Gardening the World

Agency, Identity and the Ownership of Water

Veronica Strang

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781845459406
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Around the world, intensifying development and human demands for fresh water are placing unsustainable pressures on finite resources. Countries are waging war over transboundary rivers, and rural and urban communities are increasingly divided as irrigation demands compete with domestic desires. Marginal groups are losing access to water as powerful elites protect their own interests, and entire ecosystems are being severely degraded. These problems are particularly evident in Australia, with its industrialised economy and arid climate. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to examine the social and cultural complexities that underlie people's engagements with water. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in two major Australian river catchments (the Mitchell River in Cape York, and the Brisbane River in southeast Queensland), this book examines their major water using and managing groups: indigenous communities, farmers, industries, recreational and domestic water users, and environmental organisations. It explores the issues that shape their different beliefs, values and practices in relation to water, and considers the specifically cultural or sub-cultural meanings that they encode in their material surroundings. Through an analysis of each group's diverse efforts to 'garden the world', it provides insights into the complexities of human-environmental relationships.

CHAPTER 1

A Process of Engagement

Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.¹

–Voltaire, Candide, 30

Human-Environmental Relations

To understand why cultural and subcultural groups develop diverse interactions with land and resources, it is necessary to place these in an analytic frame. This chapter explores human-environmental relationships as dynamic intellectual, emotional and physical engagements with the material world, in which groups and individuals ‘garden’ resources assiduously to support their social and cultural purposes. Its considers how this process happens, trying to provide a lens through which, in examining the ethnographic data, it is possible to discern the factors that influence people to garden in particular ways, some of which are more socially and ecologically sustainable than others.

In broad terms, human-environmental interactions entail, on the one hand, human adaptations to particular environments. As Morphy observes (1998), these occur over vastly differing time frames: there are long-term biophysical adaptations and genetic changes, such as the development of higher tolerance to sun or to dairy products; gradual shifts in cultural practice, such as transitions to new economic modes; and relatively rapid changes enabled by transformative beliefs, knowledges and technologies. The ecological ‘half’ of this interaction has similarly undergone long-term adaptive changes (for example, the development of fire-reliant flora) and new landscapes and ecosystems have emerged as the result of human activities: centuries of forest clearing, the domestication of plants and animals, the systematic draining of wetlands.

However, from an ecological perspective, rapid adaptations to human impacts are not so feasible: problems arise when human groups shift from adapting to an environment and working within its constraints to simply subjugating it technologically. At the heart of contemporary environmental problems is a sudden and massive increase in the scale and intensity of human ‘gardening’ that far outstrips the abilities of ecosystems to keep pace adaptively and sustain their normal reproductive processes. Some are robust up to a point (as observed by Adger et al. 2005 and Hughes et al. 2005), and some of this adaptive resilience can be utilized in managerial terms (as in UNESCO's Ecohydrology Programme²), but, as Australia's ecohydrological crisis demonstrates, there are limits. Ecosystems can only withstand a certain amount of loss of ‘environmental flows’ when water is diverted elsewhere, and soils, salinated by irrigation, or eroded and washed away, cannot recover their original biota.

However, although ecological problems are now emerging so rapidly that they are readily visible to humans within their own life spans, they are not generally the primary focus of their attention and concern. Extreme events – floods, tsunamis, or drought – occupy centre stage occasionally, generating anxieties about climate change and the potential for apocalyptic ‘collapse’ (Carson 1962; Diamond 2005), but in general the ecological processes that would continue – probably more successfully – in the absence of human action are relegated to the background of daily life, which is more immediately concerned with putatively ‘cultural’ issues, rather than what is classified as ‘nature’.

This conceptual separation is critical: as many environmental anthropologists have pointed out (e.g., Descola and Palsson 1996), although dualistic visions of nature and culture remain dominant in scientific and popular discourses, humans and their activities are intimately bound up with, and part of, multiple biological and ecological material processes. So while the world may be imagined, in Ingold's terms, as a separate ‘sphere’ (2000), this reflexive separation is illusory.

The assumption that humans merely engage with ‘natural’ forces masks the reality that ‘the environment’ is a creative product of culture (Wagner 1981: 71).³ Bender (1993) and others⁴ have explored how, through human action and the encoding of cultural meaning, conceptual ‘space’ is transformed into inhabited ‘place’. This work has made it plain that material environments are far more than ecological or ‘natural’ surroundings: they are the product of cultural practices, a repository for memory and cultural knowledge (Kuchler 1993; Morphy 1995; Schama 1996) and ‘the ground’ for social identity (Daniels 1993; Lowenthal 1991; Strang 1997).

Cultural landscapes – and the way that material resources are distributed – also reflect relationships between people (Bender and Winer 2001; Keith and Pile 1993; Morphy 1993). As noted previously, water is particularly implicated in power relations, and issues of ownership, control, access and use directly reflect the realities of social, economic and political processes. ‘Water resources of all kinds are never simply there, but are produced, used, and given meaning by shifting social and political relationships’ (Mosse 2003: 3). The process of making cultural landscapes with water and ‘gardening the world’ is therefore a multifaceted activity, directed towards a variety of aims.

