices in Geophysical Flows, J.-B. Flór, ed. Berlin: Springer, 2010, 61–108, 61. 98 Craig C. Epifanio, ‘Lee Vortices,’ in Encyclopedia of the Atmospheric Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 1150–1160, 1150. 99 Andrew Zawacki, ‘Ego and Eco: Saying “I” in Expressions of Sea Level,’ ­Chicago Review, vol. 57, no. 1–2, Summer–Autumn 2012, 49–62. 100 Michel Serres, Angels: A Modern Myth, trans. F. Cowper, Paris: Flammarion, 1995, 47. 101 Michel Serres, ‘The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, & Thermodynamics,’ in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, eds. Josue V. Harari and ­David F. Bell, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, viewed March 14, 2004, http://mysite.pratt.edu/~arch543p/readings/origin_of_ language.html. 102 Michel Serres, ‘The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, & Thermodynamics.’ 103 Michel Serres, ‘The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, & Thermodynamics.’ 104 Gordana Dodig Crnkovic, ‘Dynamics of Information as Natural Computation,’ Information, vol. 2, no. 3, 2011, 460–477, viewed October 18, 2017, www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/2/3/460/htm. 105 G. Gündüz, ‘Autocatalysis as the Natural Philosophy Underlying Complexity and Biological Evolution,’ Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems, vol. 9, no. 1, 2011, 1–22, 16. 106 G. Gündüz, ‘Autocatalysis as the Natural Philosophy Underlying Complexity and Biological evolution,’ 19. 107 Crow White et al., ‘Ocean Currents Help Explain Population Genetic Structure,’ Proceedings of Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 277, no. 1688, 2010, 1685–1694, 1687. 108 Crow White et al., ‘Ocean Currents Help Explain Population Genetic Structure,’ 1691. 109 Rosemary G. Gillespie, ‘Island Time and the Interplay between Ecology and Evolution in Species Diversification,’ Evolutionary Applications, vol. 9, no. 1, January 2016, 2016, 53–73. 110 Paul Nicholas Dimotakis and Panagiotas Papaspirou, ‘The Step of Kouros,’ Physics International, vol. 6, no. 2, 2015, 89–95, 90. A Voronoi diagram is the partitioning of a plane into regions based on their distance from points within the plane. An archipelago or any cluster of islands treated as points presents a natural candidate for Voronoi partition or decomposition, and ‘real’ archipelagos are frequently used by mathematicians to test and illustrate refinements and variations. (See for example L. Mestetskiy, ‘Representation of Linear Segment Voronoi Diagram by Bezier Curves,’ 2014, 83–87, viewed October 2, 2017, www.graphicon.ru/html/2014/papers/83-87.pdf, which applies the author’s method to create a Voronoi Diagram for the Malay Archipelago.) 111 Paul Nicholas Dimotakis and Panagiotas Papaspirou, ‘The Step of Kouros,’ 90. 112 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World, trans. A Szegedy-Maszak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, 173. 113 Patrick V. Kirch, ‘Controlled Comparison and Polynesian Cultural Evolution,’ in Natural Experiments of History, eds. J. Diamond and J. A. Robinson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, 15–52, 24.

86  From your own seashore 114 Milton Diamond, ‘Sexual Behavior in Pre Contact Hawai’i: A Sexological Ethnography,’ Pacific Center for Sex and Society,’ viewed April 23, 2017, www.hawaii .edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/2000to2004/2004-sexual-behavior-in-pre-­c ontacthawaii.html. 115 Although Restif de la Bretonne insisted that in Megapatonie, his utopian archipelago located at the exact antipodes of France, women enjoyed a sexual agency that surpassed that reported from the Society Islands where, according Bretonne, they are treated as ‘viles Esclaves.’ (Restif de la Bretonne, La découverte austral, Paris, France Adel, 1977, 229.) 116 Milton Diamond, ‘Sexual Behavior in Pre Contact Hawai’i: A Sexological Ethnography.’ ‘Kapu can mean either taboo, sacred or forbidden. Rules associated with the Kapu system were part of an elaborate social structure that regulated much of Hawai‘ian society.’ Basically anything that was kapu should not be done because it would anger the gods or Hawai‘ian ali‘i.’

3 Ocean connections Local knowledge and regions of care

Biodiversity is a whitefella word This chapter imagines a meeting place of local interests convened for the purpose of fostering bioregionalism. The argument for bioregionalism is succinctly put by Sami Rehman. Noting that ‘Organising societies’ capabilities for a sustainable future will depend on integration and coordination of planning and management from local to global approaches,’ he points out that ‘the global level can be overwhelmingly complicated with a lack of detail to develop an effective framework,’ and ‘the local level can be equally complicated with excessive detail and a loss of interconnectedness.’1 Arguing that any framework must ‘encompass the adaptive management of the three systems of sustainability – ecological, social and economical,’ ­Rehman promotes ‘a framework that works in a nested hierarchy of management units’ adapted to ‘The landscape-regional’ or ‘bioregional’ scale at which humans and environments ordinarily interact.2 Given his recognition that ‘Much of the philosophical thought of bioregionalism brings together poetry and essays, feelings and thought to inspire emotion and intellectual vision,’ and that ‘It is the values from these narratives that develop into a bioregional “way of thinking about human society and the natural world,”’ it is surprising that Rehman does not consider among his criteria of sustainability culture.3 In other respects, though, his analysis is obviously relevant to our discussion in ­Chapter 5 of a bioregion that, for a variety of historical, institutional and political reasons, lacks the capacity to develop and nurture an expanded, archipelagic sense of place. Here, though, a prior question has to be raised: what is, or can be, the relationship between the rhetoric and practices of bioregionalism, with its commitment to revived community and sense of place, and the decolonisation of environmental governance and reclamation of Indigenous sovereignty? Reflecting on the challenges presented by ‘deliberative democracy (­or place-based governance structures),’4 whose ‘participatory criteria’ advancing ‘fairness’ may produce a ‘distinctive tension … between impressing ideas of legitimacy and credibility, and displacing others,’5 Rehman suggests that a valuable practical model of ‘local communities demonstrating wise and sustainable choices based on mutual learning’ is the place-based governance

88  Ocean connections

Figure 3.1  S  outh East Asia and Northern Australia

model adopted in the UNESCO Biosphere Reserves.6 But here we can begin to approach the fundamental problem that no methodological revisionism emanating exclusively from the social or physical sciences is likely to resolve. As we know – and as we shall see in our discussion of the Wallacea Biodiversity Hotspot report – Biosphere Reserves aim to conserve biodiversity, develop sustainable local economies and provide ‘logistic support’ (conservation and sustainability research and projects offering education, training and employment opportunities).7 Yet, as Adams and English reflect in a discussion of Aboriginal peoples’ ‘views on the cultural value of flora, fauna and environmental health,’8 ‘Biodiversity is a whitefella word,’9 and no amount of practical training, bicultural management strategies and other theoretical concepts of ‘consilience,’ combining ‘theories and facts to provide explanations across scientific disciplines,’10 can overcome the fact that indigenous attachments to country and ‘whitefella’ concepts of conservation are incommensurable; for one is a figuratively conceived and carried network of identifications which locate the responsible human agents inside the living world, while the other is mobilised ‘essentially around the premise that “living nature is under siege” by humans.’11 When, for example, Yolngu people assert that ancestral creators crisscrossed the sea and the land creating the land and the seascape and breathing life into the living things that inhabit it … From these ancestral journeys and the network of important sites created across land and sea, we gain our names, our identity, and our way of life12

Ocean connections  89 they essay an ‘ontological politics’ that, as Verran states, cannot be scaled up and assimilated to, for example, Australian Government’s National ­Resource Management Plan [NRM].13

Is storytelling transferable? Here we encounter another problem, one of scale: if Indigenous place-based knowledge is based on a poetics of continuous creation, essentially mediated through story, and cannot easily be reconciled with ecologically based environmental conservation management – although many practical and pragmatic steps can be taken to effect a working reconciliation – equally, it is tied to a particular ancestral landscape. Writing about Maningrida, a large Aboriginal township in north-central Arnhem Land, Fogarty and Ryan tell us that ‘Decades of global research concerning Indigenous development has been consistent in its finding that for sustained success, initiatives must be participatory, locally driven and cognizant of Indigenous aspirations.’14 ‘Maximising and harnessing the potential of structures that have been developed locally and shown to work is crucial if the social problems of the town are to be addressed in a sustainable way.’15 The rhetoric of sustainability (a good ultimately based on ecological principles) may be common to both local and national economic agendas, but in practice it obviously means different things. Fogarty and Ryan cite the Bawaninga Aboriginal Corporation’s Djelk Ranger program as a success story. The program combines Indigenous knowledge about land and sea with Western scientific conservation, and aims to contribute to local economic development: A ranger job is seen by many young people as a real and desirable employment destination because it is legitimized in Indigenous cosmologies of land and sea management, is financially rewarding and is held in very high esteem by the greater community.16 According to Jon Altman, the success of such programs has national implications: Australia is increasingly aware of the issues of climate change, water shortage, environmental degradation and ecological sustainability. What is not yet well understood is that Aboriginal interests, given their substantial land holdings, have a crucial role to play in confronting these challenges and finding solutions that are in the national interest.17 But how, for example, would the local knowledge at the heart of these local economic development initiatives translate into principles that could guide the NRM strategy? Verran thinks any translation from local to national is implausible – for the simple, but profound reason that Indigenous local knowledge and the institutions flowing from it are, as Fogarty and Ryan note, ‘legitimized in Indigenous cosmologies.’ At the heart of Indigenous

90  Ocean connections local knowledge is storytelling – which, Verran considers, is not transferable. She cites the Yolnguwu Monuk Gapu Wänga Sea Country Plan, subtitled ‘A Yolngu Vision and Plan for Sea Country Management in NorthEast Arnhem Land, Northern Territory,’ from whose preamble we have already quoted, and which begins, ‘Ancestral Spirit beings of the Yirritja and Dhuwa moieties created us and the known world—the celestial bodies, land, sea, living plants and animals….’ According to these reflections, the development of an archipelagic ontology of being in place, one able to distribute governance responsibilities extra-territorially and, perhaps, across incommensurable local knowledges, faces considerable difficulties. It involves a sense of place that in many ways recalls J. J. Rousseau’s language sense, the idea that the origin of communication lies in a sense of being in the presence of another, similarly sentient being: the desire to communicate stems from this primary sympathy, its political expression a notion of assembly as the reaffirmation of a prior sociality.18 Rousseau assumed that the ‘sensing being, thinking and similar to him’ must be human.19 It is clear, however, that in Indigenous ontology the non-human world also recognises us: Rousseau’s elaborate argument for the figurative origins of language could have been greatly simplified if he had entertained this possibility. Likewise, it is not only different clans who come together to resolve issues: the ancestral creators also attend. In this regard, much can be learnt from the educative function of the Yolngu Garma festival. For the space of potential to be realised, for Garma to become an event place ‘where ideas are shared and negotiated in order to facilitate agreement,’ there needs to be an intensification of interests and alignment. This notion is conceptualised in the Yolngu term galtha, meaning a connecting spot… a spot where people make solid contact with the earth, when they have been brought together from different places, and now they are having a discussion together to agree on a plan of action. Anywhere there is ceremony, there will be galtha. Every ceremony must be different, because its art lies in creating that ceremony to specifically reflect the participants and the place and the time.20 ‘Galtha is at once a moment and a place, a process and a manifestation.’ ‘… While a ceremony has a galtha, so can individuals have their own Galtha when they become truly themselves in line with ancestral imperatives.’21

Local systems, shared interests Two theories and practices of communication collide: one inhabits language performatively – participants are acted upon by language and feel themselves inside a communicational ecology that places culture at the core of environmental sustainability; the other, the discourse of top-down management and scientifically supported ecological conservation, instrumentalises

Ocean connections  91 language; it assumes a prior silence or disorganised noise and identifies articulation with taking control, rationalisation and simplification; its object is to eliminate ambiguity in the interests of non-metaphorical conceptualisation. And the second obstacle to an extra-territorial culture of decolonised governance seems to follow as, besides its identification with poetic knowledge, participatory decision-making depends upon localisation in time and space. In a useful critique of an earlier version of this chapter, ­Michael Davis suggested that the isolation or incommensurability implied here was overdrawn. He cited a number of cases where ‘local Aboriginal groups, whether clan based, language based or other community entities embed into various regional agreements and charters, statements regarding their local ecological knowledge and practices.’22 These include promotion of Indigenous ‘water rights’ in the Murray-Darling Basin through the formation of the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations alliance; establishment in the Dubba-Ga clan of the Wiradjuri people of ‘networks among knowledge holders that transcend the specifics of a local place’; agreement between the Commonwealth Government’s Wet Tropics Management Authority and the Aboriginal Forest Council to develop joint management strategies for ‘a natural biological region, as well as a large and important Aboriginal cultural region’; and the charters and statements of principles of the (former) Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre (Alice Springs).23 Yet three of these four cases embrace legal terms of reference and administrative/managerial cultures of communication derived from non-Indigenous convention. This implies no criticism of the initiatives. As Jon Altman has persuasively argued in reviewing the alternative development model represented by the case studies collected in People on Country, A commonality … is a desire to manage land and resources in distinct Indigenous ways that encompass a deeply emotional and spiritual connection to country, an ethic of care and custodianship and personal relationship and ontological linkage to country. Strategically, it might first be necessary to talk about natural resource management in a conventional way, to deploy such language as a means to gain an initial hearing and garner support.24 Strategically, that is, in the context of entrenched colonialist governmental attitudes, it may be necessary to compromise, but, in the context of imagining an ‘ontological politics’ – one where ‘ontological linkage to country’ precedes and determines the language of communication and the scope of any plan of action and where, instead of dealing with white settler expectations, the exchange is between peoples claiming sovereignty over their own countries – what will be the translator? If local knowledges are incommensurable, how can cooperation occur except through genuflection to western conceptualisations of place, as a subset of territorially defined interests? The Yolngu Sea Country Plan proposes ‘a bi-lateral co-management agreement

92  Ocean connections with the Indonesian government’ but what would be the terms of such an agreement? Would the traditional linkages between northern Arnhem Land coastal communities and their counterparts in West Sulawesi provide the ontological ground of such an agreement or would such experiences feature simply as ‘local knowledge’ that any ‘holistic’ management plan should respect? It seems that a number of conceptualisations of place would need to change for a new regional discourse of ocean care to emerge. There would need to be a new conception of the sea as an archipelago of shared interests: ‘Maritime anthropology has demonstrated that how people understand property in ocean resources has to do with local systems of management and meaning, rather than with the nature of the sea as such.’25 But, as Stefan Helmreich points out, these local relations of the sea presuppose the sea is ‘common’ to all who use it: water exceeds local ownership and its use therefore implies a regional moral economy.26 Alternatively, or in addition to this cultural hydrographical revisionism, the role of storytelling would need to be recognised in discourses of governance. Writing of the water worlds of South Sulawesi, Jeffner Allen promotes The practice of thinking water from water while suspended in the rapid churning, entrapments, disruptions and stillness of the most voluminous through flow of water on the planet occasions a perturbation of the mindscapes that conjoin human and marine dimensions.27 This is not simply a poetic response; it is an attempt to build a poetic anthropology, one that is not grounded in a traditional sense but which instead derives its logic from water. The discourse of this would be imitative of its subject matter: Sea foam opal bubbles scum phytoplankton increase release organic matter agitated by wind and waves spacings between words not words alone in flurries logics reassemble sometimes impossible to define frothy mixing increases then dissipates.28

Can comparison work? Some theoretical solutions to the problem of scaling up place-based ontologies have been offered. Commenting on Appadurai’s 1991 claim, that ‘the task of ethnography is the unraveling of a conundrum: What is the nature of locality, as a lived experience, in a globalized, deterritorialized world?,’29 Kraidy and Murphy suggest that the new task is to ask, ‘How can ethnography enable us to understand the ways in which various aspects of globalization take concrete forms in different local settings?’30 But Kraidy and Murphy’s application of Clifford Geertz’s influential assertion that ‘the shapes of knowledge are always ineluctably local, indivisible from their instruments and encasements’31 to the challenge of creating global communication channels is remarkable (at least to me) for its failure to recognise the conceptual value to their argument of introducing a regional filter between the local and the global. When, following Geertz’s multi-sited ethnography,

Ocean connections  93 with its emphasis ‘on overlapping particularities and discontinuities that enable a model in which global communication processes can be understood by ethnographies of the local that nonetheless maintain the global as a counterpoint,’ they advocate ‘multisite methodologies grounded in a translocal epistemology,’ their thesis seems to cry out for a theory of regionalisation.32 What allows local themes to become translocal without dissolving into the global or the abstract? How do they establish a regional envelope, an archipelago of shared interests, that is more than the sum of their parts? A strong hint towards the answer is provided by George Marcus (whom Kraidy and Murphy quote), where the work of a multi-sited ethnography is captured in a single word: ‘comparison.’ In Marcus’s formulation, comparison is clearly an act of social innovation predicated on the existence of creative ­communities – and equally creative observers: comparison emerges from putting questions to an emergent object of study whose contours, sites and relationships are not known beforehand, but are themselves a contribution to making an account that has different, complexly connected real-world sites of investigation.33 Comparison is not merely an act of discovering things in common: it envisages the appearance of new concepts, which have to do (precisely) with relatedness. In a different sphere, the improvisational willingness to work with the materials to hand, recognising their intelligence, their locatedness and their potential to self-transform corresponds to what I have called ‘material thinking.’34 The key point is that in this paradigm the ‘local’ is not a fixed body of knowledge but a creative potentiality. But how will ‘comparison’ work? To clarify the governance challenge, let’s extend the thought experiment into the translocal sea-land environments of the Timor and Arafura Seas, and, as these are borderless, to adjacent coastal and sea-dwelling communities as far apart as Tamil Nadu and the Torres Strait. True, this adds an additional complication for, if western legal systems find land-based customary tenure hard to understand and accommodate, they are even less sympathetic to water-based ontologies of place. There is the same nature/culture separation to overcome: as Sandra Pannell explains, ‘popular Western conceptualisations of seascapes tend not to recognise these spaces as culturally defined’ – with the consequence that ‘conservation strategies’ treat animals and plants as ‘resources,’ ‘endangered species,’ or ‘quotas,’ while indigenous peoples are referred to as undeveloped users, problems or are disregarded altogether.35 But this is no different from the scientific approach to Indigenous land estate management that Altman seeks to reform. The additional complication derives from the fact that Until the 1970s indigenous systems of marine tenure received little attention not just within Australian waters but worldwide … The reasons for this are complex but without doubt one of the more important is the widespread European understanding that the seas are open to all. This has resulted in the indigenous relationship to the sea being seen only

94  Ocean connections in terms of resource usage and in the many and complex indigenous systems of near-shore marine tenure worldwide becoming invisible.36 However, the complication introduced into the thought experiment by these additional variables is outweighed by the ease with which the archipelagic character of the governance challenge can be visualised. While the parties convening locally at the Garma festival clearly share common ground – a cultural circumstance reproduced regionally when different place-based knowledge communities and stakeholders come together under the auspices of the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations – the same cannot be said of, for example, Tamil Nadu fishing communities on India’s Coromandel coast; ‘the Onge, a hunting and gathering people of Little Andaman Island in the Bay of Bengal’; the Mandar communities in the Makassar Straits region of Indonesia, about whom Charles Zerner has written; such Aboriginal peoples as the Yawuru, Yanyuwa and Yolngu; or the blue-water peoples of the Torres Strait Islands. These communities have not been selected at random;37 however, the presumption of hypothesising a conceptual voyage between them needs explanation, especially when the current ethnographic orthodoxy emphasises ‘thick,’ phenomenological accounts of belief systems, social organisation and economic structures illustrating the existence of local and unique, integrated living worlds and life worlds secured through a poetic ontology. Any dilution of their specificity homogenises and is, in the context of promoting placebased knowledge, the wrong kind of comparison; besides, if a regional conference is imagined to discuss shared issues that invite the improvisation of translocal (decolonising) instruments of governance, agency must surely lie with the participants, freely choosing to meet, not with the naïve critic, heir to white settler privilege. How, on another tack, decolonising governance, can a balance be achieved between cultures of difference and presumed common interests without the result collapsing into another critique of globalisation? Geographically, politically, culturally isolated from one another, these traditional land-sea custodians nevertheless experience pressures of colonisation, westernisation, capitalistic resources exploitation and globalising communications systems in similarly unsought, dispiriting and profoundly perplexing ways. Externalities of marine resource exploitation, anthropogenically engineered environmental change and destruction, together with the relentless stigmatisation of traditional ecological knowledge as primitive, aka irrational, produce economic poverty, social anomie and political lack of leadership. These generalisations can be inductively derived from many dozens of specialist articles studying many dozens of local knowledge communities, not only in our proposed land-sea zone but globally. However, short of empirical evidence derived from the places and peoples selected, what justification exists for hypothesising the value of a new ‘real world site of investigation,’ not rooted in an island, estuary or forest but immanent when their extra-territorial, archipelagic inter-relationship is recognised?

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Representing local interests These ethical questions are also methodological ones. They foreground the politics of representation: who has the right to represent local interests – who will decide the common language that mediates between them? But they also alert us to certain self-defeating consequences of repatriating knowledge and knowledge ownership if it perpetuates its localism. If, as Altman indicates in an Australian context, Indigenous land-sea governance practices offer environmental conservation solutions that serve the national interest, it is a kind of reverse paternalism to characterise them in ways that protect their integrity at the expense of translocal or regional/national adaptation and application. It is wise to acknowledge that a particular notion of local knowledge is being deployed, one that originates in western master-planning discourse, that finds hybrid expression in ecological rhetoric, and which is foreign to Indigenous senses of place. The vulnerability of local knowledge in an urban context is well put by Ian Bentley. Noting that ‘there are serious problems inherent in design culture’s systematic devaluation of lay knowledge,’38 he recognises that the problem is not simply structural or political: it is the challenge of translation. ‘Lay’ knowledge, in contrast with the technical knowledge possessed by the expert designer or planner is tacit: ‘Most of the in-depth knowledge about urban places which lay people build up is practical, tacit knowledge, embedded in their everyday practices, and well below the threshold of consciousness.’39 But what happens when the designer becomes a locally responsive artist? The local, instead of growing in general relevance, becomes more than ever local, for, as ‘local situations… differ from one another,’ different ‘local people’ will have different ideas about the best way to maintain local identity.’40 Obviously, the situation described here and the position the politically pro-active ethnographer faces in promoting local knowledge are identical. The comparison also serves to underline the fact that the next locus of transformational Aboriginal governance arrangements is not remote islands and estuaries but urban centres. Whatever the case, though, local knowledge privileged in this way risks exacerbating community fragmentation and undermining the leadership needed to secure participatory decision-making. Within the biosciences local knowledge has a different status. Particularly in ecological studies it can be considered foundational: after all, a branch of biology that ‘studies the relationship of plants and animals to their physical and biological environment’41 is unthinkable without concrete situations or distinct physical environments. However, such environments are understood as organisational units rather than spatial distributions: the concept of an ecosystem can apply to units of variable size, such as a pond, a field or a piece of deadwood. A unit of smaller size is called a microecosystem. For example, an ecosystem can be a stone and all the life under it. A mesoecosystem could be a forest, and a macroecosystem a whole ecoregion.42

96  Ocean connections A two way relationship exists between the local and its ecological study: on the one hand, ecology is founded in the study of local relationships; on the other hand, the discovery and documentation of the ongoing and continual relationship between organisms and their environment presupposes the general validity of ecological principles. In principle, any locality is an ecosystem if the scientist chooses to define it in that way. In addition, ecosystems are implicitly or explicitly measured against an ideal of homeostasis: history, or, indeed, any external influence that disturbs the inner workings of the system threatens this equilibrium. Recognising the problem, Jon Sullivan distinguishes ‘between teaching ecological principles (species-area effects, minimum viable population size, food web ecology, etc.) and natural history (what species live in an area, who do they interact with, what are their habitat requirements, etc.)’ In Australia, and particularly the north, land and sea management are bi-cultural enterprises that seek to integrate the local knowledge of Indigenous landholders and ecological science. But this integration is fragile because, as we have seen, ecologists and environmentalists view the environment in question from the outside, while the Aboriginal stewards of ‘land’ view it from the inside. From the inside there is no distinction made between human and non-human nature: there is a creative feedback between perceptions of place and ethical action. Knowledge cannot be dissociated from the place of the person professing it. How are ‘local knowledge experts’ identified? What happens when local knowledge experts disagree? Davis and Wagner suggest that these questions demand that the ‘social researchers’ reflect on their own methodologies: ‘At a minimum it seems reasonable to expect that authors describe the means by which local expertise is identified.’43 Knowledge of this hybrid, situational and interactive kind is doubtfully transferable to policy forums or long-term planning strategy, even if, locally, it has the power of law. Scientists incorporate what they call local ecological knowledge (LEK) into their management plans, but the translation between local and general is a matter of political convenience rather than genuine epistemological convergence. It does not exclude cooperation, but it implies the redefinition of values, methods and goals on both sides.44 Evidently, the planner’s and the ecologist’s local knowledge, while different, easily translate into each other: As a tool of government policy, for example, ecology becomes the environmental face of planning. In defining such attributes of good urban design as ‘environmental sustainability’ and ‘sense of place,’ planners implicitly or explicitly invoke ecological conceptualisations of wellbeing. This raises a theoretical question – if place-making and ecology are integrated, is the effect to localise the general or to generalise the local? – whose practical expression in Xerox-effect regional development is discussed in Chapter 5. Here the point is that these western conceptualisations of place and knowledge are deductive-inductive hybrids that have to instrumentalise local knowledge and knowledge production because of their fundamental lack of a poetic ontology able to explain creativity. To some extent, the formulations ‘place-based’ or ‘local’ reflect this

Ocean connections  97 absence of a generative, mythopoetically mediated algorithm of growth and renewal – which, when it is recognised, eloquently affirms the fractal integration of the local, the regional and the cosmic. The already quoted preamble to the Yolnguwu Monuk Gapu Wänga Sea Country Plan states this poetic ontology plainly but also, significantly, in the only language appropriate to its communication, the discourse of storytelling and re-telling. Both in time and space, presencing in the here and now is a convergence of other places and journeys and other lives, past, present and future: a local meeting is nested within regional influences and cosmic patterns. Further, local knowledge conceived in this integrative fashion is comparable to other Indigenous poetic ontologies, and nothing is sacrificed in translation when it is freely acknowledged that the local knowledges, like the cultures and environments they bind, are different; for, while the manifestation of their communication (in law, song, ceremony, traditional environmental management practices) is uniquely localised, and cannot be replaced, the poetic terms of reference are held in common. Four hundred kilometres to the west of Yolngu country, the Daly River Marri Ammu people sing Tjerri, a Sea Breeze Dreaming whose performance by Maurice Tjakurl Ngulkar can be viewed online.45 ‘“Tjerri” refers both to the Dreaming (ngirrwat) for Sea Breeze, which is addressed as ‘elder brother’ (mana), and to its Dreaming site (kigatiya), a beach not far from Pumurriyi in the south of Marri Ammu country.’ In one version of the song, part of the translation runs ‘Oh, brother Sea Breeze, he is eternally manifesting himself here and now’;46 the note accompanying the online version, however, explains that in this rendition of the song, Ngulkur focuses on the waves that break at the creek mouth as a result of the action of this Dreaming. In other words, the immediacy of ngirrwat, the sense of something always laying/happening here, depends on the region of its repeated coming and becoming – the waves always arriving as a manifestation of the offshore breeze. And the form of this is not a wind compass but an endless involution. As noted before, ‘When asked what the Marri Ammu term translated as ‘he makes himself active’ meant, a leading wannga dancer, Ambrose Piarlum, ‘stood up and danced its meaning.’47 The creative, self-renewing ‘local knowledge’ principles in play here are no different from those Yolngu people understand: Magowan notes that ‘ancestral power inheres in both topography and oceanography through its own natural movements and the actions of others upon it.’48 She argues that ‘the associations between people-­as-­ ancestors and people-as-places in Yolngu thought are based on kinesis as a transformative agency where each transformation has its own dynamic and interactive agency arising from particular movement forms in the landscape and seascape.’49 She examines ancestral song subjects, explaining that ­‘kinesis is best illustrated in the perpetual ebb and flow of the sea, whereby subjects become subsumed inside objects and vice versa.’50 Here is an ontology that can be multi-sited because it is sited relationally; and one, furthermore, whose incommensurabilities when constellated ­adumbrate a distinctively archipelagic region of care.

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Five biodiversity vignettes So, returning to the sea-land communities listed before in the belief that local knowledges defined in this third way are comparable without any homogenisation occurring, five brief vignettes are presented here. These vignettes cannot meet anthropological expectations of representativeness – to do so would mean a book many times the length of this – or social science expectations of consistent theoretical terms of reference – which, in any case, pre-­assimilate the difference of the materials to a common language of quantification. Offered instead are fragments, each of which exposes a different aspect of the theme held to be in common. To draw any conclusions, it is necessary to join up the dots: partly, of course, this would be a question of going back to original sources and extending the evidentiary basis for the comparison, but partly it depends on practicing a ‘hermeneutics of metaphor’ that recognises the heuristic value of fiction. Such fictions are not confined to Indigenous or traditional ecological descriptions but characterise, equally, scientific ­assertions that have embedded in them a value judgement. The key point about them, however, is that a poetic ontology represents a poiêsis of language that ‘arises out of the connection between muthos and mimêsis’;51 and the appropriate, perhaps only, way to understand it is therefore poetically. In comparison with the conventional bridgehead used in interdisciplinary studies to navigate a transition from one disciplinary centre to another – from, in this case, a phenomenological anthropology to a metaphorical ­hermeneutics – a cluster of textual islands is presented: in the light of all we have said about the multiplicity of relations radiating and converging throughout the archipelago, readers can work out for themselves the implications of this rhetorical ploy. A hypothesis of relationality is advanced for the sole purpose of floating the possibility of a creative region, a shared ‘commons’ of care, that, in principle, materialises a claim of Indigenous local knowledges that remains immanent or potential when they are mapped onto insularising western senses of place. But the translation of this thought experiment into a model of participatory action at a distance is obviously the work of years, arising properly from a groundswell of feeling across affected communities, as a result of which, ‘Elsewhere, other islands are formed and, despite the fact that each develops its own identity, dialogues between them are effectuated and thus, they can acquire the status of political archipelago.’52 •

•

… without greater consideration of its eco-system wide effects, and far greater efforts to manage it sustainably, the by-catch supported prolongation of trawl fishing along the Coromandel Coast will lead to an ecological catastrophe for nearshore marine populations as well as the permanent loss of livelihoods for fishers53 A major problem caused by insufficient recognition of this use of indigenous knowledge by the Onge is the lack of understanding of the ecosystem among the Andaman Government which has led to natural resource devastation. This in turn affects the pattern of livelihood of

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•

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Onges. For example, a decision of the government to settle Onge in a biodiversity rich area such as Dugong Creek has led to heavy deforestation. The plan to settle these nomadic forest dwellers in one place has changed their way of living and livelihood, and effectively their population growth. Further, their traditional way of living is getting eroded. The knowledge divide between the Onge and ‘modern society’ causes the situation to worsen and puts them at an even bigger disadvantage: they are not able to adapt to modern knowledge, but simultaneously lose their indigenous knowledge system54 Sulawesi has the largest coral reef area in Indonesia, at the epicentre of worldwide marine biodiversity, but is one of the areas most threatened in Southeast Asia by destructive fishing practices … Cyanide use leads to the death of coral and associated reef dwelling organisms, and is leading to the progressive over-fishing of high-value reef fish throughout Indonesia and beyond. The net economic loss to Indonesia over the next 20 years due to cyanide fishing has been estimated at greater than US$ 920 million55 A further aspect of this care for the country is the sustainability of resources. Further south around the Roper River and Numbulwar, the number of crabbers operating is far higher than in Blue Mud Bay (approximately 25–30 licences of the 49 in the NT, according to a Land Council estimate), and the crabs are rapidly being depleted in this zone…. The Dholupuyngu are well aware of the overfishing occurring further south, and do not want it happening near them. These concerns are sometimes pragmatically expressed, as people speak of ensuring that they have enough crabs for their own subsistence needs, or of operating a commercial crab fishery themselves in the future. Yet the Mud Crab is an important Ancestor in the area, and so this pragmatic expression is part of a broader concern about the health of the country and the creatures, human, animal, and Ancestral, that live there56 They took what they needed. They didn’t exploit the sea or the sea-bed and go out and “in one big rush” grab all the mai. For the mai of the sea-ground is not “inert matter”; it is part of a living cosmos to which a person’s relationship is not uni-directional but “matched” … Mai as pearl shell … has a meaning in itself becoming interchangeable with money, a new thing one step removed from the reciprocal relations of life both natural and social. Mai is a metaphor for exchange gifts carrying within it the ensemble of meanings of existence; pearl shell carries the “thingness” of commodity exchange.57

Comparable ontologies These are vignettes of markedly different detail, disciplinary perspective and even discursive genre. They exhibit the same overheard partiality and incompleteness that is experienced in a social gathering associated with a meeting.

100  Ocean connections Place the magnifying glass over any one of them, though, and a distinctive cultural ecology of local knowledge, place-based practices and conflicts with colonialist legacies come into view. Hidden inside the apparently bland call to support eco-system sustaining management practices along the Coromandel coast are, for example, Maarten Bavinck’s much-cited articles detailing the ongoing conflict between fishermen law and the state law imposed by the Fisheries Department. When Bavinck was writing, no effort was being made ‘to discover whether the apprehensions fishermen expressed about the use of the kachaavalai [snail net] had a scientific foundation.’58 He concluded, ‘It is clear that, although state fisheries law theoretically applies to the same situations as fishermen law, the two legal systems lead a largely separate existence.’59 While ‘Economic concerns, which include notions of ecological harm, play an important role in fishermen regulations,’ the State ‘approaches the disputes which come to its notice mainly from the viewpoint of conflict resolution.’60 Probe deeper, though, and the local situation is, our vignette indicates, a by-product of ‘the degradation and depletion of a renewable resource,’ associated in this case with the coming of industrial trawling to the Coromandel coast61 – in other words, the local/regional coastline is nested inside the regional/international linear ecology of sea-land livelihoods extending around the Bay of Bengal. Within a regional biodiversity perspective that recognises the importance of associated knowledge systems and cultural practices, Coromandel concerns join up with Onge experiences of disadvantage in the Andamans. But it would be naïve in the extreme (although I have observed many comparable consultative faux pas) to imagine people from these or other coastal communities (diversely influenced by colonial, neo-­ colonial and syncretist religious regimes) find common ground in a Marxist critique of the abuse of the means of production. A more plausible ground might be the seabed: as part of the living seascape, its care matches society’s self-care. It is an onion-ring logic. The outside ring of the argument is one environmental conservationists grasp: the sustainability case that Murray Islander Kebi Bala makes – ‘They didn’t e­ xploit ­ achaavalai – ‘the the sea or the sea-bed’ – is the same used to condemn the k snails targeted by the kachaavalai fishers were argued to play an essential role in maintaining fish stocks in inshore waters. If the snails were removed, fish stocks were likely to decline in the inshore area’62 – but inside both is another argument, about the environment of labour and the nature of a sustainable and sustaining economy based in an exchange rate or ‘reciprocal relations … antithetical to physical exploitation’: ‘Ten people shouldn’t benefit at the expense of general welfare.’63 And inside that is perhaps an existential identification based on a multisensory immersion in place that government agencies are unlikely to recognise and even less able to quantify. For the other ecological argument for banning seabed snail catching was odour: ‘the smell of the bait (which invariably consists of decomposing meat, generally of ray fish) was believed to have a negative influence on fish stocks in the surrounding area.’64 If, in order to be a successful fisherman you have to think

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like a fish, it is no less important that the fish you imagine react like humans. Writing about the cultural value that the Onge give to smell, David Howe, explains that ‘Space is conceived of by the Onge not as a static area within which things happen but as a dynamic environmental flow’ and, correspondingly, a ‘smellscape’ is ‘not a fixed structure but a fluid pattern that can shift according to differing atmospheric conditions.’ The way the wind blows shapes diurnal patterns – the same word, kwayaye, is used for ‘both the emission of odours and the ebb and flow of tides’ – and seasonal cycles, a calendar of scents determining when they hunt in the forest and when they frequent the coast.66 The seabed, the tides, the winds – all are ‘elsewhere’ in relation to the human subject, coming to him and her from all points of the compass, and all, in their mythopoetic transformation, bring about sense, the meaning of being in the here and now corresponding to what Ricoeur regards as the ‘most intimate and ultimate abode’ of metaphor as ‘the copula of the verb to be,’ when ‘The metaphorical “is” at once signifies both “is not” and “is like,”’67 a formula that also comprehends the archipelagic paradox of comparing incommensurables. Within an archipelago of comparable ontologies, finer grain differences flourish. While the economically and socially stratified fishing communities of Tamil Nadu are presented here exclusively in terms of offshore sea management, Onge and Yolngu operate bilaterally along the coast. The Mandarese people, ‘historically and culturally closely related to their cognate relatives in South Sulawesi,’ have seven upstream kingdoms and seven estuary kingdoms. Occupying and regularly negotiating a zone of fluctuating difference has, as we have seen, epistemological consequences: you see yourself and your relationship with the world in different ways. As Marcia Langton writes, ‘Along with other features of the natural world, the estuarine zone is not just a bio-physical feature, but a metaphorical reference to knowledge.’68 Noting that in the Yawuru community of Broome ‘Use of land is not distinct from use of the sea,’69 Patrick Sullivan emphasises the complementarity of environmental and social behaviour: Off the coast there are areas of shallows stretching for several kilometres out to sea which are mud flats at extreme low tides and permit wading to reefs and sandbars. It is an area, then, where water, salt and fresh, is a constant, and constantly changing features of the people’s lives.70 Responsive to these circumstances, ‘the adaptation favoured by the Yawuru is flexibility in the distribution of land and sea rights supported by an ideology of relatedness and common property among those of the same and related languages.’71 Yolngu people understand that the vitality of places resides in their humid potential to interconnect, in their possessing a track that embodies their vitality, so that places come alive through the spirit that moves across and through them. ‘The two names for the open sea are the names of multiple ancestral spirits that flow along the coast to join with the

102  Ocean connections waters of the open sea.’72 We are told that ‘The perceptions of water are fluid and ambiguities depending on context and a person’s ancestral affiliation reflecting the many faces of those looking at it.’73 The Manybuynga and Rulyapa currents are forms of connectivity, not so much in-between places as stretches of vitality. They cannot be defined in terms of hard-and-fast boundaries: they cross salt- and fresh-water edges, walls with interiors like snakes. Moving inside themselves, the currents are the jointure of the sea, the darker colour suggesting muscular depth.

The metaphor in common As metaphorical references to knowledge, different land-sea environments and working relationships with these, produce different poetic ecologies: to compare them across the Bay of Bengal, the Arafura or Timor Seas is not to archetype or essentialise them but to archipelagise them, that is, to acknowledge a discursively diverse and inventive region. Traditional stories become in their retelling and enactment the basis of new poetic strategies: mythos in mimêsis transforms poiêsis. But to appreciate the significance of this in decolonising governance, the outside observer will have to learn something more than respectful acknowledgement; they will have to enter into the dramaturgy of meeting and exchange and understand the ontologically metaphorical nature of communication, where multisensory modes of cognition and sense-making and physical environments are ‘matched.’ This is the challenge Charles Zerner partly sets himself when, in his work with Mandar communities in the Makassar Straits region of Indonesia, he explores different ways of talking, expressing and ‘sounding’ the environment, arguing, Cultural discourses, images, analogies, and tropes about the ­environment – the way(s) in which the world is constituted and reconstituted through talk, back-talk, and cross-talk – create the basis of new alliances, realignments of ‘interests’, and new forms of imagining the marine realm, authority, and struggles over access and control … By auditing the sounds, cadences, and concerns of fishermen, jurists, and capitalizers, fishing the Makassar Strait for meanings, rights, sites, and creatures in the late 1980s and early 1990s – I hope to evoke the polyphony, the overlapping and mirroring, and the back-talk that scuttles across these seas and shores, and the emergence of new ways of imagining authority and asserting rights in the marine environment.74 Here local knowledge consists in a theory and practice of communication: Zerner’s friend and fishing companion, Nuhung, describes how captain and fishing boat owner Pak Hadari speaks to the fish: his prayer is like shortwave radio broadcast, because shortwave broadcasts are not heard by other people. Of course I can hear you if you are

Ocean connections  103 speaking out loud. But there are other ways of making words … I can call within my mouth and you cannot hear me …. Shortwave radios have a cable, right? Hadari has a line connected to the fish traps. The line from our boat to the buaro [net] is like a shortwave cable. So Hadari holds the rope and speaks with his mouth [closed]. His calls cannot be heard by other people and he doesn’t use his audible voice. When you make a silent prayer like this, it is like whispering. You can communicate, but other people do not hear what is being said. Why, Zerner asks, is the prayer silent? It is done to make a direct voice connection with the raja [the flying fish]. It isn’t possible to live without a connection. And all connections must be made by instruments. We use cable to make the connection. And only then is the connection direct. It’s like the broadcast of radio messages from PALAPA [the Indonesian telecommunications satellite].75 The point here is that the politics is in the poetics: how their images are constructed and delivered, and how Mandar practitioners of these arts believe these images reach and move men, spirits, fish, and ancestral authorities – are important aspects of Mandar politics and poetics in the marine realm. In extraordinary performances of calling flying fish as well as larger, pelagic fish such as tuna, tone, pitch, pacing, and poetics are part of the politics of power and the exercise of authority over the seas.76 Metaphorically mediated local knowledge extends the definition of communication. Based in a primary recognition or reciprocity between humans and between humans and the non-human world, it detects messages through all the senses. All of these messages, carried on the wind, resident in the endless fluctuation of the waves, caused to vibrate in the here-and-now toand-fro of human activity are intensely localised in their interpretation. As representations, whose rich ecology of sense-making can be reported by sensitive outside observers, they have a phenomenological purity, a sense of place that is unique, but as metaphors, that is, as tokens of a dramaturgy of the life world, whose function is communication in the complexly emergent way discussed by Zerner, they are techniques of exchange that can be recognised regionally. When exported, they are not leached of their figurative mass – reduced again to traditional ecological knowledge useful in framing biodiversity protocols – but stirred into a richer realm of storytelling; the commonalities that emerge are performative and participatory, and it is likely that the outcomes will be an enlarged network of reciprocities based on practices of difference. When the focus passes from the poetic worldview to the poetics of its making, the character and function of communication

104  Ocean connections also changes: a choreography of speaking positions emerges that resembles the turbulent passages we have attributed to the geographical archipelago; the fixed or insular identities attributed to local knowledge holders yield to interactive and situated practices of relatedness. In this context, Sue ­Jackson et al. discuss ‘A popular metaphor used by Yolngu people from north-east Arnhem Land [that] reflects an appreciation of the interdependence of ­water bodies and illustrates the advantages Aboriginal people ­p erceive from ­collaborative research and management endeavours’: In the Yolngu worldview, relationships between people and country, including the spiritual elements and natural phenomena, are divided and ordered into two moieties Dhuwa and Yirritja. Garma is described as both a swirling estuarine whirlpool and the ‘philosophical enterprise’ of collaborative endeavour between Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge traditions.77

Navigating eurocentrism But how is collaboration to occur outside the present Eurocentric environmental management frameworks?78 In their 2009 article, Yunupingu and Muller offer a Yolngu ontological approach to rethinking sea country and its management, one captured in the statement by Laklak Marika, a senior Rirratjingu clan leader of the Yolngu, that This water is saltwater. And in that water lies our sacred Law. Not just near the foreshore. We sing from the shore to where the clouds rise on the horizon. Everything that exists in the sea has a place in the sacred songs, seaweed, floating anemones, turtle, fish etc. The songs follow them out from the deep water into the beach.79 Here is a poetic region whose subjective, intangible and highly distinct values … do not easily translate into Euro-centric environmental management frameworks, which have a utilitarian focus and are highly reliant on objectification, quantification and monetary valuations as a basis for resource allocation, regulation and management. What then? Acknowledging ‘the ontological divide,’ the writers call for ‘An improved mutual understanding of each other’s way of looking at the sea’ as ‘the basis of a lasting and more comprehensive reconciliation between us in this region’: ‘Our political leaders must educate themselves so that they can act as effective interpreters for both sides and make knowledge of each other’s systems more generally available.’80 But how? As presented here there

Ocean connections  105 is no common ground. The stories they eloquently summarise are ‘a map of the Dreaming,’ the Law, but ‘Many whitefellas say it is just a myth.’81 No common ground can emerge here unless two things happen: the ontological claim of mythopoietic place-making is taught, and, as a corollory, the mythopoetic construction of science and associated geographical, planning and management discourses is recognised. Without a re-education in poetics, the politics of power imbalance will not change. Further, without a grasp of the ethical foundation of the relationality metaphorically mediated through mythopoetic story re-telling, the scaled, archipelagic character of what Minoru Hokari, writing about the historical practices of the Gurindji of Daguragu (Northern Territory), calls ‘the ethics of spatial movement’ will remain unrealised: ‘Because Dreaming sites and tracks are always connected to other people and countries, the existence of your “self” and country is guaranteed only by the interaction with other peoples and their countries.’82 Further, ‘As your “self” is relationalised through the web of connection, knowledge is also relationalised.’ Authentic knowledge does not spread out ‘like radiation from one place to all places,’ it ‘happens anywhere and mobility brings it to everywhere in all directions.’ In this world of active information exchange and production, ‘different stories which contradict each other do not conflict, but simply coexist.’83 Siting history at the place of encounter changes the nature of the meeting place. The event of relating – considered both as a discursive exchange and as an interaction – establishes difference as the occasion of communication. In managing the coexistence of things originating in different directions and distances, places are already metaphorical constructions. In this conception, the scaling-up and scaling-down of knowledge associated with a decolonised governance model is not stretched between the local and the global in the manner rather implied by Hokari; rather, it is regions all the way down and all the way up. Only conceived like this can history be simultaneously ‘situated’ and ‘happening repeatedly, to anyone, anywhere, at any time.’84 The world that corresponds to this is the one William Blake ascribes to the spirit of Milton, characterized by a vortical time in which all directions and seasons coexist in one infinite plane. Its geometry is Riemannian, a globe whose surface is without edge, without centre. Its bios consisting in a movement whose most familiar manifestation is the wave breaking on the shore. When Karin Amimoto Ingersoll promotes a ‘seascape epitemology’ embodied in the surfer’s experience of the wave, she certainly identifies ‘oceanic literacy’ with ‘Expanding spatial knowledge to include the stars, the deep corals, and transient winds … the knowledge of stones, birds, sharks, rains, planets and gravitational pull,’85 but the scaling-up and ­scaling-outwards is not conceived within western cartographical parameters; a rhythmic geography is envisaged, ‘a poiesis of nonlinear movement between spaces and times,’86 that, in my vocabulary, is archipelagic. Ingersoll, writing from a Hawai’ian Kanaka perspective, finds, like Michel Serres, that she inhabits ‘a living syrrhesis’ where sea and islands

106  Ocean connections form a continuous movement form; yet out of the hurricane, she suggests, the surfer can lift what others let pass unperceived – Oceanic literacy also requires listening to waves formed thousands of miles away from the bowels of whirling winds. Surfers are trained to hear specific noises in nature that might sound like a cacophony of violently crashing water but which reveal distinct patters of informative choruses when heard by an adept ear.87 But this does not imply a separation between near and far. As the contributors to a number of volumes on customary marine tenure have pointed out, seascapes are ‘blanketed with history and imbued with names, myths and legends.’88 Ingersoll translates this into a kinesthetic knowledge rendered by the Ōlelo Hawai’i term ho’omoeā, meaning ‘to imagine deliberately.’89 Sailing with the seascape, Pacific Islanders understand that the islands and reefs are mobile, constantly expanding and contracting with the movements of their indigenous inhabitants … Within this indigenous understanding of space, the canoe is the stationary point as the islands flow past on the sea.90 This is the Carolinian concept of etak where ‘The islands are pulled to the canoe as the stars and waves pass by.’91 Would that the luckless Aelius Aristides, discussed in Chapter 4, who finds himself in a sea where once you have entered, ‘before and aft, starboard and port, everywhere the same, your view ends in an island, so that at first you are in doubt what course you should take through them,’92 had had to hand the etak navigational technique. But the point here is that in its integration of an ethics of spatial movement and a techne of steersmanship, Ingersoll’s seascape epistemology and archipelagic thinking look remarkably alike.

