Anuário Antropológico 

II | 2011
2010/II

Representing Water: visual anthropology and

divergent trajectories in human environmental
relations
Veronica Strang

Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/aa/1175
DOI: 10.4000/aa.1175
ISSN: 2357-738X

Publisher
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social (UnB)

Printed version
Date of publication: 1 December 2011
Number of pages: 213-242
ISSN: 0102-4302

Electronic reference
Veronica Strang, « Representing Water: visual anthropology and divergent trajectories in human
environmental relations », Anuário Antropológico [Online], II | 2011, Online since 24 November 2015,
connection on 23 September 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/aa/1175 ; DOI : 10.4000/aa.
1175

© Anuário Antropológico
 213

Representing Water: visual anthropology and

divergent trajectories in human environmental
relations
Veronica Strang
University of Auckland

Because of the centrality of water in all aspects of human life, visual, textual
and other representations of water are useful in articulating the cosmological
beliefs and values – and the concomitant practices – that compose societies’
broader relationships with the material world. Anthropologists and scholars in
related disciplines have therefore made comparative analyses of such represen-
tations to elucidate human-environmental relationships, cultural engagements
with water and the cosmological principles that these express (eg. Davis, 1986;
Drewal, 2008; Giblett, 1996; Morphy, 1991; Strang, 2002).
Similarly, earlier images of water and water beings help to illuminate peo-
ple’s historic and even prehistoric relationships with water, and their cosmo-
logical frames (Chaloupka, 1993; Layton and Ucko, 1999; Oestigaard, 2005).
This suggests that an analysis of water imagery has some potential not only to
enable cross-cultural comparison, but also to assist efforts to understand his-
torical changes in human-environmental relations. Although there is a wealth
of research concerned with changes in technology and material practices (eg.
Juuti et al. 2007) and a broad literature describing religious and social develop-
ments (eg. Boomgaard, 2007; Harrison, 1999), the articulation between these
remains somewhat elusive. This research therefore entails a systematic temporal
and spatial comparative analysis of water imagery, with a view to drawing out
important connections between cosmological and material changes in human
engagements with water and with the broader ecosystems that societies inhabit.
Thus it aims to trace the trajectories of human-environmental relationships by
examining water imagery and its transformations in conjunction with contex-
tual ethnographic, historical, archaeological and ecological data. This process
will help to define the factors that have led to very different trajectories of devel-
opment, and which continue to influence human-environmental engagements.
The major goal of the research is to highlight key transformations and turning
points that have led to divergences and to the diverse beliefs, values and prac-
tices that underlie contemporary conflicts over water.
Anuário Antropológico/2010-II, 2011: 213-242
214 Representing water

Origins
Early images of water in many cultural and geographic contexts often focused
on water beings: river gods and goddesses, dragons1 and leviathans. Emerging
from origin myths centering on the creative, generative role of water, these be-
ings possessed supernatural powers. Like the primal waters they represented,
through involvement in hydrological cycles and through the generation of water
and thus resources, they held a vital creative role in the ongoing production of
people and environments. Classic examples include Mesopotamian figures such
as Osiris; Celtic river beings; and the Australian Rainbow Serpent. Such figures
inhabited animated, sentient land and water scapes, in which spiritual forces
were seen as immanent aspects of the material world, to be engaged with and
propitiated. They were thus integral to environmental relationships in which
non-human and supernatural forces were positioned as collaborative (and some-
times more powerful) partners with human actors.
The preliminary research described here, which is part of a broader project,
suggests that in many cultural contexts a key historical transition was a shift
away from this focus on what may be called “nature religions” towards increas-
ingly humanised religious cosmologies led by human or human-like figures. In
Durkheimian terms,2 this indicates a fundamental change in human-environ-
mental relationships, as perceptions of agency shifted from a location in ‘natu-
ral’ or supernatural forces to an assumption of human or superhuman direction.
Indicative of a cosmological separation between humankind and other species,
such changes form the basis for a more dualistic vision of nature and culture
which, as various writers such have observed, has led to a distancing alienation
in human-environmental relations (Descola and Palsson, 1996; Ingold, 2000).
This, in turn, has enabled more competitive, adversarial modes of environmen-
tal engagement.
These divergent trajectories are evident in contemporary differences be-
tween those groups who have maintained notions of sentient environments
with whom they interact collaboratively, and those for whom spiritual being
has been abstracted from their immediate material surroundings and relocated
in humanised spiritual beings. Central to this research is a question about how
critical changes in water use – the introduction of irrigation and other manage-
rial technologies – intersect with these transformations in religious and secu-
lar ideas. Earlier research hinted at some important conjunctions between such
transformative events, and suggested a useful “triangle” of foci of investigation,
examining the relationships between cosmological ideas, material engagements
with water, and representations of water and water beings. A fuller analysis of
 Veronica Strang 215

these key areas will test the hypothesis that a disembedding of spiritual beliefs
from local material environments is linked with more directive – and increas-
ingly exploitative – material practices and forms of resource use. This hypoth-
esis implies a critical shift in a perceived balance of power, from relationships
between societies and sentient co-directive environments, to relationships in
which spiritual agency is humanised and human agency becomes dominant.
Diverse environmental relationships, and thus conflicts over resource use
and management, are common in post-colonial societies, where indigenous peo-
ples and their traditional belief systems have been engulfed by larger settler so-
cieties whose visions of the world have taken a more environmentally directive
turn. In both Australia and New Zealand, for example, indigenous groups are
now engaged in struggles to uphold their own cosmological concepts and values
in societies that have adopted a much more managerial and utilitarian approach
to the material environment. But the roots of such conflicts lie in the past.

