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Article Excerpt
This article explores water as central to defining complex attachments to place, an approach that is concerned to contribute to discussion beyond water's conceptualisation as a vital and natural resource in need of environmental management. The value of an active discourse and practice that emphasises water as a resource to be managed is obvious, for example, in cases where a sudden increase in water flows has the potential to transform rivers into floods with serious consequences for humans and other species. My interest, however, is to consider whether discussion of attachment to water sources in the Kimberley region of northern Western Australia, can show how, and to what extent, contemplation of water/human relationships might fruitfully facilitate understandings of 'place-based cultures' (Escobar 2001:142).
While notions of 'attachment' are sometimes conflated or confused with concepts of 'belonging'--about how and why persons (and/or native and introduced species, and so on), reveal or describe a sense of belonging to certain places and environments (see, for instance, Trigger and Mulcock 2005, 2005a who discuss nature, culture and belonging in an Australian urban setting)--the emphasis here is primarily on attachment. Like my co-contributors (some of whom examine concepts of belonging), I am concerned to extrapolate varied interpretations about a key environmental trope--in this case, water--to foster a deepened understanding not only about a precious environmental resource, but also about social life, cultural politics and material struggles in an Australian setting.
Concentrating on the remote (1) Kimberley region's Fitzroy River, and examples where water sources sit on their own or become agents of transformation (for example, as rain or in food preparation), I begin with a consideration of guiding themes and then turn to Australian literature about people's relationships to water, especially to texts concerned with indigenous perspectives. A selection of Kimberley ethnographic data, a region where I have undertaken fieldwork since 1981, follows. (2) Discussion of this material is used as a backdrop to canvass the ideas of Escobar (2001) on attachments to place, and of Tsing (2002, 2005, 2007) on the creation and outcome of 'friction' when cultural and environmental perceptions and activities collide. I conclude with the claim that studies of human/water relationships benefit when they are examined within the context of a place-based-culture analysis. Such a context is characterised by a mix of attachments that happen to be about places that involve water.
FRICTION, ATTACHMENT, PLACE
Conflicts and disputes over scarce or abundant water sources are major points of inquiry in current water studies (see, for instance, chapters in Coles and Wallace [2005]; Leybourne and Gaynor [2006] and in Whiteford and Whiteford [2005]). Tsing's use of 'friction', however, has the potential to provide a more comprehensive and nuanced way to explore the complexities of disjuncture and/or resonance that occurs when proposed developments threaten fragile ecologies and the life styles of nearby populations. This is especially the case on projects involving indigenous groups. Tsing (2002:472) encourages intellectual and ethical space to help make visible, rather than leave in unexamined form, problematic ideologies about environmental and indigenous interests. Tsing adopts the expression 'friction' (3) to encompass elements of what she describes as the 'grip' and 'irritation' that interact to, on the one hand, facilitate and, on the other, limit, productive engagement and positive outcomes when environmental matters are a point of departure (Tsing 2005, 2007:58).
Tsing's (2005, 2007) work is mostly focused on Indonesia, but her conceptualisation of 'friction' facilitates a fertile framework from which to examine issues outside south-east Asian locations. Friction also sits nicely alongside 'traction'. Whilst arguably a term that emphasises the value of 'grip', traction is increasingly used in Kimberley settings to indicate a desire for concrete commitment and action. The comments of a local indigenous resource agency coordinator (identified here as 'Leo') give voice to my claim:
What people [referring to indigenous communities] around here need is a bit of traction--government and industry getting a grip on what people are talking about, what their needs are. Consultation means nothing around here without grip, without proper traction, without something or someone actually taking hold (Fieldnotes, Kimberley, November 2007).
Leo's use of traction is not too distant from Tsing's 'friction', albeit in contrasting contexts. His comments, made to myself and two indigenous people present, took place after a phone conversation with a major developer who had offered to put a large amount of funding into local initiatives--as long as any plans that were put forward accorded with the developer's time-line. In later discussion, it became evident that both the phone call and the caveat were not unusual occurrences and, despite a need for funding, the offer had implications attached to it that were not straightforward, a point that indicates how Tsing's use of 'friction' might be understood. This is most apparent when Tsing argues that evidence of 'grip' and 'irritation' as 'friction' emerges when examining social and environmental movements and their relationship to the corporate sector. In the above case, for instance, it is obvious that whilst the indigenous organization was offered some sort of 'grip' in the form of financial support, the offer was not without the 'irritation' of an unrealistically short timeframe. As Tsing notes, however, while there is little evidence to show that social, environmental or indigenous movements have the ability to 'displace the hegemony of private property and capitalist development', a certain 'messiness' (2002:472, 476) exists in such situations, such that 'not all indigenous peoples support environmental causes; some are in active conflict with conservation' (Tsing 2007:55).
Escobar (2001) seems less concerned with the problem of inflexible categories and the characterization of issues that lend themselves to an analysis based on friction. His concern is on practical engagements with, and resistances to, the unwanted development of places people hold dear for a variety of culturally endowed meanings. Escobar (2001: 147) is critical of studies that over-emphasise mobility and de-territiorialization to the extent that 'place-based practices and modes of consciousness for the production of culture' are overlooked. A proponent of the need to problematise unqualified generalisations, he also aims to de-centre the uncritical use of 'Western' forms of knowledge (Escobar 2001:151; see also Raghuramaraju 2005, and Lins Ribeiro and Escobar 2006, for critiques of 'Western' epistemologies). Concentrating on the work of theorists such as Auge (1995), whose binary construction of 'non-place' tends to undermine concepts of place as multi-sited, contingent and relational, Basso (1996) and Bender (1993), among others, Escobar claims that contestations about place help to unravel the tensions embedded in material struggles. Such a process inevitably attracts consideration of local cultural beliefs and practices (2001:170171). Adding a further layer of meaning with regard to how concepts and constructs of place are constituted, Escobar cogently claims that local knowledge can also be read as political knowledge: 'Local knowledge is a place-specific way of giving meaning to the world' (p.153).
Whilst commending the literature on place as a site of sensory and phenomenological attachments (e.g. as discussed by Merleau-Ponty 1962/2006 and Milton 2002; see also Magowan 2007:25 who eloquently explores 'people-as-places'), Escobar's main concern is with the politics of place-based cultures. He shows how attachments to place are constantly created and re-created by people's social and political engagement with that place, such as via active resistance to protect an area against development projects predicted to cause harm. In Escobar's parlance, social, cultural and political attachments are formed and become meaningful through active dialectical processes of 'connectivity, interactivity and positionality' (p. 170). Such an approach logically includes consideration of divergent identities that emerge within 'the dynamics of place, networks and power' (p. 170). (4)
Giving prominence to the need for the cross-fertilization of political, economic and cultural approaches within the theories and practices of a political ecology framework, Escobar (2001:153) opines that an inter-mix of attachments to 'place' is given meaning by diverse groups of women and men through active political involvement (p.164). Escobar is also concerned to analyse attachments to place as an outcome of beliefs and practices where interactions between persons and their environments are in the constant process of mutual transformation. Such a process accords with Tsing's view that social (including indigenous or 'subaltern' to use one of Escobar's terms) and environmental movements fluctuate over time, a process that results in them being difficult to classify coherently, especially in circumstances where the local and global interconnect. (5)
Read separately or in tandem, what these authors provide is a creative and dynamic framework to explore how and when description of water/human relationships might benefit from an approach that privileges culture as place-based attachment. That social, indigenous and environmental...
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