Practices of encounter At the beginning of this chapter I proposed a thought experiment – a ­scaling-up of local knowledges to achieve a regional approach to biodiversity governance. Many caveats followed, mainly motivated by a desire to avoid the self-contradiction of neo-colonialist interpellation of the subaltern. But, as should be clear by now, the capacity of local place-based knowledge holders to participate translocally in initiatives designed to protect intertwined cultural and environmental sustainability is highly-developed: connectivity, recognition, relationality, reciprocity – these are not simply approximate synonyms for incorporating the stranger into one’s midst but distinct stages of any diplomatic protocol dictated outside the territorialist demands of the state. The real problem of translation centres on the incapacity of western epistemologies to understand metaphor. The professional training of social

Ocean connections  107 scientists and environmental scientists leaves our powerful managerial and policy-development elites essentially illiterate; beyond the most basic skills in report writing and data analysis, nothing is known about the way texts are made, circulate and refer. Even the modest intertextual weave of the present chapter is likely to encounter resistance: in counterpointing different ethnographic sources, in convening different kinds or genres of testimony, in building a fiction (the imagined meeting) in order to present figuratively the challenge represented by two incommensurable ontologies, a textual literacy is assumed. Yet, not only is the interpretative sophistication advocated here, which is the basis of storytelling, absent, it is actively discouraged. Hence, while overwhelming evidence of this exists – from Magowan’s simple ‘In legal arguments about sea rights there has been an emphasis upon pragmatic or utilitarian approaches separate from issues of ontology’93 to its corollary – ‘The dominant images in the literary and political arenas assume that “caring for country” is exclusively about land management’94 – proposals for poetic re-education are non-existent. The best that is sought on either side is a kind of translation: ‘some researchers and Aboriginal land managers in northern Australia are seeking a form of interaction and integration across cultures which exhibit “parallel, coexisting, but different, ways of knowing.”’95 But the mechanism for comparing, let alone integrating, different and, as we have seen, incommensurable ways of knowing is left unexplained. Of course, there are convergences. Occupying the Sir Edward Pellew Islands and the long adjacent coastlines and intermediate shallow waters, the Yanyuwa people of the south-west Gulf of Carpentaria have, in the language of John Bradley, developed ‘an economy and traditions which focus heavily on its marine and nearby terrestrial resources,’96 and there appears to be a promising convergence between Indigenous and eco-scientific classifications of country: The Yanyuwa categorise their physical landscape in a manner which we would recognise, that is, divisions according to various land units, whereby the combination of vegetation, soils and topography provide distinct areas. …. Such a sense of land units as discussed by the Gigingali and the Yanyuwa people approximates a system developed by the CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation] in 1953. … Briefly, it may be said that western biogeographers classify the land into units so as to reflect what they regard as ecological realities.97 Yet, in the end, superficial similarities disguise deeper differences: ‘That the Yanyuwa and the biogeographers end up with similar schemes is not that surprising, because both schemes relate to a commonly perceived “real” environment, but the Yanyuwa scheme is nonetheless richer and more animated in its conception,’ and, while the functions of the land units devised by the Yanyuwa and the CSIRO may be broadly comparable, their functions are somewhat different, reflecting ‘very different ways in which knowledge is

108  Ocean connections embedded within cultural structures and processes.’98 Subsequently, as part of the preparation of the Yanyuwa Sea Country Plan – an environmental management plan similar to the Yolngu’s Dhimurru scheme – Bradley wrote ‘Barni-Wardimantha Awara – Don’t Spoil the Country’ in which the significance of Yijan, ‘the relationships between people and their environment and the Law (narou-yuwa) which sets out the realm of Yanyuwa experience,’ is explained.99 ‘The Yanyuwa people call themselves li-Anthawirriyarra, a term often glossed as “the people of the sea”, but the real meaning of the term is “a people whose spiritual origins are derived from the sea”.’100 The feeling of living inside this world is beautifully conveyed by Elder Dinah Norman Marrngawi: Our songs and ceremony are also in sea, they are running through the sea both along the bottom of the sea and they also rise and travel on the surface of the sea. White people think the sea is empty that it has no Law, but the Law and the ceremony is there in the salt water, in the fish, in the sea birds, the dugong and the turtle, it is there and we knowledgeable people are holding it.101 After this cultural interlude, the Sea Country Plan reverts to biodiversity style and structure, presenting an impressively detailed strategy for managing and protecting a unique and complex suite of interlocking ecological units, but there is no mention of a comparable cultural literacy and pedagogy initiative securing the poetic relationships that underwrite and motivate environmental conservation. In a later book, Bradley reflects on his own evolving comprehension of kujika, ‘the stories that the Yanyuwa tell of the ancestors, the country, and the relationships that exist among them.’ After an ill-advised boat journey, he is informed that the strong south wind that has sprung up comes from the seven sisters; he has annoyed them by sailing too close to their place: ‘Even discussions of weather involved moral dimensions.’102 I could not help comparing this education with the solitary meditation Mitchell Thomashow shares at the beginning of Bringing the Biosphere Home (2001). It is a Thoreau moment in rural New Hampshire when the author registers the ‘vast and mysterious’ biosphere in the wind that ‘rustles through the trees and cools my body.’ ‘The wind is right here,’ he reflects, ‘But where does it come from? How far has it travelled? What atmospheric conditions created it? What message does it bring?’ And out of this realisation that the wind connects this place to ‘integrated biospheric cycles that circle the earth,’103 Thomashow develops his ‘place-based perceptual ecology,’ the basis of learning ‘how to move beyond that place and explore the relationship between places,’ explaining that ‘you practice biospheric perception by virtue of three interconnected pathways – natural history and local ecology, the life of the imagination, and spiritual deliberation.’104 In the context of the many ancestor stories told about the winds, the artificial solitude of Thomashow’s epiphany is painfully obvious: a Shelleyan moment of spiritual identification with nature disguises the absence

Ocean connections  109 in the Judeo-Christian tradition of a developed environmental poetics, one well able to answer the questions of origin, direction and meaning. To overcome a Cartesian self-absencing from nature, Thomashow proceeds to lay out a wonderfully rich series of place-based educational exercises, proposing from these radiating circles of influence – ‘You begin to perceive patterns of change that stretch from soil micro-organisms to global energy budgets,’105 but the initial identification of the place of study with an ecologically envisaged local knowledge stems from a western metaphysics of sovereignty that subordinates relationality to separation, mobility to stasis.

Consulting the experts Who would dispute the value of ‘building metaphors, constructing dialogues, talking about the moral and ethical implications of their observations,’106 but wouldn’t it be a good idea to consult the experts first? To acknowledge that around the globe they have been encouraging perception and facilitating wonder for thousands of years? Following this, the object of knowledge changes. It is not simply that relations are studied: our own relationships come into the picture. In the formulation of Cree scholar Shawn Wilson, The shared aspect of an Indigenous ontology and epistemology is relationality (relationships do not merely shape reality, they are reality). The shared aspect of an indigenous axiology and methodology is accountability in relationships.107 A creative region congruent with this is an archipelago which, whether imagined geographically or politically, is a relational figure. The three features that define the archipelago are the is/is not condition of self/other relations, centrelessness and illimitability. Accountability in this context is the fulfilment of the ‘biospheric’ obligations implicit in the relational concepts. Biospheric education begins at home in another sense when it undertakes the task of teaching relationality as reality, and deriving from this axioms of practice. The identification of knowledge with ceremony, the recognition that what is learned is inseparable from the way in which it is learned, is extended to the imagination of the meeting: the creative region is not a map of the archipelago, it is wherever people behave accountably, their negotiation of exchange carrying within it the ‘messages’ from elsewhere. The introduction of this consciousness into boardrooms, let alone the apparently more pluralist discourses of the conference, would bring about a discursive revolution, an immediate tethering of knowledge holders (of all kinds, technical, moral, historical and cultural) to their origins and to the fulfilment of their self-identifications through protocols of mutual recognition. Called for is a choreography of encounter, a dramaturgy of environmental design, that remembers as well as imagines. For even if a reconciliation of different life paths is achieved, in which local knowledges share in the creation of a larger movement form, the creative region, it will be baseless unless it inscribes its origins into the calligraphy of the future.

110  Ocean connections The motivation to change, whether revolutionary or conservative, is the attachment to past pleasures and pains – the life path as passage, sorge or passion. The Yanyuwa Sea Country Plan is motivated by distress: it aims to limit the degradation of a synthesis of relationships, not simply the ecological impact of over fishing.108 Ingersoll explains this double perspective, backwards and forwards in time, linked along the lifepath, when she writes that ‘The ethics of oceanic literacy travels like a wave’: ‘it is formed from the vertically deep Satawalese ocean of historical and cultural roots, and is shaped into a new and unique Kanaka potential when it hits the horizontal land.’109 And, continuing the metaphor, which is not a metaphor but a methodology, she sees in the shore arrival the possibility of cross-cultural ontological reconciliation: after all, the first deep sea voyage from Hawai’i to Tahiti, aboard a sixty-two foot double-hulled canoe, named Hōkūle’a, only occurred in 1973, and, in a typical double movement, in 2007 Hōkūle’a set out on a voyage back to the island nation of Satawal in Micronesia where the master builder and navigator responsible for the canoe’s design came from. The voyage was ‘an ethical movement’ to honour Mau Piailug and the role his knowledge had played in building ‘Pacific Island interdependence and inclusion,’ but it was also forward-looking: stopping at the Marshall Islands and Chuuk, ‘physically touching these Oceanic neighbours with their message of Oceanic indigenous empowerment,’ it ‘(re)drew cultural lines that (re)aligned Oceania, travelling across the Euro-American boundaries separating Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia on a static map.’110 In this way, she writes, ‘Epistemology and ontology are reinterpreted by historic sources through a contemporary lens.’111 The issue was never the recreation of a lost and separate world: ‘Hōkūle’a was constructed with modern materials without losing its essence or its impact.’112 It is about the embodiment of knowing in practice, being like a wave that is simultaneously an energy front and the experience of being carried along. ‘It is the literacy within the act that constructs and creates a sensibility through spurts of agility and acumen steeped in an embodied awareness of place.’113 In terms of developing new relationships, the wave is the primordial approach to the other; order out of chaos occurs where it breaks and the encounter with the other salvaging a region of care is simply the reality.

Notes 1 Sami Rehman, ‘Examining Place-Based Governance Principles in Two Atlantic Canada Protected Areas,’ Masters Thesis, University of Waterloo, 2006, 23. 2 Sami Rehman, ‘Examining Place-Based Governance Principles in Two Atlantic Canada Protected Areas,’ 23–24. 3 Sami Rehman, ‘Examining Place-Based Governance Principles in Two Atlantic Canada Protected Areas,’ 24. 4 Sami Rehman, ‘Examining Place-Based Governance Principles in Two Atlantic Canada Protected Areas,’ 32.

Ocean connections  111 5 Sami Rehman, ‘Examining Place-Based Governance Principles in Two Atlantic Canada Protected Areas,’ 32–33. 6 Sami Rehman, ‘Examining Place-Based Governance Principles in Two Atlantic Canada Protected Areas,’ 36. 7 Sami Rehman, ‘Examining Place-Based Governance Principles in Two Atlantic Canada Protected Areas,’ 36. 8 Michael J. Adams and Anthony English, ‘Biodiversity is a whitefella word: changing relationships between Aboriginal people and the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service,’ in The Power of Knowledge: The Resonance of Tradition, L. Taylor, G. R. Ward, G. Henderson, R. Davis and L. Wallis (eds.), Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005, 86–97. 9 Michael J. Adams and Anthony English, ‘Biodiversity is a whitefella word: changing relationships between Aboriginal people and the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service,’ 86. 10 Sami Rehman, ‘Examining Place-based Governance Principles in Two Atlantic Canada Protected Areas,’ 34. 11 Michael J. Adams and Anthony English, ‘Biodiversity is a whitefella word: changing relationships between Aboriginal people and the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service,’ 87. 12 Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation, Yolnuwu Monak Gapu Wana Sea Country Plan: A Yolngu Vision and Plan for Sea Country Management in North-East Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Nhulunbuy: Northern Territory, 2006. 13 Helen Verran, ‘Contemporary Australian NRM as Nature/Culture ­Dichotomy Amnesia: How Can We Do Politics of Nature without Politics or Nature?,’ presentation at ‘Performing Nature at World’s Ends,’ Department of Social Anthropology (SAI), University of Oslo, Norway, August 29–31, 2007. Useful contextualisation for this chapter is also found in: Djawa Yunupingu and Samantha Muller, ‘Cross-cultural challenges for indigenous sea country management in Australia,’ Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, vol. 16, no. 3, 2009, 158–167. 14 Bill Fogarty and Mathew Ryan, ‘Monday in Maningrida,’ in Coercive Reconciliation: Stabilise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia, J. Altman and M. Hinkson (eds.), North Carlton, VIC: Arena Publications, 2007, 263–270, 264. 15 Bill Fogarty and Mathew Ryan, ‘Monday in Maningrida,’ 266. 16 Bill Fogarty and Mathew Ryan, ‘Monday in Maningrida,’ 267. 17 Jon Altman, ‘In the name of the Market?,’ in Coercive Reconciliation: Stabilise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia, J. Altman and M. Hinkson (eds.), North Carlton, VIC: Arena Publications, 2007, 307–321, 317. 18 French can express these ideas lexically: ‘Reconnaître has a range of meanings that includes “to know” and “to know again.”’ Likewise, the verb rassembler: ‘The putatively “first” assembly of human beings can be thought of only as a reassembly. Similarly, the putatively “first” cognition of another as a subject must be thought of as a recognition.’ Michael Davis, ‘The Essence of Babel: Rousseau on the Origin of Languages,’ 4, Footnote 11, viewed January 8, 2011, https://udallas.edu/braniff/_documents/davis_m_rousseau_eol.pdf. 19 Michael Davis, ‘The Essence of Babel: Rousseau on the Origin of Languages,’ 4. 20 Marika-Munnungirritj and Michael J. Christie, ‘Yolngu metaphors for learning,’ International Journal of the Sociology of Language, vol. 113, no. 1, 1995, 59–62, 59. 21 Michael Christie, ‘Yolngu language habitat: Ecology, identity and law in an aboriginal society,’ in The Habitat of Australia’ s Indigenous Languages: Past, Present and Future, G. Leitner and I. G. Malcolm (eds.), Berlin, New York: Mouton De Gruyter, 2007, 57–78, 74, 75.

112  Ocean connections 22 Michael Davis, ‘Critical Response to Paul Carter “Developing Local ­K nowledge: What Translates?,”’ October 2014, 1–12, 6. 23 Michael Davis, ‘Critical Response to Paul Carter “Developing Local ­K nowledge: What Translates?,”’ 6–8. 24 Jon Altman, ‘Indigenous futures on country,’ in People on Country: Vital Landscapes, Indigenous Futures, J. Altman and S. Kerins (eds.), Sydney, NSW: The Federation Press, 2012, 213–231, 230. 25 Stefan Helmreich, ‘Nature/Culture/Seawater,’ American Anthropologist, vol. 113, no. 1, 2013, 132–144, 136. 26 Stefan Helmreich, ‘Nature/Culture/Seawater,’ 136 and endnote 13. 27 Jeffner Allen, ‘Reef Passions: Postcolonial Aesthetics between Coral Reefs,’ ­unpublished ms. quoted by permission, 119. 28 Jeffner Allen, ‘Reef Passions: Postcolonial Aesthetics between Coral Reefs,’ 117. 29 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Global ethnoscapes: Notes and queries for a transnational anthropology,’ in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, M. Fox (ed.), Santa Fe, NM: School for American Research Press, 1991, 191–210, 196. 30 Marwan M. Kraidy and Patrick D. Murphy, ‘Shifting Geertz: Toward a theory of translocalism in global communication studies,’ in Global Communication Studies. Communication Theory, vol. 18, no. 3, 2008, 335–355, 339. 31 Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge, New York: Basic Books, 1983, 4. 32 Marwan M. Kraidy and Patrick D. Murphy, ‘Shifting Geertz: Toward a theory of translocalism in global communication studies,’ 349–351. 33 George E. Marcus, Ethnography through Thick & Thin, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998, 86. Quoted by Kraidy & Murphy. 34 Paul Carter, Material Thinking, the Theory and Practice of Creative Research, Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 2004, 185. 35 Sandra Pannell, ‘Homo Nullius or “Where Have All the People Gone”? Refiguring marine management and conservation approaches,’ The Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 7, no. 1, 1996, 21–42, 28. 36 Nicolas Peterson and Bruce Rigsby, ‘Introduction,’ in Customary Marine Tenure in Australia, Oceania Monograph 48, N. Peterson and B. Rigsby (eds.), Sydney, NSW: Oceania Publications, 1998, 1–21, 3. 37 See Paul Carter, ‘Local knowledge and the challenge of regional governance,’ and ‘Dry thinking, wet places: Conceptualising fluid states,’ in Northern Research Futures, T. Brewer, A. Dale, L. Rosenmann et al. (eds.), Canberra: ANU epress, 2018. 38 Ian Bentley, Urban Transformations, Power, People and Urban Design, London: Routledge, 1999, 232. 39 Ian Bentley, Urban Transformations, 233. 40 Ian Bentley, Urban Transformations, 235. 41 ‘Ecology,’ viewed April 14, 2016, www.aboutbioscience.org/topics/ecology. 42 www.aboutbioscience.org/topics/ecology. 43 Anthony Davis and John R. Wagner, ‘Who knows? On the importance of identifying “Experts” when researching local ecological knowledge,’ Human Ecology, vol. 31, no. 3, September 2003, 463–489, 486. 44 See Nicolas Houde, ‘The six faces of traditional ecological management: Challenges and opportunities for Canadian co-management arrangements,’ Ecology and Society, vol. 12, no. 2, 34. [online] URL: www.ecology andsociety.org/vol12/ iss2/art34/. 45 ‘Tjerri,’ viewed December 2, 2017, http://wangga.library.usyd.edu.au/repertories/ ma-yawa-wangga/140. 46 Allan Marett, Songs, Dreamings & Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia, ­Middletown: Conn Wesleyan University Press, 2005, 145.

Ocean connections  113 47 Allan Marett, Songs, Dreamings & Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia, 28. 48 Fiona Magowan, ‘Waves of knowing: Polymorphism and co-substantive ­essences in Yolngu sea cosmology,’ The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, vol. 21, no. 1, 2001, 22–35, 22–23. 49 Fiona Magowan, ‘Waves of knowing: Polymorphism and co-substantive ­essences in Yolngu sea cosmology,’ 23. 50 Fiona Magowan, ‘Waves of knowing: Polymorphism and co-substantive ­essences in Yolngu sea cosmology,’ 23. 51 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, the Creation of Meaning in Language, R. Czerny, K. McLaughlin and J. Costello (trans.), London: Routledge, 2003, 5–6. 52 Leopold Lambert, ‘The Political Archipelago: For a New Paradigm of Territorial Sovereignty,’ The Funambulist, July 22, 2013, viewed March 5, 2014, http:// thefunambulist.net/2013/07/22/politics-the-political-archipelago-for-a-newparadigm-of-territorial-sovereignty/. 53 Aaron Savio Lobo et al., ‘Commercialising bycatch can push a fishery beyond economic extinction,’ Conservation Letters, vol. 3, no. 4, August 2010, 277–285. Lobo also contributes to the February 1, 2017 The Guardian article, ‘Bay of Bengal: Depleted Fish Stocks and Huge Dead Zone Signal Tipping Point,’ www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/31/bay-bengaldepleted-fish-stocks-pollution-climate-change-migration. 54 A. Bhattacharyya, ‘Using participatory GIS to bridge knowledge divides among the Onge of little Andaman Island, India,’ Knowledge Management for Development Journal, vol. 2, no. 3, 2006, 97–110, 102. 55 Matthew R. P. Briggs, ‘Destructive fishing practices in South Sulawesi Island, East Indonesia and the role of Aquaculture as a potential alternative livelihood,’ in Improving Coastal Livelihoods through Sustainable Aquaculture Practices, NACA, Bangkok: NACA-STREAM, 2003, 37–122, 41. 56 Marcus Barber, ‘Where the Clouds Stand: Australian Aboriginal Relationships to Water, Place, and the Marine Environment of Blue Mud Bay, Northern ­Territory,’ PhD Thesis, ANU, 2005, 196. ‘Dholupuyngu literally means “mud people”, and it is a useful general term for those people who live around Blue Mud Bay …’ (11). 57 Nonie Sharp, Stars of Tagai, The Torres Strait Islanders, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1993, 174, paraphrasing Murray Island (Torres Strait) elder, Kebi Bala. 58 Maarten Bavinck, ‘“A Matter of Maintaining peace,” State accommodation to subordinate legal systems: The case of fisheries along the Coromandel Coast of Tamil Nadu, India,’ Journal of Legal Pluralism, vol. 40, 1998, 151–170, 163. See also amplified discussion in Maarten Bavinck and K. Karunaharan, ‘A history of nets and bans: Restrictions on technical innovation along the Coromandel Coast of India,’ MAST, vol. 5, no. 1, 2006, 45–59. 59 Maarten Bavinck, ‘“A Matter of Maintaining peace,” State accommodation to subordinate legal systems: The case of fisheries along the Coromandel Coast of Tamil Nadu, India,’ 165. 60 Maarten Bavinck, ‘“A Matter of Maintaining peace,” State accommodation to subordinate legal systems: The case of fisheries along the Coromandel Coast of Tamil Nadu, India,’ 166. 61 See Tom Deligiannis, ‘The evolution of environment-conflict research,’ in Critical Environmental Security, M. A. Schnurr and L. A. Swatuk (eds.), New Issues in Security, #5, Centre for Foreign Policy Studies: Dalhousie University, 2010, 1–28, at 3. See also the plea to recognise traditional fishing practices as ‘a heritage for humankind … crucial for the protection of the biologically productive and environmentally unique coast of the Bay of Bengal’ in T. Rathakrishnan et al.,

114  Ocean connections

62 63 64 65

66

67 68

69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77

78

‘Traditional fishing practices followed by the fisher folks of Tamil Nadu,’ Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge, vol. 8, no. 4, October 2009, 543–547, 547. Maarten Bavinck and K. Karunaharan, ‘A history of nets and bans: Restrictions on technical innovation along the Coromandel Coast of India,’ 52–53. Maarten Bavinck and K. Karunaharan, ‘A history of nets and bans: Restrictions on technical innovation along the Coromandel Coast of India,’ 53. Maarten Bavinck and K. Karunaharan, ‘A history of nets and bans: Restrictions on technical innovation along the Coromandel Coast of India,’ 52. ‘To be a good fisherman you must be able to think like a fish.’ (Cecilia Jane Busby, ‘Gender, Exchange and Person in a Fishing Community in Kerala, South India, PhD, LSE, 1995, 104, viewed October 15, 2017, http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/2451/1/ U615400.pdf.) David Howe, ‘Nose-wise: Olfactory metaphors in mind,’ in Olfaction, Taste, and Cognition, C. Rouby et al. (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 72–73. See also Pandya, Vishvajit, Above the Forest: A Study of Andamanese ­Ethnoamnenology, Cosmology and the Power of Ritual. Bombay, India: Oxford University Press, 1993. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 6. Marcia Langton, ‘Earth, wind, fire, water: The social and spiritual construction of water in Aboriginal societies,’ The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies, B. David, B. Barker and I. J. McNiven (eds.), Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006, 139–160, 154. Patrick Sullivan, ‘Salt water, fresh water and Yawuru social organization,’ in Customary Marine Tenure in Australia, N. Peterson and B. Rigsby (eds.), Sydney, NSW: Sydney University Press, 2014, 159–180, 161. Patrick Sullivan, ‘Salt water, fresh water and Yawuru social organization,’ 161–162. Patrick Sullivan, ‘Salt water, fresh water and Yawuru social organization,’ 162. Fiona Magowan, ‘A sea has many faces: Multiple and contested continuities in Yolngu coastal waters,’ in The Power of Knowledge: The Resonance of Tradition, L. Taylor et al. (eds.), Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005, 74–85, 79. Fiona Magowan, ‘A sea has many faces: Multiple and contested continuities in Yolngu coastal waters,’ 80. Charles Zerner, ‘Sounding the Makassar Strait: The poetics and politics of an Indonesian marine environment,’ in Culture and the Question of Rights: Forests, Coasts, and Seas in Southeast Asia, C. Zerner (ed.), Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003, 56–108, 60. Charles Zerner, ‘Sounding the Makassar Strait: The poetics and politics of an Indonesian marine environment,’ 78. Charles Zerner, ‘Sounding the Makassar Strait: The poetics and politics of an Indonesian marine environment,’ 60. Sue Jackson, Michael Storrs and Joe Morrison, ‘Recognition of aboriginal rights, interests and values in river research and management: Perspectives from northern Australia,’ Ecological Management and Restoration, vol. 6, no. 2, 2005, 105–110, 108, quoting Magowan 2002, 18 and Yunupingu 2003, 4. The success of the Dhimurru Aboriginal Corporation in implementing ­community-based environmental management, notably formalised in the 2006 Sea Country Plan, is remarkable; but no less remarkable is the absence – at least from the management discourse – of an ontological poetics; whatever may drive Yolngu elders implementing their vision for country, their ‘Both-ways approach’ seems in practice to have been rather one way (see Mandaka Marika and Steve Roeger, ‘Dhimurru wind bringing change,’ in People on Country, People on

Ocean connections  115 country, Vital Landscapes, Indigenous Futures, J. Altman and S. Kerins (eds.), Sydney, NSW: Federation Press, 2012, 119–131, 126, 130.) 79 Laklak Marika, quoted in Drill Hall Gallery and Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala bark paintings of sea country: Recognising indigenous sea rights, Neutral Bay, NSW: Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre in association with Jennifer Isaacs Publishing, 1999. 80 Djawa Yunupingu and Samantha Muller, ‘Cross-cultural challenges for indigenous sea country management in Australia,’ 165. 81 Djawa Yunupingu and Samantha Muller, ‘Cross-cultural challenges for indigenous sea country management in Australia,’ 161. 82 Minoru Hokari, ‘Gurindji mode of historical practice,’ in The Power of Knowledge, the Resonance of Tradition, L. Taylor et al. (eds.), Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005, 214–222, 219. But this, after all, may be commonplace in non-western self/place conceptions, as we see in the next example: ‘Kanaka voyagers lack an immediate reflex to ideologically impose their identities or culture as they travel … there is a focus on creating connection, rather than distinctions, between their travelling center and places encountered.’ (Karin Animoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing, A Seascape Epistemology, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016, 141.) 83 Minoru Hokari, ‘Gurindji mode of historical practice,’ 219–220. 84 Minoru Hokari, ‘Gurindji mode of historical practice,’ 221. 85 Karin Animoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing, A Seascape Epistemology, 83–84. 86 Karin Animoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing, A Seascape Epistemology, 84. 87 Karin Animoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing, A Seascape Epistemology, 131. 88 See Sandra Pannell, ‘Homo nullius or “where have all the people gone”? Refiguring marine management and conservation approaches,’ 28 for listing. 89 Karin Animoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing, A Seascape Epistemology, 150. 90 Karin Animoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing, A Seascape Epistemology, 137. 91 Karin Animoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing, A Seascape Epistemology, 140. 92 P. Aelius Aristides, The Complete Works, vol. 2, trans. C.A. Behr, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981, 259. 93 Fiona Magowan, ‘A sea has many faces: Multiple and contested continuities in Yolngu coastal waters,’ 74–75. 94 Sue Jackson, ‘The water is not empty: cross-cultural issues in conceptualising sea space,’ Australian Geographer, vol. 26, no. 1, 1995, 87–96, 87. 95 Sue Jackson, Michael Storrs and Joe Morrison, ‘Recognition of Aboriginal Rights, interest and values in river research and management: Perspectives from Northern Australia,’ Ecological Management and Restoration, vol. 6, no. 2, August 2005, 98, quoting Marcia Langton, Burning Questions: Emerging Environmental Issues for Indigenous Natural and Cultural Resource Management, Darwin: Charles Darwin University, 1998, 8. See also Managing Pluralism in North Australian Natural and Cultural Resource Management: Reflections on a Decade of Cooperative Activity. Cooperative Research Centre for Tropical Savannas Management, Charles Darwin University, Darwin and Sue Jackson, Michael Storrs and Joe Morrison, ‘Recognition of Aboriginal rights, interests and values in river research and management: Perspectives from Northern A ­ ustralia,’ 108. 96 John Bradley, ‘“We always look north”: Yanyuwa identity and the maritime environment,’ in Customary Marine Tenure in Australia, Oceania Monograph 48, N. Peterson and B. Rigsby (eds.), Sydney, NSW: Oceania Publications, 1998, 125–141, 125. 97 John Bradley, ‘“We always look north”: Yanyuwa Identity and the maritime environment,’ 127.

116  Ocean connections 98 John Bradley, ‘“We always look north”: Yanyuwa Identity and the maritime environment,’ 128. 99 John Bradley and Yanyuwa Families, ‘Barni-Wardimantha Awara: Yanyuwa Sea Country Plan,’ prepared on behalf of Yanyuwa Traditional Owners by the Mabunji Aboriginal Resource Association, 2007, 22, viewed May 14, 2017, www.environment.gov.au/indigenous/publications/pubs/yanyuwa.pdf. 100 John Bradley and Yanyuwa Families, ‘Barni-Wardimantha Awara: Yanyuwa Sea Country Plan,’ 22. 101 John Bradley and Yanyuwa Families, ‘Barni-Wardimantha Awara: Yanyuwa Sea Country Plan,’ 20. 102 Will Owen, review of John Bradley, ‘Singing Saltwater Country,’ viewed ­November 4, 2017, https://aboriginalartandculture.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/ songs-of-land-and-sea/. 103 Mitchell Thomashow, Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001, 4. 104 Mitchell Thomashow, Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change, 4. 105 Mitchell Thomashow, Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change, 6. 106 Mitchell Thomashow, Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change, 6. 107 Shawn Wilson, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods, Black Point, NS, Canada: Fernwood Publishing, 2008, 7. 108 John Bradley and Yanyuwa Families, ‘Barni-Wardimantha Awara: Yanyuwa Sea Country Plan,’ 8–9. 109 Karin Animoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing, A Seascape Epistemology, 99. 110 Karin Animoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing, A Seascape Epistemology, 99. 111 Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing, A Seascape Epistemology, 99. 112 Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing, A Seascape Epistemology, 99. 113 Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing, A Seascape Epistemology, 99.

4 Affiliations after the flood Archipelagic poetics

Incommensurability In a recent article, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang define decolonisation as ‘the repatriation of Indigenous land and life.’1 They attack the use of the term as a ‘metaphor’ for various politically progressivist goals, arguing that these remain tied to white settler hegemony: Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, nonwhite, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or ‘settler moves to innocence’, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity.2 Instead of reconciliation based on finding common ground, they propose ‘An ethic of incommensurability,’ and, in an interesting parting shot, employ a metaphor of their own: ‘Decolonisation is not an “and”. It is an elsewhere.’3 Obviously these writers would not accept the alignment of decolonising governance with archipelagic thinking because it extends the program of decolonisation beyond the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. In the last chapter, neither term (repatriation, indigeneity) really applies to the governance model proposed for shared but dispersed land-sea worlds; equally, our analysis does not really assimilate these oceanic environments to the discourse of the lost and restored Commons that Tuck and Yang also condemn.4 At the same time, if decolonisation is not to be a metaphor, their ‘elsewhere’ must be somewhere, as a place not here but consisting of many (incommensurable) places reached from here: its logical geographical location is in the archipelago. This suggestion is consistent with their argument that different forms of decolonisation may assume dissimilar forms.5 Hence, their analysis is primarily focussed on the continuing contemporary impact of settler colonialism on First Nations in the United States

118  Affiliations after the flood and Canada. Elsewhere, in the pre-history of slavery, for example, their s­ ettler-native-slave triad is clearly inadequate: in sub-Saharan Africa export slavery and Indigenous slavery existed in symbiosis before, during and after colonisation.6 Presumably the re-assertion of Indigeneity in Ghana would produce governance arrangements very unlike those proposed for Alaska. In this chapter I want to suggest that an ethic of incommensurability and archipelagic thinking can, as it were, find common ground when a poetics of decolonising governance is brought to bear on the task of ‘relinquishing settler futurity’ and imagining ‘Native futures.’ To avoid making heavy weather of this proposal, it is best to say at the outset that two key terms – ­incommensurability and native – are defined in ways that our authors are likely to reject, but then on their own logic this need not invalidate the argument. As regards scientific theories, incommensurability does not imply incomparability but, as Thomas Kuhn explained, the absence of a ‘common language within which both could be fully expressed and which therefore could be used in a point-by-point comparison between them.’7 The same can be said of ‘“local,” ­culturally-specific accounts of science and/or nature.’8 As we have seen in the case of the Timor and Arafura Sea communities, local knowledges may demand to be evaluated locally, but this does not prevent their comparison and the discovery of shared values. These values informing a creative region are by definition archipelagic, inscribing difference into the relationship established between them. Here the link to our opening discussion of metaphor is obvious. The ‘common language’ that can establish a degree of translatability is poetic and consists entirely in the setting of exchange rates – rather as if the famous Massim region kula ceremonial exchange cycle had been transposed to the production of meaning, concepts being seasonally carried over to new environments acting as ‘a signalling system of the kind required to maintain social order’9 – and in their gifting shaping the argot of future peaceful coexistence.10 As we shall see, the poetics of the archipelago borrows closely from the rhetoric of prophecy. As regards the term native, its definition will not be in terms of birthplace, as this makes natives of us all, but in terms of cultural attachment to place held, mediated and enacted through story, a point Lakota scholar Hilary N. Weaver makes when she prefaces her richly nuanced introduction to the ‘truly complex and somewhat controversial topic’ of ‘Indigenous identity,’ with ‘The Big Game’ – ‘My father came from an Appalachian background. He was the one who remembered and kept the stories. Thus, I begin with a story about cultural identity. I do not know the original source, but the story rings with an important truth ….’11

The chaos of uncertainty This last phrase captures the scope of poetics: the examination of how the figurative truths of language have an effect on us. In its simplest form poetry is the art of metaphor, a gift in the maker for transposing concepts and in the reader/audience for recognising the value of these reconfigurations.

Affiliations after the flood  119 To grasp the archipelago as a concept is already to engage in metaphorical thinking: the constellation of points in space, the patterning of a multiplicity into a unity, is an act of gathering, relating and organising that enables us to see an order in nature where formerly there was a random distribution. Whether the archipelago is in the eye of the cartographer or a reasonably objective geographical grouping cannot perhaps ever be resolved: archipelagos breed smaller archipelagos. Tristan da Cunha, described as the smallest archipelago in the world, looks at first sight like an exception to this rule. Remembering Mandelbrot’s vision of endless fractalisation, the island namers of this group put an end to recursive speculation when they named the island in its midst ‘Inaccessible.’ But the guarantee of finitude and fixity this seems to provide proves on closer inspection to be illusory. Authorities disagree about whether the ‘Tristan-Gough Island group’ consists of four, five or six islands, while a Google map already shows at least three additional islands: Penguin, Middle and Stoltenhoff. At a further expanded scale, though, Nightingale Island is shown to possess eleven satellite islands of its own, including Sea Hen Rocks; Stoltenhoff splits into three, while Middle Island flings off fourteen islets, which begin to form an independent chain.12 The simplicity/complexity paradox of Tristan da Cunha neatly allegorises the relationship between philosophy and poetics. While literature and philosophy are products of language, they drive in different directions: ‘Poetry aims to reinvent language, to make it new. Philosophy labours to make language rigorously transparent, to purge it of ambiguity and confusion.’13 Archipelagic thinking aims outwardly to find the principles of human, and perhaps post-human, co-existence distinctively expressed in the archipelagic ordering of relationships. The temptation of an archipelagic poetics is to perceive in the endlessly self-multiplying recesses of the archipelago a figure of poetic invention itself and, making a break with continentalist metaphysics, to spin new worlds. An example of this distinction is the contrasting treatment of the Galapagos Islands found in The Origin of Species and in the short story ‘The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles,’ loosely based on Herman Melville’s experiences in the same island group. Snippets of those islands’ scientific, bio-­evolutionary rationalisation have been offered in chapter 2: now compare the fiction writer’s deliberate dive into confusion, succinctly brought out by William Engels. The imperfect reckonings of early navigators led to the idea, Melville writes, that ‘there existed two distinct clusters of isles in the parallel of the Encantadas.’ With the navigational aids available in those days it was logically impossible to tell whether one uncertainly located cluster existed – or two. ‘And this apparent fleetingness and unreality of the location of the isles was most probably one reason for the Spaniards calling them the Encantada, or Enchanted Group.’ Engels observes, The ‘unreality of the locality’ poses an epistemological problem of how one might come to know and then describe, and thus to represent, this

120  Affiliations after the flood most substantial, most material, and most ‘grounded’ of subjects— rocks… By presenting the reader with the history of ‘the delusion of the double cluster,’ of positing two distinct groups, Melville brings into view the double issue of description and self-representation so prominent in the writings of Montaigne. The problem of attaining knowledge of an object is also the problem of narration, and of literature broadly conceived […] given the syncretic structure of the Encantadas (as a chain of islands) and of The Encantadas (a text, recall, that is mnemonically and allegorically composed of ten sketches), the possibility of there being a discrete, coherent ‘whole’ is frustrated at every turn. The reference to Montaigne suggests another aspect of an archipelagic poetics, which is stylistic rather than thematic. Tom Conley draws attention to the way ‘Of Cannibals,’ Montaigne’s famous speculation about the nature of the New World, is organised. There is the thematic oscillation between the drive to factual detail – the call for local topographers – and the impatience to conceive new horizons. ‘Were [the origins of the new lands], as Plato contended, originally an island? Or a continent? Did they belong to an archipelago, as current isolarii (atlases of islands) would have us believe?’14 Conley characterises the writing as itself archipelagic: It is the essayist who tries to derive greater truths from whatever shards of information he obtains from accounts of new lands. All of a sudden the chapter begins to float as if it were an island in a greater sea of writing. Its own position becomes unmoored and unknown to itself, prey to the uncertain knowledge of its author and his failing memory.15 In fact, one can go a step further, and say that Montaigne’s ideal topographer is himself an archipelagic character. How was the New World formed: did waters carve an original continent into islands? Or did waters pile up silt into islands until they joined to form a continent? Based on his own eye-­ witness observations of the changing course of the Dordogne, Montaigne considers that either possibility is plausible: over the years, the Dordogne has subtly changed its course, sandbanks have arisen, new channels have been carved, some banks have been eaten away, elsewhere others have been consolidated. The valuable topographer, then, would be the one who had kept an accurate record of these changes – the one who therefore provides a natural allegory of Montaigne’s own mode of reasoning and writing, in which one idea swiftly flows into another, so that the course of the argument is constantly changing, eroding one fixed position, essaying another, and so on, in a process through which the constant fluctuations of perspective add up to a truthful image of the nature of knowledge. In this archipelagic mode, forgetting and remembering are twinned. So are eye-witness experience and citation, as the idea is not to clear a way to a definite destination

Affiliations after the flood  121 but to fill up the oceans of the unknown with the flotsam and jetsam of what can be known – whose ordering in the extraordinary fertility of Montaigne’s associative reasoning is a reasonable figure, an archipelago – not, to be sure, a continent whose exact outline can ever be mapped, but suggestive at least of an arrangement of islands not without reason. This suggests that an archipelagic poetics is really a matter of sensibility. Some, with the dismal association of New World archipelagos and slavery in mind, would disagree. Markman Ellis’s ‘archipelagic poetics,’ for example, refers to Britain’s desire to pass off its slave-based sugar trade as a kind of imperial benevolence reminiscent of Rome’s Augustan Age. The ‘georgic form’ adopted by apologist poets, assimilating slaves to the free agricultural labourer celebrated by Virgil, facilitates their conception of empire’ as a coming together of many islands, creating an archipelago of cane islands in the Caribbean, as well as a transoceanic bond of production, trade, prosperity and liberty, that constructs debts of allegiance and bonds of interest between planter and metropolis.16 Glissant’s influential archipelagic poetics present a more ambiguous case. There is no question that his Poetics of Relation embodies a political aspiration, a ‘collective yearning for expression’ localised in a world conceived as a shared space,17 but his ‘orientation’ to ‘following through whatever is dynamic, the relational, the chaotic—anything fluid and various and moreover uncertain (that is ungraspable) yet fundamental in every instance and quite likely full of instances of invariance’18 seems more personal and itself related to his admiration for his own teacher Michel Leiris.19 Independently of his connection with Glissant, Marc Blanchard writes of Leiris’s attempts not to polderise memory – or, at least to acknowledge that ‘Memory is not to life what reclamation is to wetlands’ – ‘Water continues to seep and dykes must continue to be built.’20 Leiris’s way of recovering his past is to imagine memories as an open series of thresholds, something like stepping-stones in the encroaching sea of forgetting. To imagine remembering as a process of territorialising and drying out – the idea that this could in theory be completely surveyed – would be equivalent to writing posthumously: therefore to convey the movement of writing and remembering, ‘The gaps, the lacunae in the unfinished material subsist with the revivals (reprises).’21 The pattern of these islets ‘where we keep watch,’ is, Blanchard suggests, an archipelago.22 An archipelagic poetics is alive to the creative potential of chaos; its sense of order is fluid, turbulent, noisy, even vortical. It speaks with the voice of wind and tide, and, like Montaigne slipping from topic to topic, defies the fixed positions of islands. ‘The hurricane does not roar in pentameters,’ declares Kamau Braithwaite, contrasting his archipelagic, even Dionysian, poetics with the Apollonian stance of Derek Walcott, who seeks “As climate seeks its style, to write / Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight ….”23

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A mode of relating If archipelagic thinking asks what archipelagos mean, an archipelagic poetics asks how they relate. Which is primary in this enquiry is a moot point. If the archipelago signifies a particular mode of communication, then it is reasonable to ask how this is effected. To go back to the question of incommensurability: if each decolonising situation is not to be a monad, strictly out of touch with developments elsewhere, a mode of relating has to be developed – not a ‘common language’ that risks neo-colonialist homogenisation, but a vehicle of differential translation able to calibrate changes of meaning across changes of context. In yet another definition of archipelagic poetics, reacting to the continentalisation of Philippine governance, Marco Cuevas-­Hewitt proposes to valourise ‘“complex connectivity,” rather than homogenous “unity”,’ allowing for commonalities to be constructed across differences, rather than at the expense of them. It would furthermore allow for notions of community and belonging to become refounded on affinities rather than essences, rendering the Philippines as a multiplicitous translocal community, rather than a unitary national one. Importantly, the various nodes of the Philippino diaspora might also be considered as part of the archipelago. He compares his ‘networked space’ to Stéphane Dufoix’s notion of ‘atopic space’ – ‘a space of more than a place, a geography with no other territory than the space described by the networks… a territory without terrain.’ The local, he insists, is not erased: ‘it is just that it is seen as inextricably connected to, and enriched by, the translocal, itself enriching the translocal in turn.’24 In theory at least, this archipelagic poetics, where ‘diversity is valued in its own right,’ goes some way to overcoming the paradox Tuck and Yang create when they insist on incommensurability. At the same time, it begs the question of praxis: without a discourse of is/is not of the kind Ricoeur explains, characteristically found in stories open to multiple interpretations, it is hard to see how diversity can be recognised, let alone valued on its own terms. As a figure of decolonising governance, the archipelago represents a moral geography; it describes a way of relating that liberates human beings from a history of physical, spiritual and environmental oppression. It harbours this possibility not so much because it is a metaphor of newly imagined and negotiated social and environmental relations but because it choreographs – demystifies – the operations of metaphor as such, and in this sense relates differently. Hence, with reference to ‘The wandring Islands,’ and reporting the story Callimachus tells in his ‘Hymn to Delos,’ Spenser explains that they are in the same wanton state as ‘th’Isle of Delos’ that ‘Amid th’ Aegaean sea long time did stray, / Ne made for shipping any certain point’ until the exiled Leto arrived there, giving birth to Artemis and Apollo, after which the island ‘firmely was established.’25 Here, evidently, virtue (in particular, temperance) is associated with fixity. And the positive value of the Cyclades when Delos was rededicated to Apollo, and the islands fixed in their ­positions – ‘around and about thee the isles have made a circle and set themselves about thee as

Affiliations after the flood  123 a choir. Not silent art thou nor noiseless when Hesperus of the curling locks looks down on thee, but ringing evermore with sound’26 – was to graft Pythagorean harmonics onto imperial apologetics – for the history hidden in Guyon’s overthrow of ‘The faire Enchauntresse’ and her lover lost in ‘lewd loves (O horrible enchantment’) – ‘Their banqet houses burne, their buildings race, / And of the fairest late now made the fowlest place’ – was the political program Spenser put forward in A View of the present state of Ireland (1596). ‘Spenser’s Irish “plot”,’ as Julia Lupton puts it, is repeatedly one of waste, as he tells the story of Ireland’s repeated devastations, surveys its present geography, and puts forward a program of depopulation, displacement, and geographic transformation – a program whose unspoken fantasy is of a land as flat, empty and inscribable as the ‘mappe of Ireland’ which Eudoxus holds before him.27 From a moral point of view, wandering islands are not necessarily a bad thing – and not simply because a sympathetic view of them de-demonises Eros. ‘The generating and demiurgic power of Eros,’ writes Claude Calamé, ‘seems to possess two complementary aspects: it is an agent both of unification and differentiation.’28 Nor because this is also, perhaps, the character of the democratic archipelago which, according to Massimo Cacciari, is prone to either of two dangers, implosive centripetal hierarchy or explosive centrifugal fragmentation,29 but rather because a wandering archipelago is one that valourises wandering. There is a striking moment in ‘A paeon of praise to the Aegean Sea,’ by Aelius Aristides, where this shift occurs. Having paraphrased Callimachus’s Hymn and endorsed its Apollonian ­constitution – ‘the sea is naturally musical, since right at the start it raised up a chorus of islands …’ – he suddenly assumes the role of sailor, writing in terms we have already encountered: For all told, the islands lie without and within one another, just as when in summer time and before the coming of the west winds, many fishing boats take to the sea. And once you have entered the sea, before and aft, starboard and port, everywhere the same, your view ends in an island, so that at first you are in doubt what course you should take through them.30 Imagining himself moving among the islands – and how else would the archipelago appear – he dissolves the opposition between fixed positions and what Engels calls ‘the delusion of the double cluster.’ Trying to understand how the medieval periplus or listing of coastal ports worked, the Arabic commentator, Ibn Khaldun, found a clue in the information about winds, speculating that The place where these islands lie cannot be found by intention, but only by chance, because ships sail on the sea where the winds take them, and

124  Affiliations after the flood navigation is dependent upon knowing the direction the wind blows, and where it blows from.31 But that was not quite correct: anticipating the deviation from one’s intended direction due to current and wind, one could compensate. Errancy of this kind applied in the Atlantic was called ‘the volta da mar, or the “sea turn,” and went against reason, for it meant sailing well to the northwest of the Canaries in order to pick up the easterlies and return home.’32 Interestingly, Mark Taylor argues that errancy is the primary feature of the relational or desiring subject. In a sense the subject is the course they take through the islands: The trace is always inextricably related to co-relative traces and inevitably entangled in temporal becoming. Unmasterable by the logic of identity and non-contradiction, the trace can be represented by the cross that marks the place where identity and difference, as well as presence and absence, repeatedly intersect. Always in transition and constantly in the ‘middest,’ the trace is irrepressibly liminal and ever erring.33 And the moral of this? ‘For Narcissus, the entire world becomes a mirror in which he sees his own face reflected.’34 An archipelagic Eros decisively resists this curtailment of incommensurable but sharable pleasure.