Tracing the Past

Using water imagery to trace changes in environmental relations, and thus
to illuminate past worlds, raises a number of theoretical and methodological
challenges. The methods central to visual anthropology, which are so useful in
deconstructing the relationships between people and environments, rely heavily
on understanding the specific ethnographic context in which images and objects
(as well as performative media) are produced and used. The analytic process of
deconstructing textual and other discursive forms is equally reliant upon con-
text: like images, these are ‘embedded and continually emergent phenomena’
(Barber, 2012: in press). Both visual and non-visual representational processes
are ‘communicative acts’ which are dynamically co-produced between artists,
speakers, performers and their audiences (Gal, 2012: in press).
A theoretical approach recognising this dynamism is illustrated, for exam-
ple, by Morphy’s analysis of Aboriginal art in Australia (2010), which makes it
clear that art production is not merely concerned with making ‘pretty pictures’,
but is primarily a form of social action directed towards political goals and the
protection of indigenous lifeways. Once produced, such images also have their
own “life story”, acquiring new meanings and purposes as they move through
different spatio-temporal contexts (Appadurai, 1986). Thus, as I have noted
elsewhere, traditional images of water beings, once created primarily for the
internal intergenerational transmission of knowledge, now have broader uses, as
educational media that promote indigenous interests in contemporary political
arena (Strang, 2010).
216 Representing water

While maintaining an anthropological aim to contextualise representations

as fully as possible, the temporal depth necessitates a more interdisciplinary
methodology. It therefore also draws upon the analytic approaches of archaeol-
ogy, art history, environmental history and religious history. As noted above,
there are three key foci for the investigation. First, by focusing primarily on
visual images of water, it adopts deconstructive methods from visual anthropol-
ogy and art history to consider the form of these images and their transforma-
tions over time. Where non-visual imagery – ie. related documentary evidence
– is available, the same principles are applied to ask “how does this describe wa-
ter and human relationships with it; how do these descriptions alter over time;
what is their particular life story?” Second, it considers the broader cosmologi-
cal beliefs and values particular to that temporal and spatial context. Third, the
research juxtaposes these analyses with temporally concurrent evidence relating
to societies’ material engagements with water. There is a wealth of archaeologi-
cal and historical research on water use practices, such as the development of ir-
rigation schemes, canals and so forth, which can assist this process (eg. Christie,
2007; Tvedt and Jacobsson, 2006).
By examining particular societal trajectories comparatively, the analysis
seeks to reveal recurrent patterns of change and transformation. This compara-
tive approach is essential to the project: there are some limitations as to how
much context can be gleaned from historical material, particularly in trying to
track changes over very long periods of time. Evidence is patchy and there are
inevitably large gaps. Comparison provides further “triangulation” to the mate-
rial, thus building a more robust analytic process.
The trajectories of human societies and their representational images are
both temporally and spatially dynamic. Populations have shifted across geo-
graphic territories in steady trickles and sometimes in great waves of migration.
Ideas and images have moved and changed with them, and sometimes without
them, carried by travellers, traders, émigrés and missionaries into new contexts.
Thus images of water now widely separated in location may share some common
geographic and cultural origins. It is clear that ideas and images from the ancient
world flowed in a number of different directions, and the way these developed
in different temporal and spatial environments is telling. How, for example, did
Mesopotamian ideas about creative water beings (Nommos) become the Mami
Wata cult across Africa? What happened as these ideas crossed Asia? Why is
there apparently such strong continuity in Aboriginal Australian images of the
Rainbow Serpent? And what happened to ideas about Maori taniwhas as they
sailed across the Pacific? To some extent, human-environmental relationships
 Veronica Strang 217

and the cosmological ideas that support them may be seen as the outcome of a
process in which people, scattering around the globe from their original clus-
ters, took with them understandings of the world that, like “Chinese whispers”,
became transformed as they travelled through different times and places. Yet,
even with multiple adaptations, they may retain vestigial links with common
sources. Charting the movements of populations and ideas is therefore an im-
portant element of my project.
There are other potential commonalities. Anthropologists have written ex-
tensively about how humans use the material objects and processes of the world
“to think with”. Thus Levi-Strauss observed that animals are “good to think” be-
cause they provide metaphorical imagery for a host of characteristics and behav-
iours applicable to humans (1966). Rival and others have described how differ-
ent societies “think with” trees to imagine concepts such as growth and kinship
(1998). Lakoff and Johnston have considered how the material world provides
the basis for a plethora of metaphors (1980), and Bourdieu has pointed to human
cognitive tendencies to form “scheme transfers” that transpose one conceptual
frame to another (1977). In my own work, I have considered how the particu-
lar characteristics of water and hydrological processes are used ubiquitously to
imagine concepts of flow, movement, connection and creativity, observing that
this cognitive employment of water’s material qualities has persisted over time
as well as space (Strang, 2004b, 2005). In examining water imagery and water
beings, therefore, it is useful to extend this thinking to consider how these em-
body both the material characteristics of water and hydrology, and the imagina-
tive concepts that these facilitate.
This ‘material logic’ is evident in the characteristics of the beings seen to
personify water. Many take the form of serpents which, as well as tending to
disappear underground or into water bodies like streams of water, share the
serpentine movements and shimmering colours of such streams, and their ca-
pacity for transformation into different forms. Some, like dragons and Rainbow
Serpents, are also expressive of the abilities of water to rise into and descend
from the skies; some, like leviathans and sea monsters, are more located in
and expressive of the powerful undercurrents of rivers and seas. Like other
supernatural creatures, water beings are often composites, and many contain
the characteristics of local aquatic fauna: eels, crocodiles, and so forth. For ex-
ample, Tacon et al (1996) suggest that the earliest Rainbow Serpent images in
Australia are based on a ribboned pipefish Haliichthys Taeniophora found on the
northern coastline of the continent.
218 Representing water

Fig. 1: Pipefish, from Tacon et al 1996

The commonalities that recur in the form of water beings and the ideas they
express can therefore be supposed to have a dual basis: in the spatio-temporal
transmission of ideas and practices, and in the common material characteristics
of water, water-like creatures, and local aquatic fauna, and the use of these as an
imaginative resource.
The widespread historical presence of water beings and the consistency of
their forms provides a wide range of potential lines of inquiry, to the extent
that one could begin almost anywhere. A logical way forward is to consider
a geographically and cultural diverse “sample” of locations, seeking out those
which have the fullest historical records available. Preliminary research sug-
gests that usefully comparative historical and pre-historical representational
“threads” can be picked up in India, Latin-America, Africa, Canada, Japan, the
UK, Scandinavia, Australia and New Zealand, There is no space here to embark
upon a wide range of examples, but taking these last two cases, it is possible to
draw out a couple of usefully illustrative strands.