Waterscapes and Meaning

The meanings encoded in land and waterscapes are clearly central to how they are ‘gardened’. Humans assign meaning to all material objects, and this is as true of ‘natural’ resources as it is of human-made artefacts (Strang 2005a). Ingold comments that ‘things can be made [i.e., given meaning] without undergoing any physical alteration at all’.⁵ Thus a stone can ‘become’ a hammer, a doorstop or a piece of ballast (1995: 58). Similarly, water can be a drink, a cooling swim, a home for fish, or a decorative fountain. Like the material artefacts described by Appadurai (1986), it has a ‘social life’ in which meaning is ascribed within shifting spatial and temporal contexts.⁶

The material qualities of objects contribute to the creation of meanings, facilitating some cross-cultural commonalities. As Preston (2003) comments, all aspects of the environment ‘lend shape’ to mental activity; thus Douglas considered the ubiquity of ‘natural symbols’ (1973) and Rival described recurrences in the meanings ascribed to trees in a variety of cultural contexts (1998). The importance of the characteristics of material things in the generation of meaning is particularly evident in relation to water (Strang 2005b), which retains its fluidity and transmutability in all contexts, and is therefore ubiquitously employed in metaphors concerned with flow, movement and change over time (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Bachelard 1983).

Water has other core meanings that recur cross-culturally, standing symbolically for life, wealth and health, and most particularly for spiritual, social and ecological regeneration (Strang 2004a). It is these core meanings that lie at the heart of efforts to ‘garden’ water and soil to generate – and regenerate – people and things. Rose observes that this is the case for indigenous people in Australia: ‘Water is life, Indigenous people keep telling us…Whether it's fresh or salt, travelling on or under the land, or in the sea, water is the source of all that is holy’ (2004: 41).

As this ethnography shows, for other water-using groups in Queensland, though more commonly discussed in purportedly secular terms, water is similarly cast as the essence of spiritual and social life, health and regeneration: ‘Our river is the lifeblood of our community’ (David Hinchcliffe, deputy mayor, Brisbane).

Cosmological associations between water and spiritual regeneration are expressed in many religious contexts (see Oestigaard 2005; Pocknee 1967; Rattue 1995; Tuan 1968), and Rothenberg and Ulvaeus (2001) add that in many ancient belief systems (for example, Celtic and Roman religions) there is also a powerful association between water and female power. This symbolic gendering of water as a feminine aspect of ‘nature’ has its own influence upon the issues that surround resource use and management (see Coles and Wallace 2005; Lahiri-Dutt 2006; Strang 2005c).

Cross-cultural commonality in the meanings encoded in water is also encouraged by the reality that human engagement with it involves a variety of powerful sensory experiences. Interactions with water are particularly immediate: it is the only aspect of the environment that is universally consumed and that constitutes the major part of the composition of the human body. As Howes and others have shown, sensory experience is heavily mediated by culture (see Feld and Basso 1996; Howes 1991, 2003, 2005; Stoller 1989; Strang and Garner 2006), and cultural context plays a major role in how sensory experiences are interpreted and embodied (Csordas 1994; Nast and Pile 1998).

However, though different contexts encourage specific emphases in sensory priorities and attach culturally specific values to these, there remains – given the universality of human physiological and cognitive responses to stimuli – some considerable commonality, for example, in the way that water slakes thirst; cools or warms the skin; splashes, soaks and submerges the body; or offers freedom from gravity. It also, with consistency, mesmerizes the eye with shimmering light, encouraging meditation and providing aesthetic pleasure. There are abundant representations valorizing the beauties of water: as Anderson and Tabb observe, ‘Water is a longstanding metaphor in art and literature’ (2002: 3), and it is plain from the ethnography described in this volume that aesthetic engagements with water are meaningful to all of the groups inhabiting the two river catchments.

The sensory aspects of human relationships with water are important to the process of ‘gardening the world’ because they are both inspiring and emotive. The ‘feeling of what happens’ involves a close link between sensory and emotional experience (Damasio 1999) and this is integral to a consciousness of being ‘in place’ (see Merleau-Ponty 2003 [1962]). Interactions with water stir the imagination and engender powerful emotions. These influence all of the social relationships and structural arrangements surrounding water use (Barbalet 1998). ‘Gardening’ with water is satisfying and enjoyable, and – in its various forms – provides aesthetic pleasure. Thus an engineer, whose work takes him to the power station at a large dam on the Brisbane River, describes the excitement of standing above the water surging through the turbines, and the peaceful feelings engendered by the lake:

You can feel it: you can feel the power in that flow…it's quite stunning to see that much water going out…You can hear the water going through the steel; you can put your hand on the side and feel it coming through. You know there's water in there!…And you can stand out on the platform here, and see the swirl and quantities of water being pushed out through the turbine…[Then] there's a measurable effect when I go out here [to the reservoir], it is quite calming to see the lake and the water: it's sort of serene and clear and clean and quiet. (Graham Heather)