Cyclonic errancy Errancy is often characterised as a hermeneutical stance implying an ­expanded consciousness or self-awareness. It avoids confronting issues head-on: any resolution of the paradox of incommensurability, for example, is likely be deferred in favour of an attention to crossing – the complexity of navigating any zone of difference. In a book, where poetic logic is applied in an interdisciplinary context, it is worth pointing out that errancy is, for better or worse, identified with the methodology of the Humanities: in the present managerialist university, where centralised authority and calculability replace wondering and wandering, teachers of literature, historians of culture, interpreters of art and any pedagogy of consciousness betray their anti-continentalist predisposition. ‘Central regulation’ aims to eliminate chance. Like the rulers of Cathay, it would, if it could, reduce the empire to a number. Its terra firma is flat, straight, treeless. There is no sea to get lost in. But ‘to err is human … we wander from a beginning we can’t recall to an end we can’t foresee.’ As distinguished literary theorist, Howard Felperin, laments, managerialism deskills: ‘remote from the ground where things get done, given to delegating, devolving and dispersing hands-on responsibility,’ it multiplies the likelihood of error.35 In regard to environmental catastrophism, the Humanities promote a kind of cultural uniformitarianism where memory, imagination and invention are endlessly recycled. As Ruta Imafuku puts in a poignant meditation called ‘Noah’s stories in shaky archipelagos: Martinique, Haiti, Fukushima,’

Affiliations after the flood  125 I have a conviction that the Humanities is a language of delay. A language that never dares to react instantaneously without the sense of deep time. The Humanities is a language of detour, too. A language that never wants to take the shortest route to reach its object. Remain here at the point of entanglement while seeking revelatory words from elsewhere. Delay and detour. In order to preserve a historical profundity: in order to play with a spatial comprehensiveness. Confronting the aftermath of the devastating tsunami, I thought I had to go very far indeed to look for words and memories strong enough to rival the actual phenomenon.36 Errancy in an archipelagic context may exhibit definite patterns: deep down the guesswork deviations of early sailors passing out of sight of land intuit the ocean’s vorticism. The necessity of sailing away from the Canaries in order to reach them was due to powerful forces acting on the vessel’s hull, a universal phenomenon, in fact. Islands row against the tide; archipelagos hold their place amid prevailing currents. The complex ‘archipelago wake’ that forms when individual island wakes interfere with one another is influenced by neighbouring islands and archipelago bathymetry. ‘Small eddies generated by the neighbouring islands lead to destabilization of the shear layers of the larger island’ and, while the neighbouring island perturbation effect is present whatever the direction of the incoming flow, it is found (in the Madeira Archipelago) that north-south wakes produce ‘geostrophic eddies,’ but west-east wakes produce exclusively ‘ageostrophic submesoscale eddies’ that travel offshore ‘with a wave-like motion.’ A recent laboratory simulation also found that The archipelago shelf contributed to the asymmetric vertical migration of oceanic vorticity. Cyclonic vorticity dominated the surface dynamics, whereas anticyclonic circulation prevailed at the bottom part of the linearly stratified upper layer.37 The modelling of aerial vortex streets is comparably complex because of the diverse factors involved, island shape and profile impacting on vertical stratification and rotation, asymmetrical island distributions leading to asymmetrical wakes and, of course, the interaction at the ocean surface of wind and water currents.38 Yet these chaotic realms can produce stable forms. The Canary Eddy Corridor, ‘whose source is the flow perturbation of the Canary Current and the Trade Winds at the Canary Islands’ is a direct zonal pathway that conveys water mass and biogeochemical properties offshore from the Canary Island/Northwest Africa upwelling system, and may be seen as a recurrent offshore pump of organic matter and carbon to the oligotrophic ocean interior.39 Sangra et al. challenge the notion that ‘mesoscale eddies are disorganised, ubiquitous structures in the ocean.’ Referring to ‘growing evidence that mesoscale eddies modulate biological production and related

126  Affiliations after the flood biogeochemical fluxes,’ they note that ‘Mesoscale eddies are not well resolved in climate models and instead are parameterized as a viscous term playing an important role in energy and momentum dissipation.’ They conclude that ‘A global eddy demography needs to be established.’40 An archipelagic poetics discovers the rules of steersmanship. Instead of deriving the coordinates of passage from cartography (or choreography), it attributes to errancy a positive value. It is significant that Poseidon demands the life of Palinurus, the helmsman, in return for allowing Aeneas to fulfil his imperial dream in crossing the sea to found Rome. ‘Me dost thou bid shut my eyes to the sea’s calm face and peaceful waves?’41, Palinurus exclaims when tempted to fall asleep. His sacrifice signifies the triumph of empire-building reason over the unruly will of the deep, a drama Socrates also played out when he exclaimed, ‘Am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than Typho?’42, a drama recapitulated in Prometheus Unbound, Shelley’s poetic drama of another warrior who, with the assistance of the Typho-like Demogorgon, defies the Olympian order. An art of navigating turbulence, one that promotes decolonising governance, has to span a detective-like attention to detail and the prophet’s powers of imagining beyond horizons. The experience of Aelius Aristides is fascinating in this regard: tipped to excel in oratory, a twenty-six year old man from the Asian provinces makes a sea voyage to Rome only to become tonguetied when he enters the Roman forum and suffer a panic attack. Perhaps it was the wrong kind of ‘great meeting.’ Gregory Nagy notes, ‘The notion of “assemble” is intrinsic to the general sense of agon, that is, “assembly”. But the word can also mean specifically “contest”. Hence “antagonism” and the derivative word “agonia” in the sense of “agony.”’43 Whatever the case, as emerges in the sequel, in order to find his own voice, Aristides has to channel the fate of Palinurus: It seemed fitting to be taken home, if I could somehow endure… We attempted sailing… Right at the start of the Tyrrhenian sea, there was a squall, darkness, a southwester. And the sea was uncontrollably rough, and the steersman let go of the rudders, and the captain and sailors poured ashes on their heads, and bewailed themselves and the ship. The sea rushed in full fury over the prow and stern, and I was deluged by wind and waves …44 Later, water cures at Pergamum under the guidance of his tutelary deity Aesculapius relieve his agony and he learns to sing.45 But his first discovery is a poetics of passage that bafflingly mingles the infinity of detail and the endlessness of the voyage, so that to tell it ‘all’ would be the same as if I should swim under water through every sea and next be compelled to render an account of how many waves I had encountered, and how I found the sea at each of them, and what it was that saved me.46

Affiliations after the flood  127 Described here is the discourse of the ‘middest’ whose grammar consists of accidence/accidents. As William Desmond writes, ‘We do not decipher the world by standing stiffly outside it, nor by lording over it in a domineering fashion, but by venturing into the thick of things and vigilantly moving through them.’47

Actors of the middest In handing back agency to the actors of the middest, a non-continentalist archipelagic communication is championed. Non because, in the spirit of a qualified incommensurability consistent with archipelagic poetics, a sharp opposition between, say, land-locked and oceanically defined archipelagic sequences is to be avoided. These oppositions are seductive and even a contribution to social ontology as nuanced as Manuel DeLanda’s theory of ­assemblage – seemingly so applicable to archipelagic networks – has difficulty in navigating them: in his model, as he notes, ‘Any process which either destabilizes spatial boundaries or increases internal heterogeneity is considered deterritorialising.’ He gives as a pertinent contemporary instance global digital communications networks.48 However, it is doubtful if a movement form, whether regarded as social or geographical, whose units lie without and within one another, can ever be described in territorial terms. Oppositions are also historically, or ideologically, attested: the mythopoetics of the Cyclades, themselves a microcosm of the primary (Aegean) archipelago exemplify Vattimo’s violent reasoning. Organised hierarchically around Delos, the birthplace of Apollo, their arrangement prohibits drifting – the labyrinthine dance that Gianfranco Salvatore says was celebrated there transforms Theseus’s descent into the Cretan Labyrinth and his successful return into an archetypal choreography in line with Jung’s observation that ‘One of the fundamental laws of natural development is that it moves in a spiral, and the true law of nature is always reached after the labyrinth has been travelled.’49 The antithesis of this land-locked, somewhat Fantasia-like vision of dancing islands that obey the logarithmic logic of Jakob Bernoulli is the archipelagic concept expressed in the Indonesian term Nusantara, often associated with the campaign to revive Indonesia’s Majapahit identity as a maritime nation.50 Introducing his video performance Nusantara Manuscript, Indonesian performance artist Iwan Wijono explains that Nusantara derives from the Sanskrit nuswa (the place that we inhabit) and antara (between), and encapsulates an enlivening both of a space and its ‘in between.’ Nusantara is the Indonesian word for the Southeast Asian archipelago, but also refers to the space between the islands, as well as, in spiritual terms, the space between galaxies, dimensions and life worlds.51 As for a poetics of performance: The unification of these notions – the idea of inhabiting both a space and its ‘between-ness’ – becomes especially evocative when we think of the rhythms of archipelagic life, in which the sea, ostensibly the place between

128  Affiliations after the flood destinations, becomes a destination and a place of return in itself. Inhabitants of archipelagic space sometimes live on the sea – like the nomadic sea tribe the Badjao – and many frequently live by, from and with it.52 Cultural thalassophobia exacerbates the opposition. The Sama Laus (Sea Sama), known to outsiders as the Badjao or Sea Gypsies live amphibiously and intimately with the deep – ‘as a childbirth ritual, a newly born infant is thrown into the sea and members of the clan dive to save the newborn.’53 In contrast, ‘The Greeks were not a swimming people,’ Anne Burnett comments apropos a dithyramb in which the early fifth-century BC poet Bacchylides describes an incident unique in ancient Greek literature – the Athenian hero Theseus’s plunge to the bottom of the sea to visit his mother, ‘wide-glancing Amphitrite’: ‘for them a dive was both a fabulous and a significant act.’ Surveying the Greek mythic literature, she concludes, ‘Immortality, salvation, judgment, and initiation were thus the ideas that Greeks associated with the act of plunging into the water.’54 I can’t tell from his Sacred Tales whether or not Aelius Aristides could swim: certainly he took to plunging, but his dream underwater swim across the Aegean is clearly fantasy. The thallasophobic prejudice persists through millennia.55 It is not only an elemental dislocation but a rhythmic one: when the externality of living water is subtracted from our movement, prosody risks drying up into prose; travelling in general is conducive to storytelling; at sea, as the proliferation of sea journals seems to prove, storying and travelling merge. ‘Fluid States, performances and UnKnowing’ is described, appropriately, as ‘the LOG, or daily ship’s diary of journeys made in Mindanao by artists interested in ‘performance, disaster and resilience’ in archipelagic space.’ Riffing on the Tagalog name of the project that emerged (in English: ‘On Tilted Earth’), participant Ella Parry-Davies posted the following: in the stressed third syllables of sa tagīlid na yutā, the rhythmic rocking sound of the phrase (at least for the non-Tagalog speaker) contains the memory and motion of the sea, even as it speaks of the land. The language of water seemed to permeate the ways in which we felt and spoke about our experiences. ‘Do you ever get the feeling that stories just pour out of people?’ organizer Professor Jazmin Llana asked me once … Our journey through Mindanao placed us in syncopated rhythms with these archipelagic lives, so that there became something especially relevant about the fact of travelling as a method of research, or as a way of thinking through the movement of the space. Memories of places we had left resurfaced as we heard similar stories of conflict and displacement again and again, and as our own transitions brushed against the migrations of the islanders…56 Like medieval sailors finding what they were looking for by chance not intention, Parry-Davies felt that ‘aside from the place-name and maybe its

Affiliations after the flood  129 position on a map, many of us did not know where we were going in real terms, or what we would find there: to this extent, every journey for the first time is a journey into the unknown’ – a condition she compares to Tim Ingold’s ‘wayfaring’ a ‘way of knowing (or, as I largely felt, not-knowing),’ which ‘is itself a path of movement through the world: the wayfarer literally “knows as he goes.”’57

Locating the unknown Described here is an archipelagic mentality that imagines the trace in terms of continuous crossings. It is a truism amongst archipelagists that there are no islands in the archipelago: in contrast with Jacques Derrida’s disillusioned assertion that there are only islands now, the archipelagic sensibility insists on the possibility of new social and political configurations, even if these involve the deconstruction of received representations of boundaries, connections and directions. Closed figures (islands) may not exist in the archipelago but openings abound: hypothetical coastlines are necessary for the presentation of breaches, and as, in the archipelago, outside and inside are defined mobilely, by the origin and direction of one’s desire, the inside of the island is always, also, a flowering space, whose petals are radiating routes. Whether this is a moral geography may be a moot point, but it certainly captures an existential situation in which the possibility of commerce (social, economic, erotic) is optimised. Malacca, Pires writes in his Suma Oriental recommending the new colonial acquisition to the Portuguese monarch, ‘is surrounded and lies in the middle.’58 ‘A city … made for merchandise,’ it is, as already noted, constitutionally open.59 To possess it is to have the road to China ‘and from China to the Moluccas, and from the Moluccas to Java, and from Java to Malacca [and] Sumatra’ all ‘in our power.’60 At the same time, the geography of trade is like a fractal figure whose end can never be reached. His account of the ‘great island of Java is finished,’ Pires says, but ‘there is no doubt that there are more things in Java, and more important things, than are related.’61 The island flotillas of the Homem-Reinel Atlas can be said to visualise these propositions. In contrast with the continuous line of the modern map, they are drawn as sequences of gaps, like one half of a zip. The islands drawn in this way are turned inside out: all openings, they contain no territory; constitutionally promiscuous, they are filled with nothing except promise. They give graphic expression to the unconscious desire of every navigator, merchant or being, which is to find an opening. The current that makes perforated screens of solid coasts, produces regional oceanic gyres and, inside these, vortex lanes indicated by serpentine processions of islands is the desire of profit. They can represent the interest of trading powers in locating trading places where profits will be made, but, in the spirit of a necessary errancy, they also embody a conception of the unknown and, as such, expose the mythopoetic mechanics of metaphor-making. The Homem-Reinel graphics

130  Affiliations after the flood purport to represent a precise number of islands whose survey has never been completed; in the spirit of Marco Polo’s original formulation of 7448 islands, where factual similitude is a function of fictional flourish, the Homem-­Reinel islands are figures of speculation62 that might be said to represent holes in knowledge. And, like the holes that form in eddies or along the fringes of a crowd, they imply centripetal and centrifugal forces of remembering and imagining between whose counter-formations the products of human invention lie. Commenting on these seas ‘filled with luxuriant archipelagos,’ which, on closer inspection, owe their clarity of definition to the fact that they correspond to no clear geographical concept – ‘The distribution of colours and the very exuberance of their tones generate chromatic contrasts that succeed in individualising the islands’ – Christian Jacob suspects a linguistic or logical motivation for this style of visualisation: ‘For lack of being named – indeed nameable – these islands (which for the most part appear on a map for the first and last time) find their identity only in their colour.’63 While this may be true of unknown islands, known islands were similarly depicted: kaleidoscopic clusters are found in Mediterranean charts64; further, in his Nautica mediterranea, written at the beginning of the 1600s Bartolomeo Crescenzi, suggests a key to the colours.65 Jacob interprets colour as the signifier for island or insularity. Noting how the characteristically scalloped jewels ‘curl back on themselves’ in a gesture of ‘insular closure,’ he suggests that the effect of the mesmeric chromatic mosaic is to produce ‘the essence of insularity more than any clear geographical entity.’66 This is true – but equally true is the fact that these islands only appear in dense clusters: insularity is a function of archipelagic membership, within whose movement form they are aligned, their isolation overcome, and they start to flow. Commenting on what appears to be ‘an intuitively visible syntax in the motifs’ very combinatory possibility,’ Jacob feels that ‘its rules remain unexpressed and mysterious.’ Sensing ‘a dialectic between the cartographic immobilisation and the dynamics of forms and structures,’ Jacob uses verbs like ‘gush’ and ‘pour’ to describe the seeming flow of the islands. They are ‘like a liquid flowing from a jar or precious stones slipping out of a pouch.’67 Another way to characterise these mental places, whose singular identities are a function of belonging to open sets, is as archipelagos of incommensurability.

States of readiness As immanent places, archipelagos are in a state of readiness. Our ideal archipelago inhabitants are not only on the lookout for signs of change; living in the midst of it, they expect to manage it. Further, they are part of it, politically, socially, psychologically: in the archipelago the sovereign Ego, the family as monad, the community as territory, breaks up and is scattered. The contracted stories (autobiography, family history, myths of exclusive origin) yield to overarching accounts of order out of chaos, to explanatory myths of transformation, often directed to rationalising those disasters of

Affiliations after the flood  131 which Imofuku speaks. As noted elsewhere, in the context of decolonising governance, these mythopoetic reformations resemble in a way the turbulent environment from which they emerge and of which they aim to make sense. The typical inhabitant of the archipelago enjoys a precarious existence, soliciting the respect of external powers; the typical place-making story is one that pours out of the people, as it were, providing a compass through the drifting and unpredictable event world. Vortical feedback translates data into information, lending both the creative resilience of a purposeful journey. With reference to Descartes’ vortical theory of planetary motion, ­William Blake imagines the life world traced out like a vortex tree: … The nature of infinity is this! That every thing, has its Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro Eternity, Has passd that Vortex, he percieves it roll backward behind His path, into a globe itself infolding: like a sun: Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty.68 Admittedly a complex metaphor, the key point for us is Blake’s supposition that it is vortices all the way down, transcendence involving settling into another situation. The archipelago is an assemblage of revolutions, a normalisation of emergency that defines environmental change in terms of emergent configurations rather than abyssal discrepancies. Understanding the sea level, and sea level change, then, is at the heart of archipelagic wisdom; here, flooding can apply to increases in land area as well as expanding water surfaces – sea level drop can be as concerning to island dwellers as sea level rise. In illustration of this last point, consider the archipelagic resistance to bridges. Katriina Siivonen has examined the experience of people living in Southwest Finland’s ‘large and idyllic archipelago covering 10,000 km2 of water and including over 22,000 islands.’69 These people differentiate degrees of archipelagic identity. It ‘does not include any large islands situated close to the mainland.’ It can be defined as ‘a continuum, which in its largest sense covers almost all of the islands in the surrounding sea.’ A stricter definition ‘includes only those islands that can be reached in one’s own boat or perhaps by ferry, but not by bridge.’ Spatially, existentially and psychologically, there appears to be an optimum equilibrium, an ideal relationship between the number of islands, their size and their isolation; the archipelago is a swarm that may mass more intensely or shade away; an archipelagic sensibility is alive to an exquisite tension between nearness and farness, to a shared isolation: the outer archipelago is for some people symbolically a more proper archipelago than the inner archipelago. At the same time the archipelago in its largest sense is a proper archipelago for others. Inside the continuum there are several smaller archipelagos. Even one and the same person

132  Affiliations after the flood can define them in varying ways in different situations. Ideas about the archipelago concept continuously change ….70 As regards the social, ‘the core element in archipelago identities is living on one’s own island in a sensitive balance with the other people living there.’ Building bridges disturbs this ‘sensitive balance’: in place of relationality, ‘an exquisite tension between nearness and farness,’ it represents the imposition of the violent rhetoric of connectivity. In a decolonising context, I am reminded of Curtius’s account of Alexander the Great’s determination to conquer New Tyre. The Tyrians were no threat to him. What offended him was the provocative location of their city. The strait separating the city from the mainland had a width of four stades. It was particularly exposed to the south-westerly wind, which rolled rapid successions of waves on to the shore from the open sea, and nothing represented a greater obstacle to a siege-work – which the Macedonians were contemplating, to join island and mainland – than this wind.71 Alexander’s first fantasy was to bridge ‘the fathomless deep,’ but ‘How could rocks big enough be found, or trees tall enough? To make a mound to fill such a void they would have to denude whole regions; the strait was perpetually stormy.’72 It was a storminess that infuriated Alexander, who seemed to take the physical situation personally: losing his temper with the Tyrian envoys, he told them, ‘I am soon going to show you that you are really on the mainland.’73

Anti-seismic Classically, archipelagos are visualised as clusters of permanent (‘high’) islands rising decisively out of the sea. They may be of continental or oceanic origin. The geological structure of continental islands is usually similar to that of the main continent nearby and due to the same processes of uplift and erosion. Oceanic islands rise to the surface as a result of plate tectonics, different volcanic processes producing respectively oceanic ridge islands, hot spot islands and the islands of island arcs.74 Some archipelagos are coastal: the Norwegian ‘Skjaergaard’ stretches almost the whole length of Norway’s Atlantic coast, ‘forming a fence or a marked outer coastline.’75 As noted, the Canadian archipelago may be called a super-archipelago as it contains islands of near continental stature as well as ‘a huge inland sea, the Hudson Bay.’76 From a continentalist point of view, larger island land-masses are naturally more important, offering strategic economic and military outreach. However, from an archipelagic perspective, it is the tailings of archipelagos whose behaviour best typifies the social and environmental consciousness of the culture as a whole. Following Captain James

Affiliations after the flood  133 Cook’s distinction, the majority of islands in any archipelagic cluster are ‘low islands … flat with their ground surface, at most, a few metres above mean low tide.’77 Even non-atoll, continental groups like Canada’s feature a majority of near sea level outcrops – ‘Almost all these bodies of water are seeded with countless islands, rocks and reefs.’78 Indonesia has some of the largest islands in the world separated from ‘innumerable smaller and tiny islands’ by only the shallowest of waters.79 Evidently, these peri-sea level features are most sensitive to change: intertidal ecosystems communities and coral reefs are especially vulnerable to ocean warming, slowing currents and tidal emersions. But there are also human implications – political: in the late 1980s it was reported that Japan feared losing its southernmost islet, Okinotorishima, whose two peaks (one no more than twenty inches to three feet above high water) are situated on an otherwise submerged reef some ten feet underwater: rather than forfeit 160,000 square miles of seabed and fishery jurisdiction, Japan proposed controversial island-building measures.80 Also philosophical: one used to studying minute variations in tidal behaviour and the tremulous surface effects endlessly self-reforming out of a complex, imperceptibly altering interplay of geology, hydrology and wind is likely to favour slow thought, a mode of reflection that Franco Cassano suggests is ‘the oldest anti-seismic construction’ precisely because it registers the tremors that fast thought – associated with the increasing speed of capitalism – can neither register nor shut down.81

Complex Here a strange conjunction occurs between two traditions of non-linear awareness or non-equilibrium attunement. One of these is the deferred attention to the chaotic complexity of real events, a result of modern science’s identification of useful knowledge with simplification in the interests of regulation, predictability and control. The other is what might be called a traditional complexity knowledge founded in the dynamics of everyday situations in the archipelago. The latter can be compared to traditional ecological knowledge where an accumulated exactitude of precise observations substituted for any formal mathematical model of stochastic systems. Dwellers in the archipelago, whose livelihood depends minutely on the smallest changes in regional oceanic behaviour, can be expected to have an environmental lexicon in which such complex phenomena as ‘vorticity (stretching) imposed by the wind stress curl,’82 barotropic tides (‘often out of phase in the different basins’),83 or even the temporal multifractal character of precipitation84 find informal mythopoetic expression. But here an important difference emerges: while chaos theory has studied sensitive dependence on initial conditions mainly in the context of understanding rapid, unpredictable change, the slow thought alive to the non-linear noise in the system treats tremulousness as a steady state property, inviting in human terms a prudence or readiness that is, as it were, anti-seismic in

134  Affiliations after the flood its management of change. Chantal Delsol links this attention to immediately contingent conditions to Ricoeur’s theory of figurative language. Modern technocratic discourse has had the paradoxical effect of making us less, not more ready, for change. The identification of progress with a growing control over the future – characterised by the whole anticipatory armature of government planning – undermines our ability to be decisive. ­Techno-politics’ ‘reluctance to make decisions’ derives, Delsol argues, from the absence of a concrete ‘situation’ – the denser the situation, the ­ ecisions – she recalls more complex it is, and the greater the frequency of d us to the particular vocation of mythic thought which, as Ricoeur taught, is always a philosophy of occasions. Myth, story as such, is a figurative discourse of densely situated decision-making: without the deviations of choice, narrative would lack its complex labyrinth; freed of error, it would resemble a policy review or any other government document that treats the future as the present extended by planning. To prepare us for a future noticeably different from this, we need to incorporate the unpredictable into the here and now. While the competent man finds a solution that he imagines almost tautologically leaping out of the problem itself, the prudent man proposes an answer that is more like a suggestion and imposes itself only because a decision must be made… It is precisely the uncertainty – the veritable leap into the unknown – of the prudent man that so terrifies our contemporaries.85

The flood myth In the essay already referred to, Imafuku hails Glissant as a ‘a future Noah’ who tries to save our globally unitary world, by presenting his vision of ‘le tremblement’ which will again fragment our world so that each part can have their own music and poetry, responding and echoing with each other, like the archipelago in our oceanic solidarity.86 Imafuku refers to the concepts of ‘errantry,’ ‘opacity’ and ‘tremble,’ which Glissant developed in his late book Une nouvelle région du monde (2006): Contrary to the modern straightforward logic which seeks transparency, the tremble requires errantry and opacity. This opacity is never ambiguous, it is a relationship in which one person or place calls on another person or place in its own right and freedom. Identification in relation to the other also includes identifying with the change, which is therefore derived from that exchange.

Affiliations after the flood  135 The vision of the tremble urges us to dive deep into our intuition. It can light up the old wisdom, all the relations that have occurred between the human being and all elemental things in the universe… The tremble happens sometimes devastatingly, but usually very subtly. It is the faintest sign hard to recognize with our ordinary senses. However, the fragility is what makes it resistant, and the fugacity guarantees its durability. Here is another ingenious attempt to express the enigma of an archipelagic poetics that seeks to preserve the twin goals of incommensurability and relationality. But the application of this environmental resonance – associated poetically perhaps with the fractal patterns those mere dustings of islands sometimes assume – may be more practical and immediate; after all, the comparison with Noah is not entirely fortunate as, at least in the received versions of the tale, his ascendancy is connected with the archipelago-­ destroying Flood. A genuinely new Noah emerging from an archipelagic sense of place would not simply ride the Flood but dispute its existence, at least as the catastrophic fiction favoured in the west. In place of worst-case scenarios whose shocking contrast with present conditions perpetuates a fallen paradise myth of civilisation on earth,87 a steersman at home with ‘the nature of infinity’ would materialise the genealogy of change in old wisdom and use the fragility of dynamic forms to urge a different ethics of care, one that embraced the precariousness of the human condition rather than scapegoating vulnerability as weakness. The Epic of Gilgamesh describes a local flood in southern Mesopotamia that destroyed the city of Shurippak. Although it introduces new details, the Epic retains the geographical specificity of the older stories of ‘the Great Flood’ found in ‘The Eridu Genesis’ and ‘The Epic of Atrahasis.’88 The Flood is impressive but hardly universal. Likewise, Utnapishtim’s boat design – ‘Equal shall be her width and her length … One (whole) acre was her floor space’89 – far exceeds in size and structural complexity the gufa, balam, muhaylah or safinah, traditional craft still used until recently in the lower reaches of the Tigris and the Euphrates.90 Yet its caulking (six ‘sar’ or eight gallons of bitumen are boiled up to seal the hull seams) and steering (‘I saw to the punting poles’) involved the same techniques used in constructing and guiding humbler craft. Speiser’s translation suggests that the vessel was square; however, according to its translator, British Museum expert ­Irving Finkel, a recently deciphered cuneiform tablet belonging to the older Atrahasis Epic explicitly states that the Sumerian king, Atram-hasis (‘the Noah figure in earlier stories’) is instructed, ‘Draw out the boat that you will build with a circular design; Let its length and breadth be the same.’91 This instruction strongly suggests that the vessel of salvation was nothing more than a scaled-up gufa, the bitumen-coated circular vessel able to ferry

136  Affiliations after the flood up to twenty people until recently a familiar sight in the marshlands of the Ma’dan. ‘In all the images ever made, people assumed the ark was, in effect, an ocean-going boat, with a pointed stem and stern for riding the waves – so that is how they portrayed it,’ Finkel is quoted as saying, But the ark didn’t have to go anywhere, it just had to float, and the instructions are for a type of craft which they knew very well. It’s still sometimes used in Iran and Iraq today, a type of round coracle which they would have known exactly how to use to transport animals across a river or floods.92 This interpretation has literary support from the Gilgamesh text where the immortalised Utnapishtim makes his new home ‘At the mouth of the rivers’ and also archaeological support – attempting to collate archaeological evidence of inundation at the southern Mesopotamian sites of Ur, Kish and Shuruppak with any hints of dating found in the Gilgamesh Epic or the Sumerian King List, David MacDonald concludes that any Mesopotamian Flood should probably be dated to the two earliest floods at Kish and a flood level at Shuruppak (say between 2900 and 2800 BC). But, noting that ‘Flood events occurred with frequency throughout southern Mesopotamia, as the two separate early flood levels at Kish indicate,’ MacDonald finds, the flood levels at Kish and Shuruppak fail to fulfil the biblical or even the Mesopotamian literary descriptions. In the degree to which those descriptions are ‘rationalized,’ any criteria for distinguishing between the biblical Flood and virtually any other flood disappear. The flood remains at Kish and Shuruppak are hardly imposing. In short, archaeological evidence for floods exists, ‘but the exact character of those events – fluvial or marine, rapid or slow deposition, unitary or ­episodic – remains unknown. The hydrology of southern Mesopotamia is very complex.’93

Drifting, not drowning The future Noah would bring to the story of the Flood the sense-making principles characteristic of an archipelagic poetics. These, as we have seen, favour the elucidation of patterns of relationality in space and time that are complexly intermeshed but also capable of punctuation and separation. The merit of re-evaluating the myth in this way resides in its superior explanatory value, its power to rehabilitate phenomena that fundamentalist reductions of the story, with their binarist classification of reality in terms of Good and Evil, only mystify: the Biblical presentation of the Flood as a universal deluge exemplifies this ideological recrudescence in the service of an otherworldly teleology. Obviously, it is a waste of energy to pursue the theological

Affiliations after the flood  137 implications of this call to re-engage with the world we live in – the psychology of Creationism is not receptive to the argument that its own telos is ultimately auto-destructive. Although the opposition to decolonising environmental governance usually justifies social and environmental destructiveness on religious grounds, there remains more chance of engagement politically. For the point here is that, while Creationist theology identifies orthodoxy with the suppression of creativity (notably the right to interpretation), most political elites pride themselves on reminting the old myths. Although, in reality, the object is comparably repressive – to leach the verbalised symbols of their powers of their polysemous ­generosity – the propagandists of continentalist domination at least acknowledge the importance of myth. Because of this, in refertilising dessicated story lines, an archipelagic poetics here joins up with a political praxis. According to Harry Slochower, this counter-narrative, which he calls mythopoesis (in contra-distinction to myth) can be traced back as far as the Epic of Gilgamesh itself where, in contrast with ‘the function of the myth … to adapt the individual to the group,’ the ‘adaptive function is nearly reversed.’94 ‘The hero’s quest becomes a critique of the existing social norms and points to a futuristic order which is envisaged as integrating the valuable residues of the past and present.’95 What would the Gilgamesh hero, more aimless than Odysseus, more willing to submit to environmental externalities, have seen in a fuller description of that Mesopotamian landscape, one not only located between rivers but ‘where floods were part of the normal pattern of life.’96 Firstly, his idle floating along lily-fringed canals would have been determined by an elaborate system of artificial canals and weirs. ‘The Mesopotamian wetlands are the oldest manipulated landscape on the face of the earth,’ Robert France observes, ‘The word “natural” applied to them is a complete oxymoron.’97 To be able to farm, the Sumerians were obliged to learn how to divert water out of the rivers onto their crops, and thus they also learned to manipulate rivers to starve neighbouring city-states or flood cities they wished to drown.98 Much later, in an interesting cross-section of rival imperialisms, Alexander, marching against the Achaemenid Empire, demolished the artificial cataracts on the Tigris to make the river accessible for his fleets;99 on the Euphrates, on the other hand, where there were no artificial barriers to naval transport,’ improving the existing canal system to secure ‘there was always an adequate supply of water.’100 But, if floating downstream, in the opposite direction taken by Alexander’s navy, our pre-Noachian steersman had reached Basra, he would have passed out of this highly engineered zone into ‘an archipelago of islets … surrounded by vast expanses of reeds.’101 Prior to their destruction, the southern Iraq marshlands (al-ahwar) covered an area of up to 20,000 square kilometres around the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They were the ancestral home of ‘several

138  Affiliations after the flood hundred thousand inhabitants, the Ma’dan, a people whose unique way of life had been preserved for over 5,000 years.’102 Photographs of the old marsh waterscape show villages on artificial floating islands built by enclosing a piece of swamp and filling it with reeds and mud. ‘Typically, a village would consist of a group of separate islands, with each one hosting an individual household.’103 These images are probably as close as we can come to the appearance of Venice in the earliest days of the Lagoon’s occupation.104 Then, beginning in 1991, the Government of Iraq commenced building a comprehensive system of canals that diverted the waters of the Euphrates and the Tigris. The destruction of the vast Mesopotamian marshlands, a region of global importance for biodiversity and home of the Marsh Arabs, will go down in history along with other human engineered changes such as the desiccation of the Aral Sea and the deforestation of Amazonia, as one of the Earth’s major and most thoughtless environmental disasters.105 ‘The setting for the Epic of Gilgamesh is [ ] now synonymous with absence of education and profound illiteracy.’106

Draining the archipelago Saddam was not the first to think of draining these marshes. ‘He was using detailed engineering plans laid out by the Brits in the 1950s but never acted upon,’ said France. The British apparently felt the marshes were a home to disease, a public-health hazard.107 Even in the Gilgamesh Epic the marshes get short shrift, they are described as ‘the waters of death’ and ‘in crossing the shallows Gilgamesh breaks up all the punting poles.’ In other words, the destruction of the archipelago cannot be dismissed as a piece of political bastardry; it embodies the polderising mindset of a dessicating control culture whose master-planning stories, in linearising cause and event in the interests of narrative closure, refuse from the beginning to entertain an archipelagic description of reality. The Paradisal hypostasis is so strong in this tradition, one associated with the engineering of a fallen world, that deviation and errancy, the hallmarks of good steersmanship, are classified as moral weakness; adeptness in accidence, that is, mastery of the changes in words that mark different speaking positions, is associated with a forfeit of sovereignty.108 So strong that, as I indicated before, it fosters a conceptual oppositionism no less violent: one has to be careful of not polderising the Marsh people – there is now evidence that the founding of such communities

Affiliations after the flood  139 corresponds with the flooding of the Persian Gulf basin around 8,000 years ago … These new colonists may have come from the heart of the Gulf, displaced by rising water levels that plunged the once fertile landscape beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean.109 In this case, the Flood myth returns where, perhaps, it began, in the experience of vulnerable islands. But here, too, an archipelagic understanding is needed of human and environmental interdependence: downplaying the environmental impact of sea level rise on islands throughout the south-west Pacific, John Connell suggests that human factors are at least as important. Noting the correlation between erosion and human activity associated with recent urbanisation (the construction of causeways, seawalls, vegetation removal, sand and gravel mining), he attributes these unsustainable shoreline adjustments to changes in traditional archipelagic life: ‘In precolonial times, islands achieved sustainable development partly through extended geographical ties, typified by dispersed clans, and linkages across atolls and between clusters of islands in order to secure social relations and claim and use land elsewhere.’110 In short, ‘Population mobility was inherent to small islands,’ but such circulation involved socio-economic-political linkages within the region.111 The growing pressures of colonialism and globalisation changed this: ‘such practices gave way to dependence on distant governments or migration or both and to a reduction in local sustainability.’112

Incommensurability reconciled The Gilgamesh epic – the fate of the Ma’dan – their climate predecessors in the Persian Gulf – the impact of human intervention in the island Pacific: my purpose in drifting across these stories has been to illustrate, however summarily, the significance of an archipelagic poetics in the redescription of reality. Ricoeur suggests that metaphor operates at three scales: word (name), sentence (statement) and discourse (fiction). In this chapter, we have traversed the fractalisation of the name, and the dynamics of the statement, but the discursive application of an archipelagic poetics is harder to chart. How is metaphor at the scale of story – as ‘the rhetorical process by which discourse unleashes the power that certain fictions have to redescribe ­reality’ – to be illustrated – short of a detailed analysis of ‘transition from semantics to hermeneutics’ – from ‘internal organisation’ to external reference – ­pursued through a single text – a task outside the scope of this book.113 Instead, I have tried through a kind of fractalisation of one fiction after another to show what I think is the characteristic feature of the archipelagic descriptions of reality – their distinctive integration of greater detail with greater distance. When we focus on certain chaotic details in the Gilgamesh account of the Flood – details that complicate the story’s assimilation to the Dreadnought myth of Noah’s Ark – we immediately find the deluge broken up into many islands of local flow and punctuation. The drift into the story of the Ma’dan

140  Affiliations after the flood is literally about an archipelagic world: but figuratively it risks b ­ ecoming isolated within the Paradisal myth common to deluge and development. This enclosure is avoided when the archipelago of that story is located within a history of archipelagic formations (the putative flooding of the Persian Gulf). By now a mythopoetic reversal of the myth has occurred; the phenomenon of slow water rising has replaced the image of the heavens opening and drowning the world. Yet, as we zoom into the detail of this ancient shoreline culture, a new scale of intimacy swims into view: the eye-­witness experience of a contemporary Pacific Islander. Here we might seem to have come (at last) to the situation in which archipelagic thinking can and must dogmatise, but, again, it slips away: what might have been taken as the locus classicus of contemporary decolonising governance action turns out, according to Connell, to be anti-archipelagic. Its lesson for us is bound up with ‘extended geographical ties’ that, in the present globalised ­environment – ‘The majority of small islands in the Pacific – where populations were never more than a thousand – probably now have over half their population in urban centres or overseas’114 – remain stubbornly elsewhere. Insofar as incommensurability can be reconciled with comparability, it may be through the resistance of archipelagic fictions to foreclose on further possibilities. A kind of narrative fractalisation occurs where episodes exfoliate endless bifurcating choices, much as the lakes born inside islands give birth to islands of their own. Such a figure is simultaneously self-same at different scales and incommensurable.115 After all, this has fundamental implications for the terms in which Tuck and Yang frame decolonised governance. Subjected to an archipelagic redescription of reality, the concept of the native or the Indigenous always proves to have an elsewhere inscribed into its self-characterisation. Instead of mimicking the colonialist identification of land with territory and both with the sovereign ego – as if the expulsion of white settler powers nevertheless retains white settler ideologies of exclusive rights – the precarious, postcolonial subject is plural, relational and dynamic, and their situated life experience, archipelagic in its interdependence, proves to be nested both within more intimate regions of care and larger regions of shared governance responsibility. As regards the half of the population now located overseas in urban centres but more likely in urban peripheries, a new archipelagic experience may happen. Archipelagic growth may be a feature of emergence at many scales: cities that develop beyond their ancient walls possess a thread-like form that accumulates in more or less dense lumps. At the centre the material is relatively compact, but towards the edges it expels islands detached from the rest of the constructed fabric. As the islands grow, they are transformed into centres in their own right, often equivalent to the original centre, forming a larger polycentric system. The result is an ‘archipelago’ pattern: a grouping of islands that float in a great empty sea in which the waters form a continuous fluid that

Affiliations after the flood  141 penetrates the solids, branching out on various scales, all the way to the smallest abandoned nooks and crannies between the portions of the constructed city. In this way the ‘great empty sea’ or void is transformed into a constellation of empty areas: ‘we can see that the islands, as they expand, leave empty areas inside themselves, and form figures with irregular borders that have the characteristic of “autosimilarity,” an intrinsic property of fractal structures.’ The city ‘develops in keeping with a natural dynamic similar to that of the clouds or the galaxies’ that is, vortically, through region-forming mechanisms of feedback. Although any city is located within the linearist grid of the imperial map, and indeed incorporates its abstract straight lines into planned development, its autopoietic potential is demonstrated archipelagically, and the ‘system of voids’ created in the interior of the urban fabric as the city expands are as important as the creation of new centres.116 Obviously, this can be compared with Deleuze’s rhizomatic multidimensional space of ‘points’ and ‘intensities’ – ‘The (non-linear) rhizome, as opposed to the (linear) arborescent, is “the principle of the interconnection between one multiplicity and another – multiplicities that are never more than provisional assemblages in the process of becoming”.’117 However, Francesco Careri develops the archipelagic metaphor further. To climb over a wall and to set off into these ‘voids’ is like leaping from the coast into the sea: we find ourselves immersed in that amniotic fluid that supplied the life force of that unconscious of the city described by the Surrealists. The liquid image of the archipelago permits us to see the immensity of the open sea, but also what is submerged there, on the seabed, at different depths.118 Plunging into ‘the sea of voids’ is to discover an alternative deterritorialised movement form. Just as a sea is edgeless (‘formed by different seas, by congeries of heterogeneous territories positioned beside one another’), so these ‘seas’ (or holes in the urban fabric), if approached with a certain disposition for crossing borders and penetrating zones, turn out to be utterly navigable, so much so that often, by following the paths already traced by the inhabitants, we can walk all around the city without ever actually entering it.119 So much for the delirium of the dérive and the walking philosophies derived from it, but to re-sensorialise the archipelago, to bring archipelagic thinking back to sensing and the language of recognition, it is necessary to return to those ephemeral dustings of islands, forming and melting between tides, and producing around and between them Chladni-like vibratory movement forms. The exchange here is never literal but always an amplification, and

142  Affiliations after the flood a translation across senses. Annette Weiner has argued that the ‘kula ring’ in the Massim region of Papua New Guinea is not about ‘the give of giveand-take for its own sake’: reminding us that ‘The sonic, kinetic and visual as well as olfactory characteristics’ of the shell valuables also signify – the word butu ‘means both “noise” and “fame”’ – Weiner says that one function of the attachments (‘trade beads, seeds, other types of shell, and bits of plastic or tin’) is to ‘impart motion (specifically, a trembling motion) to the shell, since the essence of a valuable lies in its mobility – its being for transmission.’ Hence, the ‘chiming or tinkling sounds’ the attachments make or, as Nancy Munn puts it, ‘the mobile décor [that] makes a sound that ramifies the space [of the shell]’ – ‘signify success in kula exchange through the sound.’120 It is interesting to contrast this shell sound with the music of the spheres imagined playing in Delos.121 The musical expression of an archipelagic poetics might be something like Shakespeare’s isle, full of noises, Sounds and set airs that give delight and hurt not, Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices … In The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, Bruce Smith writes, ‘­Caliban remembers a sound-world before language, and he constantly puts the audience in aural touch with that world’s existence.’122 In fact, acoustic Caliban is the echo of colonial dread. His noises resist semiotic containment. Considered in the context of future relations with white settler, they can be said to establish at the outset an alternative economy of communication, one based on the desire of recognition rather than the command of silence.

Notes 1 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonisation Is Not a Metaphor,’ Decolonisation: Indigeneity, Education, Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, 1–40, 1. 2 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonisation Is Not a Metaphor,’ 1. 3 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonisation Is Not a Metaphor,’ 36. 4 ‘Claiming land for the Commons and asserting consensus as the rule of the Commons, erases existing, prior, and future Native land rights, decolonial leadership, and forms of self-government.’ (Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonisation Is Not a Metaphor,’ 28.) 5 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonisation Is Not a Metaphor,’ 5. 6 Dirk Bezemer, Jutta Bolt and Robert Lensink, ‘Slavery, Statehood and Economic Development in Sub-Saharan Africa,’ African Economic History Working Paper Series, vol. 6, 2012, 1–46, 5. 7 Quoted by Harvey Siegel, ‘Incommensurability, Rationality and Relativism,’ in Science, Culture and Science Education, Incommensurability and Related Matters, P. Hoyningen-Huene and H. Sankey (eds.), Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2001, 207–224, 210. 8 Harvey Siegel, ‘Incommensurability, Rationality and Relativism,’ 214.

Affiliations after the flood  143 9 Rolf Ziegler, The Kula Ring of Bronislaw Malinowski: A Simulation Model of the Co-Evolution of an Economic and Ceremonial Exchange System, München: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2007, 46. 10 As regards the transformation of incommensurability into a communication that maintains local identity: The kula is not remarkable only in that it provides the inhabitants of an insular district with friendly and beneficent links oversea. The function which it fulfils has a more dynamic aspect. For recurring and competitive kula expeditions act as a channel whereby the quarrels which arise within one district, from the divisions between different lineage groups or villages, are turned outward, and made to renew the district’s foreign relations. Quarrels, which arise out of the ever-bubbling enmities at home, are turned into rivalries, which go to maintain important alliances abroad. (J.P. Singh Uberoi, Politics of the Kula Ring, Manchester: Manchester ­University Press, 1962, 108) Quoted by Ziegler, The Kula Ring of Bronislaw Malinowski: A Simulation Model of the Co-Evolution of an Economic and Ceremonial Exchange System, 87. 11 Hilary N. Weaver, ‘Indigenous Identity: What Is It, and Who Really Has It?,’ Native American Voices, A Reader, S. Lobo, S. Talbot and T. Morris (eds.), London: Routledge, 2016, 28–34, 28. See also Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London: Zed Books, 1999, 6–8. 12 N. M. Wace and M. W. Holdgate, Man and Nature in the Tristan da Cunha ­Islands, IUCN Monograph, No. 6, Morges Switzerland, 1976, 21–23. 13 George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought, from Hellenism to Celan, New York: New Directions, 2011, 214. 14 Tom Conley, ‘The Essays and the New World,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne, U. Kanger (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 74–95, Note that there is no mention of isolarii in Montaigne’s text. Perhaps this is Conley’s own Baroque addition. 15 Tom Conley, ‘The Essays and the New World,’ 79. 16 Michael Morris, ‘Scotland and the Caribbean, c.1740–1833: Atlantic Archipelagos,’ 73 quoting Markman Ellis, ‘”The Cane-Land Isles” Commerce and Empire in Late Eighteenth-Century Georgic and Pastoral Poetry,’ in Islands in History and Representation, R. Edmond and V. Smith (eds.), London: Routledge, 2003, 43–62. 17 See Christina Kullberg, ‘Crossroad Poetics: Glissant and Ethnography,’ ­Callaloo, vol. 36, no. 4, Fall 2013, 968–982, 979. 18 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. B. Wing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990, 137. 19 ‘… the poet Glissant draws Leirisian ethnography towards the imaginary: in order to contribute to global interconnectedness the observer reveals hidden connections between places and people. This is a poetic art of suggestion and associations rather than strict observation.’ (Christina Kullberg, ‘Crossroad ­Poetics: Glissant and Ethnography,’ 979.) 20 Marc Blanchard, ‘Visions of the Archipelago, Michel Leiris, Autobiography and Ethnographic Memory,’ Cultural Anthropology, vol. 5, no. 3, 1990, 270–291, 283. 21 Marc Blanchard, ‘Visions of the Archipelago, Michel Leiris, Autobiography and Ethnographic Memory,’ 288. 22 ‘…“this archipelago – how utterly subject to the ocean’s fluctuations! – made as it is of words and perceptions … ”’ (Marc Blanchard, ‘Visions of the Archipelago, Michel Leiris, Autobiography and Ethnographic Memory,’ 276.) 23 Mandy Bloomfield, ‘Isles Full of Noises: Kamau Braithwaite’s Archipelagic ­Poetics,’ Archaeopoetics: Word, Image, History, Tuscaloosa: University of ­A labama Press, 2016, 152–153.

144  Affiliations after the flood 24 Marco Cuevas-Hewitt, ‘Sketches of an Archipelagic Poetics of Postcolonial Belonging,’ Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture, vol. 11, no. 1, 2007, 242–243. 25 Edmund Spenser, ‘The Faerie Queene,’ Book II, Canto XII, Poetical Works, 132. 26 Callimachus, Hymn IV ‘To Delos.’ ll.300–304 Trans. A. W. Mair.,’ viewed ­September 18, 2017, www.theoi.com/Text/CallimachusHymns2.html. 27 Julia R. Lupton, ‘Mapping Mutability: Or, Spenser’s Irish Plot,’ in Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660, B. Bradshaw, A. Hadfield and W. Maley (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 93–115, 98. 28 Claude Calamé, The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece, trans. J. Lloyd, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, 180. 29 Massimo Cacciari, L’ Arcipelago, Milano: Adelphi, 1997, 21. 30 P. Aelius Aristides, The Complete Works, vol. 2, trans. C. A. Behr, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981, 259. 31 Paul Lunde, ‘Pillars of Hercules, Sea of Darkness,’ ARAMCO World, vol. 43, no. 3, May/June 1992, viewed October 16, 2017, http://archive.aramcoworld.com/ issue/199203/pillars.of.hercules.sea.of.darkness.htm. 32 http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/199203/pillars.of.hercules.sea.of.darkness .htm. 33 Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984, 138. 34 Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology, 29. 35 Howard Felperin, In another Life: The Decline and Fall of the Humanities, Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2014, 182. 36 Ryuta Imafuku, ‘Noah’s Stories in Shaky Archipelagos: M ­ artinique, Haiti, Fukushima,’ Open Democracy, June 8, 2012, viewed January 6, 2013, www.opendemocracy.net/ryuta-imafuku/noahs-stories-in-shaky-archipelagosmartinique-haiti-fukushima. 37 Rui Miguel A. Caldeira and Pablo Sangra, ‘Complex Geophysical Wake Flows: Madeira Archipelago Case Study,’ Ocean Dynamics, vol. 62, 2012, 683–700, 683. 38 Ayah Lazar et al., ‘Vortex Asymmetry in Island Wakes,’ viewed November 25, 2017, www.lmd.polytechnique.fr/~astegner/articles/TIRIS_Hannover2010.pdf. 39 Pablo Sangra et al., ‘The Canary Eddy Corridor: A Major Pathway for LongLived Eddies in the Subtropical North Atlantic,’ Deep-Sea Research I, vol. 56, 2009, 2100–2114, 2100. 40 Pablo Sangra et al., ‘The Canary Eddy Corridor: A Major Pathway for LongLived Eddies in the Subtropical North Atlantic,’ 2111. 41 Publius Vergilius Maro, ‘The Aeneid,’ in Virgil, trans. H. R. Fairclough, ­London: Heinemann, 1957, vol. 1, 503. 42 Plato, ‘Phaedrus,’ Selected Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowitt, New York: The Modern Library, 2000, 118. 43 Gregory Nagy, ‘The Crisis of Performance,’ in The Ends of Rhetoric, History, Theory, Practice, J. Bender and D. E. Wellbery (eds.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990, 43–59, 57. 44 P. Aelius Aristides, The Complete Works, vol. 2, 64. 45 P. Aelius Aristides, The Complete Works, vol. 2. 46 P. Aelius Aristides, The Complete Works, vol. 2. 47 William Desmond, Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness, an Essay on Origins, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987, 107. 48 Manuel De Landa, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum Press, 2006, 13. But see Elaine Stratford et al., ‘Envisioning the Archipelago,’ Island Studies Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, 2011, 122 for observation that internally an assemblage may be archipelagic. 49 Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Notes of the Seminar given in 1928–1930, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, 100. Gianfranco Salvatore, Isole Sonanti, Scenari Archetipici della Musica del Mediterraneo, Roma: ISMEZ, 1989, 14–15.