Tracking the Rainbow Serpent

Aboriginal people comprise about 2.5 percent of the Australian population.
They are believed to have “beachcombed” and possibly boated their way to
Australia along the coast of the Indian subcontinent and Indonesia, first cross-
ing the (then much narrower)3 Torres Straits from Timor around 65,000 years
ago, possibly in several waves of migration (Oppenheimer, 2003). Some of
their earliest surviving images, for example the Gwion Gwion (Bradshaw) rock
art paintings in the northern Kimberleys, are dated as being at least 17,000
years old, and depict people in boats, as well as offering pictures of deer, which
have never been part of Australia’s fauna.
 Veronica Strang 219

Like the groups that remained in Africa at that time, and the societies that
settled en route, Aboriginal Australians were hunter-gatherers, making use of di-
verse local resources and living in small and widely scattered groups that moved
systematically around their clan estates in seasonal patterns. Their environmen-
tal management was subtle, relying primarily on regular burning (to clear away
snake-infested scrub and encourage “green pick” for game) and minor and rapidly
biodegradable technologies such as small fish traps and weirs. The effects of “fire-
stick management” have been much debated, but over many millennia it doubtless
led to some alteration in the Australian landscape, favouring some plant and ani-
mal species over others, and possibly (along with hunting) leading the demise of
some of these. But in migrating to an ecologically very fragile continent, it seems
that Aboriginal population control and careful resource use enabled long-term
sustainability, as well as a luxury of time in which to develop a highly sophisticated
system of religious beliefs and practices which played a central role in managing
this fine-tuned interaction between people and resources.
Through paintings of rituals and a range of natural and supernatural beings,
early Aboriginal art works suggest that their cosmology constituted a classic “na-
ture religion”. The earliest recorded rock art depicting Rainbow Serpents has been
dated at approximately 6000 years ago (Chaloupka, 1993). As noted above, Tacon
et al (1996) argue that this is modelled upon a local pipefish species. A plethora of
such images then appeared across Australia, often incorporating elements of local
fauna, but remaining fundamentally serpent-like.
The majority of the renditions of this figure are very serpentine in their form,
expressing the formal qualities described previously and echoing the movements
and characteristics of water. The recurrence of Rainbow Serpent beings in vari-
ous forms in many parts of Australia, articulates core creative processes within
Aboriginal cosmology:

The belief in the Rainbow Snake, a personification of fertility, increase (richness

in propagation of plants and animals) and rain, is common throughout Australia.
It is a creator of human beings, having life-giving powers that send conception
spirits to all the waterholes. It is responsible for regenerating rains, and also
for storms and floods when it acts as an agent of punishment against those who
transgress the law or upset it in any way. It swallows people in great floods and
regurgitates their bones, which turn into stone, thus documenting such events.
Rainbow snakes can also enter a man and endow him with magical powers, or
leave ‘little rainbows’, their progeny, within his body which will make him ail
and die. As the regenerative and reproductive power in nature and human be-
ings, it is the main character in the region’s major rituals (Chaloupka, 1993:47).
220 Representing water

Fig. 2: Arnhem Land bark painting, showing Fig. 3: Rainbow Serpent bark painting by Jimmy
Rainbow Serpent with ancestral beings inside. Njiminjuma in Tacon et al 1996
Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford

As this quote implies, there are multiple “Rainbow Story Places” all over
Australia, containing serpents of various kinds. These can be female or male,
and are often apparently androgynous. Not only does their dual gender under-
line their role as equal life creators, it also contrasts with more dualistic visions
in which “nature” is envisaged as female.

Fig. 4: Arnhem Land painting of the daughter of the

original female Rainbow Serpent,Yingarna. Artist Bar-
dyal Nadjamerrek. Aboriginal Art Online
 Veronica Strang 221

The Rainbow Serpent (or Rainbow as it is sometimes called) is not mere-

ly expressive of water, it may be said to be composed of water, representing
aquatic flows through the environment (Strang, 2002, 2009a. See also Barber,
2005; Morphy and Morphy, 2006). Thus in Cape York, indigenous elders ex-
plain that the visible semi-circle of the rainbow, which arches over the land, is
linked with its invisible “other” half, which inhabits the underground domain
of the ancestral forces. Like water – as water – these forces creatively generate
everything that is materialised and “becomes visible” in life and which, at death,
returns to this immanent pool to be hydrologically recycled.In the Dreamtime,
the Serpent generated the totemic species, usually animals and birds,4 who be-
came the ancestors of subsequent human clans. It carved out rivers, pushed up
hills, and created whole species of plants and animals before pouring back into
the ground, where it remained, emanating power that even now has to be ap-
proached with care. Thus the most dangerous sacred sites (or poison places as
they are called in northern Queensland) are those of Rainbow Serpent beings.

Fig. 5: Rock art serpents in Mungana Caves, north Queensland

In an oral culture these are contemporary or recent explanations of course,

but the rock art and other archaeological evidence indicates considerable long-
term stability in ideas and practices. That is not to say that Aboriginal ideas and
lifeways have remained unchanged since the first migrants made their way across
222 Representing water