In one study of the Brisbane River, people's appreciation of water as an aesthetic object was examined systematically (Preston 2001). The research attempted to measure ‘community appreciation of landscape aesthetics’, asking informants to rank places according to their ‘scenic amenity’ and their capacity to be ‘interesting, calming and beautiful’. Water emerged as the most beautiful landscape feature:

The most attractive scenery in Glen Rock was described as ‘peaceful running water’. The least attractive scenery was described as a ‘dry rocky creek bed’. This emphasises the importance of running water to people's appreciation of scenery. (2001: xi)

Engagements with water, combining direct consumption and incorporation along with sensory experiences that are immediate and intense, are thus predisposed to enable affective relationships between people and places. Humans have a thirst for emotional connections with ‘nature’ (Milton 2002), and Reason suggests that such bonds often focus on water:

I am moved by art and I have feelings in the face of nature…People of all ages, genders, and classes gravitate to a pool of water; and in my own gardens (front and back), in each of which is a small pond, I have noticed that the pauses in conversation drift most congenially when by the pondside…I am sure that the special thrill that I experience near a pond is in part idiosyncratic: I have a luminous memory of being buoyed up in a forest pool as a young boy convalescing from polio, in the arms of my favourite physiotherapist. With only the slightest refocusing of attention, now, I can smell the water, feel the slight tug of its surface at my cheeks, look along the rippling light of a surface that dissolves all dimensions, and see the winking and glowing backlit leaves of the tree canopy. (1998: 85–86)

Sensory and aesthetic engagements with water therefore engender protective feelings about waterways, adding emotive force to conflicts over resource ownership and management. They are also the creative source of the powerful meanings that underlie the human imperative to garden.

Agency, Identity and Ownership

The physical and imaginative incorporation of water is equally important in the construction of human identity, which is both biophysical and social. The things humans physically consume ‘are central to our subjectivity, or sense of self, and our experience of embodiment’ (Lupton 1996: 1). There is also Bakhtin's well-known comment that, in taking substances into the body, we ‘take in the world’ (1984: 281).

Blatter, Ingram and Lorton Levesque observe that ‘water carries with it the imprint of its place of origin, including various types of microbial life and dissolved solids, temperature, corrosiveness and taste’ (2001: 47). Water can therefore be seen as ‘the substance of a place’. Flowing through all organic things, it links people and their material environments, offering a ‘substantive’ basis for collective local and wider identities (Strang 2002, 2004a; Strathern 1999). This ‘essentiality’ takes a variety of forms: water sources may provide ‘spirit children’ for indigenous groups, holy water for a Christian congregation, or a sense of community for towns along a shared river. At a larger scale, water bodies such as the Ganges or Niagara Falls function as ‘cultural monuments to new kinds of ‘imagined communities’ (Blatter, Ingram and Lorton Levesque 2001: 49).⁷

Interactions between people and places are mutually constitutive. As well as taking in the world and its waters and bringing them into their constructions of self, people also project their identity outwards into their social and material environments (Hegel 1979; Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2003). The collective creation of cultural landscapes illustrates this process, but it is perhaps most obvious in the way that the home becomes an extension of the individual and familial body:⁸

The house and the body are intimately linked. The house is an extension of the person; like an extra skin, carapace or second layer of clothes, it serves as much to reveal and display as it does to hide and protect…Moving in ordered space, the body ‘reads’ the house which serves as a mnemonic for the embodied person. If the house is an extension of the person, it is also an extension of the self. (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995: 2)

Carsten and Hugh-Jones also note that ‘the space that surrounds the house is also an extension of the personal space of its occupants’ (1995: 2). This underlines the way that people relate to their surroundings as an extension of themselves and their identity. Gardens have a major function in providing an external opportunity for creative self-expression (Strang 2004a). All societies ‘garden’, whether this is expressed through subtle forms of landscape management and domiculture, or through highly elaborate forms of horticulture. In diverse cultural contexts there are equally varied notions of what is successful and aesthetically pleasing. People may appreciate the new ‘green pick’ for game created by traditional fire management; the wealth and fecundity demonstrated by an abundant yam harvest; or the precise control over greenery achieved by the intricacy of a Victorian knot garden; but they share, cross-culturally, a creative process in which plants, water, soil and other species become infused with cultural identity and integrated into expressions of human agency.

The anthropological literature on conventional gardens helps to illuminate this process of self-extension and its underlying motivations. Eysaguirre and Linares describe gardening as an intensified relationship between humans and plants which provides materials for exchange rituals and social relationships (2004), and Nazarea suggests that, as a way of projecting identity and claiming space, gardens have a range of social and political aims (1996). Gardens manifest social relations not just locally, but on a variety of scales. Through the promulgation of particular styles and practices they can assert dominant values and ideas, expressing and affirming national identities (Helmreich 2002), and they can be hegemonic, exporting these to new colonial environments. There is resonance here with Escobar's comments about larger scale developments, in which he notes that more powerful actors exert control over others by treating places as ‘improvable’ spaces (2001: 148). In settler societies such as Australia, ‘gardening’, both domestically and on a larger scale, has clearly been an important part of a colonia...