Affiliations after the flood  145 50 Martono Yuwono and Krishnahari S. Pribadi, ‘A National Mental Revolution through the Restoration of Cities of Colonial Legacy,’ n.d., 1, viewed January 14, 2018, wirasoftfoundation.org/.../26757/.../7d695e1d-082a-442a-bf3d-596b743722e1. 51 Iwan Wijono, quoted in Ella Parry-Davies, ‘Postcards from Mindanao: Wayfaring and Displacement in Archipelagic Space,’ 2015, viewed March 5, 2016, Fluid States website Psi #21. www.fluidstates.org/article.php?id=177. 52 Ella Parry-Davies, ‘Postcards from Mindanao: Wayfaring and Displacement in Archipelagic Space.’ 53 ‘Badjao,’ viewed December 18, 2017, www.ethnicgroupsphilippines.com/people/ ethnic-groups-in-the-philippines/badjao/. 54 Anne P. Burnett, The Art of Bacchylides, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985, 29. It is not clear from the poem that Theseus really dived or swam: after plunging into the water, he is drawn down to the seabed by dolphins. 55 See Paul Carter, Dark Writing, Geography, Performance, Design, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008, 70, where an incident in Cook’s Second Voyage – the foundering of the Resolution on a reef off Tahiti (August 1773) is contrasted with the easeful dexterity of the Tahitian fishermen in their ­canoes – ‘Their boats often overset, but this is no harm to them for Men & Women swim most excellently, & I saw several dive for a single bead, & bring it up from a great distance under Water.’ (70, quoting The Resolution Journal of Johann Reinhold Forster, M. E. Hoare (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, 4 vols, vol. 2, 325.) 56 Ella Parry-Davies, ‘Postcards from Mindanao: Wayfaring and Displacement in Archipelagic Space.’ 57 Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History, London: Routledge, 2007, 30. 58 The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires and The Book of Francisco Rodrigues, edited and trans. by Armando Cortesao, London, Hakluyt Society, Second Series, No. LXXXIX, 1944, 2 vols, vol. 2, 286. 59 The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires and The Book of Francisco Rodrigues, vol. 2, 286. 60 The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires and The Book of Francisco Rodrigues, vol. 2, 287. 61 The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires and The Book of Francisco Rodrigues, vol. 1, 199. 62 Partly because the Venetian traveler states in the same passage that he has not visited them and partly because until recently little was known about Chinese trading relations with the Philippines and adjacent Spice Islands, Marco Polo’s statement has been dismissed as the figment of a ‘universal island mythology.’ (Thomas Suarez, Early Mapping of Southeast Asia, Hong Kong: Periplus Editions, 1999, 107.) However, Suarez thinks it likely that Chinese bureaucrats whom Marco Polo would have met would have known of the Philippines: ‘During the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Song Dynasty, China, established regular trade with the Spice Islands through the Sulu Sea and set up trading posts in the Philippines, becoming familiar with parts of the archipelago …’ (107). 63 Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map, Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History, trans. T. Conley, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006, 150. 64 See, for example, Carte de Navigar, portolani e carte nautiche del museo correr 1318–1732, a cura di Susanna Biadene, Venezia: Marsilio Editore, 1990. 65 Coasts and the eight principal winds are depicted in gold and green; in green ‘i venti mezzani;’ the other sixteen in red, ‘ricavato stemperando minio o cinabro in acqua’ with a little gum arabic. Islands can be coloured as one pleases, always bearing in mind that ‘piu campeggiano i colori et apportano piu vaghezza all’occhio,’ but Sicily is normally painted green and Malta and Rhodes, even after the Turkish conquest, red with the white cross of the Cavalieri (Knights of Malta). See Ugo Tucci, ‘La Carta Nautica’ in Carte da Navigar, portolani e carte nautiche del Museo Correr 1318–1732, 9–19, 9. 66 Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 150. 67 Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 151.

146  Affiliations after the flood 68 William Blake, ‘Milton’, Complete Writings, G. Keynes (ed), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969, Book 1, 15, ll.21–25, 497. 69 Katriina Siivonen, ‘Local Culture as a Resource in Regional Development in the Southwest-Finland Archipelago,’ Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, vol. 3, no. 2, 2009, 47–63, 48. 70 Katriina Siivonen, ‘Local Culture as a Resource in Regional Development in the Southwest-Finland Archipelago,’ 53. 71 Quintus Curtius Rufus, The History of Alexander, trans. J. Yardley, London: Penguin, 1984, 54. 72 Quintus Curtius Rufus, The History of Alexander, 54. 73 Quintus Curtius Rufus, The History of Alexander, 54. 74 Mohamed Munavvar, Ocean States: Archipelagic Regimes in the Law of the Sea, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1995, 11. Munavvar states, ‘Approximately seven per cent of the land area of the Earth is encompassed by oceanic islands and combined, islands cover an area of the Earth’s surface that exceeds 3,823,000 square miles.’ (11) His discussion pertains mainly to archipelagic states. 75 Mohamed Munavvar, Ocean States: Archipelagic Regimes in the Law of the Sea, 15. 76 Mohamed Munavvar, Ocean States: Archipelagic Regimes in the Law of the Sea, 15. 77 Mohamed Munavvar, Ocean States: Archipelagic Regimes in the Law of the Sea, 11. 78 Mohamed Munavvar, Ocean States: Archipelagic Regimes in the Law of the Sea, 15. 79 Mohamed Munavvar, Ocean States: Archipelagic Regimes in the Law of the Sea, 20. 80 Clive Symmons, ‘Some Problems Relating to Definition of Insular Formations in International Law,’ Maritime Briefing, vol. 1, no. 5, 1995, 3. 81 Franco Cassano, Il pensiero meridiano, Roma: Laterza, 1998, 14. See also Carmen Beatriz Llenín-Figueroa, ‘Imagined Islands: A Caribbean T ­ idalectics,’ PhD, Duke University, 130, note 12, viewed September 8, 2017, https:// dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/5420/LlennFigueroa_ duke_0066D_11264.pdf?sequence=1 82 William S. Kessler, Gregory C. Johnson and Dennis W. Moore, ‘Sverdrup and Nonlinear Dynamics of the Pacific Equatorial Currents,’ Journal of Physical Oceanography, vol. 33, 994–1008, 994. 83 Pierre F. J. Lermusiaux et al., ‘Multiscale Physical and Biological Dynamics in the Philippine Archipelago: Predictions and Processes,’ Oceanography, vol. 24, no. 1, 2011, 70–89, 71. 84 M. I. P. de Lima and J. L. M. P. de Lima, ‘Investigating the Multifractality of Point Precipitation in the Madeira Archipelago,’ Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics, vol. 16, 299–311, 2009, 305. 85 Chantal DelSol, Icarus Fallen, trans. R. Dick, Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2004, 117. 86 Ruta Imafuku, ‘Noah’s Stories in Shaky Archipelagos: Martinique, Haiti, Fukushima.’ 87 The Fall was not only moral but geological, and what it produced was an archipelago. Following Thomas Burnet (Sacred Theory of the Earth, 1684), before the Deluge the surface of the Earth floated on the waters and was composed of particles aggregating on the oil surface to form a crust – but after a time it began ‘to crack and open in fissures …’ The crimes of mankind had for some time been preparing to draw down the wrath of heaven; and they at length induced the Deity to defer repairing those breaches of nature. Thus the chasms of the earth everyday became wider, and, at length, they penetrated to the great abyss of waters, ad the whole earth in a manner fell in. Then ensued a total disorder in the uniform beauty of the first creation. (Rev. E. Blomfield, A General View of the World, Geographical, Historical and Philosophical, in 2 vols., Bungay, 1807, 129)

Affiliations after the flood  147 Hence the present appearance of the globe is due to our ‘fall’ into the abyss: the oceans and the seas are still a part of the ancient abyss that have not had a place to return to. Islands and rocks are fragments of the earth’s former crust; kingdoms and continents are larger masses of its broken substance; and all the inequalities that are to be found on the surface of the present earth, are owing to the accidental confusion into which both earth and waters were the thrown … (130) 88 See William H. Shea, ‘A Comparison of Narrative Element in Ancient Mesopotamian Creation-Flood Stories with Genesis 1–9,’ Origins, vol. 11, no. 1, 1984, 9–29. 89 Translation by E. A. Speiser, in Ancient Near Eastern Texts, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950, 60–72. See also reprint Isaac Mendelsohn (ed.), Religions of the Ancient Near East, New York: Library of Religion paperbook series, 1955, 100–106; notes by Mendelsohn. 90 Shane Mountjoy, The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005, 8. 91 Maev Kennedy, ‘Relic Reveals Noah’s ark Was Circular,’ The Guardian, ­January 2, 2010. The fact that both epics stipulate that the vessel should be equal in length and breadth leaves open the possibility that the square deck described in the Gilgamesh Epic was constructed on a circular hull. 92 This sounds like journalistic license. There is no reason why the Biblical Ark should meet the expectations of marine archaeology. The point is that the universalisation of the Flood was an ideologically-motivated misappropriation of an environmental occurrence quite open to other, less apocalyptic interpretations. 93 David MacDonald, ‘The Flood: Mesopotamian Archaeological Evidence,’ Creation/Evolution Journal, vol. 8, no. 2, 1988, 14–20, viewed May 6, 2008, http:// ncse.com/cej/8/2/flood-mesopotamian-archaeological-evidence. 94 Harry Slochower, Mythopoesis: Mythic Patterns in the Literary Classics, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970, 34. 95 Harry Slochower, Mythopoesis: Mythic Patterns in the Literary Classics, 34. 96 Mark Geller, ‘The Flood and Global Warming: Who Is Responsible?,’ Slavia Meridionalis, vol. 14, 2014, 74–86. 97 Professor of landscape ecology quoted by Christopher Reed, ‘Paradise Lost? What Should – or Can – Be Done About “the environmental crime of the century”?,’ Harvard Magazine, January–February 2005, 32–37, viewed June 15, 2017, https://harvardmagazine.com/2005/01/paradise-lost.html. 98 Christopher Reed, ‘Paradise Lost? What Should – or Can – Be Done About “the environmental crime of the century”?’ 99 A. B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire, The Reign of Alexander the Great, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 159. ‘It was the late spring, the river at high water, and water was flowing in torrents over the holding dams which in quieter seasons diverted some of the flow to irrigation channels.’ 100 A. B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire, The Reign of Alexander the Great, 159. Evidently what Alexander would not abide was any obstacle to connectivity. 101 Julian Rzóska, ‘General Biology of Iraq Waters,’ in Euphrates and Tigris: Mesopotamian Ecology and Destiny, Monographiae Biologicae, vol. 38, Dordrecht: Springer, 1980, 87–94, 87. 102 ‘The Iraqi Government Assault on the Marsh Arabs, A Human Rights Watch Paper,’ January 2003, viewed August 18, 2008, http://pantheon.hrw.org/ legacy/backgrounder/mena/marsharabs1.pdf. This paper documents a calculated assault on human and natural biodiversity only extraordinary in its destructiveness.

148  Affiliations after the flood 103 H. Partow, ‘The Mesopotamian Marshlands: Demise of an Ecosystem, Early Warning and Assessment Technical Report,’ UNEP/DEWA/TR.01-3 Rev. 1, Division of Early Warning and Assessment, United Nations Environment Programme, Nairobi, Kenya, 2001, 16. 104 For the archipelagic character of the country of the Ma’dan, see Mountjoy, The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, 9. 105 H. Partow, ‘The Mesopotamian Marshlands: Demise of an Ecosystem,’ 36. 106 Philip Lewis et al., ‘Effect of Armed Conflict on Health of Marsh Arabs in Southern Iraq,’ Lancet, vol. 381, 2013, 959–961, 960. 107 Christopher Reed, ‘Paradise Lost? What Should – or Can – Be Done About “the environmental crime of the century”?,’ again quoting Robert France. 108 ‘The Greeks conceived the paradigm of the noun as the upper right quadrant of a circle: the nominative was the vertical radius, and the other cases were radii which “declined” to the right, and were therefore called ptoseis “fallings,” which the Romans translated literally by casus.’ (Marcus Terentius Varro, Varro on the Latin Language, 2 vols, vol. 1, 370, note). 109 Jeanna Bryner, ‘Lost Civilisation May Have Existed beneath the Persian Gulf,’ Live Science, December 9, 2010, quoting Jeoffrey Rose, University of Birmingham. 110 John Connell, ‘Vulnerable Islands: Climate Change, Tectonic Change, and Changing Livelihoods in the Western Pacific,’ The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 27, no. 1, 1–36, 14. 111 John Connell, ‘Vulnerable Islands: Climate Change, Tectonic Change, and Changing Livelihoods in the Western Pacific,’ 15. 112 John Connell, ‘Vulnerable Islands: Climate Change, Tectonic Change, and Changing Livelihoods in the Western Pacific,’ 15. 113 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, the Creation of Meaning in Language, R. Czerny, K. McLaughlin, J. Costello (trans.), London: Routledge, 2003, 5. 114 John Connell, ‘Vulnerable Islands: Climate Change, Tectonic Change, and Changing Livelihoods in the Western Pacific,’ 22. 115 As Bob Hodge notes, ‘self-similarity may be recognisable only after a small number of iterations. If the formula repeats many times, fractal self-similarity may become invisible. Sometimes clear fractality is lost after only three iterations in either direction, reaching a boundary of incommensurability.’ (­ Social Semiotics for a Complex World: Analysing Language and Social Meaning, ­Cambridge: Polity, 2017, Chapter 8, n.p.) 116 Francesco Careri, ‘Transurbance,’ in Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale, P. Barron and M. Mariani (eds.), London: Routledge, 2014, 107–113, 109. 117 Manola Antonioli, ‘Virtual Architecture,’ Julie-Francoise Kruidenier and ­Peter Gaffney (trans.), in The Force of the Virtual: Deleuze, Science, Philosophy, P. Gaffney (ed.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, 178. 118 Francesco Careri, ‘Transurbance,’ 110. 119 Francesco Careri, ‘Transurbance,’ 110. 120 All references as cited by David Howes, ‘Scent, Sound and Synesthesia: Intersensoriality and Material Culture Theory,’ in Handbook of Material Culture, C. Tilley et al. (eds.), London: Sage, 2006, 161–172, 166. 121 Gianfranco Salvatore, Isole Sonanti, Scenari Archetipici della Musica del ­Mediterraneo, 182. 122 Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, Chicago, IL: ­University of Chicago Press, 1999, 338.

5 Overflow A model for culture-based regional development

The first formation of waterholes Why assume archipelagos are purely pelagic – inter-island arrangements at sea? Why not imagine inland regions in similar terms? The obvious objection is that an administrative region like the Western District of Victoria (the subject of this chapter) lacks the three attributes we have defined as constitutive of archipelagos: innumerability, edgelessness and the is/is not condition. Driving through a landscape of extinct volcanos, one experiences parallax effects like those experienced in a vessel sliding between islands, but the resemblance is purely picturesque: no-one much lives in the mountains and the road-woven network of regional towns, which skirts patches of privately held property (anything but an open sea), has a cadastral identity and finitude that stems from its origin in the colonial survey. The Western District, a terrestrial region slightly larger than the whole of Ireland, is a jigsaw of straight edges, its only fractal chaos clustered along the Bass Strait coastline between approximately Cape Otway and Mount Gambier. But there exists another possibility: to consider the same region as a hydrological, rather than geological, formation, as a system of flows and catchments unconstrained by engineered divisions and constantly changing its surface arrangements and relative positions. The ontological properties of a waterscape are considerable: access to an inherently reflective or doubled knowledge of the universe; acknowledgement of the water body distributed serpentine throughout the country as pools, creeks, meanders and treelines; and they belong to culture, as desertification occurs first in rhetoric, then in reality. Hence, writing about late nineteenth-century irrigation mania, apologists co-opted the name that colonial Surveyor-General Major Mitchell gave to the Western District in 1836, relocated it geographically and inverted its meaning: ‘Australia Felix was an arid waste, a hell of heat and flies, the old grey Murray … pouring millions of gallons a day into the salt sea ….’1 But, most of all, the implications of water literacy for a decolonised governance are not simply in reclaiming a common good whose ‘externalisation’ as a commodity ‘constitutes a form of alienation among people,’2 but primarily in the redefinition of fluency – in discursive terms, the energeia that exceeds any accomplished translation, comparable with overflow.

150 Overflow

Murray River

Horsham South Australia Victoria

Grampians

Mt William

Ararat

Ballarat Mount Gambier

Toolondo Swamp Glenelg River

Hamilton Mt Rouse Caramut

Lake Condah Portland

Dj

Kangatong Tower Hill G

Deen Mar

Melbourne Lake Corangamite

Camperdown Framlingham Warrnambool Lake Bullen Merri Lake Gnotuk

Geelong

Cape Otway

G Gunditjmara Dj Djabwurrung

Figure 5.1  W  estern Victoria, Australia

To begin with a story told by Scottish immigrant, Western District squatter, advocate of regional government and co-author of Australian Aborigines (1881), James Dawson, who is a story in his own right: if Tuck and Yang’s ‘ethic of incommensurability’ is not to prove fatal to any postcolonial renegotiation of land rights and responsibilities, evidence of cultural convergence, intellectual capacity and residual mythopoetic imagination will have to be demonstrated in the colonising mindset. It cannot ground anything, but it can scrape away the crust of human and environmental alienation to expose a ground in common; documenting a non-appropriative act of the imagination, isophoric in Forsythe’s sense, it provides historical precedent for the hope that coming into full social being through the other extends beyond a traditionally practiced moiety system of social arrangements to involve every aspect of a creative region’s relational ecology. But to begin with ‘The First Formation of Waterholes,’ an ‘anecdote,’ told by one of Dawson’s Aboriginal language informants: One very dry season, when there was no water in all the country, and the animals were perishing of thirst, a magpie lark and a gigantic crane consulted together. They could not understand how it was that a turkey bustard of their acquaintance was never thirsty ….

Overflow  151 Taking care not to be seen, they followed the turkey bustard to a place with a flat stone. Lifting the stone, the turkey ‘drank from a spring running out of a cleft in a rock.’ After he had left the magpie and lark descended, taking a drink and a bath and congratulating themselves on discovering the secret; then a transformation occurred: ‘They flapped their wings with joy, and the water rose till it formed a lake. They then flew all over the parched country, flapping their wings and forming waterholes, which have been drinking places ever since.’3 I want to persuade readers that Dawson was an exceptional practical humanist, but in classifying this creation story as an ‘anecdote’ he appears conventional – like his contemporaries, associating folklore with superstition, and both with an earlier stage of societal-spiritual development: unless, perhaps, aware of this prejudice, and committed to showing Gunditjmara and Djabwurrung people were knowledgeable, sophisticated and fully able to manage their country, he sought to minimise the target. Any mythopoetic account of the Western District’s coming into being is severely hampered by what amounts to a collectively reinforced act of cultural, even, precisely, poetic genocide.4 As Brumm notes, ‘Unfortunately, the evidence for Aboriginal myth and oral traditions in the Victorian region, owing to the violent dispossession of these groups early in the colonial history of Australia, is extremely fragmentary.’5 A ‘myth’ reported by Brough Smyth in The Aborigines of Victoria, ‘How Water was first Obtained,’ describes how Eaglehawk’s son grew thirsty and asked Crow where he could get a drink. Crow told the young one to go down to a river, then forced him to drink ‘until he was swollen to an immense size’: the Crow then threw something at him, and caused him to burst, and the waters that flowed from him overspread the country.’6 The patrilineal kinship system practised by the Kulin peoples of central Victoria (around present-day Melbourne) was structured around moieties totemically represented by Bunjil the Wedgetailed Eagle and Waa the Crow.7 The relationship between these different ancestral bird creators is difficult to reconstruct: we know that Bunjil travelled throughout the south-west as far as Portland: his final resting place is commemorated as Deen Maar, ‘The Man’8; ‘the sacred site of Bunjil’s Cave in the Grampians [Western District] was connected by songlines stretching to South Australia, New South Wales, Queensland and Eastern Victoria’ – and Jim Poulter asserts, ‘When traveling through another tribe’s territory the song for that section had to be sung in the language of that tribe, as a sign of the legitimacy of your travel.’9 Or, as Bill Yidumduma Harney puts it, ‘Each part of a beach, hill, water, creek, river or spring was sung in the song-map chants’ – the story might travel through many areas, bringing together ‘different languages and people’10: the story also varied according to the language and geographical location, but it retained the original theme. ‘Each tribal group has only part of the story, and to learn the whole myth one would need to trace it from its beginning through to its conclusion.’11

152 Overflow Hence Eaglehawk and Crow travel throughout south-east Australia making the landscape as they go. And, by analogy with the entanglement of story lines documented elsewhere in Australia, we may assume that in their journeys they meet the turkey bustard, the giant crane, or Native Companion, and the magpie lark of Dawson’s anecdote. Probably the only way to confirm this is through the choreography of the stars.

A story about relating As noted, Dawson’s anecdote is a story about the creation and organisation of social relations across a region. Writing in 1904, the ethnographer R. H. Mathews observed that conspicuous stars and star clusters all the way along the zodiacal belt, have well-known names and traditions. Moreover, each star figuring in the myths belongs to a phratry [moiety], section, clan or other subdivision, precisely the same as the people of the tribe among whom the tale is current. He further noted the correlation between constellations and kinship relations: ‘a man and his wives, his family, his weapons, his dogs, are not generally far apart. Brothers, uncles and other relationships are often separated by considerable distances.’12 Dawson’s story had a moral, but it also had a socio-economic, function: set, as it were, among a Milky Way of story constellations that symbolically mapped social, spatial and environmental relations and reciprocities, it was the kind of story that could be traded. In fact, far from being an ‘anecdote,’ it was a kind of hyper-story – a meta-narrative about the discursive foundations of relating.13 Discussing the rules governing the distribution of food, Dawson writes, The narrator of this custom mentioned that when he was very young he used to grumble because his father gave away all the best pieces of birds and quadrupeds and the finest eels, but he was told that it was a rule and must be observed. This custom is called yuurka baawhaar, meaning ‘exchange ….’14 To illustrate the moral of the tale, Dawson follows this up with a story told him about someone punished for being, like the turkey bustard, ‘selfish.’15 However, this was not simply a matter of family economy: the same principle of giving with interest applied at the great meetings which occurred throughout Aboriginal Victoria and were an Australia-wide phenomenon: Isabel McBryde notes that Dawson and other nineteenth-century observers tended to characterise the transactions negotiated at the great meetings in terms derived from Victorian merchant economics when, as W. E. H. Stanner suggests, they more closely resembled the Melanesian Kula.16 Besides

Overflow  153 prestation of material objects, ‘it is clear that women, services, songs, names and dances also change ownership.’17 Drawing on Dawson’s descriptions of the ‘great meetings’ and his own archeological work at Lake Condah, revisionist ethnohistorian Harry Lourandos theorised that the super-­abundance of eels produced through the elaborate eel-weir farming system stimulated inter-group meeting and trade, that is, both ‘more closed formations’ (great meetings, for example) and ‘more complex and costly relationships’ illustrated by the evolution of ‘the vast, expanded networks of south-eastern Australia (Victoria in particular), which incorporated territorially bounded (or “closed”) social units.’18 But it is possible that the production of excess was calculated. McBryde speculates that W. E. H. Stanner’s comment on Merbok (‘a relentless imperative seems at work: nothing is more offensive than a pile of foreign goods with nowhere to go’) also applied in south-­ eastern Australia.19 And, taking this another step further, Brumm seeks to answer McBryde’s central provocation – why did people travel from afar to the Mount William greenstone quarry near Lancefield (Central Victoria) when their own territory held comparable stone?20 – by suggesting that the essential exchange had to do with spiritual power: Surviving oral traditions suggest that Mt William quarry may have had an important role in Kulin mythology that was seen as imbuing its axes with great power. The quarry owner/managers as song-makers were responsible for receiving such knowledge from the Ancestral world and communicating it to their own and far-distant groups. Their role in creating and/or reinforcing the great power of Mt William in the form of myth, therefore, seems likely.21 So here we come full circle: the essential energeia driving the production and distribution systems drawn together and spread out through the great meetings was not utilitarian but mythopoetic, to do with the continuous overflowing of story from one creative incarnation into another.

Of flows and catchments In other words, a seemingly guileless fairytale about the formation of waterholes turns out to contain within itself, almost fractally as it were in the scaling up and scaling down of primary relationships, a redefinition of the human landscape in terms of flows and catchments. The flows correspond to story lines; the catchments are ‘great meetings.’ And were a drawing of this overflow system drawn, it would resemble the pattern of ‘the Sharing system’ which the famous Ngarinyin elder Mowaljarlai made for Jutta Malnic, reproduced in Yorro Yorro22: the interior of the Australian landmass is represented as a wickerwork basket or a lattice whose nodes are frequently joined diagonally as well. Where strands – history stories travelling along trade routes – cross, the overlapping strips create a square. The square

154 Overflow symbolises the area where a community lives, and has the same width as the track: it is this identification of passage and place, their mutualism, that makes the design truly archipelagic: islands form where journeys meet, and inscribe their dimensions into the next part of the journey. Exchange is inscribed, like passage into place, into every aspect of reality: When discussing Aboriginal paths, it is difficult to separate trade in material property and Aboriginal metaphysics and cosmology. Not knowing where to find water was fatal for people travelling on foot in the Channel Country. Dotted across this landscape are permanent mound springs or mikiri, fed by water that is pushed up from the underground artesian basin. These mound springs are important features recalled in song, stories, carvings and drawings.23 As Mowaljarlai knew, this choreotopography of periodic pooling and spreading, coming together and separating again, operated across all scales of time and space, from the sharing of food to the seasonal cycles and conjunctions of the stars and planets.24 The present isolation of Deen Mar is in this perspective temporary: correlating the occupation of Australia to the period of the last Ice Age, when the continental shelf of Australia (Sahul) extended as dry land across the Arafura Sea to New Guinea and across the Timor Sea nearly as far as Timor, David Rose speculates that many of the trans-regional ‘macro Dreamings’ reflect cycles of sea level rise and fall, alternating periods of continental consolidation and archipelagic fragmentation, and associated depopulation and repopulation.25 Maybe some memory of Deen Mar’s isolation is preserved in the belief that Bunjil created the sea.26 In comparison with the European colonialist mythos, with its founding rhetoric of flood and shipwreck, and its engineered elimination of overflow – human as well as environmental – the ‘structuring principle’ of ‘The Australian system’ has not been domination but instead ‘egalitarian mutuality’27: its strategy for managing social organization is not competition but reciprocity, consecrated through marriage exchanges in formal kinship and ceremonial systems; its approach to managing resources, both material and semiotic, is not exploitation and innovation, but conservation and stability. Conservation over deep time is achieved by inter-­generational transmission processes that maximize precision of replication.28 To which should be added that the networked, ‘flat’ ontology implied here is, in fact, voluminous – as Mowaljarlai says, everything standing up alive – and spreads and pools within a movement form whose ‘wet ­ontology’ suggests the ‘continual reformation’ of the ocean but here governs human relations inland.29 What began as an anecdote brings us, then, to the brink of an incommensurable reality: what common ground can be found between

Overflow  155 an anastomosing civilisation and one that predicates sustainability on visions of deluge disaster? The American literary theorist J. Hillis Miller reminds us that anastomosis, or ‘intercommunication between two vessels, channels, or distinct branches of any kind, by a connecting cross-branch,’30 also happens in language where it refers to the ‘insertion of a qualifying word between two parts of another word.’31 Even discursively, then, the project of building a regional governance model mindful of the silences out of which the white settler voices arises seems fraught. And it would be idle, even gratuitous, to float a practical reconciliation proposal where none may be possible. What is possible, though, is to identify the putative grounds of such a future, the necessity of fluency, and a model for its recognition in the human and post-human landscape.

Of regional fluency From the other side, an archipelagic reconceptualisation of the Western District bio-region, celebrated for its volcanic plains and inland lakes superficially resembles a thought experiment in which Australia’s federal distribution of powers (currently blocked at a State level) extended to the creation of regional authorities ‘midway between the present Shires and the existing States [and] more properly described as an extension of local government.’32 However, in contrast with decentralist federal thinking, whose provision of a greater number of regionally responsible subnational governments serves, in fact, the opposite political principle of unification, an archipelagic conception springs locally and plurally and generates regional consciousness (and the informing social, economic, environmental and political economy) from impulses of association that are relational rather than territorial. If cultural development and political consensus-building are a function of regional literacy, the case of Scottish settler and humanist James Dawson is exemplary: best known for his work on behalf of Aboriginal rights, Dawson was instrumental in defining the Western District as a cultural landscape and a powerful advocate of local government. However, the archipelagic import of Dawson’s joint interest in Aboriginal society and local enfranchisement only emerges when these themes are considered together: corresponding to the regular meetings convened to record Gunditjmara and Djabwurrung vocabularies is a discourse of place-making that resembles a field of flows and catchments, of passages joining meeting places to form a place that, following the etymological sense of district, resembles a string figure in which the parts are held together because they are tensely held apart. A further feature of the archipelagic region outlined here, in contrast to the incommensurability thesis of Chapter 2, is its focus on a mechanism of postcolonial self-organisation that incorporates cross-cultural experiences of colonisation. Instead of treating the invasion of sovereign peoples as an irremediable breach of human contract, as if invaders and invaded are fixed

156 Overflow in irremediably hostile cultural destinies, counter-impulses or traditions are documented within that landscape of erasure. As a step towards loosening this un-negotiable binary, the Indigenous occupation of the country is not defined purely in terms of longevity of occupation but rather in terms of sustainable practices and associated philosophies of place, which are dynamic, inter-regional and no less or more ‘modern’ than systems of areal organisation and development imported from Europe. Regionalism in Australia has conventionally been approached as an economic and administrative issue: regional political aspirations have consistently been resisted with the odd effect of inhibiting their founding impulse, an awareness of distinctive cultural identity. In this sense, in the absence of any imminent likelihood of constitutional change to recognise regional sovereignty, cultural development is the quickest way to bring about political devolution. The important nuance here, though, is that cultural change is, from an archipelagic point of view, where places are made after their stories, inseparable from the evolution of new governance principles and practices. One decolonising gesture is to reconnect the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty to the cultural institutions that supported it. Another is to expose those suturing gestures in the colonial landscape where Aboriginal linings, undercladdings and distributions of powers pucker, fold and recover the flows and catchments that the patchwork of the cadastral survey scissored apart.

The great meetings First, I want to sketch two types of areal organisation: one is the inter-­ regional relationship secured by the periodic ‘great meetings’ documented by Dawson; the other is the proposal to form ‘local societies’ for the purposes of sociability, but also for the promotion of regional literacy, another campaign in which Dawson was involved. It is no accident that Dawson drew attention to ‘great meetings’ or that he characterised them in pre-­ Enclosure terms as meetings held ‘annually in midsummer for hunting, feasting, and amusements.’ His account could, without much difficulty, be transposed to the last comparable event that occurred in the country where I was brought up, the 1859 Scouring of the White Horse. Dawson’s account of the great meetings held at Mirraewuae, a large marsh to the west of present day Caramut, was not disinterested: tribes gathering there from a regional catchment of approximately 35,000 square kilometres amounted to perhaps 2,500 people, ample evidence, were it needed, of a strong regional population. Perhaps more importantly, as archaeologist Harry Lourandos argued in the 1970s, great meetings of this kind, especially those convened around the flourishing eel-trapping industry of Lake Condah, demonstrated the existence of a society that was not composed of isolationist blocks but which defined itself instead ‘in terms of “relationality” and “fluidity.”’ Archaeological research conducted at Toolondo Swamp, north of Hamilton, in the 1980s by Harry Lourandos revealed that Aboriginal people excavated a  three kilometre-long channel system to connect Budgeongutte Swamp

Overflow  157 with Clear Swamp. Lourandos argued that the construction of this system extended the range of the eels and facilitated a harvest that exceeded local needs: the ‘overflow’ of eels was a valuable trading commodity that was ecologically sustainable and built a regional economy. The broader ecological context was a living practice in harmony with an eel life cycle that involved oceanic migration as far as the Coral Sea. Kaawirn Kuunawarn (c.1820–1889), chief of the Kirrae wurrung, who had the authority to convene such meetings, represented the meeting place as a circle carved into the flat side of his spear thrower. But just as important in his designs were rows of notches ‘extending from each end of the stick to the camp [that] indicate the numbers of individuals of the two tribes approaching from opposite directions.’33 The motif described here corresponds closely to the ‘Travelling sign, with the concentric circles representing a resting place,’ which Geoffrey Bardon, working with Pintupi artists at Papunya, Central Australia, in 1971–1972, found were basic to Western Desert imagery.34 No stylistic genealogy is proposed: simply, the probability of comparable understandings of the relationship between being in place and travelling between places.35 On this latter point: another chief, Weeratt Kuyutt, not only summoned people from afar, he also travelled among them as ‘both a messenger and a teacher,’ and his catchment was even larger than that represented at the Caramut meet: he travelled unmolested all over the country between the Grampian ranges and the sea, and between the rivers Leigh and Wannon; and was received and treated everywhere with kindness and hospitality. These peripateias were ceremonialised: a messenger announcing a meeting painted his face with red and white stripes across the cheek and nose; if the information related to death, their heads, faces, and hands, their arms up to the elbows, and their feet and legs up to the knees, were painted with white clay. So a figure like Weeratt Kuyutt pre-announced his news, but the time of news-breaking was, in turn, made visible to him: ‘when the Pleiades are visible in the east an hour before sunrise, the time for visiting friends and acquaintances is at hand.’ Astronomy, geography and sociability are interlocking cogs within a single timepiece; if some distant locality requires to be visited by night, it can be reached by following a particular star. He taught them also the names of localities, mountain ranges, and lakes, and the directions of the neighbouring tribes.36 Here is an archipelagic region that, according to a leading law-maker, is simultaneously traversed by an ocean of stars, by journeys knowledgably conducted in the footsteps of their rising and settings and by ceremonialised modes of communication through which federated tribes were alternately maintained apart and sustained together. Different levels of association are imagined as a movement form whose choreography is imitated

158 Overflow at successively smaller scales. Stars are invariably imagined as stopped in their tracks, as indexical evidence of recent events, an interpretation that gives equal weight to blank spots. Hence ‘the coal sack of the ancient mariners’ is named after the bunyip and supposed to be a waterhole: ‘celestial aborigines, represented by the large stars around it, are said to have come from the south end of the milky way, and to have chased the smaller stars into it, where they are now engaged in spearing them.’37 Storytelling imparts to the subject matter occasion, direction and movement; mobile relations are mapped rather than fixed positions defined territorially. The object is to regulate situations of periodic overflow and contraction, to manage interconnectedness as a system of inter-related catchments. There may be an environmental analogy. Numerous lakes and swamplands are dotted across the Western Volcanic Plain and range dramatically in scale. Some of these are formed by low lying depressions in the relatively flat landscape, other larger ones are the result of ancient volcanic flows blocking creeks and river valleys, effectively halting the drainage of water. The largest inland lake in Victoria, Lake Corangamite, was formed by this process …38 The primary goal of landowners committed to restoring the pre-colonial water landscape is the removal of weirs and channels that inhibit flow and overflow, the rehabilitation of the old water syntax whose grammar of subtle slopes and occasional catchments produced after rain a distinctive local bubbling up that spread in many directions to produce temporary regional laceworks of running water.

Radicalism and separatism In 1861, the year that the Princeland Secession Movement was inaugurated, the Framlingham Mission Station was opened. This should give pause to any thought that white settler regionalism across the Western District involved radical reappraisal of shared sovereignty. Nevertheless, the push to localise powers over the management of infrastructure, trade and growth is significant: in the context of an early twenty-first-century orthodoxy that imagines the present distribution of responsibilities between federal, state and local authorities (the latter of which still lack recognition in the constitution) as fixed and consensual, it demonstrates the existence of viable alternative governance models that destabilise the centralist model. A. J. Brown has argued convincingly that when the States were formed c.1859 decentralization ceased, the advent of local government stalled, and the centralised unitary constitutional structure developed in NSW was reproduced across the new colonies.39 Australian federalism stymied a true federation: Australian Federation was not being built out of the language of ‘unity in diversity,’ as celebrated by later federal orthodoxy, but of ‘unity in sameness.’40

Overflow  159 Unrelated to the republican notion of separation as an exit from the British monarchy or empire, territorial independence within the Anglo-Australian colonial group was, in this context, Brown says, a pervasive and positive idea. While current orthodoxy neither comprehensively notices nor explains these movements, classing them as mere ‘localised and parochial responses to state boundary grievances,’ these secessionist movements were, in fact, proto-federalist: If anything, the decentralist federal tradition embedded in separationist behaviour became progressively more sophisticated and basic to many regions’ long-term political identity.41 Regions became proto-federalist when conceived relationally from the inside, rather than as bailiwicks of the state. In 1861 farming interests in and around Hamilton met to lament the fact that ‘the wealth of the district was expended in beautifying Melbourne.’ Referring to the formation of a Separation League in Portland, a leading squatter, Peter Learmonth, argued ‘that the Western District will never have anything like justice done to it until a complete severance from Victoria took place.’42 As the self-identified smallholder or tenant-farmer, Mr Alfred Arden put it, ‘The advantages of separation would be, that our funds would be employed in the formation of such roads as would most materially decrease the expenses of transit of such goods as wool, wheat, &c.’ Benefits would accrue through investment in the infrastructure of the public domain. Like the Wakefield-inspired South Australians, Arden looked forward to the development of villages supported by hinterlands of smallholdings. To support this development, ‘he would, further, advocate immigration upon an extensive scale, which would not only not injure but would be of great benefit to all classes in the community.’43 In other words, in contrast with the later mooted, post-State abolition ‘glorified shire councils’ extending local government regionally, the separation advocated here sought to restore sovereignty over decision-making. It was proto-federal because, as the export arrangements and immigration policy illustrated, it envisaged the new region inter-regionally. In principle, had these and other secession movements succeeded and the colonial States collapsed, a federation of regions would have emerged where sovereignty was voluntarily shared, as was the case with the ‘Native States’ proposed in the 1920s, areas self-governed ‘by a native tribunal as far as possible according to their own laws and customs, as well as represented in the federal parliament.’44 Dawson was actively interested in promoting locally representative government. He also advocated for Aboriginal freedom of movement and cultural, if not political, sovereignty. Sociability, the core goal of his advocacy, was ambiguous: it could be construed culturally or politically.45 The establishment of the Anglican Mission Station at Framlingham (opened in 1865) may have been critical to the clarification of his views. Dawson was no federalist: following

160 Overflow the Duffy Act of 1866, Dawson engaged (unsuccessfully) in ‘dummying’ – buying back parts of his own disintegrated Kangatong estate – p ­ rimarily, it seems, to stem the anticipated flood of common Irish immigrants. But he abhorred the containment of Aboriginal people not only on the grounds of natural justice but because it was associated with the suppression of culture. Through conversations with inmates at Framlingham, Dawson acquired most of the ethnographic information published in Australian Aborigines, but he deplored the attempted deracination. Observing ‘the depressing effect on the minds and health of the natives’ caused by the prohibition of corroborees, Dawson arranged for them to occur at Kangatong. This is an interesting gesture: as part of his campaign to build regional literacy, Dawson promoted the arts – he commissioned landscapes by the artist Eugen von Guerard, he advised the composer Louis Bayer, whose opera Muutchaaka is inspired by Kaawirn Kuunawirn. These cultural investments used ‘amusement’ to build a sense of unique regional identity. Dawson thought little of Aboriginal music; it appears that the corroborees he facilitated were connected, for him, with the memory of the ‘great meetings.’ Certainly, the spirit in which they were convened contrasts sharply with the corroboree put on at Robert Leake’s ­Glencoe property to farewell three squatters who after a decade in the Glenelg, Mt Gambier area, were preparing to repatriate their new found wealth. To Leake, the corroboree was nothing more than ‘a wild tum-tum by firelight, and all painted.’ As Duncan Stuart, interpreter, observed: ‘Europeans pay no respect to the rights of the Aborigines to their country. To make money is the only thing they have in view.’46

Local self-representation Shortly after publishing Australian Aborigines, Dawson returned to Linlithgow in Linlithgowshire (succeeded by West Lothian in 1921) for two years (1882–1883). Both Dawson’s father and elder brother had occupied the office of Provost of Linlithgow, and, in the lead up to the passage of local government legislation for England and Scotland (in 1888 and 1889 respectively), one imagines that the Dawson household was a forum of lively political debate. The argument for increased taxpayer representation was not only formal; a stronger sense of local identity was perceived as a bulwark against the continuing erosion of locally distinctive cultural habits. But perhaps most important was the gain to sociability that greater participation in local affairs fostered. In his essay ‘Village organization,’ the Wiltshire writer Richard Jefferies described the same social malaise Dawson had observed at Framlingham: ‘It is difficult to convey an adequate idea of the desultory nature of village life. There is an utter lack of any kind of cohesion, a total absence of any common interest, or social bond of union.’47 And the consequences are also the same: A little desultory work … a little desultory talk, a little desultory rambling about, a good deal of desultory drinking: these are the sum and

Overflow  161 total of it; no, add a little desultory smoking and purposeless mischief to make it complete.48 Jefferies’ remedy for this social disaffection was the creation of Local Societies. These would provide the means of ‘bringing gentlemen together from distant parts of the parish … [leading] to a more intimate social connection,’49 and, through the renovation of ‘the old idea of a common,’50 give the agricultural poor a place to congregate. The contrast between the open ‘archipelagic’ organisation of Western Kulin peoples and the enclosed territorial integrity sought by the white settlers separatists is obvious – noting that ‘The southern portion of the South-East [of South Australia] forms with South-West Victoria one extensive volcanic plain which covers more than 10,000 square miles,’ the Princeland secessionists anticipated perhaps the rhetorical identification of the lava plains with a ‘district’ that artificially stopped at the 143 longitude.51 Nevertheless, overlaid onto each other, certain convergences of interest can be discerned. One of these concerns the idea of a purely archipelagic federation. Citing the way in which more or less local modes of social relationships and ways of doing things depended on regional interconnections,’ ‘many religious beliefs and practices [involving] supra-local relations and cooperation,’ Ian Keen considers that Aboriginal Australia was ‘a “regional system.”’52 Such a system of overflows and catchments depends on a certain similarity throughout. It operates federally on condition that the parts agree to respect each other’s differences without recourse to a higher authority: then political scientist Ralph Chapman’s comment, that ‘The actors are continuously involved in mutual transfers creating thereby an additional set of structures and processes, extra-constitutional and, in many cases, extra-­parliamentary,’ applies exactly.53 Novel forms of self- and group-organisation at a local level do not emerge as a consequence of federation: they are implicit in a federal ‘state of mind,’ as J. Anderson puts it, which understands structure as process, and hence recognises the Janus-faced role of the ‘actors’ in the system. Where ‘every component part of the structures remains an autonomous functioning whole while at the same time contributing to the functioning of other wholes,’ then ‘duality, for the life of the federation, is implicitly inexpungible.’54 Although rarely theorised in a secessionist context, regions operate inter-regionally on the assumption of an absence of outside interference: Michael Longo notes that ‘regional representation’ in the EU is able to resist ‘institutional deficiencies of EU governance’ because of a ‘high degree of autonomy and strong regional identity.’55 But the key point is that archipelagically imagined federations of this kind can only federate with other like-minded states: what Stoutenberg observes in relation to the future of island states applies logically here: archipelagic states ‘would lose their right to draw straight archipelagic baselines around their original territory if they entered into a federation with a continental state, since the new federated state would no longer exclusively consist of archipelagos and

162 Overflow other islands.’56 So with ‘flow and catchment’ assemblages: they lose their ontogenic significance if they are treated as purely cultural overlays onto a region conceived continentally: ‘Assemblages act in concert: they actively map out, select, piece together, and allow for the conception and conduct of individual units as members of a group.’57

Regional governance failure Here, then, we transition from an historical overview to a blocked contemporary possibility and confront the methodological challenge of fostering a ‘creative region’ identity – creative because conceived archipelagically. While the overview has certainly unsettled the colonialist rhetoric of imposed sovereignty, territorial integrity and administrative subordination – and the stories revealed in the process will underwrite the new regional governance template – it also brings into view how far regionalism in this colonial federacy has dessicated to the point where, nowadays, the term has to be reinvented almost from scratch, and in the absence of any distinct historical or regional literacy, becomes little more than an administrative tool. In this context, it is not surprising that local councils expected to implement regional development policies fail. No less surprising is the fact that, when divorced from political progress, cultural development strategies invariably collapse back into localist competition at the expense of what might be called the regional Commons. Notwithstanding the Princeland position, driving through Victoria’s Western District one certainly has the impression of traversing a unique cultural and environmental bio-region, picturesquely archipelagic as its extinct volcanos punctuate the horizon like so many tropical islands. Crossing the western basalt plain whether from Portland or Ballarat, one sails, as it were, under fleets of cloud pinned in a horizon-wide sky, among intermittent vast sheets of water; close-up there are miles of dry-stone walls and the periodic dark fretwork of cypresses planted as windbreaks; elsewhere the great empty forests of red gum stalk the dry paddocks and the saw tooth escarpments of the Grampians rise up biblically in the background. Mitchell’s ‘Australia Felix’ informally recognised what the Kanawinka Geopark has more recently defined formally: a landscape uniquely defined by two flows – of lava and water.58 Yet this country, whose border towns are Portland, Hamilton, Horsham, Ararat, Ballarat, Geelong and Warrnambool, is currently divided into fifteen local government areas (twelve shires, two rural cities and one city) that administer regional development funds. The environmental artificiality of government areas is illustrated by their lack of conformity to river catchments or other ecologically defined systems. Catchment Management Regions straddle up to three local government areas. The lava flows, the water flows and, indeed, the centripetal/centrifugal Indigenous and immigrant cultural flows that connect these areas archipelagically have no collective representation and, almost by definition, fall outside any local jurisdiction.

