Małgorzata Owczarska

This article explores contemporary aspects of cultural renewal in postcolonial Tahiti. By focusing on the renewed interest in unu sculptures, I describe practices of indigenous associations, which are trying to address the islanders’ profound cultural identity crisis. As a result of colonial history of the region, the cultural continuity has been almost entirely severed. The activists consciously strive to reclaim the history and knowledge that disappeared. However, the goal does not consist in mere restoration of the historical forms, or rewriting the history anew in the hardened Western canons. What is the most important for the activists is to live through and to link relations between human, non-human, spirituality, places and memory. Therefore, I am particularly interested in pointing out the intersections of various relations cutting across categories such as time and space. These activities will also be characterized as processual and mobile.

The text is an experimental sketch based on a dialogue between an ecohydrologist and an anthropologist of culture. The authors will subject a critical, interdisciplinary reflection to various water languages used colloquially or in selected professional discourses. They will ask themselves what water is in different contexts, how it is spoken of, how it is thought of, how it is treated and what role water related languages play in times of climate crisis. After all, it is reasonable to ask whether water is a resource, chemical compound, life, service provider, stakeholder, law, or sewage. Based on examples in contemporary discussion on water and the associated blue-green infrastructure the authors distinguish several trends in different ways of talking about water: economic, medical, defensive, scientific and communitarian. They will reflect on the mechanisms comparable to colonial ones that determine the domination of some and the infantilization or cancelation of others, especially the communitarian ones. This dialogue will reveal an “intercellular” permeability of water definitions and how easily water can assume some meaning to escape it and create a series of new ones.

In this article, I would like to consider the comparison of stranding to landcentric cognitive processes that translate into the creation of an impossible world – devoid of water and its potentials, rhythms and cycles immersed in it. I will illustrate this with examples of fresh water and sea hydro-policies (including nuclear trials in the Pacific) and will explore cognitive and activist alternatives proposed by the Polynesian sailors and navigators. I will also use two ambiguous metaphors of a ship and a Polynesian voyaging canoe as an opening for different narrations of the planets’ future in the climate crisis.