the Straits: merely that these seem to have been intensely conservative. This is
borne out by descriptions of cosmological principles in which human beings,
emerging spiritually from ancestral water sources, are exhorted to relive the
lives of their totemic ancestors, learning their lexicon of bush lore, practising
their rituals, and making use of local resources according to the blueprint pro-
vided by the ancestral stories, songs and images through which these ideas are
transmitted intergenerationally. Within this mode of engagement, the ances-
tral beings, and the Rainbow Serpent in particular, define who belongs where,
who has what rights, who can access resources, when and how. The Rainbow
Serpent acts as a protective being, enforcing the Law if necessary. Thus there
are multiple parables about how those who transgress (for example by entering
places or taking resources without permission) will be swallowed by an angry
Rainbow Serpent.
Thus one of the key things to be generated by the Serpent is knowledge and
power. For example, ethnographies of Cape York describe a traditional ritual
that entails being swallowed by the Rainbow Serpent. Unsurprisingly this cen-
tres upon immersion in water. In the swallowing and regurgitation process the
initiate is given secret, sacred knowledge that opens the door to becoming a
shaman or “clever doctor” (Taylor, 1984). Along with this ritual, traditionally
undertaken only by a few people, all members of a community undergo various
stages of initiation into the deeper sacred knowledge that lies at the heart of the
Law. Provided at various stages of life, this gives elders the highly egalitarian
gerontocratic power that constitutes Aboriginal forms of governance. It is the
collective responsibility of the elders to ensure that such knowledge is passed
on. In this sense, the regenerative powers of the Rainbow Serpent, and the cir-
cularity of the hydrological cycle, provide a perfect metaphor for the way that
cosmologies and cultural heritage are perpetuated over time (Strang, 2011).
This reliable intergenerational process was obviously much disrupted by the
arrival of European settlers in the late 1700s. There was an intensely traumatic
period of violence in which indigenous populations were both decimated and
dispossessed of their land, then dragooned into providing unpaid labour for co-
lonial economic endeavours. There was no Treaty acknowledging their rights,
as occurred in New Zealand; nor did they live in large and powerful tribal
groups, being scattered widely and vulnerably in small clans. Missionaries went
to considerable lengths to separate young people from the elders responsible for
holding and transmitting traditional knowledge, and forbade the enactment of
indigenous rituals.
 Veronica Strang 223

With the settlers came a combination of Christian ideas of dominion and

stewardship over “nature”, and a secular, pragmatically managerial view of the
material environment. The long struggle for Aboriginal rights in Australia,
which began with resistance to the colonial invasion, was followed by a long
period of subjugation. Indigenous communities, pushed into enforced labour or
missionisation, often led “double lives” in which traditional beliefs and practices
were quietly maintained. Rather than replacing local belief systems, Christianity
was overlaid like a larger umbrella over these. Traditional beliefs were already
“underground” in a way, and could quite readily be rendered invisible to colonial
eyes, at least until the ancestral landscape was more directly threatened.
But early European settlement in many areas was also driven by a desire for
gold, and this aggressive invasion, not just of the land, but into the ancestral
domain itself, was agonising to the indigenous population. For much of the co-
lonial period their protests went unheard, but following the civil rights move-
ment in Australia in the 1960s, which gave voice to indigenous concerns, there
were many anguished protests about rapidly increasing mining activities and
the dangers of penetrating the domain of the Rainbow Serpent. Indigenous pro-
testers argued that such intrusion could kill generative ancestral beings (Kolig,
1987; Merlan, 1998; Strang, 2004a); it could threaten the health of their re-
lated human clans; and it could undermine the capacity of the land to provide
resources for people and other species. It might even rile the Rainbow Serpent
to the extent that it would emerge apocalyptically: “If the rocks of the mountain
are disturbed the giant snake will emerge and destroy everyone in the world”
(Lea and Zehner, The Australian Financial Review, 16 July, 1973). In indigenous
terms, as this apocalyptic vision demonstrates, because the Rainbow Serpent
“holds” and embodies the Law that constitutes Aboriginal society, the idea of its
destruction is indeed “the end of the world”. The Serpent and the hydrological
cycles it represents are essential to the proper flow of events. Thus, in more
recent years, proposals to dam waterways have elicited similar concerns, with
activists protesting that such impediments to the movement of water will have
dire effects (Strang, 2009b).
In the context of these protests, visual, textual and performative images of
the Rainbow Serpent acquired multiple uses. They retained their traditional
purpose in encapsulating the key elements of Aboriginal cosmology, describing
a human-environmental relationship in which a material environment, imbued
with sentient ancestral forces, worked in partnership with the human groups
whose spiritual and social identity arose from and remained connected to the
water circulating in and out of the land. But rising concerns about mining, as
224 Representing water

well as the land rights movement which gathered force in the 1970s, necessitated
the outward explanation of Aboriginal culture. Images of the Rainbow Serpent
therefore became integral to an educational process via which indigenous people
hoped to communicate an understanding of their world to the wider Australian
society. This, they believed, would engender greater respect for their beliefs and
values and assist their claims for the restitution of lost lands.
This communicative effort has had some real effect, enabling sufficient un-
derstanding of how ancestral beings constitute relations between people and
places to provide the basis for the Native Title Act in 1993. This – after 200
years of denial – acknowledged that indigenous Australians had indeed had a
system of land ownership prior to European settlement, and (building on earlier
legal efforts)5 attempted to enshrine key indigenous principles in contemporary
legal forms. This opened the door to a land claim process which, though it cre-
ated an intense conservative backlash, has gone some way towards the restora-
tion of rights to indigenous communities. Thus the Rainbow Serpent is not only
used to speak for indigenous interests, it continues, in a contemporary setting,
to play a key role in the creative regeneration of their lifeways.
Indigenous people in Australia now have what Altman calls a “hybrid” econ-
omy (2006), based on the maintenance of some traditional economic practices
along with income from welfare and other forms of employment. But many
communities, and particularly those who have retained or regained their tradi-
tional “country”,6 continue to promote beliefs and values that express key ele-
ments of a longstanding egalitarian human-environmental partnership. That is
not to say they haven’t learned (as they put it) to “talk the talk” of mainstream,
much more human-centred approaches to environmental management: they
have done so very effectively. For example, in the Mitchell River area of Cape
York in the early 1990s, the indigenous community of Kowanyama initiated one
of the first river catchment management groups in Australia. The same commu-
nity has astutely reformed the traditional role of young “warriors” in protect-
ing clan land to create “Aboriginal Rangers”, making use of the language and
authority of park rangers in a way that succeeded in protecting a whole range
of indigenous interests (Strang, 1998, 2001). Rather than merely controlling
tourist activities, these Rangers protect local resources, tracking down illegal
fishers and ensuring that sacred sites are protected. They look after small groups
relocating to “homelands”, as well as the broader interests of the community.
They also provide a useful interface with other land and water managers in the
area, and are central to the community’s efforts to regain ownership or at least
some control of land and water appropriated in the colonial era.
 Veronica Strang 225

While there have been some efforts to promote the idea of bi-cultural gov-
ernance in Australia, the small Aboriginal population, for the most part, retains
aims that sit outside rather than in partnership with those of state and national
governments. In a variety of ways, indigenous people continue to resist the impo-
sition of governance, creating, in their own communities, what Scott describes as
areas of Zomia which in subtle ways try to evade state and federal control (2009).
Their aspirations are to maintain their own trajectory of development, and to
support lifeways that adhere to their own beliefs and values. In this context it
could be said that the Rainbow Serpent continues to maintain a powerful pres-
ence, resisting mainstream flows and regenerating a subaltern cosmos.