Overflow  163 The rhetoric of regional development is everywhere; its implementation nowhere. Inherited political structures see to this, and the sublimation of an impulse blocked politically into cultural development strategies remains ineffectual precisely because these strategies lack political resonance. ‘New Regionalism’ may promote the idea that ‘effective local governance is necessary to ensure regional competitiveness and sustainability in an increasingly globalised knowledge economy,’59 but where regions are not recognised as federal units enjoying sovereignty over their own affairs, an interesting cathexis occurs: what cannot be achieved politically is made the responsibility of culture. In the absence of political regionalism, government agencies responsible for regional planning and development readily subscribe to the truism that the identification of shared environments, historical associations and cultural legacies serves to bring communities together, fostering mutual recognition and a desire to relocate the local regionally through the development of shared regional story lines, cooperative environmental management strategies and cultural production that is trans-local and able to represent the region to the regions.60 But who makes these identifications, assembles these associations and evaluates the future significance of cultural legacies? Who owns, shares and cares for regional story lines? A recent Victorian study found that ‘rural-regional local government staff and cultural decision makers need better place-specific data and are keen to learn from the experiences of other local governments to inform their own planning.’61 However, as the EU’s Culture for Cities and Regions report notes, the societal value of cultural infrastructure is best realised when it promotes ‘heritage-based participatory processes in cities and regions, thus promoting new models of multi-stakeholder governance.’62 In Australia, large regional development infrastructure and service provision remain in the hands of State government, often leading to homogenising and locally inappropriate programs; the remaining programs, by default badged as local, are devised and administered by local government authorities in competition with one another. An ironic corollary of this situation is the ‘Xerox effect’: initiatives to strengthen local identity (via urban redevelopment, cultural programming and tourism offerings) lead different places to look increasingly alike.63 Catchment Authorities are often keen to sponsor public art and place-based education but, because of the mismatch of administrative boundaries, find it difficult to find partners.64 Regions may matter psychologically as well as physically – a substantial proportion of Australians, over half the population as estimated by sample survey findings, perceive themselves as living in a region – but their sense of place finds no reflection in governance structures and responsibilities.65 Among those people, a sense of belonging to a region is just as strong as their sense of belonging to locality. Their neglect is spiritually as well as economically dispiriting. Discussing the history of Australian regional policy, Brown distinguishes between ‘regionalism’ (‘the “bottom-up” political expression of everyday Australians as regional

164 Overflow communities’) and “regionalization” (“top-down” regional-level administrative programs pursued by governments with or without community support.’66 And, reviewing the terms in which successive post-war governments framed ‘the regional idea’ – the organisation of ‘the social and economic life of Australia … at official spatial scales other than those represented by current political jurisdictions, typically the scale between the “local” and the “state”’ – he concludes, Decentralisation was now an economic and administrative, not political or constitutional process. ‘Regional’ life as delineated, planned and managed under these policies was the territory of expanding bureaucracies, not of the citizenry …. this was not an exercise in ‘regionalism,’ but ‘regionalisation’ aimed at ‘improved organisational rationality, efficiency and economy’ in administration; ‘devolution was not a consideration.’67 As Brown notes, this narrowly economic notion of decentralisation exacerbated the problem it was supposed to solve: ‘The ‘bush’ remained in active decline with only 14 per cent of Australians living in rural areas by 1966 as compared with 21 per cent in 1933, but no one any longer asked if lack of regional political autonomy had some role in this process.’68 Writing of ‘the dying town syndrome,’ Monica Keneley has found that The experience of urban centres in the Western District points to an evolutionary process in the development of small towns. It suggests that unless a town can grow to a point of self-sufficiency it is locked into a cycle where growth is inevitably followed by decline.69 Self-sufficiency is the antithesis of the ‘resilience’ that targeted regional planning promise: it refers to the power to generate its own creative region; by contrast, ‘resilience’ really refers to local government success in attracting regional development funds. Locking regional centres into a de-politicised economic dependency cycle, the new regionalism makes further decline and isolationism almost inevitable.

Relating to country In this governance-impoverished environment a renewed sense of place ownership is likely to be mediated through stories. However, the interpretation of this proposition is complicated. Firstly, the absence of governmental support for trans-local (regional) themes reinforces the identification of ‘local knowledge’ with places already delimited by European conventions of post-Enclosure separateness. Secondly, and more subtly, even where stories escape from the picturesque identification with a place, their capacity to

Overflow  165 travel between places and link them up may be a formal narrative function rather than a creative expression of regional relations. The ‘homeland constellations and travelling stories … remembered through the painting or sand representation’ at Papunya look like archipelagos. However, this definite spatial logic (or graphic language) is inseparable from the identification of the artist with the remembered country: ‘The travelling lines given in one story could imply many adjacencies or incidences … The depicted loops and multiple lines stated the relationship of places to each other as structural homologies or as isomorphisms.’ The confidence of these ‘visual word-­ constructs’ – their freedom from map-like literalism – depends on the fact that these designs ‘were traditionally memorized by the young people as a system of survival and navigation.’70 These paintings were land titles, assertions of sovereignty.71 Clearly, a white settler society unwilling to acknowledge the original violation of sovereignty can only copy these place-marking and place-making methods without conviction. We know that story-based local knowledge that informs a creative region is simultaneously localised, trans-local and inter-regional. Place making stories are polysemous, able to bear multiple meanings and interpretations. They function ‘as a bridge between the local and the Global,’ redefining the local as an ‘in-between space for the intersection of multiple and contested stories.’72 We know that reconceiving places as elements in complex systems enables ‘the intricate relationships between’ those parts to be activated, in this way redefining sense of place as a creative act of making sense; as Australian writer and historian Ross Gibson has eloquently described, the ‘animated, poetic’ spaces opened up in this way are ‘changescapes,’ which, ‘When they help us understand our existence in a world of change … tend not to finish and we sense an urge to keep them vital.’73 But how is this creativity collectivised as the ‘creative expression of the multiplicity of identities in relationship with the specificity of place’?74 My proposal takes the formulation ‘places made after their stories’ as an injunction to consider the circumstances under which stories come into being. It understands the situations of sociability negotiated in this way as constituting rites and rights of passage because this is the topic of the generative encounter, the room that is made through it. The creative region extended and navigated through the archipelagic distribution of flows and catchments generated in this way is not a receptacle of stories but, as it were, the tension in the string figure that makes possible the intersection of multiple and contested stories. In this formulation there is no singular origin, only identified and recovered beginnings; what is most special should also be what is most ordinary, the unique valuable because it is dispersed. If in what follows I focus on the humanitarian labours of Dawson and his daughter, Isabella, it is not to render them exceptional but to elicit from the ‘animated, poetic’ spaces of their years-long engagement with Aboriginal people a creative act of making sense that embodied in the act of communication a conception of

166 Overflow region that was archipelagic, a constellation of flows and catchments, that outlined a creative region that was unfinished, open and, above all, characterised by overflow.

Gaining fluency Although the main focus of Australian Aborigines was on the languages spoken by the people who worked on his Kangatong property north of Warrnambool in the 1860s, Dawson was a lifelong collector of information about the way Indigenous people lived in his area – their habits, as we might say, and their habitat – and towards the end of his publication he expresses regret that the ‘opportunity for securing the native names of places’ in southwest Victoria ‘has, in many cases, gone forever.’ The traumatic dislocations due to colonisation, combined with white indifference, have caused the ‘names’ of ‘features’ to go unrecorded. ‘How much more interesting,’ Dawson muses, ‘would have been the map of the colony of Victoria had this been attended to at an earlier period of its history.’75 And not simply more interesting: more inhabitable, for Dawson’s campaign to rehabilitate Indigenous cultural knowledge and environmental know-how was motivated not simply by a sense of natural justice but by a humanist vision of the just society. The argument that brings together his practical humanism, expressed across a range of interests, causes and commissions, is that a direct relationship exists between social justice and environmental literacy: how can a recent immigrant population form place-based attachments unless it knows the place where it lives? And how is this going to be effected if the appropriate symbolic representations are not available? In commissioning the noted landscape artist Eugen von Guerard to paint ‘Tower Hill’ (a volcanic feature outside Warrnambool) Dawson was investing in the visualisation of the landscape; in leading the campaign to gazette Mount Rouse as a nature reserve, he sought to create reflective and reflexive places where the costs of colonisation (the clearing of the land and consequent loss of habitat) could be contemplated and, with education, corrected. The collection of Aboriginal words was integral to the project of conceptualising the region in such a way that habit and habitat were practically and symbolically related. Unless the region’s symbolic economy could be articulated, its long-term social and environmental sustainability must be in doubt. In a situation where translation was understood to be critical to the planning and education of a future regional society, the question of ­translatability – the commensurability of different ‘descriptions’ or h ­ abits – was obviously central. Translatability was not a Whorfian challenge – a matter of adjusting incommensurable systems of signification – but the precondition of growth. For a symbolic representation to emerge some principle of generalisation must be at work; but the process of growing abstraction is itself subject to the generation of further abstractions. It is interesting in our context of relating habit to habitat that Peirce saw a direct connection

Overflow  167 between this principle of logical immanence and biological evolution76: the tendency of life to evolve increasingly complex forms or inter-relations in response to its changing environment finds an analogue in what Peirce refers to as a ‘habit-change’ – ‘meaning by a habit-change a modification of a person’s tendencies toward action, resulting from previous experiences or from previous exertions of his will or acts, or from a complexus of both kinds of cause.’77 In the context of learning the symbolic repertoire for living sustainably in a new country, it is essential that habits can be modified. This is possible presumably because any sign or symbol always conveys more than ‘any existential act’: ‘no agglomeration of actual happenings can ever completely fill up the meaning of a “would be.”’ Indeed, and this fact, which is common knowledge to poets, that the potential of the referent always exceeds what it conventionally refers to is, in a higgledy-piggledy way, evoked in the brief discussion about the translation, or otherwise, of the term ‘river.’ The questioner’s ‘river’ and the informant’s various responses to this establish the conditions of a ‘would-be’ place, one accessible when the poetic or full symbolic potential of the sign is released.

Laws of engagement Weaving theoretical arguments and historical instances together inevitably poses the question of intentionality: was Dawson aware of the potential of his and his daughter’s work to bring about a modification in the collective behaviour of regional Victorian society? His efforts to promote mindfulness in fellow citizens is well-documented; he appreciated the direct link between a knowledge of the regional cultural and environmental heritage and the cultivation of a ‘sense of place,’ and, with remarkable vigour, he identified the future of the just society with the enlargement of the public domain; even if the ‘Commons’ were contracting under the pressure of pastoral expansion, the space of public education (and interest) was in principle enlarged through his program. However, Dawson was not a poet and even less a theorist. His and his daughter’s account of the people they worked with is distinguished by its empirical discretion and, more interestingly for us, by its scrupulous preservation or acceptance of idiolectal differences (different individual pronunciations producing different spellings of what appear to be variants of one word). In an important sense the language section of the book documents a performance that unfolded intermittently over the ten years of Isabella’s field research. The whole book is, in this Peircean sense, a symbolic representation – not of a people or a place but of the discursive situation itself in which its knowledge emerged and to which the contents of the book are indexically related. It embeds different speaking positions, different voices, gendered knowledges and the mould, as it were, of the questioners’ ancestral habitat. Given the rareness of mist, snow, hail, frost and sleet in south-west Victoria, one can be forgiven for detecting a Scottish bias in the design of the vocabulary. What Kaawirn Kuunawarn or Yarruun

168 Overflow Parpur Tarneen (two of the elders who made the wordlists possible) thought of when asked to translate ‘gloaming,’ one can only imagine.78 One indication that Dawson understood the novelty of his interests – and the purposeful originality of his language-getting techniques – was his decision to name the property he moved to in the 1870s after the regional word for ‘lip’: wuurong. The regional word for ‘habitation’ was well-known, and any white settler with a picturesque taste for the primitive – and there was in the wake of invasion a fashion for adopting Aboriginal words for private properties, as well as administrative units – would logically have selected wuurn or some variant.79 Indeed, Dawson’s first property sported an Aboriginal name (Kangatong). In this context Dawson’s decision to call his second home after a part of the human mouth is unlikely to be accidental. The term wuurong featured in the names Dawson gave to the languages he recorded – ‘Peek Whurrung’ (translated by the Dawsons as ‘kelp lip’) and ‘Chaap Wuurong’ (‘broadlip’), later written as Djabwurrung). Perhaps, then, Dawson intended to commemorate the association of the place where he lived with the language project. Perhaps, though, the association was more precisely with fluency: this possibility seems to be circumstantially confirmed by the role the same word played in Aboriginal toponymy, where, according to Dawson, the word was found in place names such as ‘Wuurong killing’ (‘Lip of waterhole,’ with reference to a ‘particular spring where a bunyip lives.’) and ‘Bukkar whuurong’ (‘Middle lip,’ referring to a Bank between Lakes Bullen Merri and Gnotuk. A gap in this dividing bank is said to have been made by a bunyip, which lived at one time in Lake Bullen Merri, but, on leaving it, ploughed its way over the bank into Lake Gnotuk, and thence at Gnotuk Junction to Taylor’s River, forming a channel across the country.80 Wuurong and its orthographic variants were, it appears, primarily associated with overflow – with the passage of air (breathing, speaking) or water (brimming waterholes, weirs and channels). Home in this environment of translation was a place of passage, growth and exchange. Fluency in the languages of the country had its counterpart in the fluency of the habitat, notable for the aquaculture it supported. Dawson’s interpretation of the regional Indigenous cultures was remarkable for its recognition of their productivity: when, in the 1970s the archaeologist Harry Lourandos overhauled the primitivist hunter-gatherer model of pre-colonial Aboriginal societies, he based his work partly on the evidence of complex economic patterns derivable from the excavation of particular sites, and partly on ­Dawson’s descriptions of the ‘great meetings,’ where disputes were resolved, goods exchanged and treaties reaffirmed. Dawson unquestionably brought his own radically conservative biases to his description of Indigenous life – strategically, perhaps, assimilating it to a kind of pre-industrial smallholder model, but his great distinction was to recognise that the Gunditjmara and Djabwurrung

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produced the country that produced them. The focus of the eel trap design which produced the abundance of produce underpinning the intensification of sociability witnessed at the great meetings was the lip, the artificially constructed overflow where outgoing eels could most easily be trapped: Eels are prized by the aborigines as an article of food above all other fish. They are captured in great numbers by building stone barriers across rapid streams, and diverting the current through an opening into a ­funnel-mouthed basket pipe, three or four feet long, two inches in diameter, and closed at the lower end. When the streams extend over the marshes in time of flood, clay embankments, two to three feet high, and sometimes three to four hundred yards in length, are built across them, and the current is confined to narrow openings in which the pipe baskets are placed. The eels, proceeding down the stream in the beginning of the winter floods, go headforemost into the pipes, and do not attempt to turn back.82 In other words, wuurong referred not simply to a body part and its anthropomorphic analogue in the landscape: it referred to the climactic event in the regional economy, the production of the excess that transformed a subsistence culture into a trading one where groups of people were defined ‘in terms of “relationality” and “fluidity.”’ So here, already, we have a place made after the story that takes the form of fluency across different regimes – topographical, cultural and performative. A human landscape is conceptualised as brimming over; communication is coeval with anastomosis, the running together of individual tributaries and the joining up of individual pools to create a constellation or archipelago of inter-related story-places. But what matters is less the discovery of a powerful metaphor or analogy that enables different parts of the environment to be seen as a creative region than the discursive protocols established in the encounter that underwrite and differentiate proper access to the country from invasion. These protocols are performative and constitutional, embedded in the rules that guide the opening and emerging cross-cultural encounter and exchange. As we have seen, the legal framework legitimising the politics of dispossession is tautologous: if ‘colonialism was central to the constitution of international law and sovereignty doctrine,’83 we cannot expect our legal and political institutions to be interested in negotiating just access to country. They rest on a fundamental discrimination, between ‘the civilized and the uncivilized,’ a distinction which Antony Anghie sees perpetuated in contemporary ‘divisions between the developed and the developing, the pre-modern and the post-modern and now, once again, the civilised and the barbaric.’84 However, the language of political coercion and administrative regulation is, as we have seen, incomplete: a decolonising discourse of place-making replaces it with a poetics of meaning production that returns authority to discourse – to the language act when it is imitative of the movement of communication. Ricoeur speaks in this context of a

170 Overflow ‘Reflective philosophy’ that is ‘a philosophy of the concrete,’ where ‘the symbol and the myth are the result of an occasion or occasions, distinguished by the particularities of time and space.’ The reflective poetics corresponding to this is mythopoetic, the reinvention or translation of existing cultural material into a new environment. If ‘particularities of time and space’ defined the law enacted at the ‘great meetings’ that Dawson described, it applied equally to the ‘laws of engagement’ governing the ‘little meetings’ that Isabella Dawson convened in her garden with Kaawirn Kuunawarn, Weeratt Kuyuut, Yarruun Parpur Tarneen and Wombeet Tuulawarn.85

A region of care What were these laws? They were tentatively arrived products of cultural, political and social self-awareness. Convening a language-getting session created a situation ripe for misunderstanding. Alternating impulses of curiosity and embarrassment, circumspection and cooperation, must have been obvious. The artificiality of the meeting would have been a source of nervousness, discharged as laughter. As Stephen Muecke has remarked, ­‘Wherever there is cultural difference, negotiation must continue; encounters: some rough, others pleasant; visiting: food and drink taken together; songs and stories exchanged, and laughter ….’86 Perhaps most distinctive in establishing the conditions in which the vocabularies and associated personal names, kinship relations and extensive natural history inventories were assembled was the duration of the interest – these recording interludes seem to have extended over a decade and must have involved an increasingly reflexive ­meta-discourse around the meaning of the lexical items – and Isabella’s privileging of idiolect over natural language: two of the wordlists (‘Kuurn kopan noot’ or ‘small lip’ and ‘Peek whurrong’ or ‘kelp lip’) are clearly dialectal/idiolect variants of the same language. According to ­Dawson, their ‘cooperative Aboriginal friends’ were so keen to be involved, ‘so proud and jealous were they of the honour, that, by agreement among themselves, they were allotted a fair proportion of questions to answer and of words to translate.’87 In this dynamic performative environment, the object of any protocols worked out between the participants were like those characterising Deleuzian ethology. They were experimental, designed to articulate the ‘intensive capacities’ of the participants. The intention was to release creativity, even ‘regulatory’ impulses serving to foster a conviviality that was mobile and dynamic in its results.88 Dawson recalled that ‘if levity was shown by an individual present who could not always resist a pun on the word in question, the sedate old chief, Kaawirn Kuunawarn, reproved the wag, and restored order and attention to the business in hand.’89 But the object of this was ultimately sociable, to maintain good humour, to make room for something to happen and keep happening, never the same twice.

Overflow  171 The situation in which Isabella sat down with farm hands and domestic servants from the Gunditjmara and Djabwurrung90 language groups at their pastoral property, Kangatong (immediately north of Warrnambool), can be characterised as a ‘second contact’ one. It was also secondary – at least within a patriarchal context – because of the agency it allowed women. Just as invasion impacted on mothers, daughters, sisters and wives differently from the way it affected the lives, sense of self and freedoms of men, so with the discourses issuing from that traumatic domain. Domestic servitude differed from pastoral recruitment, and as the everyday settings of colonial labour demanded different skill sets, vocabularies and cross-cultural literacies, so with the interests likely to surface in any list of typical words, the names of things, the doing words and, of course, the places for things.91 In the wake of systematic violence against Aboriginal peoples and the programmatic usurpation of their land, no ‘second contact’ was going to have the innocence of expectation that conventionally clings to ‘first contact.’ It was bound to be a reflective transaction where motives were mistrusted, irony was frequent and the meaning of the meanings conveyed (their political significance, their forensic value and their cultural implications) lay outside conventional reckoning. This was the first point: the parties were entering into a compact to arrive at a new truth. The situation bore certain resemblances to a law court where the Indigenous people were under examination. However, the object was revisionist, to find a law outside the law: to unsettle what had been illegally settled by drawing attention to a pre-­ existing state of social organisation and environmental attachment. Access to this would occur through the improvisation of a new discursive situation, occasioned by the desire to obtain the local languages. There can be little doubt that James Dawson saw himself as a defence lawyer at the bar of British prejudice: motivated to bring to light the systematic infringement of personal and property right that the regional Indigenous communities had suffered at the hands of pastoralists and their servants, he considered that the best witnesses to the human dignity, cultural and environmental competence and (disarmingly recognisable) social institutions that had been trampled underfoot were the people themselves.92 Irony, but also an enormous urgency, surrounded these efforts to open a conversation that might last: the project of fixing the languages was at war with the desire to yarn, to reminisce, to advocate rhetorically – and to pun, that is, to be fully human or, as Ricoeur puts it more importantly, to see something through a new relationship to something else, to communicate an awareness of the role that the imagination plays in ‘the semantic moment of the metaphorical statement,’ and through this to indicate new horizons of common sense. To understand how local Indigenous people related to their country and to one another, the Dawsons created a situation in which these legal arrangements could be related to them (and thence to the white settler public). Access to Indigenous law of the country was inescapably

172 Overflow discursive – the quality of the laws governing such matters as reciprocal obligations, responsibilities of care and kinship relationships was inseparable from the quality of the dialogue maintained intermittently throughout the duration of the language enquiry. It is reasonable to assume that the content of Indigenous law exposed through this dialogical process would have consisted largely of rules governing speaking positions, and that settled positions on any important matter would be due to consensus-building rather than any prior foundational mythos deployed axiomatically to answer every accident. Such an approach ran counter to the techniques and expectations of government-funded translation programs: what Roland Barthes said of French colonial institutions, Le vocabulaire officiel des affaires africaines est, on s’en doute, purement axiomatique. C’est dire qu’il n’a aucune valeur de communication, mais seulement d’intimidation. Il constitue donc une écriture, c’est-àdire un langage chargé d’opérer une coïncidence entre les normes et les faits, et de donner à un réel cynique la caution d’une morale noble93 demonstrably applied then (as it does now) to the framing of legislation governing Aboriginal affairs in Australia. The back and forth of talk between the Dawsons and leading interlocutors such as Kaawirn Kuunawarn and Yarruun Parpur Tarneen was, in this sense, ambulatory, a discursive walking about the object of enquiry which depended on a prior commitment to the protocols of the meeting place for its integrity and sustainability. A region of care was instituted that transcended the false security/insecurity dialectic.

Accidents and accidence To return the making of the law to its roots in discourse is immediately to make a connection between the laws pertaining to accidents and the laws of accidence. Accidence, as noted, is a term in grammar referring to the parts of words that change according to usage.94 Gender, number and case can all be regarded as accidental, as something falling out from a state, a state when it is activated, representing the quality of changefulness, and associated with the idea of happenstance, danger or peril. Accidence is the marking of language that allows it to move: without a system of affixes, suffixes and other verbal modifications, discourse (the to and fro of language in speech) would be impossible. Mobilisation would seem to be essential to the efficacy of linguistic communication; however, grammarians concerned with the rules of language have traditionally regarded accidence as secondary. Hence a verb is declined, while the different suffixes of nouns in languages that differentiate nouns by their function in the sentence mark their cases, a word that means ‘falling off.’ In this conception of the laws of language only the nominative case (for a noun) and perhaps the imperative form of the verb

Overflow  173 enjoy sovereignty, a stable identity that can resist the vicissitudes of chance. In contrast, the inflections of language – the morphological bendings, the syntactical inclinations, intonations and pronunciations of words as they fit together in order to relate – are treated as weaknesses: being subject to change, governed by the demands of the situation, they are unreliable. But for the regulation of grammar, a language motivated by the desire to communicate would, it is implied, be lawless and ungovernable. The linguistic landscape that the vocabularies surveyed was like the flows and catchments of the physical landscape, not a continuous territory but a constellation of site-specific discursive translations where words flowed back and forth between mouths, tongues, voices and languages. Ownership did not exist apart from the act of translation, legitimate access to country being predicated on its accurate naming. The dialect of the new beginning would be flowing, interconnected, intuitive and constructed. The history made possible by the ‘second contact’ would be one of performative occasions where the law of accidents replaced the ‘sovereignty doctrine’ ‘formed by its origins in and engagement with the colonial encounter.’95 The application of such laws to the management of, for example, periodic changes in the environment (seasonal food supplies) would be coterminous with their renegotiation, as consensus-building provided the essential guarantee that the laws of access would be respected and, if ignored, enforced. To devise a law of accidents is, then, simultaneously to dismantle territorial (or geographical) notions of place and to bring into question the concept of language as a unified and internally coherent system of signs. The bounded figure of the territory yields to the spaghetti-like entangling of many interconnected discursive flows. Language is redefined ‘as the study of interactions between any given language and its environment.’96 The environment is both social and natural. This action-oriented view of language suggests that the idea of language as a coherent and complete system, ‘enabled by the arbitrariness of the sign (the sound-meaning nexus), and structured by complex patterns of rules’ is a second-order construct. As a first-order construct, Florian Coulmas insists, ‘every language is the result of human language-work … every individual word in every language traces back to an individual act of coining.’97 The corollary of this is that each iteration of the spoken language is both for the first time and foundational, both recollection and innovation; it depends for its efficacy on the inclination of the other parties to the transaction to validate the performance through a concomitant act of social production. Likewise, a country owned performatively, through the repeated enactment of the primary relationships that constituted its vitality, is overflowing: it is not complete, ready to be contained and worked because it already works. Vergunst makes the point that colonialist doctrines of state and territory not only regard nature as a thing apart but as completed. On this Garden of Eden principle nature has been in decline ever since humankind interacted with it historically: like language, nature suffers a decline when it is utilised. In a colonial context,

174 Overflow the resources that nature affords ‘are usually understood to be at their fullest extent at the moment of contact, and then diminishing through their use by industrialised people.’98 He reminds us that The identification of terra nullius, unowned land, is linked to the idea of nature through the principle in Greek and Roman law that property rights come from a settled existence in farming. Practising agriculture thus removes the land, and the people who live on it, from the state of nature.99 Obviously, the convenient myth that Aboriginal people were fecklessly ‘nomadic’ could not be sustained in an environment where a flourishing aqua culture existed. But, even leaving aside the eel harvesting culture (and the evidence of stone-built ‘villages’), Dawson’s enquiries gave access to a differently conceived commons, one that was not in a ‘state of nature,’ stable, static and ready for division and development, but instead overflowing, its functional topography resembling the distribution of water into an archipelago of waterholes and seasonally flowing channels – to which might be added the regional chiaroscuro of marshes, swamps, lakes and lagoons. As Dawson writes, ‘Every river … which forms one continuous stream during both summer and winter has a name which is applied to its whole length … At the same time, every local reach in these rivers has a distinguishing name.’100

Overflowing The distinction between the ‘continuous stream’ and the ‘local reach’ captures in a hydrological phenomenon the distinctively archipelagic state of communication in this decolonised regime. For the key distinction between an archipelagic state and a region that is (however creatively re-imagined) territorial is the ontological value given to negative spaces, or those intervals in time, space and scale that mediate between the local and the regional, and between both and the inter-regional. Wherever there is an overflowing, there exists an ‘is/is not’ condition; the water that flows over the edge of the weir makes a vivified appearance in the moment of disappearance. In this context, it seems that the story of the heavenly bunyip for which ‘the coal sack of the mariners’ is named has an earthly equivalent. Dawson records the place names ‘Wuurong killing,’ explaining that the name means ‘Lip of waterhole,’ with reference to a ‘particular spring where a bunyip lives.’101 The semantic cluster invoked here seems to be a centripetal/centrifugal idea of simultaneous closing in (as of approaching a meeting place) and flowing away out of sight. It is a dynamic figure appropriate to the hunt as well as the hearth. Perhaps this explains why the word for lip also turns up in an apparently unrelated context as ‘a superstition, called Wuurong, connected with the tracking and killing of kangaroos.’ Perhaps this superstition is named for the fact that the spell placed on the kangaroo’s footprints enables the

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‘doctor’ to track his prey ‘to a waterhole, where he spears it.’ In any case, an archipelagic conception of relationships gives a positive value to the dark spaces in-between, marking them as sites of transformation. It also defines a lawful discourse of place-making and place-marking as a process of approaches and departures, where breakings-off have to be managed as carefully as resumptions of exchange. The preparation of this double movement involves the choreographing of speaking positions and the collectivisation of storytelling. The economy of such storytelling corresponds to the discourse that produces and reproduces the law of accidents. It is a discourse of flows and interconnections, which is constantly susceptible to interruption, diversion, temporary containment and release under pressure. Just as Dawson’s Indigenous experts divided up the linguistic tasks in order to sew together a richer possum cloak of language, one in which the different parts were equivalent, related and interdependent, so with the discourse in general of those information sharing sessions. It exhibited the rhetorical property of anastomosis, a rhetorical term to describe the ‘insertion of a qualifying word between two parts of another word.’103 It was through the introduction of qualifications that the participants in the translation proved their qualification to take part: the fluidly experimental orthography, the semantic partiality of the vocabulary and the respect for small regional and individual variations are the documentation of an ‘open’ conversation, whose lively essence was a desire of modification. Anastomosis is not only a rhetorical figure: it describes anabranching fluvial systems – found throughout Australia. As the ‘intercommunication between two vessels, channels, or distinct branches of any kind, by a connecting cross-branch,’104 the word can, as we have noted, refer to two closed vessels (two lakes joined by a stream) or two open vessels (two channels joined by a branch channel). Or, to put it another way, is the anastomosis ‘an external link between two vessels or channels’ or does it enter into the vessel it opens ‘so that it becomes a version of the figure of container and thing contained’?105 In this question is the distinction between a region defined as a subordinate unit of the nation state and a region subject to the law of accidents. Only the latter decolonises governance. We are told that ‘the most impressive anabranching reach of the Rio Negro’ in the Amazon Basin exhibits ‘multiple vegetated islands known as the Mariuá archipelago.’106 This could be a geographical allegory of the regional governance arrangements that might evolve from archipelagic thinking embedded in the flow and catchment structuring of second encounter. In another place, the analogy between this system of punctuated flows and the engineered design and operation of the Lake Condah eel traps could be developed.107 Then the coast, which has been left undisturbed in this discussion, would turn out not to be a boundary but a channel lying inside the archipelagic constitution. As the typical expression of a regional cultural development industry that buys into the fetishisation of the local at the expense of the trans-local and the inter-­regional, public art often gets a bad rap. However, an eel-­inspired

176 Overflow storytelling that locates this region within the archipelagic outreach of the short-finned eel’s life-cycle migration would surely typify the new dispensation. An interesting precedent would be Carol Brown’s 1000 Lovers, a performance that traversed Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter in 2013: working across two different varieties of eel knowledge, as a somatic mapping of their movement patterns and a retelling of the story of Hine and Tuna through embodied narratives, we sought to open a dialogue with the shoreline that was layered and non-linear and moved beyond the privileging of the anthropocentric. The idea was to subvert the sharply engineered policing of water ways – ‘­cutting the coastline, culverting streams, polluting the harbour and denying a pre-­colonial namescape’ and instead ‘Through an ambulatory journey that crossed a linear strip of reclaimed harbour and in moving from sea to city’ to ‘activate embedded memories and invisible histories, referencing the once abundant k ­ aimoana (seafood) and the now absent Tuna Mau (stream of eel).’ By this means, ‘The contemporary urban shoreline through the flows of bodies, the crossing, swimming, salvaging and surrendering of lovers, provides the place for a strange encounter through which we seek to recover and repair a sense of pastness in the present, rather than reclaim or lament a lost pre-colonial landscape.’108

Notes 1 Veronica Strang, quoting Ernestine Hill (Water Into Gold: The Taming of the Mighty Murray River, 1958) in ‘Dam Nation: Cubbie Station and Waters of the Darling,’ in The Social Life of Water, J. R. Wagner (ed.), New York: Berghahn Books, 2013, 36–60, 40. 2 Veronica Strang, ‘Dam Nation: Cubbie Station and Waters of the Darling,’ 43. 3 James Dawson, Australian Aborigines, the Languages and Customs of Several Tribes ­ obertson, of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Melbourne: George R 1881, reprinted by Australia Institute of Aboriginal Studies (Canberra) in 1981, with a valuable but unnumbered introduction by Jan Critchett, 106. 4 Inflammatory to our Candide nation-state apologists, this statement is nevertheless supported throughout the nineteenth-century literature of land theft and missionisation. Dawson’s efforts to facilitate corroborees, ‘discountenanced’ by ‘Government officials, and other protectors’ reflected his profound contempt for his ‘Christian brethren.’ (Australian Aborigines, 84, v.) 5 Adam R. Brumm, ‘“The Falling Sky”: Symbolic and Cosmological Associations of the Mt William Greenstone Axe Quarry, Central Victoria, Australia,’ Cambridge Archaeological Journal, vol. 20, no. 2, 2010, 179–196, 187. 6 Robert Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, 1876, Melbourne: Government Printer, reprinted by John Currey, O’Neil (Melbourne) in 1972, 2 vols, vol. 1, 430. 7 In contrast, the peoples of the Western District (West Kulin) – including the Djabwurrung and the Gunditjmara – were matrilineal societies, their descent system based on the Gamadj (black cockatoo) and Grugidj (white cockatoo) moieties. This difference does not appear to have hampered exchange: there was considerable lexical overlap between Western and Eastern Kulin language communities. Blake estimates that over 80% of their vocabulary was common to the western Tjapwurrungand their immediate eastern neighbours, the Djadjawurrung (Barry

Overflow  177 J. Blake, Dialects of Western Kulin, Western Victoria: Yartwatjali, Tjapwurrung, Djadjawurrung, Melbourne: La Trobe University, viewed March 14 2008, www .vcaa.vic.edu.au/documents/alcv/dialectsofwesternkulin-westernvictoria.pdf, 14); elsewhere the percentage was higher, besides which speakers were typically multi-lingual or multi-dialectal. Additional evidence of inter-regionality is the attendance at the ‘great meetings’ of delegations from outside the immediate language area: ‘It is known that Wadawurrung gathered at Mirraewuae Swamp, east of the Grampians, to hunt and conduct ceremony with the Djab Wurrung, Dauwurd Wurrung and Girai Wurrung. It is thought that Wadawurrung and Girai Wurrung similarly gathered at Lake Bolac with the local Djab Wurrung clans for the annual early autumn eel migration,’ and ‘The homeland of the patrilineal Wadawurrung extended eastwards from Fiery Creek to the Moorabool River, Geelong and the Werribee Plains.’ (City of Greater Geelong, ‘The lands of the Wadawurrung,’ viewed November 18, 2017, www.geelongaustralia.com.au/kaap/ article/item/8d33614ddad2a9c.aspx.) 8 ‘Deen Maar Island,’ viewed October 14, 2017 www.geocaching.com/geocache/ GC1E693_deen-maar-island?guid=a5388fde-8b01-4313-aab2-c9730e23ca28. Dawson translates the name as ‘This blackfellow here.’ (Australian Aborigines, lxxix.) Its English name is Lady Julia Percy Island: the same Geocache website notes correctly that ‘Over 10,000 years ago it was connected to the mainland by a land bridge, but due to rising sea levels it is now 22 km off the coast.’ 9 Jim Poulter, ‘How to do an Aboriginal songlines map of your municipality,’ viewed October 15, 2017, www.jimpoulter.com/article13.php. 10 W. E. Harney, ‘Roads and Trades,’ Walkabout, vol. 16, no. 5. 1950, 43–45. 11 Dale Kerwin, ‘Aboriginal Dreaming Tracks or Trading Paths: The Common Ways,’ PhD thesis, Griffith University, 2006, 182, quoting Alex Barlow, Trade in Aboriginal Australia, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Islander Studies, 1979, 5. 12 R. H. Mathews, ‘Ethnological Notes on the Aboriginal Tribes of New South Wales and Victoria, Part 1,’ Journal and Proceedings Royal Society of New South Wales, vol. XXXVIII, 203–380, 279. Hence Dawson states that the Larger Magellanic Cloud, kuurn kuuronn, was known as the gigantic crane,’ and that ‘Centauri, the pointers,’ or ‘Tuurlirmp’ are known as ‘magpie larks.’ (Australian Aborigines, 99–100.) Stanbridge agreed with the former, which he calls Kourtchin, ‘the native companion’ (or crane), besides stating that his Boorong informants identified the Pointers with the two brothers Berm-berm-gl, and said that the eastern stars of the crux were ‘the points of the spears that have passed through ­Tchin-gal, The Emu.’ (W. E. Stanbridge, ‘On the Astronomy and Mythology of the Aborigines of Victoria,’ Proceedings of the Philosophical Institute, ­Melbourne, 1857, 137–140.) Another story relates that ‘Bunjil appointed two brothers, the Bram-bram-bult brothers, sons of Druk the Frog, to finish the task he had set himself. Their job was to bring order to the new world; to name the animals and creatures, to make the languages and give the laws.’ (www.brambuk.com .au/assets/pdf/Grampians NationalParkGariwerdCreationStory.pdf) For related astronomical traditions in other southern Australian Aboriginal cultures, see Duane W. Hamacher, ‘Identifying Seasonal Stars in Kaurna Astronomical Traditions,’ Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, vol. 18, no. 1, 16, and for a valuable analysis of Stanbridge’s 1857 paper, see Duane W. Hamacher and David J. Frew, ‘An Aboriginal Australian Record of the Great Eruption of Eta Carinae,’ Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, vol. 3, no. 3, 2010, 220–234. 13 Adapting Timothy Morton’s useful concept of the hyper-object. 14 James Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 22. 15 James Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 22–23. 16 Isabel McBryde, ‘Exchange in South Eastern Australia: An Ethnohistorical Perspective,’ Aboriginal History, vol. 8, no. 2, 1984, 132–153, 134. ‘Merbok,’ practised

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by the Mullukmulluk and Madngella peoples of the Daly River area of northern Australia, consisted of an exchange partnership whereby highly valued objects (e.g. ochre, weapons, hair belts, ornaments) passed from person to person within and (more importantly) between communities along “paths” (which ­extended for distances up to 120 miles) between the southwest and northeast. (However, the individual participant was concerned with, and usually knew about, only his own direct partners …). (Douglas L. Oliver, Oceania: The Native Cultures of Australia and the Pacific Islands, vol. 1, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1989, 509–510.) But see James Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 33 for reference: ‘Korroboraes, and great meetings of the tribes, are the chief opportunities for selecting wives; as there the young people of various and distant tribe have an opportunity of seeing one another.’ Harry Lourandos, Bruno David, Bryce Barker and Ian J. McNiven, ‘An Interview with Harry Lourandos,’ in The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006, 33. Isabel McBryde, ‘Exchange in South Eastern Australia: An Ethnohistorical ­Perspective,’ 137. Isabel McBryde, ‘Exchange in South Eastern Australia: An Ethnohistorical ­Perspective,’ 149. Adam R. Brumm, ‘“The Falling Sky”: Symbolic and Cosmological Associations of the Mt William Greenstone Axe Quarry, Central Victoria, Australia,’ 193. David Mowaljarlai and Jutta Malnic, Yorro Yorro, Everything Standing Up Alive, Broome, WA: Magabala Books, 2001, 192. Dale Kerwin, ‘Aboriginal Dreaming Tracks or Trading Paths: The Common Ways,’ 180. Kerwin writes with particular reference to the ‘Two Dog’ story, an Aboriginal storystring for the transcontinental trade in pituri that follows the river system, flowing between the western side of Cape York Peninsula and Port Augusta in South Australia (177). David Mowaljarlai and Jutta Malnic, Yorro Yorro, everything standing up alive, 190. David Rose, ‘Phylogenesis of the Dreamtime,’ Linguistics and Human Sciences, vol. 8, no. 3, 2013, 335–359, 349–350. Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, 429. David Rose, ‘Phylogenesis of the Dreamtime,’ 356, quoting Kenneth Maddock, The Australian Aborigines, a Portrait of Their Society, Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1972. David Rose, ‘Phylogenesis of the Dreamtime,’ 354–357. See Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters, ‘Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 33, no. 2, 2015. J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992, 155. J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines, 155. This apparently esoteric figure of speech is the ordinary experience of people talking: where interruption places one part sentence inside another yet unfinished, or where one overhears a number of voices simultaneously, a similar ‘great meeting’ of parts within parts occurs. A. J. Brown, ‘The Frozen Continent: The Fall and Rise of Territory in Australian Constitutional Thought 1815–2003’, PhD Thesis, Key Centre for Ethics Law Justice & Governance, Griffith University, 2003, 181. James Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 73. Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, Papunya, A Place Made after the Story, Carlton: Miegunyah Press, 2004, 111.

Overflow  179 35 However, the fact that the number of notches corresponded to the number of people approaching suggests that the number of parallel lines drawn between resting places and the number of concentric circle Pintupi artists drew were not simply stylistic flourishes but had a precise meaning. 36 For this and previous quotations, see James Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 75. In a recent article Aaron Corn draws on collaborative work with Yolngu elders from northeast Arnhem Land to illustrate the proposition that ‘the physical human form, its natural environments and its traditional behaviours [are] phenomena that are given by the ancestors and patterned on their grand archetypal designs for life.’ ‘Yolngu nomenclature for human anatomy is used as a meta-­language to describe the significances of the topographical features on country and on the formal features of Yolngu performance traditions.’ Further, ‘the concept of the body extends from the corporeal to the corporate; from a body of limbs and organs, to a body of different people and patrifilial groups.’ (Aaron Corn, ‘Ancestral, Corporeal, Corporate: Traditional Yolngu Understandings of the Body Explored,’ borderlands e-journal, vol. 7, no. 2, 2008, 2.) 37 James Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 99. 38 Planisphere, South West Victoria Landscape Assessment Study, 2013, 1–29, 11, viewed March 14, 2017, www.planning.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/ 6373/01-The-Western-Volcanic-Plains-Part-1.pdf. 39 A. J. Brown, ‘The Frozen Continent: The Fall and Rise of Territory in A ­ ustralian Constitutional Thought 1815–2003,’ 97ff. 40 A. J. Brown, ‘The Frozen Continent: The Fall and Rise of Territory in A ­ ustralian Constitutional Thought 1815–2003,’ 109. 41 A. J. Brown, ‘The Frozen Continent: The Fall and Rise of Territory in A ­ ustralian Constitutional Thought 1815–2003’, 85. 42 The meeting was held at ‘The Grange,’ possibly Peter Learmonth’s Grange Burn Mill. (‘Separation Meeting at Hamilton,’ from The Hamilton Spectator, reproduced in the Portland Guardian and Normanby General Advertiser, ­Monday June 24, 1861, 2, viewed August 15, 2014, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/ article/65446763.) See also Merron Riddiford, ‘Passing of the Pioneers,’ July 31, 2014, viewed January 4, 2018, https://westerndistrictfamilies.com/2014/07/31/ passing-of-the-pioneers-34/ for photograph. 43 ‘Separation Meeting at Hamilton.’ Incidentally, Arden’s employment of Gunditjmara people on his property, the name exchanges that occurred there and Arden’s Aboriginal advocacy, closely parallel Dawson’s activity (primarily with Djabwurrung speakers). 44 A. J. Brown, ‘The Frozen Continent: The Fall and Rise of Territory in A ­ ustralian Constitutional Thought 1815–2003,’ 169. 45 Of the refusal of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines to allow the Framlingham station people to dance a ‘Korroboree’ at the Henty Jubilee festival, Dawson wrote, I cannot bring myself to believe that a body of men selected, I presume, for their common sense and knowledge of human nature, could be unanimous in their determination to exclude the original owners of the land from participation in the festivities so deeply concerned with their fate. (J. Dawson, letter to the editor of The Camperdown Chronicle, 15 ­November, 1884, quoted by Jan Critchett, ‘Introduction to the Facsimile Edition,’ James Dawson, Australian Aborigines, Canberra: Australian institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1980, unnumbered.) 46 Leith MacGillivray, ‘We Have Found Our Paradise: The South-East Squattocracy, 1840–1870,’ Journal of the Historical Society of SA, no. 17, 1989, 25–38, 33. Disparagement of Indigenous statements about their legal claim on the land is associated with their translation into politically harmless, even poetically picturesque, forms of symbolic expression. The status of the corroboree as a

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political event, one used for the periodic reconciliation of inter-communal conflict, and offering a potential framework for negotiating just access to the land, is from the earliest days downplayed: a generic song and dance event comes to be illustrated in the colonial literature, where it figures as a colonial attraction, or antipodean Sadler’s Wells. Richard Jefferies, ‘Village Organisation,’ in The Hills and the Vale, Oxford: ­Oxford University Press, 1980 (Originally published 1875), 151–206, 165. Richard Jefferies, ‘Village Organisation,’ 167. Richard Jefferies, ‘Village Organisation,’ 202. Richard Jefferies, ‘Village Organisation,’ 191. R. McL Harris, ‘The “Princeland” Secession Movement in Victoria and South Australia, 1861–1867,’ The Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 17, ­December 1971, 365–376, 369. Ian Keen, ‘A Continent of Foragers: Aboriginal Australia as a “regional ­system,”’ in Archaeology and Linguistics: Aboriginal Australia in a Global Perspective, P. MacConvell & N. Evans (eds.), Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997, 261–273, 269. R. J. K. Chapman, ‘Structure, Process and the Federal Factor: Complexity and Entanglement in Federations,’ in Comparative Federalism and Federation, M. Burgess & Alain-G. Gagnon (eds.), New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, 69–93. James Anderson, ‘Arrested Federalisation? Europe, Britain, Ireland,’ in Federalism, the Multiethnic Challenge, G. Smith (ed.), London: Longman, 1994, 279–293, 284. Michael Longo, ‘(E)merging Discourses: Local and Regional Governance in Australia and the European Union,’ University of Tasmania Law Review, vol. 30, no. 2, 2011, viewed March 8, 2012, http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ UTasLawRw/2011/11.html. Longo emphasises that the situation is different in Australia: local government is constitutionally weak and under-resourced; ­regional identities are poorly developed and supported. Jenny Grote Stoutenberg, Disappearing Island States in International Law, ­Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2015, 183. Elaine Stratford, Godfrey Baldacchino, Elizabeth McMahon, Carol Farbotko, Andrew Harwood, ‘Envisioning the archipelago,’ Island Studies Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, 2013, 122. The decolonising significance of this formulation is clear in Pocock’s renaming of the British Isles as ‘the Atlantic archipelago,’ which Stratford et al. point out focuses attention on ‘a historically uneasy and problematic relationship between and among England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. This history is not a continental or Euro-centric narrative of Britain and of the origins of its empire.’ Rather, quoting Pocock, it is one that sees ‘people in motion, histories traversing distance … [and in oceans] not in narrow seas … and ‘identities’ (the term is overworked) never quite at home.’ (see Celmara Pocock, ‘“Blue Lagoons and Coconut Palms”: The Creation of a Tropical Idyll in Australia,’ Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 16, no. 3, 2005, 335–349.) A community-based initiative, the Kanawinka Geopark lost its UNESCO global status in 2013 partly because its sense of region conflicted with the Australian federal government’s national parks system. See Stuart Stansfield, ‘Geopark loses “global” status, confusion blamed,’ viewed September 20, 2014, www.abc .net.au/local/stories/2013/04/03/3728913.htm. M. Keating, The New Regionalism in Western Europe: Territorial Restructuring and Political Change, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1998, 20. Tony McCall, ‘What Do We Mean by Regional Development?’ 2010, 1–14, www.utas.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/61935/McCall,T.-2010,-What-isRegional-Development.pdf. L. Andersen and M. Malone, ‘All Culture Is Local: Good Practice in Regional Cultural Mapping and Planning from Local Government,’ 2012, viewed

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January 14, 2013, www.lgnsw.org.au/files/imceuploads/59/All%20Culture% 20is%20Local_CAMRA%20Toolkit.pdf. European Union, ‘Culture for Cities and Regions,’ 2016, viewed October 18, 2016, www.cultureforcitiesandregions.eu/culture/project/activities/cultural_heritage. Kim Dunphy, L. Metzke and L. Tavelli, ‘Cultural Planning Practices in Local Government in Victoria,’ 120–137, http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/conferences/ index.php/acelg/PNLGRF/paper/viewFile/481/85. The default position is submission of local management plans and cultural initiatives to state-wide policies. See Victorian Government Department of Sustainability and Environment, Western Region Sustainable Water Strategy, Melbourne, 2011, 61, 84, 171. Mediating between state, shire and catchment interests are Aboriginal communities wanting to ‘protect natural resources in a holistic way’: for instance, ‘waterways are important as meeting places to come together as families and communities for cultural, social and recreational activities, as a way to travel throughout the region and teach culture to young people.’ (100) Ian Gray and A. J. Brown, ‘People’s Perceptions of Governance and the Implications for Regional Australia,’ 1–13, 12, viewed August 14, 2017, http://2015.segra .com.au/PDF/GrayandBrown.pdf. A. J. Brown, ‘The Frozen Continent: The Fall and Rise of Territory in A ­ ustralian Constitutional Thought 1815–2003, 216–217. A. J. Brown, ‘The Frozen Continent: The Fall and Rise of Territory in A ­ ustralian Constitutional Thought 1815–2003, 219, quoting R. J. K Chapman and M. Wood, Australian Local Government, the Federal Dimension, Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1984, 171–172, 202. A. J. Brown, ‘The Frozen Continent: The Fall and Rise of Territory in A ­ ustralian Constitutional Thought 1815–2003, 220. Monica Keneley, ‘The Dying Town Syndrome: A Survey of Urban Development in the Western District of Victoria 1830–1930,’ The Electronic Journal of Australian and New Zealand History, 2004, www.jcu.edu.au/aff/history/articles/ keneley3.htm. Viewed November 18, 2016. Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, Papunya, A Place Made after the Story, 47. Andrew Crocker quotes artist Charlie Tarawa (Tjaruru) Tjungurrayi: ‘If I don’t paint this story some whitefella might come and steal my country.’ (Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, Papunya, A Place Made after the Story, 506.) Margaret Somerville, ‘Place Studies for a Global World,’ in Landscapes and Learning: Place Studies for a Global World, M. Somerville, K. Power and P. de Carteret (eds.), Rotterdam: Sense Publishers 2009, 3–20, 6. Gibson, Ross, ‘Changescapes,’ in Halfway House: The Poetics of Australian Space, J. Rutherford (ed.), Nedlands, WA: UWA Publishing, 2010, 17–33, 26. Elizabeth Slottje, ‘Stories Tell Culture, Connecting Identity with Place: ­ Australian Cultural Policy and Collective Creativity,’ PhD Thesis, University of Western Sydney, 2009, 237. James Dawson, Australian Aborigines, lxxviii. In a similar way writers like Douglas Robertson and John Maynard Smith ‘measure biological evolutionary progress in terms of abrupt improvements in the way information is represented and transmitted inside living organisms.’ (Gregory L. Chaitin, Thinking about Gödel and Turing, Essays on Complexity, 1970–2007, Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2007, 236.) Eliseo Fernánde, ‘Peircean Habits and the Life of Symbols,’ Semiotics, 2010, 98–109, www.pdcnet.org/collection/show?is+cpsem_2010_0098_0109&file_type= pdf. Viewed December 30, 2014. Dawson indicates that lists of English words were distributed amongst the participants at the word-getting sessions. The evidence of the wordlists themselves is that Isabella (who had a basic knowledge of the languages) explained the meaning of

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unfamiliar terms, sometimes by reference to Indigenous terms for related concepts, sometimes by paraphrase or deictically or pantomimically. Hence, the resulting lexicon is a genuine act of ‘thirding,’ an accurate account of a new hybrid language arrived at performatively and indexically related to the process of its production. (See Paul Carter, ‘The Enigma of Access, James Dawson and the Question of Ownership in Translation,’ Griffith Law Review, vol. 22, no. 1, 2013, 8–26, 14–15.) Wuurn and wurrong may look somewhat similar, but there is no question that Dawson distinguished them – lexically, semantically and phonetically. For further discussion of Dawson’s use of wuurong as the name of his homestead, see Paul Carter, ‘The Enigma of Access, James Dawson and the Question of Ownership in Translation,’ 16. See Harry Lourandos, ‘Aboriginal Spatial Organization and Population: South-Western Victoria Reconsidered,’ Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania, vol. XII, 1977, 202–225. Again, it is interesting that no English word is equivalent to the kind of ‘stone barriers’ described here. Elsewhere Dawson resorts to the term ‘dam,’ explaining that the baskets are placed in ‘a gap of the dam.’ (Australian Aborigines, 94.) Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, 310. Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, 311. Two photographs of these sessions, notionally dated around 1865, exist. Five or six (respectively) Aboriginal people dispose themselves on the grass around the seated Isabella. It is possible that among the additional informants were Gnuurnecheean and Muulapuurn yurong yaar. (See the photographic portraits reproduced in Richard Bennett’s Early Days of Port Fairy, J. Critchett (ed.), Warrnambool: W.I.A.E. Press, 1984, 44 and James Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 44–45.) Stephen Muecke, Joe in the Andamans and Other Fictocritical Stories, Sydney: Local Consumption Publications, 2008, 93. James Dawson, Australian Aborigines, iv. James Dawson, Australian Aborigines, iv. James Dawson, Australian Aborigines, iv. Spellings continue to be subject to change: Dawson’s Chaap wuurong corresponds to Tjapwurrung and the currently preferred Djabwurrung. Clark ­recommends that ‘Gundidjmara’ be replaced by ‘Dhauwurd Wurrung’ (see Ian D. Clark, Aboriginal Languages and Clans: An Historical Atlas of Western and Central Victoria, 1800–1900, Monash Publications in Geography, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, 3168, 1990, 23.) However, most writers continue to use Gunditjmara. This said, the following discussion does not take account of the gender of the translation: Isabella’s primary role in obtaining the three vocabularies printed in Australian Aborigines has been obscured by the sole ascription of the book to James. Isabella’s primary informant was another woman Yaruun Parpur Tarneen. There is little doubt that the extremely detailed information about family relationships (lxiv–lxxvii) and the account of ‘mother-in-law’ language (29) reflect her interests and influence. In another traverse across the material the gendered nature of the discourse and the protocols shaping communication between the sexes would need to be taken into account in understanding the ‘ownership’ of what was said. Legislation that adversely affected the regional Indigenous population provided the context for much of Dawson’s information gathering. His twenty-year-long battle with the Victorian Government’s Aboriginal policy is documented by Jan Critchett in her ‘Introduction to the Facsimile Edition,’ Australian Aborigines. Dawson’s advocacy was not an isolated phenomenon: progressive members of the Warrnambool community, including William Goodall (Manager

Overflow  183 of the Framlingham Aboriginal station) and H. B. Lane (Police Warden and government-­appointed Aboriginal Guardian) were in regular correspondence with Dawson about local Aboriginal cultures, their maintenance and protection. It is in this context that Rolf Boldrewood characterised Dawson as ‘of a temper singularly intolerant of injustice.’ (Critchett, ‘Introduction to the Facsimile Edition.’) 93 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Paris: Seuil, 1970, 230. The official vocabulary of African affairs is, as we might suspect, purely axiomatic. Which is to say that it has no value as communication, but only as intimidation. It therefore constitutes writing, i.e. a language intended to bring about a coincidence between norms and facts, and to give a cynical reality the guarantee of a noble morality. (Translation by Richard Howard in ‘African Grammar’ in Roland Barthes, ‘African Grammar,’ in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, Berkeley: ­University of California Press, 1997, 103.) 94 Older grammars often spell the term ‘accidents.’ 95 Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, 312. 96 Florian Coulmas, quoted by Rob Amery, Warrabarna Kaurna: Reclaiming an Australian Language, Exton, PA: Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, 2000, 40. 97 For this and previous quotation, see Rob Amery, Warrabarna Kaurna: Reclaiming an Australian Language, 40, where, in his discussion of the language once spoken by the Indigenous people of the Adelaide area in South Australia, he emphasises Coulmas’s further point that ‘the contribution of each individual is “more conspicuous in demographically small languages ….”’ 98 Jo Vergunst, ‘Moving in Nature: Walking and Completedness in Nature,’ paper presented at ‘Performing nature at the world’s ends,’ University of Oslo, 29–31 August 2007, 6. 99 Jo Vergunst, ‘Moving in nature: Walking and Completedness in Nature,’ 6. 100 James Dawson, Australian Aborigines, lxxviii. In another place the nomenclature of these ‘reaches’ should be discussed. In essence, the names are borrowed from parts of the human body with the idea of emphasising the jointure or inflection of the water in relation to a larger water body. Hence names such as ‘bone.’ ‘shoulder blade’ and ‘wrist’ are typical. 101 James Dawson, Australian Aborigines, lxxxiii. 102 James Dawson, Australian Aborigines, Ibid., 54. 103 J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines, 156. 104 J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines, 154. 105 J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines, 155. 106 Sara Eugenia Morón-Polanco, ‘Understanding the Origin and Controls on the Development of Anabranching Rivers,’ PhD, University of Adelaide, May 2016, 28. Morón-Polanco makes the point that ‘dynamic equilibrium of the anastomosing system is attained by the balance between rates of channel creation and channel abandonment.’ (22) 107 See though, Paul Carter, ‘The Enigma of Access: James Dawson and the Question of Ownership in Translation,’ for discussion of contrasting Djabwurrung and white settler representations: while Robinson attempts to reduce the “system” to a continuous, self-­ contained figure, where all flows are contained and regulated, the local draughtsman describes a system of openings, a ground pattern for the multiplication of relationships. One tries to remove ambiguity; the other makes bifurcation and the chances of choice its operational principle. (20) 108 Carol Brown, ‘City of Lovers,’ in Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance, V. Hunter (ed.), London: Routledge, 2015, 199–222.

6 Bacan Biodiversity in the anarchipelago

Biodiversity values In this chapter I want to focus on the establishment of value, to ask whether the setting of exchange rates integral to the political economy of archipelagos has implications for biodiversity maintenance, management and governance. Can archipelagic thinking define relational regions that cross the human/non-human, culture/nature divide? There are obvious conceptual parallels between biological and metaphorical associations, between semantic clusters and eco-systems: can these generate different ways of evaluating human behaviour, understanding the emotional and sense-making mechanisms that motivate care and the project of co-existence? It is likely that the present valuation and re-evaluation of living spaces and their governance will be a transformation of inherited political, economic and social institutions, that it will be multi- or trans-sensory, involving a kind of conceptual synaesthesia or capacity for acknowledging complex patternings across different scales and media. In an archipelagic setting, it would be surprising if the parties to the transaction were not themselves changed by exchange, discovering in it principles of relationality – the dynamics of ­c entripetal/ centrifugal energeia – that exceed any physically defined region and locate it within a network of similarly curated spaces. In this way Venice, for example, might come to the Moluccas, and the European navigator’s habit of calling every significant pile village located along the shores of southeast Asia ‘little Venice’ might be more than picturesque license, intuiting how archipelago talks to archipelago. The outcome of such a poetic speculation cannot be a blueprint for systematic decolonisation of centralised nation-state social and environmental policy, but it can be a constructive critique of master plans that, while they engage the best scientific information and organisational talents of constituent communities, ignore the role sense-making plays in value setting. The classically imagined archipelago always had a bias towards overarching organisation, implied by the element arche; in the decolonised regime where memory and imagination underwrite regional political innovation, an anarchipelago may emerge, incorporating values of is/is not, incalculability and endlessness.

Bacan  185 Geographical archipelagos are recognised as evolutionary accelerators; when they form across tectonic divides, they also concentrate species ­d iversity – Wallacea, the region broadly drawn around Sulawesi, the southern island chain running between Lombok and Timor-Leste, the Banda Sea and the Moluccas/Maluku ‘is a hotspot in central Indonesia and ­Timor-Leste in Southeast Asia with a total land area of 33.8 ­m illion hectares.’ (See Figure 3.1 for this and other places mentioned in this ­chapter.) The region’s thousands of islands support highly diverse biological communities with many unique species—more than half of the mammals, forty per cent of the birds and sixty-five per cent of the amphibians found in Wallacea do not occur outside the hotspot. Many of these species are endemic not only to the hotspot but also to single islands or mountains within it. Such species are highly vulnerable to habitat loss, hunting, collection and other pressures. As a result, Wallacea has 308 terrestrial and freshwater species classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as globally threatened, and many more species for which data is inadequate to allow full assessment of their status.’ Additionally, the region has more marine species than anywhere else on the planet, and it forms the heart of the Coral Triangle. Of these marine species, 252 are classified as threatened with extinction by IUCN, many of them corals, which are vulnerable to ‘the combined effects of bleaching, sedimentation and pollution as well as destructive fishing practices.’1 But Wallacea is also a cultural biodiversity hotspot, although the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) report makes no mention of this: as Antoinette Schapper writes, What is less well known is that this tremendous species diversity correlates with a rich linguistic diversity. In Wallacea the number of languages is much higher and average speaker population much lower than in western Indonesia. In Maluku alone there are approximately 130 languages, with speaker populations typically between several hundred and a thousand. In terms of language families, Wallacea is more diverse than the region to its west. Whilst the entirety of western island Southeast Asian languages are Austronesian, the languages of Wallacea hail from over a dozen different language families, not only the large Austronesian family but also many smaller distinct Papuan, or non-­Austronesian, families. Structurally, the languages of Wallacea are recognised as particularly diverse.2 At the same time, Schapper makes a well-referenced case for the existence of a distinct ‘linguistic area’ whose origins are ancient,’ concluding, ‘The Wallacean linguistic area extends over a large archipelago of islands and thus can only have come into existence in the presence of a pre-Austronesian maritime culture connecting disparate speaker groups.’3

186 Bacan

Civil society and its priorities Unrelenting in its exposure of institutional failure at all levels to monitor and care for Indonesian environments and their custodians and equally clear about the necessity to equip civil society to self-organise and act effectively, partly through advocacy, partly through skills transfer and partly through inter-community cooperation, the authors of the CEPF report place their greatest hope for improved biodiversity governance in what they refer to as enhanced civil society capacity.4 One object of this is to empower ­Indigenous communities to maintain traditional environmental management systems: Throughout Wallacea, there are numerous traditional societies that have evolved systems to protect, conserve and manage the natural resources on which they depend, and to ensure equitable distribution of these resources. Anthropological studies indicate that hot spots of high biodiversity are associated with regions where traditional societies are frequently found. There are numerous examples in Wallacea of traditional knowledge systems. The Lamalera people in Lembata islands are the only community in Indonesia with customary law (adat) regarding whale hunting as part of a traditional subsistence fishery. One of the most well-known and intensely studied traditional resource management systems is an Indigenous fisheries resource conservation and management tradition in Maluku known as Sasi. Although Sasi has transformed with time and its scope differs from location to location, studies indicate that marine Sasi can be used as a basis for building local level natural resource management institutions.5 At the same time – and leaving aside the innumerable variations on the sasi system,6 originally land-focused7 and ‘essentially an institution for managing social interactions, mediating tenure disputes and maximizing economic returns, rather than a resource conservation and management institution per se’8 – Indigenous knowledge systems are both under threat – historically because of colonisation and presently because of Indonesian state development settings (whether tending to centralise or decentralise, these contest the traditional authority of the kewang 9) – and constantly adapting and self-­ transforming.10 In this situation, a strategic alliance is desirable. Noting that there is ‘a clear distinction in key biodiversity areas where customary institutions and management practices prevail versus areas where social change has led to the decline of those institutions,’ it is clear that two-way re-­education is necessary.11 Local communities need to be converted to conservation principles: ‘The conservation status of a site will be better in the long-term when managed with the involvement of Indigenous and local communities given appropriate incentives, institutions, technical support and recognition of rights than it would have been if managed to exclude local resource users.’12 At the same time, among ‘the gaps in civil society capacity’ the report singles out ‘Incomplete understanding of how conservation goals can be integrated

Bacan  187 with customary knowledge and practice in ways that are sustainable and avoid under-mining customary practice in the process.’13 By ‘civil society’ the writers appear to mean effectively the ‘Local and national civil society groups dedicated to conserving global conservation priorities,’14 many of whose members have contributed to the extraordinary mosaic of information and measures contained in the report. While there is a perceived convergence of interests between civil society organisations (CSO) and Indigenous communities, they are obviously different and the reconciliation of interests remains work in progress. Firstly, there is geographical disaggregation: while Maluku possesses the highest number of key biodiversity areas, it also lacks local conservation NGOs and people organisations. Secondly, there is a residual romanticism in the assumption that biodiversity values map to Indigenous environmental practices. Writing recently in a New Guinea context, William Thomas observes, ‘For many, the twenty-year experiment of involving indigenous people in conservation is proving to be a disaster for nature and the enthusiasm for partnerships with indigenous communities has waned.’ We have, he says, to let go of the idea ‘that indigenous people have a special relationship with the land’ that ‘has prevented them from destroying their biological heritage and will enable them to continue to conserve their lands for future generations.’15 Even if this has a Tristes Tropiques disillusionment about it, and the CEPF advocates steps to ‘identify and articulate the links between conservation and livelihoods, and thus to communicate this link to stakeholders,’ the gap remains, presumably, considerable.16 The communication or consensus-reaching recommended here is one way, a translation occurring that reformulates Indigenous practices in ecological terms. The discourse of this imagined civil society and its ­actor-agents is Habermasian, indeed seeks to reclaim Wallacea discursively as a public space amenable to rational-critical debate. Its actor-agents belong to the protest sector ‘where people come together, or are mobilized, in networks, campaign groups, social movements and other forms of association in pursuit of influence for purposeful change.’17 The report, at least, envisages reaching a shared understanding that leads, logically, to agreement.18

Customary societies and their interests Then, to speak in terms of collective life worlds and their cultural mediation, what happens when the metaphors disagree? What are whales to the Lamalera? They are not an exemplum of biodiversity. They are the exchange rate. According to tradition, the whale hunters migrated from eastern Indonesia to Lamalera in the sixteenth century. As they settled in the Lamalera village, they entered into contractual relationships with the indigenous people, offering them fish in exchange for land use rights. Only small amounts of whale meat are consumed by the hunters and their households. Rather, being a basic item of barter, it is an indispensable item in the local economy, often being used as a form of currency and by maintaining its value sustains the barter system, which in turn constructs and maintains an interdependent

188 Bacan relationship. Although Lamalera villagers have bartered whale meat and whale oil since the seventeenth century, they have never traded with people from other islands. The result is a trust-based barter system securing peaceful coexistence.19 Outside this socio-political contract, however, Barnes explains, the Lamalera, like other coastal Melanesian communities are economically extravert, depending ‘on external trade for symbolically significant objects, such as elephant tusks and fine Indian cloths,’ a reality that Barnes, following Gell, derives from a drive in Melanesian prehistory ‘towards trade specialisation responding to a cultural impetus “to participate eagerly in commodity exchange even when local production could provide substitutes for commodities obtainable through trade.”’20 Such commodities ‘obtain their local value through their role in ceremonial exchanges necessary for the reproduction of clans, households, ritual houses, in the settlement of disputes.’ The resulting ‘trade asymmetry’ stems from ‘the symbolic load’ that imported objects have – kain berang red cloth from Ambon or porcelain from Java. Roy Ellen notes that this ‘endogenous asymmetry’ or ‘continuing dependency provides permanent structural foci for a local trading network,’ and that ‘some of these networks may assume a degree of symmetry through circular linkages, of a kind exemplified by the kula in the New Guinea Massim.’21 One way to characterise the impact of Portuguese, Spanish and, a little later, Dutch colonisation and expansion of the spice trade is topologically. ‘Endogenous asymmetry,’ creating a value-adding feedback loop that was economically, politically and socially homeostatic, conformed to what Jennifer Gaynor calls the ‘Hinterseas’ culture – ‘the confusing coast-­ skipping, straits-crossing, and island hopping array of allegiances that one finds across the historical maritime world of Southeast Asia,’22 where the basis of exchange was a myth of regional biodiversity that functioned to preserve the locally unequal distribution of resources, as Pires observed when he reported rather skeptically, ‘The Malay merchants say that God made Timor for sandalwood and Banda for mace and the Moluccas for cloves, and that this merchandise is not known anywhere else in the world except in these places; and I asked and enquired very diligently whether they had this merchandise anywhere else and everyone said not.’23 Gaynor links her ‘hinterseas’ concept to O. W. Wolters’ ‘mandala polities,’ ‘with their interlinked hub-and-spoke patron-client ties, common to the region’s amorphously structured coastal polities’ and to Bennet Bronson’s ‘dendritic imagery of “upstream-downstream relations,”’ itself reflecting the Malay notion of teluk rantau, roughly ‘bends and reaches,’ a feature of riparian geography that structured relations between upstream and downstream polities, but also orients one to the view from the port, as rantau represents movement to another place, away from one’s usual stomping – or fishing – grounds in order to make a living, and which she proposes to apply to saltwater situations, pivoting it ‘so that it now reaches up and down coasts and across stretches of seawater to touch other

Bacan  189 24

littorals.’ It is a model of trading centres (like Makassar) as ‘polycentric societies in fragile and temporary coalitions,’ as essentially coastal cultures whose ‘nautical pursuits’ are defined by ‘archipelagic geography’ and ‘a political economy that depended on social relations between maritime people and those who wanted access to, and benefits from, their networks, knowledge and skills.’25 Evidently, the supply chain presupposed by commercial imperialism was different. Venice, for example, received the precious spices it on-sold so profitably after they were mostly harvested by slaves, and then sailed or paddled in tiny praos from the Spice Islands (the Moluccas) to Malacca. From there, they were shipped in junks across two or three dangerous tropical seas. After that, this freight was carried on camelback through the desert from Aden to Egypt, becoming more expensive at each stage. Emirs, sultans and pirates levied high customs tariffs on whatever had not been lost to typhoons, sandstorms or other pirates. The exotic freight passed through at least a dozen hands before it was received by European merchant firms in Alexandria or Constantinople.26 When the Portuguese intervened, their call for expanded production created a new demand for slaves. In the wake of Abreu’s residency, Sultan Abu Lais of Ternate aligned himself with the Portuguese. There was economic advantage; it also gave him an edge over his rival, the sultan of Tidore (who soon took the opportunity to solicit Spanish support). In any case, these and other local sultanates organised the slave labour to harvest the cloves and nutmegs and oversighted transportation, benefiting from the rapidly expanding spice trade in the same way as the exactly contemporary Biafida-Sapi, Banyuk-Bak and Mande trade diasporas in western Africa profited from the Portuguese interest in slaves.27 The Dutch industrialised slave labour to an unprecedented degree, further distorting the networked regional economy by creating a centre-­periphery supply-and-demand bottleneck. Their plantation economy involved two modes of production: of labour power (that is slaves) in the periphery – the most important areas for the supply of slaves were ‘the large and relatively thinly populated islands of Sulawesi, with Macassar as its trade centre, and Ceram’ – and of centralized merchant capitalistic spice production, in the Banda Islands, for example, rendered profitable by obtaining ‘slave labour at a price that was far beneath the reproduction costs of the labour power.’28 Keeping the purchase price of nutmeg and cloves artificially low – and cutting out most of the ‘dozen hands’ involved in the older trade – Dutch profits on the European market naturally shot up, and their demand for slaves usually far exceeded the local supply.29

Amphibious capacity In short, even if, as the CEPF plan asserts, there is ‘a clear distinction in key biodiversity areas where customary institutions and management practices prevail versus areas where social change has led to the decline of those

190 Bacan institutions,’ no convenient commitment to ‘purposeful change’ (or arrest of decline) can be assumed. The report identifies no less than forty-nine marine key biodiversity areas around Sulawesi of which only a handful enjoy protection. They map reasonably well to the location of the many ­Bajau-speaking communities scattered around the Sulawesi coastline,30 who are, or should be, ‘a key stakeholder group with regard to current international conservation activities,’ as Clifton and Majors put it. However, unless their ‘perceptions of environmental causality, and spiritual belief systems’ can be ‘integrated into resource management initiatives,’ they ‘will continue to occupy a peripheral role in conservation.’31 As Annet Pauwelussen shows in a study of a female Bajau trader’s network in practice, the performance of her network requires the ceaseless movement of people and things, in travelling (mobility) as well as in the reshaping of relations (fluidity). The trader’s network is enmeshed in historically grown relations of kinship, ethnicity and patron-client associations across the sea. These socially and spatially mobile associations are at odds with conservationists’ preoccupation with a spatial fixation of people, places and borders.32 She and G. M. Verschoor argue that this mismatch of conceptual frameworks affects both environmental and cultural biodiversity and witnesses the double marginalisation of Bajau people and coral protection – both in their view ‘ontologically ambiguous’: For conservation outreach to become seaworthy, it needs to cultivate an amphibious capacity, capable of moving in-between and relating partly overflowing ways of knowing and being. Providing room for ambiguity, thinking with amphibiousness furthermore encourages suspension of the (Western) tendency to explain the Other, to fix what does not add up. As such, it is of heuristic relevance for the on-going discussions of ontological multiplicity that have proliferated at the intersection between STS [Science, Technology and Society] and anthropology.33 These authors quote a blast fisherman and village elder from the Bajau community on Serang Island: ‘People travel, and so do fish. We depend on God to bring them [fish] towards us. It’s a matter of fate/luck (rejeki) if we meet. There’s continuous increase and decrease, coming and going with the tides and the moon.’34 Here, they write, is ‘an inherently amphibious world, in which ambiguous objects or beings move, meet or merge.’35 But, in terms of the relational movement form where wellbeing is a matter of ‘constant balancing by reciprocal exchanges,’36 the exchange described here is little different from the Carolinian concept of pookof – the sense that ‘the islands expand as the fish, birds, and plants travel out, and they contract as their inhabitants journey back home. The “Boundaries” of the islands and reefs are perceived as fluid and connected to the life within them.’37 As regards the implications for coral conservation, they recommend a discourse

Bacan  191 of ‘amphibious translation,’ or ‘controlled equivocation’ that can handle ‘ambiguity and fluidity.’ The resulting ‘incoherence’ can provide, they say, ‘scope for creativity, learning and dialogue.’ The treatment of amphibiousness and ambiguity as synonyms seems to me mistaken: amphibious forms are no more prone to ambiguity than any other complex. However, given the thesis of the previous chapter, a recommendation to cultivate ‘an amphibious capacity’ that engages ways of knowing and being that ‘partly overflow one another’ without ‘assuming one to be superior’ obviously resonates.38 Here is one answer to the CEFP’s question-begging call to address ‘the gaps in civil society capacity,’ as the primary skill to be learned may be poetic, an attitude towards place and people governance that understands exchange ­ontologically – not as an after-effect of cross-cultural encounter but as the primary work of coming into being existentially and socially. As Ingersoll argues, the life steersmanship, or etak, that corresponds to pookof, is not simply a more mindful or considerate approach to achieving agreement: it involves reclaiming the meaning of story and storytelling. The navigator, the surfer, even the singular and collective body regarded as a movement form, ‘think through the question of “personal identity” in a new way, taking into account the temporal dimension (temporality) of a being who, by existing with others in the horizon of a common world, is led to transform himself in the course of a life history.’39 Translated into the scope for dialogue, the ‘narrative identity’ performed in this way is not, to pick up our own conversation with Ricoeur, ‘closed in on itself but opens out onto other things,’ exhibiting ‘an original capacity for renewal.’40 A simple example of this in writing a story (whether factually based or fictional) is the capacity of the writer to step out of the chronological sequence or ‘episodic dimension’ of the story into the ‘configurational dimension’ and ‘to “reflect upon” events with the aim of encompassing them in successive totalities.’41 But this is not simply a matter of textual literacy of importance to the humanities; any hermeneutically self-conscious ethnographer, or participant observer, necessarily acknowledges its essential role not only in creating ‘that other relationship between the teller and the audience’ but in achieving a meaningful exchange between parties some of whom are not familiar with the conventions of communicative rationality, and on this account find the entry qualifications for participating in deliberative democracy over their heads.

Discursive reflection When the ‘configurational dimension’ of the story is made integral to the meaning, something like the value-adding that occurs in the kula exchange takes place – as Bronisław Malinowski’s account of the Melanesian theory of shipwreck and salvage illustrates. Malinowski will, he states, give the narrative on which he bases his account ‘in a consecutive manner, as it was told to me by some of the most experienced and renowned Trobriand sailors in Sinaketa, Oburaku, and Omarakana,’ adding, like any writer of fiction, ‘We can imagine that exactly such a narrative would be told by a veteran toliwaga to his usagelu on the beach of Yakum, as our Kula party sit round

192 Bacan the camp fires at night,’ which is reasonable enough, as neither the storyteller nor his audience has ‘had any personal experience of such a catastrophe, though many have lived through frequent narrow escapes in stormy weather.’42 Yet Malinowski no sooner promises a consecutive narrative than he interrupts it to quote and discuss a number of spells used to outwit the mulukwausi.43 These spells have a different time signature from the main narrative; they are like musical accompaniments. Far from being interludes, they focus the storyteller’s prowess as a rhapsode or performer: spoken in short, jerky sentences, with onomatopoetic representations of sound, the narrative exaggerates certain features, and omits others. The excellency of the narrator’s own magic, the violence of the elements at critical moments, he would always reiterate with monotonous insistence. He would diverge into some correlated subject, jump ahead, missing out several stages, come back, and so on, so that the whole is quite incoherent and unintelligible to a white listener ….44 So, reflecting on the story, he brings himself into the story as it unfolds, as this comment illustrates: It is necessary for an Ethnographer to listen several times to such a narrative, in order to have a fair chance of forming some coherent idea of its trend. Afterwards, by means of direct examination, he can succeed in placing the facts in their proper sequence. By questioning the informants about details of rite and magic, it is possible then to obtain interpretations and commentaries. Thus the whole of a narrative can be constructed, the various fragments, with all their spontaneous freshness, can be put in their proper places, and this is what I have done in giving this account of shipwreck.45 But what Malinowski has really done is to expose a methodological self-awareness. You could say, perhaps cynically, that the salvage operation he performs is a function of his own episodic fragmentation, but the object is clearly different – to introduce the ‘narrative function’ into the ‘historical enquiry’ and by this means to align his interests with those of the sailors. Each time the story is passed on, more of its meaning is revealed: it grows in value and interest exactly as the objects of the kula exchange when they are passed on. The ethnographer creates a relationship with the reader that recalls how the mulukwausi hunts down the sailors and wraps them in mist: the mist is not intended to mystify, it is a tourbillon, an eddying movement form, a formula for navigating the serpentine dangers of the deep. As Ingersoll comments, ‘Identity is always moving in relation to one’s “time narrative,” in relation to one’s deep rhythmic thoughts … Part of ontology is geopolitical time.’46 A first step towards a biodiversity conservation strategy involves discursive reflection of this kind. Historically, and scientifically, it means acknowledging where the conservation impulse has come from – owning its story. It also entails recognising the non-rational, even phantasmagoric, relationship

Bacan  193 Europe has had with the Spice Islands. The regionalisation of Wallacea owes its origin, as its name suggests, to Alfred Russel Wallace’s publication The Malay Archipelago, a synthesis of seven years’ natural history study and specimen collection in what is now largely the Indonesian archipelago, during which, zigzagging between islands, he covered over 14,000 miles.47 We mentioned Wallace’s decision to organise the material from his journals into five sections. Here was a simple example of ‘configuration’: in the first great work of zoogeography, the narrative would be regionalised, not simply because a linear narrative would lose sight of the wood for the trees, but because the selection, organisation and re-narration of journal sections around their geographical points of reference reinforced Wallace’s primary zoogeographical thesis. There was a subtle and persuasive feedback loop between these provisional sub-regionalisations and the emergence of explanatory patterns in the abundance of empirical data. Informing the arrangement was a geological hypothesis about the formation of the archipelago. Discovering two sharply different but adjacent zoogeographical regions within the Malay Archipelago, Wallace hypothesised that the juxtaposition of the Indo-Malayan and Austro-Malayan divisions of the Archipelago was due to long-term geological changes: ‘Geology teaches us that the surface of the land and the distribution of land and water is everywhere slowly changing.’48 To help readers grasp how Java, Sumatra and Borneo should be considered outliers of Asia, while the Celebes, the balance of the chain of islands east of Java (beginning from Lombok, and the sea of islands northwards to the Moluccas) should be classified as remnants of a formerly larger Australian or Pacific continent, Wallace conducted a thought experiment.49 South America and Africa are far apart and have very different fauna and flora. Suppose, though, that a slow upheaval of the bed of the Atlantic should take place, while at the same time earthquake-shocks and volcanic action on the land should cause increased volumes of sediment to be poured down by the rivers, so that the two continents should gradually spread out by the addition of newly-formed lands, and thus reduce the Atlantic, which now separates them, to an arm of the sea a few hundred miles wide.50 At the same time, Wallace further hypothesises, ‘we may suppose islands to be upheaved in mid-channel’; these islands would ‘sometimes become connected with the land on one side or other of the strait, and at other times again be separated from it.’ Internally too we would see the same phenomenon: several islands might join together or at another time be broken up again. The outcome would be ‘an irregular archipelago of islands filling up the ocean-channel of the Atlantic’ with nothing in their arrangement to suggest where they came from.51

Patterns of dispersal Later, Wallace discounted the idea of massive exchanges between land and sea; instead he championed ‘the general stability of continents with

194 Bacan constant change of form’ theory; the submarine mountain range in the mid-­Atlantic discovered by the soundings of HMS Challenger possibly indicated ‘the former existence of some considerable Atlantic islands’ of which the Azores, St Paul’s Rocks, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha are the last remaining peaks, but there was never an Andes there.52 However, transposed to the shallower seas of Sundaland, his ‘slow upheaval’ hypothesis was valid: post-glacial sea level change in Wallace’s Indo-Malayan region would have flooded vast areas, as evidence of submerged drainage systems, ‘complete with river deltas, floodplains and back swamps’ suggests.53 However, the point here is simply that Wallace’s interest in the formation of the archipelago can be described as continentalist: the archipelago is rationalised as an effect of what nowadays is described in terms of active deformations within a complex plate-boundary zone.54 It is not only islands that are secondary but even oceans: Polynesia, for example, is characterised as ‘pre-eminently an area of subsidence, and its great, widespread group of coral-reefs mark out the position of former continents and islands,’ and: ‘when a Pacific continent existed, the whole geography of the earth’s surface would probably be very different from what it is now.’55 The effect of this continentalist framing of some 18,000 islands is fascinating: it allows the actual discovery of two sharply contrasted biogeographic regions to belong to a larger picture of bio-evolutionary change, and, besides the inevitable controversies that will arise over the best siting of the lines of internal division,56 it also establishes the focus of evolutionary theorising on the impact of environmental change on endemic populations, relegating movement to a secondary position. As Cowie et al. note, ‘vicariance biogeography,’ emerging from ‘the fusion of cladistics and plate tectonics’ has treated dispersal as ‘a random process essentially adding only noise to a vicariant system.’ This bias is reflected in ‘a focus on the biogeography of continents and continental islands,’ while the biogeography of ocean islands, ‘dependent on stochastic dispersal’ has been regarded as uninteresting.57 The archipelago has been treated as a static constellation rather than a critical arrangement, insularly asymmetrical and immersed in the vortically forming and unforming currents of ocean and atmosphere. Far from being random, ‘general dispersal patterns in oceanic systems’ exist: ‘ocean currents, predominant wind patterns (trade winds, hurricane tracks), the geographical arrangement of islands (facilitating use as stepping stones) and bird migration routes. And they stress the importance of ‘asymmetry of dispersal’: to reinforce the notion that dispersal within hot-spot archipelagos is far from a stochastic process, we can point to many examples of studies in numerous plant and animal groups that have detected common patterns of dispersal that generally conform to the so-called ‘progression rule’ that dispersal and colonization, frequently accompanied by lineage bifurcation, proceeds from older to younger islands.58

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The fetish of species My object here is not to adjudicate on bioevolutionary fashions (for which evidently I have no qualifications). It is to sketch the philosophical framework that tacitly underwrites the Wallacea biodiversity strategy, and to emphasise its deep roots in continentalist thinking. The object is not some facile disparagement of Wallace’s extraordinary achievement – an attack of that kind would begin elsewhere in astonishment at the sangfroid with which the great zoologist contemplated the death agonies of the orangutans shot for him or by him in Borneo.59 Nor is it to make a metaphorical comparison between biogeographical priorities and governmental institutions predicated on the integrity of territories and the regulation of movement. It is to relativise an implicitly ecological, utilitarian mindset – its normative appeal to actor agents collectively represented by ‘civil society’ – and to assert the importance of a cultural autoethnography as a preliminary to entering into discussions where cultural and environmental biodiversity cannot be separated out. Configuring the biodiversity narrative in terms of this scarcely acknowledged colonialist psychogeography allows identifications and persuasions to emerge that are powerfully motivational but not amenable to the tests of communicative rationality. We could go a step further, recognising that European rationalisations of the archipelago have, to some extent, reflected the archipelagic character of facets of European culture: the drive to unity has always been threatened by multiplicity, that incoherence that must always surface where different currents overflow and mingle. Colonialist nation-state sovereignty based on slavery, for example, depends for its illusion of self-sufficiency on what Benjamin calls phantasmagoria, a screen image of ‘the imaginary relationship of society to its real condition of existence’ that disguises the true exchange value (vested in the cost to human suffering and environmental despoliation of commodity production).60 From this perspective the characterisation of the Homem archipelagic flotillas as hieroglyphs of wide-eyed wonder or a taste for the beyond is naïve. They are the visions of someone tripping on nutmeg: ‘upon closing eyes hallucinations appear quite real in 3-D, like watching a movie. First these dreams appear in black and white, but later colours start appearing. Chartreuse and magenta first appear, then blue and finally red. First I had visions of large numbers on gaming tables, then people.’61 When Pires assured the Portuguese monarch that ‘Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice,’62 his thoughts were clearly not focused on expanding intellectual horizons. It is the prospect of illimitable wealth, diversity of commercial interest, that drives him. Pires provided the first ‘proper description’ of the Moluccas to reach the west. When the five islands of Ternate, Tidore, Motir, Makyan and Bachian are clearly differentiated and accurately characterised, they fulfil the double condition of phantasmagoria, that it should present an authentic image through its dream-like double. His descriptions are exact in the same way that Marco

196 Bacan Polo’s number is precise: both signify that which is illimitable, a wealth that is dematerialised or spiritualised, that disguises the work that produces it. The endless end represented by the Moluccas depends on its distance, on its containment within a dream region, in relationship to which it is microcosmic. As Pires explains, in now familiar terms: of the ‘great many other islands around the Moluccas’ he will not write ‘because it would mean writing about another hundred thousand.’63 Phantasmagorias ‘merge real worlds, distant countries and fictional worlds without hierarchy.’ Phantasmagoria entails a horror vacui. It is a dreamlike continuum of these alibis. It accumulates them eclectically without critique. These alibis can be linked to an ideology of conservation, an archaeological fetishism, to an obsession of reproduction (more real than the real), or to an absolute iconicism (the sign of the real being greater than the real).64 And what can be asserted about the island flotillas – that they represent nothing except a fantasy of specie, the prospect of unimaginable spice-based profit, applies in a way to modern conservation ideology. Greatly as the CEPF biodiversity strategy is to be applauded in principle – what global citizen could oppose empowering people ‘to be good stewards of the planet, so they and future generations continue to benefit from its life-­sustaining resources, such as clean air, fresh water, a stable climate and healthy soils’?65 – the definition of ‘conservation outcomes’ in terms ‘of species, and more specifically species that are threatened with extinction,’66 embeds at the heart of an otherwise sophisticated and ramified implementation strategy a Wallacean fetishism.

The Moluccas in the west Recognising this is neither to impugn motives nor disparage expertise and vision: it is to ask for a deeper reflection on the motives and mechanisms informing value formation. The first step in decolonising biodiversity governance models is to decolonise the mindset that informs it. As already argued, autopoietic mechanisms inform sense-production, and these are arrived at discursively, precisely through the continuous production of meaning in exchange. The challenge is to keep creativity moored in the real world of external contingency, rather than allow the emergence of Ersatz trading states, whose fiction of self-sufficiency is a figure of emotional dissatisfaction. ‘I need not explain to a Viennese the principle of the “Gschnas,”’ writes Freud: It consists in constructing what appear to be rare and precious objects out of trivial and preferably comic and worthless materials (for instance, in making armour out of saucepans, wisps of straw and dinner rolls) – a favourite pastime at bohemian parties here in Vienna. I had observed that this is precisely what hysterical subjects do: alongside what has really happened to them, they unconsciously build up frightful or perverse imaginary events which they construct out of the most innocent

Bacan  197 and everyday material of their experience. It is to these phantasies that their symptoms are in the first instance attached and not their recollections of real events.67 This observation can be related to Freud’s further aperçu: ‘A sense of guilt also originates from unsatisfied love. Like hate. In fact, we have been obliged to derive every conceivable thing from that material: like economically self-­ sufficient States with their “Ersatz products.”’68 Spices such as cloves, nutmeg and mace have minimal food value, and within the Moluccan hinterseas were considered worthless.69 In Europe, though, as in a Viennese party, they were conjured into ‘rare and precious objects.’70 An early sixteenth-century writer, Peter Matyr, praised Magellan’s feats but feared that the products of the Spice Islands were causing men to become effeminate: ‘virtues weaken, and people are seduced by these voluptuous odours, perfumes and spices,’71 but to a large extent this was wish-fulfilment: with the exception of MDMA-rich nutmeg, the ‘love’ these condiments aroused was an ersatz substitute for the real thing. Hence, the exogamic, as it were, trading allegiances typically tying together Gaynor’s ‘hinterseas’ network are not simply productive of good social relations: because they are economically interdependent, they are likely to produce non-neurotic phantasies and good dreams. It is probably no accident that Europe’s collective Eros has been focused on Venice: Venice is the Moluccas in the west, a model archipelago in comparison with the island network at the source of its wealth and, unlike the society of the south Finnish archipelago, not afraid of bridges. The prismatic character of its physical spaces, psychological masks and political constitution is a creative reflection of its self-identification through the imagination of the other. According to the historian Gino Benzoni, Venetian diplomats no sooner re-entered their native city than they were called upon to present a ‘geo-historical-anthropological’ report, a synthetic account or relazione of the country where they had been posted and its people.72 This ‘relation,’ or network of relations constantly flowing into the Serenissima, provided the Venetian government with the essential information it needed to navigate the tumultuous waters of European politics. The relazioni on which the Venetians based their external policy were also, as Benzoni emphasises, the extensive catalogue of the world in whose sifting the Venetians discovered their own identity. And this Venice, captured and fragmented, like the reflections of its own buildings, is not simply a product of nostalgic affection: it was an autopoietic production as Jacopo de’ Barbari’s famous Veduta di Venezia shows. Designed in the very years Vasco da Gama made his first voyage to India, it draws the city as an archipelago of local perspectives, that is, as a self-organising figure of multiplicity. Historically, de B ­ arbari’s View is situated between the old ichnographic tradition of the aerial view and the new planigraphy – already by Sabbadino’s day, the projection has become ‘zenitale,’ and, as Tucci notes, all picturesque devices have been expunged from the design.73 But local conditions made even an ichnographic projection with its assembly of ‘wedge-shaped’ views convergent on an ideal

198 Bacan centre problematic: as Juergen Schulz observes, the urban structure of Venice makes the calculation of distances very difficult – one might add, the closeness of buildings, and the winding nature of the canals, mean that a vast number of angles would have to be taken even to plot a small part of the city. The general absence of rectilinear spaces adds to the conundrum. In this forest of half-occluded prospects, where the habitual impression (from water or land) is of constant parallax, as one façade slides before another, even a survey using the known heights of the campanili would be a most labourious process, not dissimilar to trying to count and map the relative positions of Marco Polo’s 7,448 islands. Schulz’s analysis makes clear that, far from being either geographically or topographically accurate, de Barbari’s map is really a mosaic of little views, whose circumstantial detail persuades us of their accuracy: it is an impression of a city that is ‘all ports.’74

The priceless outside The challenge of representing a ‘thalassocracy,’ a power neither of land nor sea, consisting of a federation of viewpoints, finds its way into contemporary geopolitical theory through the association of urban planning and the notion of ‘unrepresentability’ in the writings of Manfredo Tafuri and Massimo Cacciari.75 Venetian history has characteristically taken the form of a voyage, the classic case being Boschini’s riposte to Vasari, La Carta del navegar pittoresco.76 Il Promoteo, the music theatre collaboration between Luigi Nono and Cacciari, invites the listener to wander through seven islands, an experience of ‘decision-indecision’ which we might compare to the ‘is/is not’ nature of figurative thinking, or the ‘ontologically ambiguous’ communication of the coral world, but which, in geopolitical terms, ‘in addition to being a refutation of Carl Schmitt’s sharp separation of land and sea,’ may be interpreted as ‘the Southern answer to the nomadic-rhizomatic utopia proposed by Deleuze and Guattari,’77 a geophilosophical application of the archipelago directly descended from the isolarii which modelled the globe in Venice’s own image as a series of islands.78 However, at least from an Australian point of view, Cacciari’s mediterreanismo is a missed opportunity. His geophilosophical derivation of the western spirit, an adaptation of the natural fit said to exist between the emergence of Athenian democracy and the distribution of island and coastal cities associated with it, ignores the other archipelagic economy that supported it. In Cacciari’s reworking of a by now familiar myth, Logos, Truth, the One, is a function of recognising the reality of the Many – and the logic of the Many, which is not ‘anarchic,’ but ordered ‘cosmically’ or cosmetically as it were; the discourse of Logos is therefore necessarily dialogical, essentially translation,79 and the archetypal translator, sailing from one strange city to another – much as the Athenian theorist visited foreign places and reported back, or the Venetian diplomat, having frequented the Levant, brought home his impressions – is Ulysses, whose Dantean restlessness on reaching Ithaca Cacciari explains as a function of archipelagic governance, which resists all forms of subordination

Bacan  199 and is centreless: Ulysses sails into the sunset because no island can ever become a State, and the Fatherland, if it exists, is always elsewhere.80 The same myth firstly imagines Ulysses breaching the boundary set by the Pillars of Hercules, sailing into the sunset, and, secondly, transforms Columbus’s voyage towards the Old World of Cathay into the discovery of a New World (and the ambiguously Spice/non-Spice islands of the Caribbean). It is also, mutatis mutandis, the logic remotely relayed through the Suma Oriental, The Malay Archipelago and the CEPF report. The common thread is an idealisation of the archipelago as another reality beyond this, as a temporal rather than spatial horizon. The means of paying for this limitless expansion is slavery. Vidal-Naquet writes, ‘The slave made the social game feasible, not because he performed all the manual labour (that was never true) but because his condition as the anti-citizen, the utter foreigner, allowed citizen status to define itself.’ As we noted, the slave not only shaped Greek space but Greek time. Male or female, the slave, as Vidal-Naquet argues, made utopianism possible, the reign of reason, possible. And, perhaps critically for us, the maintenance of this state depended on the slaves remaining socially fragmented, having neither homeland no language in common.81 This was the archipelagic illusion: something for nothing; in this sense Schmitt, building on a tradition going back to Grotius, is right to insist on the lawlessness of the sea: its enslavement was essential to the idea of free travel, expansion without cost. In this scenario, as in Wallace’s geological reconstruction, the archipelago is always transitional, between continents as it were – a predisposition already apparent in the mediterreanisation of the Pacific Ocean in the Homem chart where to the east ‘a solid landmass represents the eastern coastline of Ptolemy’s Sinus Magnus.’82 There may have been a political reason for this oceanic enslavement: according to a recent account, ‘despite its apparent aim of disclosure, the Atlas Miller hides more than it reveals.’83 The proposition is that the a­ tlas was ‘an instrument of geographic and geopolitical counter-­ information …. the graphic expression of the Portuguese strategic vision of the globe intended to counter the vision upheld by Castile.’ The argument is that ‘the peculiar “neo-Ptolemaic” concept it features, with the sea as stagnon (the oceans surrounded by land, the New World as a continent, the mythical Austral Land, etc.), suited the Portuguese in c. 1519 because it suggested that it was not possible to sail westwards across to the other side of the planet, i.e. to do what was attempted first by Columbus and subsequently achieved by Ferdinand Magellan.’84 Be that as it may, the territorialisation of the ocean evident in these charts, the predominance of land over sea, represents a cultural projection that has its roots in Flood eschatology, in the persistent fantasy of submersion. ‘It is our Lord who decrees the downfall of Mohammed, and John the writer is rapidly bringing it about. The time has already come:’85 thus Pires, commenting on the seizure of Goa and, with reference to the author of the Apocalypse, imagining the defeated Moors like the merchants of Babylon who ‘weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more.’86 Who could forget that in the sequel, after Babylon had been destroyed and a new heaven and earth established, ‘there was no more sea.’87

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Phantasmagorias There is an ultimate link between the fetishisation of speciation and the inventorying of precious merchandise.88 A utopian image, kaleidoscopic, phantasmagoric, informs the organisation of matter. Discussing the virtual images produced by the brain’s compensatory mechanisms, and the chains of resemblances they spawn, Raúl Ruiz quotes a description by Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault of returning sight after a cataract operation: Every source of light caused an imperfectly geometrical figure of constant form. My right eye saw a something like a treble-clef, leaning backwards with the lower element obliquely elongated. At night, the brilliant light of the street lamps and display windows appeared like so many treble-clefs … For my left eye, less affected, the false image was smaller: it was like a somewhat scalene raspberry, I mean with an oblique base, sketched out in glowing filaments … When the light sources are numerous and close together, for instance watching sunlight in the leaves of as tree, the whole forms a most curiously disciplined ensemble. All the figures seem to be resting on a singular kind of grid, more intuited than perceived. For the right eye (the one seeing treble-clefs) this grid is lozenge-shaped … For the left eye (the one seeing the flaming raspberries) the links of the grid are square … the eye from which the cataract was removed tends to modify all colours by the addition of a bit of blue … Strong, dark colours are not changed; light colours change slightly in dominant tone, sometimes agreeably so: pink takes on a violet hue, a violet-pink turns a rarer colour still; stark tones tend to disappear.89 As a hypnagogic mobilisation of images, this is an uncanny description of cartography’s painted archipelagos.90 Both suggest images from The Art and Practice of Astral Projection.91 ‘In 1867, Hervey de Saint-Denys described and illustrated his hypnagogic imagery as “wheels of light, tiny revolving suns, coloured bubbles rising and falling… bright lines that cross and interlace, that roll up and make circles, lozenges and other geometric shapes.”’92 Transposed to yet another transformation discourse, alchemy, such protozoic and protogeometrical forms may preserve in their colouring the order of their appearance and their place in the emergent sequence. In the alchemical opus there is a three-stage process from chaos (nigredo, blackness) via the divided light of the albedo to the rubedo, or ‘epitome of colour.’ ‘The beginning of the albedo is often marked by an intermediate stage called the cauda pavonis (peacock’s tail), which is characterised by a rainbow of colours.’93 The Ophiel drawings, which illustrate the alchemical transformation (‘The first thing to appear is the solid black. Then next the colours begin to appear through the black … The black then thins out, the colours become more brilliant, and finally burst into the blinding pure white