Fig. 6: Rainbow Serpent on water tank in Kowanyama, north Queensland

Across the Tasman

Maori people constitute about 16 percent of the New Zealand/Aotearoa pop-
ulation. Mitochondrial DNA evidence indicates that their ancestors came from
south-east Asia, via Taiwan, island southeast Asia and the southwest Pacific
(Chambers, 2008; Whyte et al. 2005). Evidence provided by Lapita pottery
locates them in the Bismarck Archipelago, east of New Guinea, about 3,500
years ago, and it appears this population expanded eastwards from there, with
their East Polynesian descendents possibly travelling as far as South America.
They left a trail of Lapita materials through Melanesia, New Caledonia and
into Fiji, Tonga and Samoa where, in the first millennium BC, they established
226 Representing water

what is now recognised as Polynesian culture (Sheppard et al. 2009). There is

further contention as to exactly when and how this population came to New
Zealand: longstanding stories of a single “Great Fleet” arriving in about 1350
have been questioned by suggestions of several waves of migration from Tahiti
and the Marquesa Islands about 1000 years ago and by recent evidence that vari-
ous groups made their way from the Cook and Society Island region (Howe,
2006).7 The idea of a Great Fleet is central to Maori traditions though, describ-
ing the arrival of a number of canoes (wakas) from a mythical place of origin
called Hawaiiki, whose particular crews provided the basis for subsequent tribal
groups.
These groups settled first around the more temperate eastern coasts of New
Zealand/Aotearoa, making a living through a mix of hunting and gathering and
crop cultivation, the proportion of each depending on local conditions. The
hunting resulted in the extinction of some of some species, most notably the
various types of Moa, a massive, flightless bird whose meat, bones and feathers
were much in demand.8 Some large areas of forest were burned too, to clear
land for horticulture, and this had impacts on a number of species; but, overall,
Maori economic activities remained fairly low key and thus sustainable.
However, cultivation was a meaningful part of the Maori economy, and dis-
tinguished the Polynesian migrants from the hunter-gatherers across the Tasman
in several key ways. It both required and enabled a greater degree of settlement
and larger clusters of people, which encouraged the development of a more hier-
archical set of social arrangements. Compared to Aboriginal Australians’ more
subtle managerial activities, it involved somewhat more directive environmental
engagement. As well as some land clearing and levelling, cultivation meant fenc-
es,9 agricultural tools, planting and harvesting. The Maori settlers had brought
with them a variety of plants, including sweet potatoes, taro, gourds and yams,
and (with what must have been careful planning) less readily portable plants,
such as mulberry trees. Though there is no evidence that they brought rice, Best
suggests that they retained linguistic terms for it (ari and vari) (1941: 355), pre-
sumably from earlier use of this crop in South-east Asia. Rice had been brought
to that region in the late Neolithic period by Austronesian speaking peoples,
and it is there that archaeologists have found the first evidence of rice cultiva-
tion (Christie, 2007). In fact, South-east Asia was the home of some of the
world’s earliest irrigation schemes. Swamps and wetlands were modified for
taro production both there and in the New Guinea highlands at around 7000
BCE (Ibid.). The forebears of the Maori were thus part of one of the first human
ventures into more directive forms of engagement with water.
 Veronica Strang 227

Having arrived in New Zealand with an orientation towards cultivation,

Maori groups had some practices in common with the European settlers who
followed only a few hundred years later. Though the latter were farmers rather
than shifting cultivators, and their technologies were more diverse than those
of the Maori, their production was initially small in scale and focused heavily
on subsistence-level provision of food for a small community of settlers. Thus,
at least at the beginning, their economic practices didn’t differ massively from
those of the indigenous population. Obviously this changed as cattle and sheep
were imported from Europe in larger numbers and farming began to intensify.
The rapid forest clearance caused by a hungry timber trade also presented radi-
cally different ways of using resources. But, at least at the outset, there was some
common ground in the respective economic modes of both communities, which
may have made it more feasible for their developmental trajectories to converge.
Unfortunately, common ground was also a problem: as European settle-
ment expanded, competition for land grew fiercer, leading to violent conflicts
over territory. But compared to events in Australia this colonial conflict was
much more equal in force. Though European technologies allowed the later
colonists to prevail and to subjugate the Maori people to some extent, they also
had to negotiate and make agreements with them, based in part on the Treaty
of Waitangi, signed in 1840 in an effort to bring the violent conflicts to an
end. The meanings and translation of this treaty remain much contested but,
whatever its limitations, it opened a potential path to bi-cultural governance be-
tween the Maori and the European settlers, and led events towards the potential
co-ownership and management of resources. It has consequently been possible
for Maori groups to participate in social, political and economic practices at a
national level. Though rural communities still struggle economically and educa-
tionally, there is now a large Maori middle class which participates fully in these
processes, taking the lead in multiple negotiations about land, water and re-
sources. This engagement seems to have had a considerable effect on indigenous
relationships with the material environment, and these effects are discernible in
changing cosmological ideas, discourses and representations.
The traditional cosmology contextualising and directing Maori lifeways was
reflective of the mixed economy brought by waka from the Pacific. It describes
both non-human and human agency. Water is portrayed as a primal source of
power and creativity, and origin myths describe a water god called Tangaroa
forming the world out of an era of creative chaos (te kore).There were other
major gods, both male and female, representing the various aspects of the en-
vironment. And there were also human – or rather superhuman – figures in
228 Representing water

this creative era: ancestors who journeyed, hunted, fished and so forth. For
example, New Zealand itself was pulled up out of the water by Maui, a major
creative figure.