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Astral light’ ) are remarkably like the island swarms of the Atlas Miller and other Portuguese charts of the period. If an alchemical geography existed, it would explain the cauda pavonis of islands as the figure of emergence – a thought that, according to Robert Robinson, brings us back to the structure of Chaos, for ‘the scintillae of light’ appearing as the nigredo stage gives way to the albedo stage, representing a ‘pattern of development [that] is typical of emergence in many situations analysed by chaos theory: the beginnings of new structure appear, then disappear. Only gradually and at no predetermined place or time does the new structure fully form.’95 Whatever the theory, these are figures of creativity; they represent forms of projection which, whether their origins are neurological or sociological, signify an unconscious desire of adding value to the material world; they are attempts to regulate exchange rates. As the brain draws the curtain on external sensations, it becomes aware, Schopenhauer speculated, of the ‘inner nerve-centre of organic life’ – a transition comparable to a ‘candle that begins to shine when the evening twilight comes.’ The mind, never a tabula rasa, receives external impressions, but also projects its own organic images. These bear some relationship to external impressions, but, as dreams demonstrate, the organic life of the mind is a magic lantern generating and projecting its own rare visions – ‘we see ourselves in strange and even impossible situations.’ Only when the subject dies to the external world ‘can the dream occur, just as the pictures of a magic lantern can appear only after the lights of the room have been extinguished.’96 Whatever the explanation, the power to imagine reality changes the world. For the film-maker, it presents the challenge of the plot, which is no longer to locate characters and situations in a psychologically plausible narrative but to entertain ‘strange, and even impossible situations.’ Here there is an aesthetic and ethical bifurcation. It is undeniable that Hollywood manufactures dreams, but the danger, as Ruiz notes, is that utopian worlds thus produced do ‘not culminate in the realisation of man’s aspirations, but in their derealisation,’ and he characterises ours as ‘the era of assembly-line reproductions of perfect worlds, conceivable worlds, all seemingly different but all governed by the same laws of evidentia narrativa.’97

The imagination of coral The anarchipelago is the imagination of coral: it is the inhabitation of the shallows. If Venice usefully gives back to the Moluccas, it is in this environmental wisdom, which is also political, as the passage from Pigafetta has already illustrated, and poetic.98 Although Ruskin claimed a physical reason for Venice’s rise to greatness (‘built, on a clouded cluster of islands’), he appealed to his reader’s mental imagination to see this, arguing that only God could have seen in ‘those islands shaped out of the void’ ‘the founding of a city which was to be set like a golden clasp on the girdle of the earth, to write her history on the white scrolls of the sea-surges …’ 99

202 Bacan The rise and fall of empires may be tidelectic. The bradiseismic variations of the coastline around Pozzuoli associated with periodic volcanic activity have drowned the Roman port of Puteoli some twenty metres under water, but its quays and jetties still can be made out in aerial photographs of the site. All lost things seen through the fluctuating mirror of water hold this fascination: warped and distorted, alternately magnified and compressed, they offer the paradoxical spectacle of the out of reach and the imminently graspable. Hence the shallowness of Venice suggests hidden depths. A distinctive poetics goes with this: The most skilful interpreter of dreams is he who has the faculty of observing resemblances. Any one may interpret dreams, which are vivid and plain. But speaking of resemblances’, I mean that dream presentations are analogous to the forms reflected in water … if the motion in the water be great, the reflection has no resemblance to the original, nor do the forms resemble real objects. Skilful, indeed, would he be in interpreting such reflections who could rapidly discern, and at a glance comprehend, the scattered [dislocated] and distorted fragments of such forms, so as to perceive that one of them represents a man, or a horse, or anything whatever … in a similar way, some such things as this [blurred image] is all that a dream amounts to, for the internal movement effaces the clearness of the dream. Thus the skilled interpreter of reflections is a master of metaphor: For it is the nature of a riddle that one states facts by linking impossibilities together (of course, one cannot do this by putting the actual words for things together, but one can if one uses metaphor) and it is a sign of natural genius, as to be good at metaphor is to perceive resemblances.100 As Wood points out, euphuia, translated here as ‘natural genius,’ does not imply an altogether exceptional talent: if it did, the role of resemblances in concept formation would be minimal – and most scientific taxonomies, including the existence of comparable zoogeographic regions, would be unthinkable. Rather, it refers to ‘the very hylomorphic constitution of the natural body as a substrate underlying a series of active powers.’101 All people use metaphors, and even if they lack a talent for inventing them, they recognise them.102

Hylomorphic For readers wondering what these stories about western imaginings and their unconscious geographical projections have to do with the challenge of biodiversity design in Bacan, Wood’s allusion to the dynamic, purposeful,

Bacan  203 ‘hylomorphic constitution’ of the minded animal is important. It recalls us to the full force of what Ricoeur means when he emphasises la métaphore vive, where vive is both adjective and verb. As Hanna and Maiese explain, in the hylomorphic theory of mind/matter consciousness, (‘the form of any material object and its matter are just as tightly connected as Yeats’s dancer and her dance’103) consciousness ‘necessarily and completely embodied in a suitably neurobiologically complex living organism … is primarily manifest as desire-based emotion.’104 As ‘the very nature of a conscious, intentional mind entails causal, spatial, and temporal asymmetry,’105 to figure things out – to create connections – is to navigate the world – sense-making as path (sens) making. And the continuous process of fixing, modifying and renewing exchange rates – here no different from any other metabolic process or autopoietic evolution occurring against an entropic background – ­‘confers natural purposiveness on the animal by moulding the precise dissipative structure that must be maintained or ramified in order to preserve that animal’s life over time.’106 So these dreams or forward projections are neither noise in the historical system nor fantasies to be cleared away: they are stories, imaginal configurations of possible realities, operating stochastically in a universe of probabilities. Their outcomes are notably the exchange rates established between incommensurable symbolic economies, and they seem to me to illustrate in sociability precisely those properties of ‘dynamic emergence’ or ‘natural creativity’ that these authors see in ‘the non-organismic growth of thunderstorms out of build-ups of towering cumulus clouds.’107 Here, in effect, relationality is prior to any Part-Whole hierarchy, a fact that allows us to differentiate more clearly between the archetypal voyaging of, say, Ulysses – understood here as a theory of organisation – and the kind of diving, swimming and sailing evoked in this book by Ingersoll or ­Pauwelussen. For if, as Descartes recognized, mind and body are ‘intermingled’, and for a unit, then, just as ‘Our mental desires, intentions and conscious decisions seem to influence many of our physical actions,’ so, through their ‘mutual interaction’ ‘bodily events’ may cause ‘mental events.’108 Certainly, in voyaging among the islands, figures like Ulysses and Columbus organise a sequence of data inductively into geographical generalisations, imaginable archipelagos, but the discoveries are not embodied in, or recognised as co-emergent with, the natural purposiveness attributable to Cowie’s ‘general dispersal patterns.’ Relationality relevant to archipelagic thinking is not established sequentially: it is a local property whose global distribution produces the archipelago we have described – where there are no islands and the is/is not distribution is, to linear reasoning, chaotic. Referring to what they call ‘supervenient emergence,’ in natural systems, Hanna and Maiese stress the seeming temporal asymmetry of local and global: ‘local proper parts relationally interact in a way that yields novel global properties of these systems,’ and these latter properties ‘are irreducible to the intrinsic non-­relational properties of their local proper parts.’109 Yet the irreducibility is constitutional as these same properties, ‘together with the fundamental

204 Bacan physical properties of the proper parts of the system, hylomorphically jointly constitute the whole system and fix its causal powers and operations.’ Hence, ‘Supervenient emergence is accidentally diachronic but essentially synchronic,’110 much as we could say with Aelius Aristides that the Cyclades are essentially ‘without and within one another’ as a fleet of fishing boats must appear to any of the fishermen in them, but present themselves accidentally when ‘you are in doubt what course you should take through them.’111

Beyond vicariance Regions are complex configurations of equally complex episodes in the narrative of power. They respond to shifting political structures and the fashions that support their economic base. To characterise Wallacea as a ‘transition’ zone – it contains species of mixed Asian and Australasian origin – may be to save zoogeographical appearances predicated on the vicariance orthodoxy, and perhaps inevitably to discount for management purposes a resurgent interest in diversification.112 In the practical interests of conservation, which is to say geopolitical context,113 it is to forget (or bracket off) those phenomena of dispersal, migration and return that not only describe the human history of the archipelago but, ultimately, the hylomorphic character of its most stable (and threatened) endemic populations. I fully appreciate that raising these seemingly recondite issues in theoretical biogeography in the context of the massive threats to biodiversity presented by uncontrolled development – ‘At current rates of habitat loss, some projections estimate extinction of up to 85% of the region’s species by 2100. Curbing human population growth, protecting pristine habitats, and restoring degraded areas are all necessary to preserve the region’s biological integrity’114 – may seem politically perilous. Nor is there any pretension to any alternative ‘solution’: the object is to assist the cross-cultural subduction needed to bring the ­actor-agents of civil society into better dialogue with traditional custodians and their senses of place. Unless our own mythopoetic constructions are examined, we will have no stories to bring to the table – and nothing whose value can be recognised and lent equivalence. To return to Bacan/Bachian/Batchian, the island or island group that figured so largely in Wallace’s theorisation of biogeographical regions, and which, as part of the Wallacea Biodiversity Hotspot now is assessed as possessing six priority terrestrial Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs), one terrestrial corridor of conservation importance and one marine KBA.115 What is the story? Looking at it from an Indigenous methodological perspective, say, what is the story? I would argue that all of the twenty-five indigenous research projects that Linda Tuhiwai Smith lists in her book Decolonising Methodologies come under the heading of storytelling: sharing testimonies, celebrating, remembering, reclaiming, connecting, recreating. At their heart is the exposure of the colonial myth (and myth-making) – ‘the origins of imperial policies and practices, the origins of the imperial visions, the origins of ideas and values’ – with a view to reclaiming ‘a different sort of origin story.’116 As Smith

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indicates, this is partly reactive, partly proactive, but at its heart is trauma, ‘stories handed down,’ as she observes, quoting Stuart Rintoul, ‘told to new generations, taught in explanation of racism and mistreatment, recited with rage and dignity and sorrow.’118 The CEPF reports explains that grantees are likely to be organizations working on livelihoods, rights or other social issues, which are aware in a general way of the importance of natural resources and ecological services but lack the knowledge to define these links clearly or to address environmental issues in their programs.119 This shows an awareness of the nexus between social, economic and environmental sustainability, but what about cross-cultural cooperation? What are the ‘links’ that act as tokens of exchange establishing mutually recognised values? And, further, a point that Smith does not consider, how are these negotiated when none of the communities are Indigenous, even though traditional ecological knowledge may be exercised through adat or customary law?

A different origin story A starting point might be a different ‘origin story’ for Wallace’s epoch-­ making contribution to evolutionary theory. A human face is given to the subsequent century and a half of evolving complexity in biogeographical theory when the physical circumstances of Wallace’s collecting are recalled; further, these turn out to be self-same, as it were, with the direction of Wallace’s intellectual interests, so that a kind of isomorphism exists between what Hanna and Maiese might call the spatial asymmetry of the life world and the natural purposiveness of thought. As mentioned Wallace collected where physical circumstance permitted: ‘There are certain requisites of a good collecting-ground,’ he wrote of the island of Batchian, where he spent nearly six months between October 1858 and April 1859: ‘In some places there is no virgin forest, as at Djilolo and Sahoe; in others there are no open pathways or clearings … At Batchian there are only two tolerable ­collecting-places, – the road to the coal-mines, and the new clearings made by the Tomōré people.’120 Along these inland coastlines, Wallace advanced purposefully, his line of enquiry determined, like Pires, by the prospects for trade: of the ‘many heathen kings in the island of Sumatra and many lords in the hinterland,’ Pires explains, ‘as they are not trading people and known, no mention is made of them,’ and he embarks instead on a port-by-port periplus of Sumatra’s seven-hundred-league coastline.121 Even the phantasmagoric iconicism is similar. ‘The beauty and brilliancy of this insect [the “bird-winged butterfly”] are indescribable,’ Wallace writes, recalling a climactic episode in the forests of Batchian, … and none but the naturalist can understand the intense excitement I experienced when I at length captured it. On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings, my heart began to beat violently, the blood

206 Bacan rushed to my head, and I felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death.122 Isn’t there at least a quaint parallel between Wallace’s habitual hunting grounds – and the ‘desire-based emotion’ embodied there – and his eventual hypothesis of ‘progression and continued divergence’? Certainly there is a resemblance between the pre-condition for the emergence of varieties – ‘the comparative abundance or scarcity of the individuals of the several ­species … due to their organization and resulting habits’ 123 – and his own fieldwork methods, where the organisation of his linear laboratory and his travelling habits entirely determined his assessment of biodiversity. Wallace states that the Tomōré originated in ‘the eastern peninsula of Celebes’: ‘These people were brought here at their own request a few years ago, to avoid extermination by another tribe.’124 This is partially accurate but, as Esther Velthoen’s study meticulously shows, there is a back-story.125 In fact, it was their own ‘tribe’ that threatened to murder them, for failing to resist strongly enough an inland attack against Usundau, the main fortification of the Tomori, led by a Dutch-Ternaten force in 1856. ‘Fearing the revenge of the Tomori mokole … they requested to be taken away by the Dutch. They were resettled in Bacan, where they formed successful agricultural settlements.’126 Velthoen adds the additional information that in the year of Wallace’s Bacan sojourn, 110 Tomori returned. Behind this incident lay a struggle between the Dutch (through the agency of Ternaten officials installed in the east coast Tobungku coastal village network) and the Bone sultanate for control of the trepang trade. As Tobungku autonomy contracted, maritime trade opportunities lessened, and there was a corresponding pressure to extract more from inland trade, a situation that the Ternaten elite exploited, regularly underpaying the Tomori for their goods. In response to this, and weakening Tobungku authority inland, the Tomori started launching their own attacks – ‘primarily directed at the Muslim elite; the ruler, the aristocrats … and the animist part of the population suffered less.’127 This was the immediate background to the Dutch-Ternaten raid and its sequel. And behind it was a broader history of divide-and-conquer colonial monopolisation where, as Mary Helms argues, ‘hierarchical definitions of centre-periphery relations’ overtook ‘small-scale, “acquisitional” polities,’ defined ‘as an overlapping of several essentially separate and distinct cosmological realms in which each acquisitional polity or superordinate centre basically regards its outside protagonists as either helpful or threatening cosmological elements.’128 As Velthoen notes, this relational notion of collective self-identification made such communities vulnerable to manipulation. While Helms emphasises the active role played by local interests in ‘selecting and adapting outside influences to strengthen the position of local elites,’ the fact that Indigenous cosmologies gave a special value to trade objects brought from outside – ‘remote and powerful centres from where imported prestige objects originated had a near celestial quality’ – risked a

Bacan  207 perilous alignment of ‘local ancestral power’ with that of ‘remote, and supernaturally charged political centres.’129 But this is not a story of historical victimisation. Probably its salient point is its evidence of a habitual or always potential mobility. From everything Wallace writes, the recent immigrants to Bacan have settled down, established coastal sago plantations and as ‘an industrious agricultural people … supply the town with vegetables’130 – all of this inside two years.131 Velthoen states, ‘Relations with external centres were often upheld by itinerant groups or local migrant chiefs and traders originating from external centres’; eastern Sulawesi was connected to the outside world primarily though diasporas of individuals and groups, some sojourners, others who stayed. The presence of these groups had important economic and political implications for the societies of the east coast. The modular nature of polities meant that groups from elsewhere could easily be incorporated as allies. Relations extended inland as well as along the coast and between islands: Cultural, economic and kinship ties link Banggai with coastal tributaries and their mountainous hinterlands. Tobungku is connected in the same way to the inland areas of Matano and Toepe. The coastal realm of Laiwui was but one realm in the larger inland federation of Konawe, while Buton was surrounded by a myriad of islands and coastlines, each with their own origin myths and chiefs. ‘The landscape was not just populated by humans,’ Velthoen reflects, nor was it just a backdrop for human activity. While traveling down the east coast, stories were told to me that related to certain parts of the landscape, commemorating events and people in the past, noting particularly dangerous spots inhabited by souls of people who died there, or by a guardian spirit that [had] to be appeased.132 In this context one might wonder whether the immigrant Tomori reached out to Bacan’s inland peoples, but here is another disruption of expectation. Wallace reported, ‘The island of Batchian possesses no really indigenous inhabitants, the interior being altogether uninhabited, and there are only a few small villages on various parts of the coast.’ There are, however, ‘four distinct races’ – ‘the Batchian Malays,’ the ‘Orang Sirani’, the ‘Galela men’ from the north of Gilolo (now Halmahera) and the Tomore – all of which are immigrant. Wallace makes the nice point – perhaps against gullible followers of his own theory – that anyone listening to the ‘Batchian language’ here and there, and noticing its variety, would on the hypothesis that the ‘population of a country is generally stationary’133 be tempted to fantasise

208 Bacan all  manner of ‘transitions’: ‘what theories of the origin of races would be developed!’134 In reality, Bacan is also remarkable for a cultural biodiversity that is not endemic: the Moluccan foundation myth recorded by a Portuguese governor of Ternate, Antonio Galvão, around 1536–1539, describes the discovery of a nest of nagu eggs on the southern-most clove-producing island of Bacan; the three males and the female they hatch become, respectively, the king of Bacan, the king of the Papuas, the king of Butung and Banggai and the wife of the king of Loloda.135 On the face of it, this myth of radial dissemination does not support Leonard Andaya’s centre-­p eriphery reading: defining the Moluccas in relation to what lies beyond – New Guinea to the east, Sulawesi to the west – it suggests a non-hierarchical web of reciprocal obligations. At any rate, when the Tomori fled to Bacan, they were retracing an ancient and supernatural sea route.

Decolonising governance I have sought in this chapter to expose the implicit values in the CEPF report and to move their negotiation centre stage. The conservation of non-human biological diversity presupposes the integration of conservation goals ‘with customary knowledge and practice in ways that are sustainable and avoid under-mining customary practice in the process.’ But this conditional respect for cultural biodiversity is wholly inadequate. The impulse to equip stakeholders with the ability to identify the links between conservation and livelihoods entirely misses the cultural dimension of this equation – as we have seen, the sustainability of trans-local relationships depends on the symbolic values that accrue to objects through their transfer. Even if sasi exists in Maluku as a viable marine resource management system,136 its expressions are various and its motivations are cultural: ‘It is an encompassing body of meaningful relations between people, the natural environment and gods, ancestors and spirits.’137 Other limitations exist: in a marine environment, it applies to only a few species and to local inshore waters, and besides, in the Bacan context, what is one to make of the observation (which the CEPF supports), that ‘Sasi has a strong hierarchical structure and is highly dependent on the village head.’138 In practical terms the Sultan of Bacan is the ‘head,’ but, in an island without Indigenous communities, surrounded by uninhabited islands, his authority (and indeed his constituency) is limited. With the renewed commitment of the Indonesian government to decentralisation, other conduits for integration may arise. There is Another adat institution linked to sasi is the Latupati, a venue for meetings of traditional leaders at the island-wide level. The Latupati in the Lease Islands (i.e. Saparua, Nusa Laut and Haruku) has been effectively dormant since the passage of the legislation on village governments in 1979. However, a revitalised Latupati may have potential as a

Bacan  209 regional resource management body. In 1996, the first Haruku Island Latupati meeting in twenty years was held as a consequence of the efforts of NGOs interested in developing the marine resource management capacity at the island and regional levels. Subsequently, NGO interventions have also led to the revival of the Latupati on Nusa Laut Island in 1998.139 Delegation and education do not, however, decolonise governance: to embark on that requires a fundamental collective reorientation and self-­ examination. We need to map the collision of two culturally remote tectonic plates, two markedly different hyper-stories or poetic ontologies of exchange and value creation. As Cuevas-Hewitt argues, a distinctively archipelagic political organisation, a ‘territory without terrain,’ depends on evaluating ‘the sea between – the site of multiple relationships that are never fixed, but constantly in flux.’140 The antithesis of this is, he considers, an obsession with islands – or, we might say, in the economic and scientific spheres with specie/s. The ‘nation-state-centric view of the world’ imagines it as ‘composed of discrete, bounded entities’: ‘it sees only islands of order, forgetting that there is a whole ocean out there that mixes the things of the world.’ And Cuevas-Hewitt makes the nice point that this ‘“nesological” worldview’ imposes ‘a stark geometry of inside and outside upon thought.’141 It treats dispersal, diffusion and, indeed, the non-linearist but purposive steersmanship needed to navigate this metaphorical world – a world held together and apart by the negotiation of exchange rates – with suspicion. It sees in the uncertainty of origins an image of its own illegitimacy. In the archipelago, however, this is a source of buoyancy: whatever the origin of the languages spoken in the Spice Islands, they have been the originals of place names elsewhere. Thirty-one place names in Hawai’i can be sourced to the Spice Island region, suggesting that Hawai’i was colonised over a 1,500-year period ‘via Micronesia directly from the Spice Islands.’142 Even the name Hawai’i may come from here, as the name Hawa, or Java, ‘was an ancient name for the Spice Islands, perhaps the original Hawaiki.’143 At the heart of this translation is a moral authority, the memory of a trial passage. ‘Need and desire,’ John Dewey wrote, are ‘actualisations’ of ‘natural being,’ of ‘its contingencies and incompletenesses,’ and ‘nature is wistful and pathetic, turbulent and passionate.’ This can be said of coastlines when they break up into many islands, creeks and arms. But without deviations from the fixed and rigid, what desire would there be to go on? The union of the hazardous and the stable, of the incomplete and the recurrent, is the condition of all experienced satisfaction as truly as of our predicaments and problems … For if there were nothing in the way … no deviations and resistances, fulfilment would be at once, and … would fulfill nothing, merely be. It would not be in connection with desire or satisfaction.144

210 Bacan In contrast with our coastally xenophobic mindset, Many coastal villages (Muslim and Christian) have frequently ‘recruited’ or ‘tolerated’ outside emigrants … Because Malukans traditionally do not view land as ownable real estate, Malukans generally tolerate and often helpfully accommodate small emigrant gardening and fishing communities. They often willingly share their total resource environment, often for low rent costs, percentages of the surplus and sometimes for nothing in return.145 Here Being is thought differently, and any biodiversity initiative, however community-responsive, that fails to ground itself in this reality remains colonialist. A chapter like this can only indicate a methodological reappraisal, and the ethical necessity it represents. In relation to the worlds within worlds of the south-east Asian archipelagos, it is as ignorant and ill-equipped as the early voyagers from Europe – and, no doubt, despite its best efforts, carries over many blind spots and prejudices. It took centuries for European cartographers to identify Bachian; they have always shaped it to their desires: a Dutch map from 1683 shows the fort that the Dutch East India Company seized from the Spanish in 1609 and renamed Fort Barneveld – by 1707 this symbol of clove trade monopolisation has entirely taken over the island, which, as the centre of the Archipelago of St Lazaro, is shown as rectangular with four islands positioned like feet at the four corners (the island is painted yellow, the islets green and red). In later charts, Bachian successively multiplies or contracts, expands or evaporates. This chapter similarly sails an intellectual region that is heterogeneous thematically – some passages are shallow, others plumbed more deeply – and the voyage is certainly not Ulyssean but prone to a hylomorphic fusion of storytelling with figuration, as if archipelagic thinking is continuously projecting connections. Sceptical readers may complain that they have had difficult finding where this chapter is going, but this is only to draw attention to the unconscious purposiveness that often prevents recognition of the externalities that, in reality, actualise the narrative. Sir John Forrest was on a quest to locate clove supplies uncontrolled by the Dutch; his voyage through the Moluccas was, as far as possible, to be invisible. The price of local cooperation, though, was a willingness to travel as locals did. In December 1774 and January 1775, it took Forrest almost two months to be sailed in his Tartar Galley from Bissory Harbour, Batchian Island, to Dory Harbour in northern New Guinea. It is a voyage among islands; the vessel is laid up for repairs; provisions purchased; diplomatic relations negotiated; there is bad weather: ‘As the ship travels, so do news and merchandise … islands constitute a cluster of islands among which people gather and interact,’ writes Panida Lorlertratna telling this story.146 Before he came to Bacan, Wallace also voyaged, like Forrest, from the Moluccas to Dory, although his voyage took less than a fortnight.147 Then, three

Bacan  211 and a half months later, he sailed back to Ternate, his base, two and a half months later setting out for Batchian. Of his time in Dory, Wallace wrote, ‘This long-thought-of and much-desired voyage to New Guinea had realized none of my expectations,’148 but of Batchian, by contrast, it ‘is an island that would perhaps repay the researches of a botanist better than any other in the whole of the Archipelago’: it is strange to realise that, even though disguised by the geographical arrangement of chapters, Wallace’s desire-based emotions were the puppet of ‘nautical pursuits,’ defined by an ‘archipelagic geography’ and ‘a political economy’ of shipping lanes and trading ports.149 Strange to think that Wallace’s organisation of knowledge, his book, his theory, were incubated inside another archipelago, whose ­ontologically diverse mode of relating across time and space, remains e­ pistemologically unregarded, and whose relational discourse anarchipelagic. Commenting on the origin of Bahasa Indonesia in an anticolonial project, Hypatia Vourloumis draws attention to the unusual sense in which ‘the Indonesian nation is a history of language, or rather, the history of the Indonesian nation is the history of the idea and performance of language understood as a potentiality for archipelagic communicability.’ Inevitably, the assertion of state power, measured in the transparency of communication, depends on the elimination of ambiguity: even the periphery must speak the same language. The result, she says, writing echoically in French? ‘Ceci n’est pas un archipel.’150

Notes 1 Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF), Ecosystem Profile, Wallacea ­Biodiversity Hotspot, viewed regularly in August–November 2017, http://legacy .cepf.net/SiteCollectionDocuments/wallacea/EcosystemProfile_Wallacea.pdf. 2 Antoinette Schapper, ‘Wallacea, a Linguistic Area,’ Archipel, vol. 90, Paris, 2015, 99–151, 100 with references. 3 Antoinette Schapper, ‘Wallacea, a Linguistic Area,’ 141. 4 CEPF, 249. 5 CEPF, 81 with references. Despite this summary the institution of sasi features nowhere else in the report. For a similarly functionalist analysis, see I. Novaczek et al. (eds.), An Institutional Analysis of Sasi Laut in Maluku, Indonesia, Penang: ICLARM, The WorldFish Center, 2001, where the topics of the ‘Spirit of Sasi’ and ‘The importance of ceremony’ warrant one paragraph each in an appendix (see 266). 6 CEPF, 81. 7 Awwaluddin, ‘The Role of Marine Sasi System, an Indigenous Knowledge in Managing the Sustainability of Coastal Resources in Maluku Villages, ­Indonesia,’ PhD, Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, 29. 8 Awwaluddin, ‘The Role of Marine Sasi System, an Indigenous Knowledge in Managing the Sustainability of Coastal Resources in Maluku Villages, ­Indonesia,’ 33. 9 Awwaluddin, ‘The Role of Marine Sasi System, an Indigenous Knowledge in Managing the Sustainability of Coastal Resources in Maluku Villages, ­Indonesia,’ 41. 10 As Zerner notes, ‘Today, sasi is again undergoing change, with a renewed emphasis on conservation aspects.’ Quoted by I. Novaczek et al., An Institutional

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11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23

24 25

Analysis of Sasi Laut in Maluku, Indonesia, 31, who also note that there were precedents for this: ‘sasi clearly was performing a conservation function in the 1920s, when the use of poisons in the fishery was banned under sasi rules’ (31). CEPF, 215. CEPF, 265. CEPF, 151. CEPF, 349. William Thomas, ‘The Forest Stewards; Using Tradition to Conserve New Guinea’s Star Mountain Wilderness,’ in D. Telnov (ed.), Biodiversity, Biogeography and Nature Conservation in Wallacea and New Guinea, Rīga: The Entomological Society of Latvia, 2011, 7–16. Citing four different fieldworkers (8). CEPF, 151. Graham Scambler, ‘Habermas, Civil Society and the Public Sphere,’ ­January 30, 2013, viewed December 18, 2017, https://grahamscambler.wordpress .com/2013/01/30/habermas-civil-society-and-the-public-sphere/. ‘Coming to an understanding is the process of bringing about the agreement on the presupposed basis of validity claims that can be mutually recognised.’ (Jürgen Habermas and Maeve Cooke (eds.), On the Pragmatics of Communication, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, 23). James M. Savelle and Nobuhiro Kishigami, ‘Anthropological Research on Whaling: Prehistoric, Historic and Current Contexts,’ Senri Ethnological Studies, vol. 84, 2013, 1–48, 16. R. H. Barnes, Sea Hunters of Indonesia: Fishers and Weavers of Lamalera, ­Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, 148. Roy F. Ellen, ‘Trade, Environment and the Reproduction of Local Systems in the Moluccas,’ in E. F. Moran (ed.), The Ecosystem Approach to Anthropology: From Concept to Practice, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990, 207. Ellen argues that the impact of Dutch occupation and the measures the VOC took to protect their clove monopoly not only connected Moluccan centres more closely with the world system but, paradoxically, made them more dependent on local trading links as well … As land under spices and population increased, so also did local trade in sago, root crops, vegetables and other products necessary to supply deficient spice-­producing areas. (216) Jennifer L. Gaynor, Intertidal History in Island Southeast Asia: Submerged Genealogy and the Legacy of Coastal Capture, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016, 62. The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires and the Book of Francisco Rodrigues, ­A rmando Cortesao (ed. and trans.), London: Hakluyt Society, Second Series, No. LXXXIX, 1944, vol. 1, 204. The ‘wild’ varieties of both plants were probably more widespread throughout Wallacea and New Guinea, and no archaeological evidence related to pinpointing such a specific area of domestication is available. The smaller areas or islands which came to be associated with the ‘only’ islands that produced the spices were likely protohistoric trade areas where large quantities of the spices were collected and stored for trade. (See Jennifer L. Gaynor, Intertidal History in Island Southeast Asia, 144ff, 253ff.) Jennifer L. Gaynor, Intertidal History in Island Southeast Asia, 61–62. Jennifer L. Gaynor, Intertidal History in Island Southeast Asia, 62. This was not, though, a free trade zone: ‘The Sosolot were areas with exclusive trade rights.’ They ‘appear to have been communities of traders or trading agents.’ Whether they formed part of the ‘Tidorese mandala’ is unknown. They were flexible

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26

27

28

29 30

31

32

enough, though, to accommodate the ‘Chinese System’ of trade. (See Susanna G. Rizzo, ‘From Paradise Lost to Promised Land: Christianity and the Rise of West Papuan nationalism,’ PhD Thesis, University of Wollongong, 2004, 134–135.) Doz Udo Pollmer, ‘The Spice Trade and Its Importance for European Expansion,’ Migration & Diffusion, vol. 1, no. 4, 2000, 58–72, 58. The spices that come to Venice pass through all Syria, and through the entire country of the Sultan and everywhere, they pay the most burdensome duties. Likewise, in the state of Venice they pay insupportable duties, customs and excises. Thus with all the duties, customs and excises between the country of the Sultan and the city of Venice I might say that a thing that cost one ducat multiplies to sixty and perhaps to a hundred. (Girolamo Priuli, quoted by Ian Burnet, Spice Islands, Kenthurst: Rosenberg Publishing, 2001, 48.) George E. Brooks, Landlords & Strangers, Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993, 168. With regard to the Moluccas: There are no tricks, no violence, no deceit, no atrocities that can be imagined, that have not been employed by the domestic merchants; yes, even by the small rulers of these nations, to get hold of slaves, preferably women and children, to then sell them (…) to the European traders. (B. van der Oudermeulen, quoted by J. L. van Zanden, ‘The Rise and Decline of Holland’s Economy: Merchant Capitalism and the Labour Market,’ Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, 78.) J. L. van Zanden, ’The Rise and Decline of Holland’s Economy,’ 79. On the question of whether slave-raiding carried on by sultanates should be considered different from the slave trade supporting European mercantilism, see James Francis Warren, ‘Looking Back on “The Sulu Zone”: State Formation, Slave Raiding and Ethnic Diversity in Southeast Asia,’ JMBRAS, vol. 69, Part 1, 1996, 21–33, 28ff. See also A. Reid, Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency in Southeast Asia, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983, and discussion in E. J. Velthoen, ‘Contested Coastlines: Diasporas, Trade and Colonial Expansion in Eastern Sulawesi 1680–1905,’ PhD Thesis, Murdoch University, WA, 2002, 81–86. J. L. van Zanden, ‘The Rise and Decline of Holland’s Economy,’ 79. See David Mead and Myung-Young Lee, ‘Mapping Indonesian Bajau Communities in Sulawesi,’ SIL International 2007, who offer the following figures for Bajau speakers: North Sulawesi and Gorontalo: 7,000; Central Sulawesi: 36,000; Southeast Sulawesi: 40,000; South Sulawesi: 9,000. The CEPF report refers to the Bajau twice. Sulawesi’s population is approximately 18 million; Makassar, the chief city, has a population of around 1.5 million. Julian Clifton and Chris Majors, ‘Culture, Conservation, and Conflict: ­Perspectives on Marine Protection among the Bajau of Southeast Asia,’ Journal of Society & Natural Resources, vol. 25, no. 7, 2012, 716–725, 716. See also the discussion of the Wakatobi Marine National Park dispute in Julie-Beth McCarthy, ­‘Examining Identity-Level Conflict: The Role of Religion,’ in M. M. Draheim, F. Madden, J.-B. McCarthy, E.C.M. Parsons (eds.), Human-Wildlife Conflict: Complexity in the Marine Environment, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Annet Pauwelussen, The Moves of a Bajau Middlewoman: Understanding the Disparity between Trade Networks and Marine Conservation, Anthropological ­Forum 25, July 4, 2015, 1–21, viewed February 12, 2018, www.researchgate.net/

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 4 4 45 46 47

48 49

50

51

publication/282803869_The_Moves_of_a_Bajau_Middlewoman_Understanding_ the_Disparity_between_Trade_Networks_and_Marine_Conservation. A. P. Pauwelussen and G. M. Verschoor, ‘Amphibious Encounters: Coral and People in Conservation Outreach in Indonesia,’ Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, vol. 3, 2017, 292–314, 292. A. P. Pauwelussen and G. M. Verschoor, ‘Amphibious Encounters,’ 304. A. P. Pauwelussen and G. M. Verschoor, ‘Amphibious Encounters,’ 304. A. P. Pauwelussen and G. M. Verschoor, ‘Amphibious Encounters,’ 304. Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology, ­Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016, 137. A. P. Pauwelussen and G. M. Verschoor, ‘Amphibious Encounters,’ 309. Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing, A Seascape Epistemology, quoting Maria Villela-Petit, both in relation to Ricoeur’s concept of ‘narrative identity.’ Paul Ricoeur, ‘What Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding,’ in J. B. Thompson (ed.), Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 1981, 154–164, 158. Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Narrative Function,’ in J. B. Thompson (ed.), Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, 274–296, 279. Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Pacific, New York: Routledge and ­Kegan Paul, 1922, 248. Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Pacific, 249–255. Bronisław Malinoswki, Argonauts of the Pacific, 258. Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Pacific, 258, where Malinowski’s l­ iterary self-awareness is evident in the footnote appended defending his reconstruction as ‘legitimate.’ Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology, 114. The raw figures remain amazing: ‘He collected altogether an astonishing 125,660 specimens of natural history, mainly beetles, butterflies and birds, a number greater than the contents of many major museums.’ Bastin’s further figures show the quality of the collection: ‘In the whole Archipelago he collected a total of 212 new species of bird … some 900 new species of beetles, 200 new species of ants  …’ (John Bastin, ‘Introduction,’ in Alfred Russel Wallace, The ­Malay Archipelago, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1986, vi–xxvii, xvii) It has recently been estimated that Wallace’s assistants collected at least a third of these, and it is at last recognised that Ali, Wallace’s ‘Malay’ assistant, also made a decisive contribution to the shaping intelligence of Wallace’s individual voyages, expeditions and reconnaissances. (John Van Whye and Gerrell M. Drawhorn, ‘“I am Ali Wallace”: The Malay Assistant of Alfred Russel Wallace,’ JMBRAS, vol. 88, Part 1, 2015, 3–31, 23–24.) Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, 21. New Guinea and Australia make up Sahul, the continental land mass torn from the ancient southern super continent, Gondwanaland. Sahul has witnessed a rather rapid northern migration, but long-term isolation over the last tens of millions of years, hence the evolution of unique flora and fauna (e.g., marsupials). Sahul has subsequently collided into the Asian continental plate creating the double volcanic and uplifted Sunda-Banda arc, which is bent northwards and back in a curled fashion as seen from Timor to Buru. Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, 28. In reality, of course, the discovery that the Earth’s mantle consists of geotectonic plates in a constant state of post-Gondwanaland migration recuperates in this instance an opposite narrative, one of sliding apart rather than growing together. Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, 28.

Bacan  215 52 Alfred Russel Wallace, Island Life, or, the Phenomena and Causes of Insula ­Faunas and Floras, London: Macmillan, 1880, 101 and note. 53 Dhani Irwanto, Atlantis: The Lost City is in the Java Sea, Bogor: Indonesia ­Hydro Media, 2015, 9. 54 The Indonesian archipelago formed over the past 300 million years by reassembly of fragments rifted from the Gondwana supercontinent that arrived at the Eurasian subduction margin. The present-day geology of Indonesia is broadly the result of Cenozoic subduction and collision at this margin. (Robert Hall, ‘Indonesia, Geology,’ 454–460, 454, viewed March 4, 2017, http://searg.rhul.ac.uk/ pubs/hall_2009_Indonesia%20Islands.pdf) Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements indicate very high rates of relative motions, typically more than several centimetres per year, between tectonic blocks in ­Indonesia. (454) 55 Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, 595. 56 See George Gaylord Simpson, ‘Too Many Lines; The Limits of the Oriental and Australian Zoogeographic Regions,’ Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 121, no. 2, 1977, 107–120. 57 Robert H. Cowie and Brendan S. Holland, ‘Dispersal Is Fundamental to Biogeography and the Evolution of Biodiversity on Ocean Islands,’ Journal of Biogeography, vol. 33, 2006, 193–198, 193. 58 Robert H. Cowie and Brendan S. Holland, ‘Dispersal Is Fundamental to ­Biogeography and the Evolution of Biodiversity on Ocean Islands,’ 194. 59 Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, 52ff. 60 Marc Berdet, ‘Eight Theses on Phantasmagoria,’ August 2010, viewed F ­ ebruary 10, 2018, http://anthropologicalmaterialism.hypotheses.org/611. 61 Doz Udo Pollmer ‘The Spice Trade and Its Importance for European Expansion,’ 63, quoting Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story, Berkeley, CA: Transform Press, 1992. 62 The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires and the Book of Francisco Rodrigues, vol. 2, 287. 63 The Suma Oriental of Tome Pires and the Book of Francisco Rodrigues, vol. 1, 221–222. 64 Marc Berdet, ‘Eight Theses on Phantasmagoria,’ 2010. 65 CEPF, xvii. 66 CEPF, 22. 67 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, J. Strachey (trans.), London: ­Basic Books, 1960, 217, note 1. 68 Sigmund Freud, The Complete Psychological Works, J. Strachey (ed.), London: Hogarth Press, 1964, vol. XXIII, 300. 69 Noting this fact, Wallace applies it to an ingenious defence of the Dutch trade monopoly. (The Malay Archipelago, 296.) 70 As Charles Zuber notes, while they had no nutritional value, ‘Spices were status symbols for the ruling classes, and had significant ceremonial and symbolic functions.’ (‘Islands of the Imagination: Representations of the Spice Islands from pre-colonial to post-colonial times,’ PhD, Griffith University, 2005, 2.) 71 Quoted by Zuber, ‘Islands of the Imagination: Representations of the Spice ­Islands from Pre-colonial to Post-colonial Times,’ 25. 72 Gino Benzoni, Da Palazzo Ducale, Saggi sul Quattrocento-Settecento Veneto, Venezia: Marsilio, 1999, 142. 73 Ugo Tucci, ‘La Carta Nautica’ in Carte de Navegar, portolani e carte nautiche del museo correr, 1318–1732, S. Biadene (ed), Venezia: Marsilio Editore, 1990, 9–19, 9. 74 Juergen Schulz, La cartografia tra scienza e arte, Carte e cartografi nel Rinascimento italiano, Ferrara: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1990, 79–82.

216 Bacan 75 Witness De la vanguardia a la metrópoli (written with Francesco Dal Co and Tafuri, 1972), Oikos (1975) and the essay ‘Eupalinos o l’archittetura’ (1978). 76 Or, equally characteristically, the Venetian atlases known as isolarii. 77 Alessandro Carrera, ‘Introduction,’ in Massimo Cacciari, Unpolitical: On the Radical Critique of Political Reason, M. Verdicchio (trans.), New York: F ­ ordham University Press, 2009, 37, with reference to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980. 78 Jennifer Scappettone, Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice, New York: Columbia University Press, 2014, 235. Scappettone compares the structure of Ezra Pound’s Cantos to the islands and canals of Venice, noting that, in contrast with Ruskin, Pound devotes poetic attention equally to the spaces ‘between the stones’ (235). 79 Massimo Cacciari, L’arcipelago, Milano: Adelphi Edizioni, 1997, 19–20. 80 Massimo Cacciari, L’arcipelago, 20–21. 81 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World, 1986, trans. A. Szegedy-Maszak, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 171. 82 To trade in antitheses: if anything, regions within the 7448 could be characterised as a reversal of the Aegean arrangement – The area known as Laut Sulawesi, or Celebes Sea, is a basin enclosed to the north by the Sulu Archipelago and Mindanao, to the east by the Sangir (or Sangihe) and Talaud islands, to the south by the peninsula of North Sulawesi, and to the west by the eastern coast of Sabah. (Adrian P. Lapian, ‘Laut Sulawesi: The Celebes Sea, from Center to Peripheries,’ Moussons, vol. 7, 2003, 3–16.) 83 Joaquim Ferreira do Amaral, ‘Preface,’ Description Atlas Miller Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, viewed March 12, 2010, www.moleiro.com/en/ maps-atlases/atlas-miller.html. 84 Alfredo Pinheiro Marques, ‘Geopolitical Counter-Information for the Eyes of a Prince (or Princess): Miller Atlas and the Age of Discoveries 1519,’ viewed March 12, 2010, www.maldivesculture.com/index.php?option=com_content& task=view&id=222&Itemid=58 y. 85 The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires and the Book of Francisco Rodrigues, vol. 1, 57. 86 The Suma Oriental of Tome Pires and the Book of Francisco Rodrigues, vol. 1, 57, with reference to Rev, 18:11. 87 Rev 21:1. Mapping Portuguese/Spanish conquests to the Revelations of St John seems to have been conventional – see Christopher Columbus’s Fourth Voyage Letter. 88 See again Rev 18:12–13. 89 Raúl Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema, B. Holmes (trans.), Paris: Éditions Dis Voir, Paris, 1995, 37–38. 90 De Clérambault’s ‘scalene raspberry’ is almost exactly anticipated in the Catalan World Map produced by Abraham Cresques in Mallorca, c. 1375. See Kenneth Nebenzahl, Atlas of Columbus and the Great Discoveries, Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 1990, 6–9. 91 Ophiel [Edward C. Peach], The Art and Practice of Astral Projection, York Beach, Maine: Weiser Books, 1974. 92 Susan Hiller, The Dream and the Word, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2012, 41. 93 Robin Robertson, Indra’s Net, Alchemy and Chaos Theory as Models for Transformation, Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2009, 90, paraphrasing Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy, Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1971. 94 Ophiel [Edward C. Peach], The Art and Practice of Astral Projection, iii. 95 Robin Robertson, Indra’s Net, Alchemy and Chaos Theory as Models for Transformation, 111.

Bacan  217 96 Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘Essay on Spirit Seeing,’ in Parerga and Paralipomena, E. F. J. Payne (trans.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, vol. 1, 231–238. 97 Raúl Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema, 40–41. 98 Hence, and characteristically, just as the story of the Spartan pirate Cleomenes’s thwarted bid to invade the Lagoon establishes Venice’s amphibious genius, so the ‘first contact’ of the Portuguese with the Badau or Celates maritime groups in 1512 near Ambon Island occurs after Francisco Serrau’s junk runs aground and sinks. Likewise, in 1579, Sir Francis Drake comes to grief on a submarine reef north of Tomori Bay (E. J. Velthoen, ‘Contested Coastlines,’ 99) As for the Bajau, they trade tidelectically, entering the village at high tide. 99 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, London: George Allen, 1900, 3 vols, vol. 1, 46.) 100 Aristotle, de div. somn. 464b5 ff (trans. J. L. Beare and discussed by George ­Devereux, Dreams in Greek Tragedy, an Ethno-psycho-analytical Study, ­Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970, xxx.) 101 Matthew S. Wood, ‘Aristotle and the Question of Metaphor,’ PhD thesis, ­Department of Philosophy, University of Ottawa, 149, note 255. 102 Matthew S. Wood, ‘Aristotle and the Question of Metaphor,’ 169. 103 Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action, Oxford: ­Oxford University Press, 2009, 348. 104 Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action, 343. 105 Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action, 351. 106 Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action, 352. 107 Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action, 365. 108 Kelly James Clark, Religion and the Sciences of Origins: Historical and Contemporary Discussions, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 175. 109 Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action, 365. Supervenience is where ‘the global properties of a system locally strongly supervene on its compositional atoms’ (359). 110 Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action, 366. 111 P. Aelius Aristides, The Complete Works, vol. 2, trans. C. A. Behr, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981, 259. 112 For a comprehensive review of the history of biogeographical concepts in the IAA, and the vicariance/dispersal discussion, plus excellent geological maps, see David J. Lohman, ‘Biogeography of the Indo-Australian Archipelago,’ Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, vol. 42, 2011, 205–226. See Brett R. Riddle, ‘Comparative Phylogeography Clarifies the Complexity and Problems of Continental Distribution that Drove A. R. Wallace to Favor Islands,’ PNAS, vol. 113, no. 29, July 2016. The CEPF report notes that ‘Wallacea’ is ‘referred to locally as Eastern Indonesia or Nusa Tenggara – literally, the “islands in between.”’ It was long forgotten during the surges of growth from the 1970s through the early 2000s. Not having the population or urban muscle of Java, Bali, or parts of Sumatra, and not having the vast natural resources of Sumatra, Kalimantan, or Papua, while instead suffering as a place of little rainfall and little political attention, the region made a turn in the last ten years. (CEPF, 237) For a remarkable myth created to explain eastern Sulawesi’s marginalisation, see the story told to Velthoen by an elderly woman in the small village of Nambo, south of Luwak: She told me that in the olden days there was a huge, magnificent tree with leaves that were made of cloth. The leaves on the top branches were made of beautiful silk of all imaginable colours and patterns, but further down the tree the leaves were made of poorer quality cloth, and at the bottom the leaves were made of the cheapest and plainest cloth. One day this tree toppled

218 Bacan over, so that the top part with the expensive and colourful cloth fell on the western world and the lower part fell here. (E. J. Velthoen, ‘Contested Coastlines,’ 2) 113 See the fascinating article by Sonja Walch who, discussing the work of American tropical botanist, Elmer D. Merrill – one of the first to conceptualise Wallacea as a biogeographical ‘transition zone’ – argues that ‘the plants resembled the inhabitants of the United States’ insular overseas territories, who were legally defined neither as aliens nor as citizens. In this sense, Wallacea embodies epistemic as well as geopolitical boundaries …’ (Sonja Walch, ‘The Reshaping of Phytogeographical Knowledge as the “Transition zone,”’ Wallacea: An American Expansion project in the Philippines, 1902–1928,’ Berichte zur ­Wissenschaftegeshichte, vol. 39, no. 3, September 2016, 245–264.) 114 David J. Lohman, ‘Biogeography of the Indo-Australian Archipelago,’ 221. 115 He wrote his famous letter to Darwin from nearby Tidore in February 1858. Viewed April 8, 2008. See http://wallacefund.info/content/1858-darwin-wallacepaper. 116 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London: Zed Books, 1999, 149. 117 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 151. 118 Stuart Rintoul, The Wailing: A National Black Oral History, Port Melbourne: Heinemann, 1993, quoted by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 144. 119 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 249. 120 Wallace resided in the small port town of Labuha on the south-west coast of the main island. (The Malay Archipelago, 346.) 121 Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, 165. 122 Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, 342. 123 Alfred Russel Russell, ‘Letter to Darwin.’ 124 Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, 337. 125 I can only touch on this outstanding history but, for an introduction to different aspects of the complex storytelling ecology in East Sulawesi recommend E. J. Velthoen ‘Contested Coastlines,’ 35–46. 126 E. J. Velthoen, ‘Contested Coastlines,’ 275, note 576. 127 E. J. Velthoen, ‘Contested Coastlines,’ 275. 128 In E. J. Velthoen, ‘Contested Coastlines,’ quoting Mary Helms, 8. 129 In E. J. Velthoen, ‘Contested Coastlines,’ 9–10. But see also Leonard Y. ­A ndaya, ‘Local Trade Networks in Maluku in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries,’ Cakalele, vol. 2, no. 2 (1991), 71–96. 130 Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, 339. 131 A spectacular, exceptional but, presumably, culturally legible instance of mass exilic wandering occurred in the wake of the failed Nuku movement in the 1780s. This war against the Dutch and Ternate dislocated thousands of people on both sides. Entire communities took up a wandering existence for years on end, with only temporary settlements dispersed throughout Maluku, but based mainly on the north coast of Seram. Nuku’s fleets, which could number between thirty and eighty vessels, roamed the eastern archipelago, raiding and destroying Dutch posts and allied settlements. His following consisted of people from Tobelo, Galela, Maba, Weda, Patani, Gebe, the Raja Ampat Islands and Goram. (E. J. Velthoen, ‘Contested Coastlines,’ 215) Supported by slave-raiding, this Odyssean wandering brought a remarkable redistribution of lives and communities.