Fig. 7: House post (epa) in Taranaki, 1919. The figure at the top is a marakihau, or sea
taniwha. Carving by Te Tuiti-Moeroa. Puke Ariki - Taranaki Museum & Library

As well as comprising a key element in origin myths, water contained other

supernatural beings, water serpents such as taniwha and marakihau (sea taniwha).
In the creative era, it formed vital connections between people. Muru-Lanning
describes, for example, how ancestral beings created the rivers of the Waikato
region, establishing critical social and spiritual connections between the iwis
(tribal communities) along their banks (2010).
The generative era also produced a world imbued with a sentient ancestral
force, mauri, which, like the ancestral forces across the Tasman, remains im-
manent in all aspects of the material environment. Water’s powerful mauri is
indicated by a belief that the human spirit returns to water upon death: each
must journey to the very tip of New Zealand, where the Pacific and Tasman seas
 Veronica Strang 229

meet, to slide down a pohutakawa tree root into an aquatic spiritual realm. The
material environment is also regarded as being inhabited by a variety of spiritual
beings, including the kaitiaki: guardian spirits whose role is to protect sacred
places. The serpentine taniwha is one of these guardians, a water being whose
powerful nature is indicated by the fact that this word can also be translated as
‘chief”. Thus a tribal saying (pepeha) about the Waikato River, “He piko he tani-
wha, he piko he taniwha, Waikato taniwharau”, is translated as “At every bend a tani-
wha or chief, at every bend a taniwha or chief, the Waikato River of one hundred
taniwha (chiefs)” (Muru-Lanning 2010:116).

Fig. 8: Taniwhaon the Main Gates at TurangawaewaeMarae in Ngaruawahia. Photo:

MaramaMuru-Lanning

Images of taniwha appear recurrently in Maori artworks, most particularly

in the traditional carvings that decorate meeting houses (marae) and other key
places. There is evidence of earlier usages, for example in the rock paintings in a
cave shelter beside the Ōpihi River in South Canterbury.The form of the taniwha
varies, but these are all variations on a theme: it remains a classic water be-
ing, sinuously combining elements of serpent and dragon, and sometimes other
aquatic species. It may be plumed or feathered, but it is indubitably a water crea-
ture, with shimmering and sometimes multi-coloured scales, and a long, snake
or eel-like tail which sometimes ends in a fishtail.
Its powers come into play when the sites of which it is a guardian are threat-
ened. A taniwha called Tuhirangi was said to have accompanied a mythical
230 Representing water

explorer, Kupe, in his voyage to New Zealand, and to have been placed by him
as a guardian in the Cook Strait. In the period since European colonisation,
taniwhas have often been called upon to express resistance to the damming or
diversion of waterways. Echoing indigenous protests across the Tasman, Maori
activists have articulated concerns that such interference with water and its mau-
ri runs contrary to the principles of order underpinning their traditional beliefs,
impeding the proper movements of human and environmental processes.
In many ways, the notion of mauri, like descriptions of the Australian
Rainbow Serpent’s creative and retributive powers, provides a clear assertion of
the agency located in water, as does the presence of taniwha who may be inter-
preted as a concentrated, personified manifestation of ancestral forces. To this
extent, it is clear that like Australian Aboriginal belief systems, Maori cosmol-
ogy locates considerable agency in non-human things, and promotes values of
reciprocal care between people and their material surroundings. But there has
also been some apparent divergence in the trajectories of each group, most par-
ticularly in recent years.

Becoming Human
The Australian Rainbow Serpent is depicted as a non-human creative figure
which is only “ancestral” to the extent that it generates human spirit beings
(usually spewing them into the world). It also generates all of the other totemic
ancestral beings, the animals and birds, whose creative journeys across the land-
scape combine accounts of the physical and behavioural characteristics of those
species with more human kinds of events and practices. These beings are often
transformed from animal to human form, or vice versa. Such transformations can
also occur in Maori mythology. For example, Orbell recounts a myth from the
Waikato region which describes how an ancestral chief, Tuheitia, was drowned
by a jealous brother-in-law and became a taniwha who has since reappeared to
the local iwi to warn them of impending danger (1995:224).
However, the taniwha comes from a somewhat more humanised religious
tradition, and unlike the rainbow serpent it is often depicted with a human
face (usually decorated with traditional tattoos (moko). In the Waikato region,
the language describing the river as a “river ancestor”, Tupuna Awa, also im-
plies human characteristics, locating this ancestry alongside customary genealo-
gies, which describe in detail each family’s long lines of connection back to the
original waka of the Great Fleet. Thus not just rivers, but also mountains, and
other features of the local environment, are placed within a single genealogical
system. This incorporation is clear in evidence presented to the Environment
 Veronica Strang 231

Court in an earlier dispute over the Waikato river:

This genealogical relationship is one of the foundations upon which the Maori
culture is based. It is known as “whanaungatanga”. Whanaungatanga in its broad-
est context could be defined as the interrelationship of Maori with their ances-
tors, their whanau, hapu, and iwi as well as the natural resources within their
tribunal boundaries e.g. mountains, rivers, stream, forests etc (Ngati Rangi
and Ors decision, 2004:28, in Muru-Lanning, 2010:56).

The inclusion of aspects of the material world into this single genealogy is
indicative of some sense of shared human-environmental agency, but it involves
an incorporation of non-human things into a human system, rather than – as in
Australian indigenous cosmological ideas – the incorporation of human groups
into a totemic system defined by non-human figures. Though they sometimes
take the form of animals and birds, key Maori ancestral beings are most often
human or semi-human. And the way of life described in their ancestral stories
places greater direction and power over the material world in human hands.
As well as being more inclined to give the balance of agency to humans,
traditional Maori cosmology has been greatly influenced by Christianisation.
Missionary efforts in the Pacific were either more forceful or persuasive than
in Australia. Possibly Christianity simply meshed more readily with the Maori
cosmos, with its greater emphasis on humanised religious figures and its rela-
tively steep hierarchies which already contained notions of higher ranking gods
and even a supreme being (Io). At any rate, Christian evangelism achieved a
much more integrated, tighter hold on people’s lives, being fully and enthusiasti-
cally adopted in many Pacific communities, including those who came to New
Zealand.
As I have observed elsewhere (Strang, 1997), though there are vestiges of
previous, more nature-oriented belief systems in the early parts of the Bible,
Christianity places the agency in human-environmental relationships squarely
in the hands of a humanised and male God, framing the material environment,
including water, as subject to and an expression of His will. Thus God sends the
rain to fertilise the earth and feed the world – or sends floods to punish unruly
human societies when they transgress. In Biblical mythology, paganism, in the
form of the serpent, is invariably slain by male culture heroes. The relevance of
this assertion of human authority over water beings is well expressed by Maori
interpretations of the figure of St George and the Dragon, an image which ap-
peared on the gold sovereigns brought to New Zealand by British settlers:
232 Representing water