Bacan  219 132 E. J. Velthoen, ‘Contested Coastlines,’ 101. 133 Alfred Russel Wallace, ‘Letter to Darwin.’ 134 Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, 338. 135 Leonard Y. Andaya, ‘Centers and Peripheries in Maluku,’ Cakalele, vol. 4, 1993, 1–21, 6–7. See also Leonard Y. Andaya, ‘Cultural State Formation in Eastern Indonesia,’ 38–39 Andaya in A. Reid (ed.), Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era, Trade, Power, and Belief, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993, 23–42, 38–39, where Sultan Babullah uses this myth to justify territorial expansion. The ‘Papuan’ areas include south-eastern Halmahera, eastern Seram, the Seram Laut Islands, the raja Ampat islands, and the coasts of New Guinea (see Reid (ed.), 39); Banggai-Butung are both located in east Sulawesi; Loloda lies on the north-west coast of North Maluku. 136 CEPF, 132. 137 F. von Benda-Beckmann, K. von Benda-Beckmann and A. Brower, ‘Changing “Indigenous Environmental Law” in the Central Moluccas: Communal Regulation and Privatisation of Sasi,’ Ekonesia, no. 2, 1993, 1–38. Quoted in I. ­Novaczek et al., An Institutional Analysis of Sasi Laut in Maluku, Indonesia, 30. 138 Ingvild Harkes, ‘An Institutional Analysis of Sasi Laut, a Fisheries Management System in Indonesia,’ c. 1999, viewed December 13, 2017, http://pubs.iclarm .net/Pubs/Way%20Forward/19%20Harkes.pdf. 139 Inqvild Harkes, ‘An Institutional Analysis of Sasi Laut in Maluku, I­ ndonesia,’ Chapter 3, ‘Regional and Village Level Context,’ 27–36, 31 viewed http:// pubs.iclarm.net/Pubs/Sasi/chapter%203.pdf. 140 Marco Cuevas-Hewitt, ‘Sketching Towards an Archipelagic Poetics of ­Postcolonial Belonging,’ Budhi, 1, 2007, 244. 141 Marco Cuevas-Hewitt, ‘Sketching Towards an Archipelagic Poetics of ­Postcolonial Belonging,’ 241. 142 Charles E. M. Pearce and F. M. Pearce, Oceanic Migration: Paths, Sequence, Timing and Range of Prehistoric, Migration in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Dordrecht: Springer, 2010, 172. ‘Kauai, one of the Hawaiian group, is named after Tawai, one of the Batchian islands.’ 143 Charles E. M. Pearce and F. M. Pearce, Oceanic Migration: Paths, Sequence, Timing and Range of Prehistoric, Migration in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, 172. 144 John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 1: 1925, Experience and Nature, J.A. Boydston (ed), Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1981, 57. 145 David Kyle Latinis, ‘Protohistoric Archaeology and Settlement in Central Maluku, Eastern Indonesia,’ PhD thesis, National University of Singapore, 2002, 36. 146 Panida Lorlertratna, ‘A Quest for Insularity: Thomas Forrest’s Voyage to New Guinea and the Moluccas,’ PhD UC Riverside, 2006, 183. http://escholarship .org/uc/item/45d235rk. 147 He was a passenger in the Dutch schooner, Hester Helena (Alfred Russel ­Wallace, The Malay ­Archipelago, 496). 148 Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, 513. 149 The nesting of the environmental sciences (and their notion of biodiversity) within cultural histories is illustrated at an Indonesian scale in Amazon. See ‘Ancient peoples shaped the Amazon rainforest,’ March 2, 2017, viewed October 14, 2017, https://science.naturalis.nl/en/about-us/news/onderzoek/ ancient-peoples-shaped-amazon-rainforest/. 150 Hypatia Vourloumis, ‘MISperformance,’ Performance Research, vol. 100, ­forthcoming 2018.

Conclusion

Unacknowledged legislators The Saramakas of Surinam and French Guinea are one of many peoples in the Americas descended from rebel slave communities. ‘Saramaka ­collective identity is predicated on a single opposition: freedom versus slavery.’1 This explains the reverence accorded to ‘the era of the Old-Time People,’ the period (roughly 1680–1800) of struggle against the Dutch. The Saramakas live profoundly in history, even if the past relevant to their sense of identity is ‘temporally restricted.’2 Yet here is something odd: in this classically postcolonial society, access to knowledge of that past is also restricted. The transmission of formal First-Time knowledge is ‘deliberately incomplete’: It’s a paradoxical but accepted fact that any Saramaka narrative … will leave out most of what the teller knows about the incident. A person’s knowledge is supposed to grow only in very small increments, and in any aspect of life people are deliberately told only a bit more than the speaker thinks they already know.3 Richard Price explains that ‘The central role of First-Time in Saramaka life is ideological; preservation of its knowledge is their way of saying “Never again.”’4 Yet the power of this message depends on its never being explicitly restated or repeated: the story that will perpetuate ‘freedom’ must remain incomplete; the journey to understanding is as long as a life. Further, it is an unfolding relationship, between teller and listener; it will deliberately incorporate many ‘testings’ – the neighbouring Alúku utilise a ‘spurious culture’ to keep what is precious close and ‘have made a high art of institutionalised prevarication.’ Into the involutions, the feints and meanders of the story, are woven the shadows of trauma, and to begin the task of decolonising governance is to interpret the substance of what is deliberately omitted. Colonising governance, in contrast, ignores the substance in favour of the sign. Conceptually, colonisation may be impossible without this prior objectification of language and tools of exchange: it is the doctrine of the equivalence of signs that makes the replacement of one system of signification with another plausible. Theorists of political economy like Jeremy

Conclusion  221 Bentham and John Stuart Mill may have tightened the rules of exchange by eliminating as far as possible the scope for ambiguity, but it was only a refinement of rules of trade – both commercial and conceptual – designed to produce an unencumbered profit – ‘the command of language’ as ‘the language of command,’ as Bernard Cohn puts it. What presented itself as the enlargement of the public realm – the elimination of party politics and class interest from the operations of government – contributed inadvertently to the privatisation of meaning. Marquand has commented on the strange premonition of the neo-liberal turn in recent capitalistic democracies and the decline or non-emergence of the public realm in the mid-nineteenth century: in the public domain, accountability can come only through the Voice – in other words through argument, discussion, debate and democratic engagement. But in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain, accountability through Voice was lacking or attenuated; and the growth of the public domain did nothing to enhance it. And Marquand goes on to explain that at the core of the Gladstonian central state lay a tradition of autonomous executive power, a parliamentary monarchy which ‘was not supposed to be democratic, still less participatory.’5 But the identification of administrative language with class and commercial self-interest was not new. Writing of the British appropriation of ‘Indian languages to serve as a crucial component in their construction of the system of rule,’ in the late eighteenth century, Cohn argues that it depended on a much older imperial mindset: Europeans of the seventeenth century lived on a world of signs and correspondences, while Indians lived in a world of substances … The British in seventeenth century India operated on the idea that everything and everyone had a ‘price’. The presents through which relationships were constituted were seen as a form of exchange to which a quantitative value could be attached … They never seemed to realise that certain kinds of clothes, jewels, arms and animals had values that were not established in terms of market-determined price, but were objects in a culturally-constructed system by which authority and social relations were literally constituted and transmitted.6 And what has this to do with the archipelago? The perpetuation of colonial values in states recently liberated from colonial rule is an almost universal phenomenon, but Vanja Hamzić, writing from a gay point of view, gives it an unusual twist in his discussion of ‘President Suharto’s autocratic New Order’ and its reinstatement of hierarchical, homonormative patriarchal values. The effect of the ‘regulatory interventions’ supporting the new ‘public morality,’ has, he says, the effect of throttling ‘all other forms of kinship or gender/ sexual relations and expressions.’7 More generally, the homogenisation of Indonesian cultural diversity and plurivocality and the complex ties that weave

222 Conclusion together the ‘world’s largest archipelagic state,’ does not produce an ideally well-adjusted citizenry: on the contrary, it create a collection of integers – ­individuals without ties, tabula rasa identities ready to be stamped with the impression of nationhood – a situation he compares to the twelfth-century map charted by al-Idrisi, where Indonesia is represented ‘as a random assortment of blobs.’8 In other words, the supposed unity of the nation state, whether colonial or postcolonial, depends on the erasure of local and regional self-organising social practices to produce an absolute fragmentation of non- or even anti-colonial relationships. Internally, considered as a social contract, the nation state is a random collection of human islands bound together by nothing more than self-interest. If this line of argument is right, it goes a long way to explaining the anti-archipelagic bias of continentalist thinking: ‘The negro, then, is the white man’s fear of himself,’ Mannoni wrote many years ago,9 interestingly defining the ‘unconscious tendency’ of colonisers ‘to seek out oceanic islands inhabited only by Fridays or … to go an entrench themselves in isolated outposts in hostile countries’ as the expression of a belief that the ideal colony is ‘the desert island.’10 Be that as it may, psychologically, the uncontrollable archipelago of others lies within the nation state: it is the western collective ego’s fear of fragmentation.11 And, with our concern to reinstate metaphorical modes of communication, we can go a step further, for the individual subject corresponds in language to the individual word. ‘Meaning for the English was something to be attributed to a word, a phrase or an object, which could be determined and translated, hopefully with a synonym which had a direct referent to something what the English thought of as the “natural” world …’ writes Cohn.12 In the classical languages against which the English benchmarked Indian languages, grammar was imagined on the analogy of master–slave relations, in terms of relative authority and subordination; as we saw, the operational laws of communication – what makes discourse possible – were regarded as secondary, accidental in relation to the substance of the law, itself vested in the unambiguous signification of nouns. In reference to Marquand’s ‘Voice,’ it is relevant that Varro also regards the sound shape of words as secondary: ‘Morphology’ – equivalent to accidence – ‘is a process that creates new word forms by manipulating a word’s phonological shape.’13 The most authoritative word, then, does not have to speak its own name; in the act of relating, departing from its ideal form, it declines. Evidently, the ‘ontological function of metaphor,’ as Ricoeur puts it, the presentation of humans ‘as acting’ and all things ‘as in act,’ is impossible here. And, in arguing for a linkage between decolonising the language of governance and archipelagic thinking, we can illustrate this point graphically. Also writing about al-Idrisi’s chart, Tibbetts suggests a lexical illiteracy is partly responsible for the depiction of all the jazā’ir as ‘shapeless islands,’14 for the Arabic word ‘jazira’ indiscriminately used to mean island really means ‘some place where a trader arrived by sea and left by sea, and is often equivalent to “riverside town” or “seaport.”’ Here we anticipate the representation of coastlines in Homem’s charts as opportunities, as lines of openings signifying a constant traffic of coming and

Conclusion  223 going. To draw an archipelago of shapeless islands is equivalent to denying the existence of society or the primary role storytelling – figurative relations of all kinds – plays in human communication. ‘Islands of meaning are isolated from one another: “this archipelago – how utterly subject to the ocean’s fluctuations! – made as it is of words and perceptions”. By themselves they are separate retreats, vignettes, possibly paradises of self-contained, nostalgic memories; together they are linked by an artful narrative ….’15 How will the Voice of the archipelagically conceived creative region emerge? The different discourses traversed in Decolonising Governance respond to this question differently. Ethnographically, as Price, or the earlier story from Malinowski, shows, the story is indistinguishable from social identity; as the story of the formation of waterholes, and its transformation into the flows and catchments of political organisation, economic exchange and environmental responsibility, metaphorical narrative provides the lawful jointure of individuals, collectivities and life worlds. The humanities might see it differently: taking a leaf out of Hamzic’s book, identifying a Glissant-like, going-with-the-flow of historical hybridisation and cultural creolisation with the creation of a new polyversal style of writing, adequate to the mapping of those ‘intermediate areas’ of affect where individuals engage in ‘the perpetual task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet inter-related.’16 The implicitly feminist advocacy for the ‘the intricate elasticity’ of ‘archipelagic selves’ surely finds its natural spokesperson in Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector.17 Writing about Lispector’s book Agua viva, Hélène Cixous considers that, like a process of gradual initiation into knowledge, or like Leiris’s perpetually unfinished drafts, it ‘does not give itself to be read without escaping, drowning, submerging, retreating.’ Its fictional form stages ‘a finality without end’18 that can be compared to ‘a coast.’19 ‘The means of locomotion of this text are inscribed everywhere.’20 One arrives at ‘the incandescence of something that is orgiastic, but in a feminine way, at something that goes over the limit and then one can say no and everything starts up again.’21 Isn’t this comparable to the economy of flows and catchments or the geography of ‘jazira’? The body that is reading the world is ‘worldly… it is taken in moments of exchange, of making love with the other, hence the rhythmic variations.’22 This state of being is one of extreme receptiveness, one is sensitive to any affordances the minimalist environment extends: islands, for example, or the signs of islands, present a finality without ending or an endless beginning – ‘exactly like the text itself that never amounts to a sum, to a whole. What can be found everywhere, like a series of callings, new beginnings, are little words.’23 This is an oceanic poetics, one that correlates the breath pattern with the rise and fall of the wave that Aelius Aristides grasped when, after becoming tongue-tied in the Roman forum, he fled to Pergamum and learned to sing again. It is the form inspiration takes when it is no longer subjected (transported) but carries over: In human breathing, in its everyday quality, perhaps we have to already hear the breathlessness of an inspiration that paralyzes essence [i.e.

224 Conclusion self-identity], that transpierces it with an inspiration by the other, an inspiration that is already expiration, that ‘rends the soul’! It is the longest breath there is, spirit. Is man not the living being capable of the longest breath in inspiration, without a stopping point, and in expiration, not to thought.24 But here is the rub. While the functionaries of western techno-know-how feel no compunction about imposing their discursive rules-of-the game on all negotiations with others – whether they are classified as cultures of the past or present – deterritorialised or reterritorialized for the purposes of management and control – no reciprocal courtesy is extended to the voice of story. It is an ideological blind- and deaf-spot, which, I suggest, is reinforced in the disciplinary fragmentation of the western academy. Embedded in the language of power, it blights statist government whether operating effectively or weakly. The Wallacea Biodiversity plan unfolds against a general background of demographic change and human-induced land degradation and a particular background of what John Braithwaite calls anomie, ‘an instability resulting from the breakdown of the regulatory order that secures norms,’ illustrated in Maluku by the post-Suharto inter-racial violence, 1998–2002.25 As Indra de Soysa’s views imply, the kind of environment conflict that the Wallacea plan tacitly hopes to mitigate misses the point if it fails to recognise that ‘inadequate governance’ is ‘always intermediate between environmental scarcity and negative social effects.’26 In general, in the field of environmental security, where decolonising governance practices come into the most acute conflict with ‘the state system, industrial capitalism, technological innovation … individual liberty manifesting as consumerism, and the tyranny of bureaucracy,’27 the state, or its idea of order, is the problem.28 But where to go from there? How, for example, can ‘A postmodernist politics of dissent’29 find a voice of its own if it mimics the power-talk of power? Simon Dalby recommends ‘thinking of political space in terms of ecopolitics, rather than through the conventional markers of states.’30 In an analogous way, Dipesh Chakrabarty urges the humanities to develop a new kind of historical consciousness. The age-old identification of ‘History’ with progress towards human emancipation no longer holds: ‘whatever the rights we wish to celebrate as our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions (such as the temperature zone in which the planet exists) that work like boundary parameters of human existence.’31 The prospect of imminent catastrophe demands we rethink ‘the history of the world since the Enlightenment.’32 Overcoming the false distinction humanists have made between natural history and human history, we need ‘a general history of life.’33 At the risk of repetition, the future of this new past is limited if it is not written differently. Just as an archipelagic geography resists the calculable logic of cartography, so the historical discourse of archipelagic thinking will be plurivocal and, perhaps, pluritemporal.34 In 1994 Yolngu at Galiwink’ku, Elcho Island, released ‘an indigenous marine protection strategy

Conclusion  225 for Northern Territory coastal waters between Maningrida and Numbulwar and to the north to the Australian-Indonesian boundary.’35 Discussing the influence of David Burrumarra, ‘immediate past leader of the Warramiri clan,’ on this initiative, Ian McIntosh brings out the fact that ‘ownership’ in this context refers to continuity in time as much as space. The proper interpretation of one of the recommendations, that a ‘bilateral co-management arrangement with Indonesia should be pursued by the Australian government and Yolngu,’ would depend on ‘the possession of sacred objects and knowledge associated with particular tracts of country, including the sea,’ and this ‘holding’ of the sea belonged uniquely to the Yolngu because they ‘were custodians of laws associated with the “real” owners of Manbuynga ga Rulyapa, the totemic whale and octopus creational beings.’36 The whale story has a beginning point, as it were, in time and space where ‘the totemic whale beached itself on Aboriginal land at the beginning of time.’37 At the same time, the whale is a living metaphor (in a non-metaphorical sense of actualising energeia) as ‘The whale is understood to be a product of the salt water itself and the movement of the tide is indicative of the movement of the ancestral whale being.’38 Hence there emerges a tidal geography, a history of maritime relations inscribed in the currents: the Warramiri are associated with other coastal peoples in Northern Australia and Indonesia because they are associated with all the places where the whale travels.39 This is not a timeless connection: Warramiri ‘sea identity’ was ‘created, sustained and affirmed over the centuries as Yolngu came into contacts with others’: Burrumarra differentiated three waves of pre-European contact: the ‘whale hunters,’ the Bayini and the Macassan trepangers.40 Each of these extended the Yolngu’s sea connections: with the ‘whale hunters’ the Warramiri are said to have travelled to ‘Layilayi (a small island of Macassar) and Danimba (Tanibar) and Warru (aru), in Maluku province in eastern Indonesia’;41 with the Bayini came a special relationship with the island of Banda, a place that in Yolngu story is ‘symbolic of the ownership of “traditional Aboriginal information,”’ but elsewhere, of course, a ‘blessed place’ because it was the home of the nutmeg.42 Through more recent Macassan visits, clan members came to know Sulawesi.43 Here is history as archipelagic production. It produces a tidelectic region much in Kamau Braithwaite’s sense, where the remotest connections can be intuited in the nearest ‘complex interaction of waves lapping on Caribbean beaches, coming together, opposing, dissolving, recreating themselves’44 – where the artificially separated regions of Chapters 3 and 6 flow back together. In the story geography, history and the law coalesce, and the value of this is priceless – Burrumarra said that ‘The stories were “too expensive” to talk about, in any detail, in anything other than a ceremonial setting.’45 These are not stories for children but demand a sophisticated metaphorical literacy, whose spatio-political expression is the creative region imagined as an archipelagic string figure or tensional ecology of endless, incomplete translations between the incommensurable and the comparable. Such

226 Conclusion imaginative geographies46 conserve complexity, they abhor the ending as a premonition of extinction. Every story gathered in Decolonising Governance is the outside story; perhaps the inner story of the book is the connections, across cultural histories but also disciplinary boundaries, that readers make between them. Relations in all dimensions always exceed what can be contained and mapped. If we were going to ask where the whale, Mirrinyungu, came from, we would need to learn about its associations through Manbuynga with the coral reef (Marryalyan) and the sea floor (Ngulwardo, who ‘senses like a fish through currents deep in the sea, currents from far off places’).47 Ngulwardo introduces depth into the discussion, the impression of what is hidden and the reflection of the sky: an advocate of ‘a blue green oikos,’ who sees the greatest obstacle to developing ‘a blue-green, interdependent vision – an archipelagic vision’ as ‘tehomophobia, our collective fear of the deep’ would find Ngulwardo a useful warden.48 The climax of tehomophobia in Christian theology is the eschatological vision of St John of Patmos,49 prefigured in the Noachian adventure of The Flood. By contrast, a ‘sea-ing’ and ‘fathom-ing’ Christian faith embraces ‘risk and vulnerability,’ comparing ‘the infinite relatedness of God’ to the way the ‘the sea touches all shores.’50 Yet I am not sure that Victorin-Vangerud plumbs the depths: her conception of the ‘abyss’ remains rather literal and the flowing attributed to it undifferentiated. An unreformed land/sea dialectic continues to shadow her image of ‘God’s blue-green oikoumene.’51 Taking her metaphor seriously, as an actualisation rather than a static similarity, I finish where I began – with the poets, and, particularly, with the question the young Apollo, recently installed in Delos, asks in Keats’s unfinished long poem, ‘The Fall of Hyperion, a Dream.’ Urging Mnemosyne to ‘point forth some unknown thing,’ he asks, ‘Are there not other regions than this isle?’ Like Shelley, Keats describes the overthrow of tyranny and the installation of a new world where poetry and politics seem fused in their pursuit of freedom. Unlike Shelley, who associates this revolution with the overthrow of Jupiter and the Olympians, Keats backdates spiritual emancipation to Jupiter’s defeat of Saturn (and the vanquishing of the ‘old God of the Sea,’ Poseidon, by Apollo). In ‘The Fall of Hyperion,’ the question, which concerns the fall of the One into the Many, is interpreted conventionally by Apollo himself: ‘What are the stars? Point me out the way / To any one particular star, / And I will flit into it with my lyre.’52 This is Pythagorean sentimentality and not very interesting. Elsewhere, Keats tackled the question of what it meant to stand ‘On the shore / Of the wide world’ in a more original way. In ‘Endymion,’ another Apollonian myth poem set on Delos, he imagined the infinite relatedness produced by love in the reflection of the moon’s reflected light in ‘Neptune’s blue,’ describing ‘a stress / Of love-spangles… Dancing upon the waves, as if to please / The curly foam with amorous influence.’53 Down glancing from the sky, ‘She fathoms eddies, and runs wild about / O’er whelming water-courses… O love! how potent has thou been to teach / Strange

Conclusion  227 54

journeyings!’ Gauche, perhaps but the quintessence of all the other elements invoked in the archipelago, a fifth element whose closest name is a sense of home in a homeless world. And the colour of this archipelagic relationality is Keats’s blue: Blue! ’Tis the life of waters:—Ocean   And all its vassal streams, pools numberless, May rage, and foam, and fret, but never can   Subside, if not to dark blue nativeness.55 ‘Dark blue’ is not native to ocean or water: it is a reflected light that installs the unhomely or homeless light filtered through the atmosphere into an elemental body. It is resident in the world as ‘in an Eye … alive with fate.’ ‘What strange powers / Has thou, as a mere shadow!’ Keats exclaims, and not the last of these is the reflective knowledge that nativeness in the archipelago is always metaphorical, a recognition of kinship, as between green and blue.56

Notes 1 Richard Price, First-Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983, 11. 2 Richard Price, First-Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People, 5. 3 Richard Price, First-Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People, 10. 4 Richard Price, First-Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People, 11. 5 David Marquand, Decline of the Public, London: Polity Press, 2004, 61. 6 Bernard S. Cohn, ‘The Command of Language and the Language of Command,’ in R. Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies IV, Writings on South Asian History and ­Society, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985, 276–329, 279. 7 Vanja Hamzić, ‘Unlearning Human Rights and False Grand Dichotomies: Indonesian Archipelagic Selves Beyond Sexual/Gender Universality,’ Jindal Global Law Review, vol. 4, no. 1, August 2012, 157–170, 158–159. 8 Vanja Hamzić, ‘Unlearning Human Rights and False Grand Dichotomies: Indonesian Archipelagic Selves Beyond Sexual/Gender Universality,’ 159. 9 O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban, the Psychology of Colonization, trans. P. Powesland, London, Methuen, 1956, 200. 10 O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban, the Psychology of Colonisation, 104–105. 11 Jerome S. Bernstein, Living in the Borderland: Evolution of Consciousness and the Challenge of Healing Trauma, London: Routledge, 2006, 34. 12 Bernard S. Cohn, ‘The Command of Language and the Language of Command,’ 279. 13 Malcolm D. Hyman, ‘Terms for “Word” in Roman Grammar,’ 1–15, 4, viewed January 18, 2008, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8dc4/f236cf27bf9944ecbaf 2335364279ff39228.pdf. 14 G. R. Tibbetts, A Study of the Arabic Texts Containing Material on South-East Asia, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979, 18. 15 Marc Blanchard, ‘Visions of the Archipelago: Michel Leiris, Autobiography and Ethnographic Memory,’ Cultural Anthropology, vol. 5, no.3, 1990, 276. As Christina Kullberg reminds us (‘Crossroad Poetics: Glissant and Ethnography,’ Callaloo, vol. 36, no. 4, Fall 2013, 974), Leiris was the one ethnographic authority Glissant recognised in his own archipelagic thinking, precisely because of his sensitivity to the way events and things are ‘related to, part of a subject living through them.’ (Blanchard, 274).

228 Conclusion 16 Vanja Hamzić, ‘Unlearning Human Rights and False Grand Dichotomies: ­Indonesian Archipelagic Selves Beyond Sexual/Gender Universality,’ 170. 17 Vanja Hamzić, ‘Unlearning Human Rights and False Grand Dichotomies: ­Indonesian Archipelagic Selves Beyond Sexual/Gender Universality,’ 168. 18 Hélène Cixous (ed.), ‘Foreword, in Clarice Lispector,’ The Stream of Life, trans. E. Lowe and E. Fitz, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, xx. 19 Hélène Cixous, ‘Foreword, in Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, xxii. 20 Hélène Cixous, ‘Foreword, in Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, xii. 21 Hélène Cixous, ‘Foreword, in Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, xxiv. 22 Hélène Cixous, ‘Foreword, in Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, xxiv. 23 Hélène Cixous, ‘Foreword, in Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, xxxi. 24 Cited by Gerald L. Bruns, ‘The Remembrance of Language: An Introduction to Gadamer’s Poetics,’ in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997, 22. 25 John Braithwaite, ‘Maluku: Anomie to Reconciliation,’ in E. Aspinall, R. Jeffrey and A. Regan (eds.), Diminishing Conflict in Asia and the Pacific: Why Some Subside and Others Don’t. London, New York: Routledge, 2013, 37–48, 37. 26 Deligiannis, Tom, ‘The Evolution of Environment-Conflict Research,’ New ­Issues in Security #5, Critical Environmental Security: Rethinking the Links ­between Natural Resources and Political Violence, M. A. Schnurr and L. A. Swatuk (eds.), Halifax, Nova Scotia: Dalhousie University, 2010, 1–28, endnote 98. 27 Larry A. Swatuk, ‘Environmental Security in Practice: Transboundary Natural Resources Management in Southern Africa,’ Pan-European Conference on International Relations, The Hague, September 9–11, 2004, 1–29, 5. 28 Larry A. Swatuk, ‘Environmental Security in Practice: Transboundary Natural Resources Management in Southern Africa,’ 13. 29 Larry A. Swatuk, ‘Environmental Security in Practice: Transboundary Natural Resources Management in Southern Africa,’ 15. 30 Larry A. Swatuk, ‘Environmental Security in Practice: Transboundary Natural Resources Management in Southern Africa,’ 16. See also, Helen Verran, ‘Contemporary Australian NRM as Nature/Culture Dichotomy Amnesia: How Can We Do Politics of Nature or Without Politics or Nature?,’ presentation at ‘Performing Nature at World’s Ends,’ Department of Social Anthropology (SAI), University of Oslo, Norway, August 29–31, 2007, 11–20. 31 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses,’ Critical Inquiry, Winter 2009, 197–222, 218. 32 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses,’ 219. 33 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses,’ 219. 34 ‘Conventional history does not recognise the problem of variable dimensions of time, let alone that a non-rigid concept of time itself might be called-for on the basis of the variant distribution of the historical matter.’ (Ernst Bloch, ‘A “Flexible” Time Structure in History, on the Analogy of Riemannian Space,’ A Philosophy of the Future, trans. J. Cumming, New York: Herder and Herder, 1970, 128.) 35 Ian McIntosh, ‘Yolngu Sea Rights in Manbuynga ga Rulyapa (Arafura Sea) and the Indonesian Connection,’ in J. Finlayson and D. E. Smith (eds.), Native Title: Emerging Issues for Research, Policy and Practice, Research Monograph No. 10, Canberra: Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian ­National University, 1995, 9–22, 9. 36 Ian McIntosh, ‘Yolngu Sea Rights in Manbuynga ga Rulyapa (Arafura Sea) and the Indonesian Connection,’ 11. ‘The word Manbuynga refers to yirritja moiety waters in north east Arnhem Land and Rulyapa to dhuwa moiety waters (10) McIntosh only offer a yirritja perspective on Yolngu sea rights (11). For further information on David Burrumarra, see Ian McIntosh, The Whale and the Cross: Conversations with David Burrumarra M.B.E., Darwin: Historical Society of the

Conclusion  229

37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Northern territory, 1996. On the significance of the Bayini, see Ian McIntosh, ‘Unbirri’s Pre-Macassan Legacy, or How the Yolngu Became Black,’ M. Clark and S. K. May (eds.), Macassan History and Heritage: Journeys, Encounters and Influences, Canberra: ANU Epress, 2013, 95–105. McIntosh, Ian, ‘Yolngu Sea Rights in Manbuynga ga Rulyapa (Arafura Sea) and the Indonesian Connection,’ 12. McIntosh, Ian, ‘Yolngu Sea Rights in Manbuynga ga Rulyapa (Arafura Sea) and the Indonesian Connection,’ 12. McIntosh, Ian, ‘Yolngu Sea Rights in Manbuynga ga Rulyapa (Arafura Sea) and the Indonesian Connection,’ 12. McIntosh, Ian, ‘Yolngu sea rights in Manbuynga ga Rulyapa (Arafura Sea) and the Indonesian connection,’ 15–16. McIntosh, Ian, ‘Yolngu sea rights in Manbuynga ga Rulyapa (Arafura Sea) and the Indonesian connection,’ 18. McIntosh, Ian, ‘Yolngu sea rights in Manbuynga ga Rulyapa (Arafura Sea) and the Indonesian connection,’ 18. McIntosh, Ian, ‘Yolngu sea rights in Manbuynga ga Rulyapa (Arafura Sea) and the Indonesian connection,’ 17. Burrumarra classified the Macassans with the Japanese and the Europeans because they failed to follow Yolngu law (16). For the broader prospects for incorporating Makassan visiting rights into Indigenous Australian sea rights, see Denise Russell, ‘Aboriginal-Makassan Interactions in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Northern Australia and Contemporary Sea Rights Claims,’ Australian Aboriginal Studies, no. 1, 2004, 3–17. Elaine Savory, ‘Kamau Braithwaite: Grounded in the Past, Revisioning the Present,’ in M. A. Bucknor and A. Donnell (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, London: Routledge, 2011, 11–20, 14. Ian McIntosh, ‘Yolngu Sea Rights in Manbuynga ga Rulyapa (Arafura Sea) and the Indonesian Connection,’ 12. The phrase is Edward Said’s (Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978, 55). Ian McIntosh, ‘Yolngu Sea Rights in Manbuynga ga Rulyapa (Arafura Sea) and the Indonesian Connection,’ 13. Nancy M. Victorin-Vangerud, ‘Thinking Like an Archipelago: Beyond ­Tehomophobic Theology,’ Pacifica, vol. 16, no. 2, 2003, 153–172, 165. Nancy M. Victorin-Vangerud, ‘Thinking like an Archipelago: Beyond ­Tehomophobic Theology,’ 159. Nancy M. Victorin-Vangerud, ‘Thinking like an Archipelago: Beyond ­Tehomophobic Theology,’ 171. Nancy M. Victorin-Vangerud, ‘Thinking like an Archipelago: Beyond ­Tehomophobic Theology,’ 171. John Keats, ‘Hyperion,’ Book III, 961–101 in H. W. Garrod (ed.), Poetical Works, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, 242. John Keats, ‘Endymion,’ Book III, 82–85, Poetical Works, 107. John Keats, ‘Endymion,’ Book III, 87, 92–93, Poetical Works, 107. John Keats, Poetical Works, 367. John Keats, Poetical Works, 367.

Index

1000 Lovers see Brown, Carol Abu Lais, Sultan 189 Adams, Michael J 88 Aegean Sea 78, 122 Agrawal, Arun 20 Agulhas Current 84–85n96 Aitchison, Jonathan see Ali, Jason Alexander the Great 132, 137 Ali, Jason 57 Allen, Jefner 92 Altman, John 89, 91, 93, 95 Alúku (people) 220 Ammons, A. R. 75 Anderson, James 161 Anghie, Antony 66, 169 Appadurai, Arjun 92 Archipelagic thinking 62–79 Archipelago (geographical) 22–23, 62, 132 Archipelago (conceptual) 18, 21–23, 32, 38–40, 60–61, 73–79, 131–34 Arden, Alfred 159 Aristides, Aelius P. 29–30, 106, 123, 126–127, 204, 223 Aristotle 29, 30 Atlas Miller see Homem Australian Aborigines chapter 5 passim Bacan 52, 54, 195, 205–208, 210 Bachian see Bacan Bacchylides 128 Badjao/Bajau (people) see Sama Laus Barbari, Jacopo de’ 197 Bardon, Geoffrey 157 Barlow, Roger 33 Barnes, Robert Harrison 188 Barreira, Fr Balthasar 69 Barthes, Roland 172

Batchian see Bacan Bausani, Alessandro 65 Bavinck, Maarten 100 Bayer, Louis 160 Benjamin, Walter 195, 196 Bentham, Jeremy 19, 25, 26, 28, 221 Bentley, Ian 95 Benveniste, Émile 71–72 Benzoni, Gino 197 Bernouilli, Jacob 127 Blake, Barry J. 176n7 Blake, William 105, 131 Blanchard, Marc 121, 143n22, 227n15 Blomfield Rev. Ezekiel 146–147n87 Bollier, David 37 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 6 Bororo (people) 26–28, 30 Boschini, Marco 198 Bougainville, Louis-Antoine, Comte de 53 Bourdieu, Pierre 2 Bradley, John 107–108 Braithwaite, John 224 Braithwaite, Kamau 121, 225 Bronson, Bennet 188 Brooks, George E. 83n67 Brough Smyth, Robert 151 Brown, A. J. 158–159, 163–164 Brown, Carol 176 Brumm, Adam R. 151, 153 Burnett, Anne 128 Burrumarra, David 225 Cabo Verde archipelago 83n67 Cacciari, Massimo 123, 198 Calamé, Claude 123 Callimachus 122, 123 Canadian Archipelago 132 Canary Islands 125

232 Index Careri, Francesco 140–41 Caribbean archipelago 56, 70 Carter, Paul ‘Ocean Connections’ 8; ‘Pearl’ 8–9; ‘Tidal’ 8 Cassano, Franco 133 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 224 Chapman, Ralph 161 Chauvet, Louis Marie 29 Chennai Adyar Poonga Ecological Restoration Plan 7 Cixous Hélène 223 Clérambault, Gaëtan Gatian de 200 Clifton, Julian 190 Cohn, Bernard 221, 222 Columbus, Christopher 68 Conley, Tom 120 Connell, John 139, 140 Corn, Aaron 179n36 Coulmas, Florian 173 Cowie, Robert H. 194, 203 Crawfurd, John 53, 55, 66 Crescenzi, Bartolomeo 130 Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) 88, 185–87, 189–190, 196, 204–205, 224 Cuevas-Hewitt, Marco 62, 122, 209 ‘Culture for Cities and Regions’ (EU report) 163 Cyclades (archipelago) 53, 122, 127 Dalby, Simon 224 Davis, Anthony 96 Davis, Michael 91 Dawson, James chapter 5 passim Dawson, Isabella 165, 170, 181–82n78 DeLanda, Manuel 127 Deleuze, Gilles 141, 198 DelSol, Chantal 134 De Quincey, Thomas 11, 40, 42 Derrida, Jacques 129 Desai, Chandni see Sium, Amun Descartes, René 12, 203 Desmond, William 127 Dewey, John 209 Dholupuyngu see Yolngu Dilthey, Wilhelm 26 Dimotakis, Paul Nicholas 11, 79 Djabwurrung (people and language) 151, 155, 168, 171 Duffy, Cian 13 Dufoix, Stéphane 122 Durkheim, Émile 27 Durrell, Lawrence 54 Dussel, Enrique 21

Ellen, Roy F. 188, 212n21 Ellis, Markman 121 Engels, William 119 English, Anthony see Adams Epic of Atrahasis 135 Epic of Gilgamesh 135–39 Equiano, Olaudah 69–70 Eridu Genesis 135 Eriksen, Hylland 27 Faber, Johannes 66 Felperin, Howard 124 Fluid States: Performances of UnKnowing 127–29 Fogarty, Bill 89 Forrest, Sir John 52, 210 Forster, Johann Reinhold 145n55 Forsythe, Kathleen 39, 150 Foucault, Michel 12 Framlingham Mission Station 158, 159, 160, 182n92 France, Robert 137 Freud, Sigmund 76, 196–97 Freycinet, Louis de 52 Galapagos islands 57–59 Galvão, Antonio 208 Gama, Vasco da 197 Gaynor, Jennifer 188, 197 Geertz, Clifford 92 Gibson, Ross 165 Glissant, Édouard 12, 19, 56, 65, 68, 70, 121, 134, 143n19 Grotius, Hugo 66, 67 Ground Truthing: explorations in a creative region 6 Guerard, Eugen von 160, 166 Gunditjmara (people and language) 151, 155, 168, 171 Hamzić, Vanja 63, 221–23 Hanna, Robert 203–5 Harney, Bill Yidumduma 151 Hau’ofa, Epeli 24, 55 Hawai’ian islands (archipelago) 77, 209 Hayward, Philip 55, 71 Heidegger, Martin 29 Helms, Mary 206 Helmreich, Stefan 92 Henrique of Malacca 64–65 Hodge, Bob 148n114 Hokari, Minoru 105 Hōkūle’a (vessel) 110 Hölderlin, Friedrich 58

Index  233 Homem, Lopo, Frontispiece 9–10, 15n33, 34, 39–41, 48n86, 54–56, 60–61, 68, 74, 129–30, 199, 200, 222 Howe, David 100 Howell, David F. 53 Huen, Chi W. 3 Huffman, Douglas see Lawrenz Humboldt, Wilhelm von 58, 63–64, 71 Hussein, Saddam 138 Hymes, Dell 63 Imafuku, Ruta 124–25, 134 Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law 66 Indonesia 51, 67, 133, 221–22 Ingersoll, Karin Amimoto 33, 105–106, 115n82, 191, 192, 203 Ingold, Tim 129 International Conference on Small Islands and Coral Reefs 55 Jackson, Sue 104 Jacob, Christian 130 Jefferies, Richard 160–61 Jung, Carl 27, 127 Kaawirn Kuunawarn 157, 167, 170, 172 Kanaka (people) 110 Kawi (language) 58 Keats, John 226–227 Keen, Ian 161 Keneley, Monica 164 Khaldun Ibn 123–24 Kngwarreye, Doris 6 Korčák, Jaromír 10, 60 Kraidy, Marwan M. 92–93 Kuhn, Thomas 118 Kula exchange cycle 118, 143n10, 152 Lamalera (people) 186–88 Lambert, Leopold 72–73 Langton, Marcia 101 Lawrenz, Frances 55 Learmonth, Peter 159 Leezenberg, Michiel 27 Leiris, Michel 121, 143n19 Leonardo da Vinci 41 Lewin, Kurt 61 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 27, 30 Librett, Jeffrey S. 63 Lispector, Clarice 223 Litfin, Karen 20 Llana, Jazmin 128 Lockhart, James 70–71

Long, Michael 161 Lorlertratna, Panida 210 Lourandos, Harry 153, 156–57 Lupton, Julia 123 Lyell, Sir Charles 81n26 MacGaffey, Wyatt 71 Ma’dan (people) 136–39 Madeira archipelago 125 Magellan see Pigafetta Magowan, Fiona 97, 107 Maiese, Michelle see Hanna Majors, Chris see Clifton Malacca 34–35, 129, 189, 195 Maluku chapter 6 passim Malaysia 51 Malinowski, Bronisław 4, 191–92, 223 Mandar (people) 94, 101–3 Mandelbrot, Benoit 10, 39, 60, 68 Maningrida (Arnhem Land) 89 Mannoni, Octave 222 Marcus, George 93 Marika, Langani/Laklak 35, 104 Marquand, David 221, 222 Marrngawi, Dinah Norman 108 Marri Ammu (people) 97 Mathews, R. H. 152 Mattioli, John 44 Matvejević, Pedrag 33, 54 Matyr, Peter 197 Mauss, Marcel 27 McBryde, Isabel 152, 153 McGarry, Dan 65 McIntosh, Ian 225 Meeting Place: the human encounter and the challenge of coexistence 6 Melanesia (archipelago) 110 Melville, Herman 40, 59, 119–20 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 12 Micronesia (archipelago) 110 Mignolo, Walter 20 Mill, John Stuart 25, 221 Miller, J. Hillis 155 Mitchell, Sir Thomas 149 Moluccas see Maluku Montaigne, Michel de 120–21 Mowaljarlai, David 153, 154 Muecke, Stephen 170 Muller, Samantha see Yunupingu Munn, Nancy 142 Murphy, Patrick D. see Kraidy, Marwan M. Murray Island see Torres Strait Islands Myerhoff, Barbara 4

234 Index Nagy, Gregory 126 Nakata, Martin 20, 37 Nancy, Jean-Luc 62–63 National Resource Management Plan 89 Ngulkar, Maurice Tjakurl 97 Nono, Luigi 198 Norwegian archipelago 132 Okinotorishima 133 Oliver, Douglas L. 178n16 Onge (people) 94, 98–101 Palinurus 126 Pannell, Sandra 94 Papspiros, Panagiotas see P. N. Dimotakis Parry, Milman 43–44 Parry-Davies, Ella 128–29 Pauwelussen, Annet 190, 203 Peirce, Charles Sanders 166–67 Pentecost Island 53 Pessoa, Fernando 71 People on Country: vital landscapes, Indigenous futures 91 Philippines 51, 122 Piarlum, Ambrose 36, 97 Pigafetta, Antonio 59, 64–65, 72, 199, 201 Pires, Tomé 34, 129, 195–96, 199, 205 Places Made After Their Stories: design and the art of choreotopography (Carter) 7 Pocock, Celmara 180n57 Poetics of Relation 121 Polo, Marco 11–12, 32, 39, 54, 130, 195 Polynesia (archipelago) 78–79, 110, 133 Popke, Jeff 21 Popper, Karl 38 Poseidon (god) 126 Poulter, Jim 151 Price, Richard 220, 223 Princeland Secession Movement 158 Priuli, Girolamo 213n26 Prometheus Unbound 126 Pugh, Jonathan 53 Rainio, Kullervo 61 Rancière, Jacques 43 Rehman, Sami 87–88 Reilly, Evelyn 75 Reinel, Pedro see Homem, Lopo Ricoeur, Paul 6, 26, 29–31, 38, 67, 100, 122, 134, 139, 169–71, 191, 203, 222 Rintoul, Stuart 205 Ritskes, Eric see Sium, Amun

Robinson, Robert 201 Romaines, Suzanne 65 Rose, David 154 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 90 Ruby, Jay see Myerhoff, Barbara Ruiz, Raúl 200, 201 Ruskin, John 58, 201 Ryan, Mathew see Fogarty, Bill Shakespeare, William 142 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 12–13 Said, Edward 12, 43 Saint-Danys, Hervey de 200 Salvatore, Gianfranco 127 Sama Laus 128, 190–91 Sangra, Pablo 125 San Roque, Craig 43 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 21 Saramakas (people) 220 Sasi 186, 208–209 Schapper, Antoinette 185 Schopenhauer, Arthur 201 Schulz, Juergen 198 Serres, Michel 75–76, 105 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 12–13, 226 Siivonen, Katriina 54, 131 Sium, Amun 36 Slave trade 68–70 Slochower, Harry 37, 137 Smith, Bruce 142 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 204–5 Smyth, William Henry 55 Socrates 126 Solzhenitsyn 11, 24, 67–68, 82n65, 82–83n66 Southwest Finland archipelago 54, 131–32 Soysa, Indra de 224 Speiser, E. A. 135 Spenser, Edmund 40, 122–23 Spice Islands see Maluku Stanbridge, W. E. 177n12 Stanner, W. E. H. 7, 152, 153 Steinem, Karl von den 27 Steiner, George 29 Stoutenberg, Jenny Grote 161 Strachey, William 66 Stratford, Elaine 21, 31–32 Stuart, Duncan 160 Sturt, Charles 22–23 Suarez, Thomas 145n62 Sulawesi 34, 39–40, 99, 190; West Sulawesi 92; South Sulawesi 92, 101 Sullivan, Jon 96 Sullivan, Patrick 101

Index  235 Tafuri, Manfredo 198 Tamil Nadu 94, 98, 101 Taylor, Mark 124 Ternate 189, 195, 206, 208 The Aborigines of Victoria 151 The Art and Practice of Astral Projection 200 The Malay Archipelago 193 The Origin of Species 119 Thomas, William 187 Thomashaw, Mitchell 108–9 Thomaz, Luis Filipe F. R. 34 Tibbetts, G. R. 222 Tidore 189, 195 Tomas, David 64 Tomore (people) 205–7 Torres Strait Islands 94, 100 Tristan da Cunha (archipelago) 119 Tuamotus (archipelago) 59 Tuck, Eve 117, 122, 140, 150 Turner, Margaret Kemarre 42, 43 Turri, Ugo 197 Umali, Bas 11, 62 Une nouvelle region du monde 134 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea 51 Urban, Greg 3 Vance, Eugene 37 Vanuatu 53, 65 Varro, Marcus Terentius 71, 84n85, 148n108, 222 Vattimo, Gianni 11, 71, 72, 127 Velthoen, Esther 206–7, 217n112, 218n131 Venice 41, 59, 138, 184, 197–98 Vergunst, Jo 173, 174 Verran, Helen 89, 90 Verschoor, G. M. 190

Vico, Giambattista 12 Victorin-Vangerud, Nancy 58 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 78, 199 Voronoi diagram 85n110 Vourloomis, Hypatia 211 Vygotzky, Lev 28 Wagner, John R. see Davis, Anthony Walcott, Derek 121 Wales, William 53 Wallace, Alfred Russel 52, 56–57, 81n32, 193–95, 205–8, 210–11, 214n47 Wallacea Biodiversity Hotspot see Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund Weaver, Hilary N. 118 Weeratt Kuyutt 157, 170 Weil, Simone 41–42, 43 Weiner, Annette 142 Western District (Victoria, Australia) chapter 4 West Indies see Caribbean archipelago White, Crow 77 Wijono, Iwan 127–28 Williams, Nicholas 38 Wilson, Shawn 109 Winch, Peter 27, 30 Wolters O. W. 188 Wombeet Tuulawarn 170 Wood, Matthew 30, 31, 202, 203 Yang, K. Wayne see Tuck, Eve Yanyuwa (people) 94, 107–8, 110 Yarruun Parpur Tarneen 168, 170, 172 Yawuru (people) 94, 101 Yolngu (people) 88––92, 97, 99, 101–2, 104, 108, 224–26 Yunupingu, Djawa 104 Zawacki, Andrew 75 Zerner, Charles 94, 102–3