In Te Ao Hou in March 1959, Leo Fowler, born in 1902, described a story told
to him about how the dragon slain by St George on the sovereign represented
a taniwha: “Personally, I have never seen a taniwha, nor I expect have readers. I
have met some who told me they had seen one, and they were people I had ev-
ery reason to respect and to believe. My old friend Nepia Pomare, (a Ngapuhi
and my Maori godfather) once told me that the taniwha on our gold sovereigns
was not unlike a taniwha he had once seen. This taniwha, whose name he
could not utter, (so tapu was it) had a body very like that of the taniwha on the
sovereign, but the wings were only partly formed and the head was the head of
a manaia [stylised carving of a supernatural being]” (Basil Keane. ‘Taniwha’,
Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 1-Mar-09URL: http://
www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/taniwha/7/3).

Fig. 9: The British gold sovereign. (Basil Keane. ‘Taniwha’, Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New
Zealand, updated 1-Mar-09 URL: http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/taniwha/7/3)

Fig. 10: Tāmure defeating the taniwha. Artwork by Manu Smith (in Bacon 1996:12)
 Veronica Strang 233

There is a Maori myth which echoes this subjugation of a powerful water

being. It describes how a hero called Tāmure wrestled with a man-eating sea
taniwha that lived in an underwater cave at Piha (a beach just west of Auckland,
where rip tides regularly drown swimmers). He hit it with his greenstone weap-
on (mere pounamu) which had the power to overcome any taniwha, injuring it so
that it no longer ate people (Bacon, 1996). Such epic battles are common in
Maori myths, valorising human dominance over other species or the elements,
and, like the St George legend, presenting an image of powerful masculine cul-
ture triumphing over “the other”.
However, St George and Tāmure are the least of the threats to the survival
of water serpent beings. Growing out of Judao-Christian moves to valorise ra-
tionality, science has overtaken St George and the other dragon slayers in kill-
ing off mythological water beings and establishing the dominance of male “cul-
ture” over (increasingly) female “nature”. Though vestigial ideas about energies
and consciousness persist, a rationalist perspective has also had a dampening
effect on ideas about sentience and agency in land and waterscapes. Most con-
temporary water management deals with the material environment in secular
Cartesian terms, adopting a techno-managerial mode of engagement which is
more concerned with measurement than with meaning. The influence of this
scientific worldview, along with the embracing of Christianity, have given rise
to some changes in Maori relations with water, and this is reflected in some
striking differences between the images of water beings produced in the first
half of the 20th century, and contemporary art works, which are more clearly
humanised, suggesting a further shift in the location of agency.

Fig. 11: Marakihau in the meeting-house called Poho-o-Rawiri at Gisborne. Carved

by the late Tama te Kapua Raihi (Journal of the Polynesian Society, 1957: 3)
234 Representing water

Fig. 12: Contemporary Marakihau by Lisa Reihana, Museum of

New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

Though taniwha are still called upon regularly in New Zealand to attest
to the subaltern belief system subsumed by Christianisation, unlike Rainbow
Serpents, they do not propose a wholly “other” way of engaging with land and
water, in which agency is shared equally between humans and non-humans. The
image of the taniwha is employed, instead, to support the authority of human
groups. In recent years this difference has become more pronounced. Muru-
Lanning observes that powerful contemporary leaders can be represented (or
represent themselves) as taniwha:

The symbolism of taniwha, chiefs, kaitiaki and guardians are also manipulated
by core members of the Kingitanga to denote Waikato iwi and the Kingitanga’s
authority in relation to the river. Indeed, many people perceived Robert
Mahuta as a great taniwha when he was alive as he was not only a well known
chief but also a self-professed kaitiaki of the river (2010:116).

Writing about contemporary negotiations over the control and management

of the Waikato River, she notes that there has been a key discursive shift in the
terminology used to describe the ancestral role of the river:
 Veronica Strang 235

Tupuna Awa defined the Waikato River as an important tribal ancestor. In

contrast, Waikato-Tainui’s river negotiators and Crown officials subsequently
embraced the idiom of Te Awa Tupuna, translated as “ancestral river”, which re-
defines Waikato Maori understandings of the river. This discourse emphasises
iwi identity, iwi partnerships with the Crown and a vision of co-managing the
Waikato River (2010:ii).

This shift towards a more managerial mode of engagement is also illustrat-

ed by the replacement of the phrase “Guardians of the Waikato River”, agreed
as the descriptor for a joint management agreement between the Crown and
Waikato-Tainui Maori in 2008, with “Waikato River Authority”, which is quite
literally more authoritative in its reframing of the relationship between people
and water (Muru-Lanning, 2010:11).
It appears, therefore, that Maori groups are not just “talking the talk” in re-
lation to introduced notions of environmental management, they are also “walk-
ing the walk”, by integrating its precepts into their own activities. Their politi-
cal efforts to regain ownership or control over land and water are aimed not at
a separate Zomia in which their own subaltern traditions are revived and upheld,
but towards the achievement of equal bi-cultural management of the country’s
resources. Building on the initial Treaty of Waitangi (1840), they have been
successful in ensuring that this role has been legally recognised, for example in
the Resource Management Act (1991) which includes various provisions for the
consultation and inclusion of Maori in decision-making processes.

Conclusion
It appears that the worldviews of indigenous communities in both New
Zealand and Australia have been considerably influenced by the introduction
of European ideas and practices in the period since colonisation. These influ-
ences are apparent not only in their representations of water beings, but also in
their use of these in legal and political arena to promote indigenous aims and
interests. However, it is also clear that, although their cosmologies have some
important common elements, there has been a much lengthier divergence in the
trajectories of their particular human-environmental relationships. Aboriginal
Australians have maintained an intensely conservative belief system, which has
proved highly resistant to change, even in the most traumatic of colonial cir-
cumstances. The underlying precepts of this system, which comprise a true “na-
ture religion” in giving significant agency to non-human species and things, con-
tinue to guide their lifeways. Thus, though willing to “talk the talk” sufficiently
236 Representing water

to co-manage resources and have a voice in the decision-making processes of a

wider Australian society, they are unwilling to discard the close, affective and
egalitarian relationships with places that provide core meanings in their lives.
Maori groups in New Zealand arrived on its shores with a religious cos-
mology that, although it gave considerable agency to non-human species and
things, was more hierarchical in its form, had already incorporated more di-
rective modes of environmental engagement, and was more inclined to place
the balance of power in human and particularly in male hands. This worldview
resonated more readily with the ideas introduced by Christian missionaries and
colonists, providing sufficient common ground to form the basis of a potential
co-managerial approach. It may therefore be seen that, rather than seeking to
diverge radically, the trajectory of Maori human-environmental relations has
run in a direction that, if not quite parallel, has shifted increasingly to run in ac-
cord with that of the European settler society in New Zealand, albeit with some
intention of pulling the latter towards its own aims.
As these case studies illustrate, a comparative examination of changing ideas
and representations of water over time in two indigenous communities provides
some insights into the parallels and divergences in the trajectories of their re-
spective human-environmental relationships. It illuminates the ways that they
balance power and agency in these interactions, with concomitant effects on the
human and non-human participants.

Recebido em 08/06/2011
Aprovado em 15/06/2011

Veronica Strang is an environmental anthropologist and Executive Director of the

Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University. Her research focuses on human-en-
vironmental relations, and in particular on people’s relationships with water. She is the
author of The Meaning of Water (Berg, 2004); Gardening the World: agency, identity and
the ownership of water (Berghahn, 2009) and (co-edited with Mark Busse) Ownership
and Appropriation (Berg, 2010). Named as one of UNESCO’s Lumieres D’Eau in 2007,
she has published extensively on water issues in the UK and in Australia.
 Veronica Strang 237

Notes

1. Though popular contemporary mythology has downplayed this aspect of dragons,

they have always been associated with water historically. Some inhabit water itself, others
are associated with underground caves, wetlands and swamps.
2. I refer here to Durkheim’s well known assertion that societies make their religions
in their own image (1966).
3. Changes in temperature and thus sea levels form a key part of the picture of popula-
tion movements, providing a set of pressures and opportunities for migration.
4. Totemic ancestors could also be plants and other aspects of the environment.
5. For example the seminal Land Rights (NT) Act of 1976.
6. “Country” is a term used to describe clan estates, ie land traditionally owned by a
specific group.
7. Earlier theories have been challenged by a range of evidence: radio-carbon dating
of archaeological sites; DNA analysis of people and also of the Pacific Rat; and analyses of
volcanic ash.
8. Some of these birds reached a height of 3.7 metres and weighed about 200 kg.
9. Initially – before pigs were introduced by Europeans – these were simple reed
fences to keep out swamp hens (pukekos) (Best, 1941:358).
238 Representing water

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Resumo Abstract

Este artigo baseia-se em pesquisa sobre This paper describes research concerned
representações visuais de seres aquáti- with visual representations of water be-
cos e sua capacidade de articular rela- ings and their capacity to articulate hu-
cionamentos humano-ambientais. Seres man-environmental relationships. Water
aquáticos (como serpentes arco-íris e beings (such as rainbow serpents and
taniwhas) são relevantes em muitas cos- taniwhas) play a role in many different
mologias culturais diferentes, mais par- cultural cosmologies, most particularly
ticularmente aquelas que se orientam no those oriented towards ‘nature religions’
sentido de “religiões da natureza”, nas in which land and water scapes are seen
quais as paisagens terrestres e aquáticas
as being animated by sentient beings.
são vistas como animadas por seres sensí-
veis. As análises destas imagens visuais, e Analyses of these visual images, and their
suas transformações ao longo do tempo, transformations over time, suggest that
sugerem que, como reflexo de crenças as reflection of cosmological beliefs and
cosmológicas e valores, elas podem ilu- values, they can illuminate the past and
minar o passado e fornecer insights úteis provide useful insights into key changes
para mudanças fundamentais nas relações in human relationships with water. As
humanas com a água. Como representa- representations of the worldviews of
ções das visões de mundo de grupos par- particular groups, they also have a vital
ticulares, elas também têm uma função function in contemporary debates about
vital nos debates contemporâneos sobre environmental management and the
gestão ambiental, propriedade e contro- ownership and control of water resourc-
le dos recursos hídricos. Baseando-se em es. Drawing on examples in Australia and
exemplos da Austrália e Nova Zelândia, New Zealand, this paper therefore con-
este artigo considera, portanto, o papel siders the role of such images as tempo-
das imagens como indicadores tempo- ral indicators of change, and as symbolic
rais de mudança e como representações representations of subaltern cosmologies
simbólicas de cosmologias subalternas in post-colonial societies. It also examines
em sociedades pós-coloniais. Examina the potential implications of the research
também as implicações potenciais da
for theory and method in visual anthro-
pesquisa para a teoria e o método em an-
tropologia visual. Ao manter uma abor- pology. By retaining an ethnographically
dagem etnograficamente situada objeti- situated approach it aims to demonstrate
va, demonstra que as transformações nas that transformations in human relations
relações humanas com a água, expressas with water, as expressed through visual
através de imagens visuais de seres aquá- imagery of water beings, continue to di-
ticos, continuam a dirigir os conflitos rect contemporary conflicts over water
contemporâneos sobre a propriedade da ownership, management and use.
água, sua gestão e utilização.
Keywords:
Palavras-chave: seres aquáticos, cos- water beings, cosmology, human-envi-
mologia, relações humano-ambientais, ronmental relations, representations of
representações da água water