Thinking about the sea
Figure 1: The Sea is Not Empty’, the Women Dreaming emerging from the sea in Marra Country, in the Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia (Marra Families et al., 2021). These ancestral women feature in this Indigenous curated, digitally animated film, for as they rose from the sea, they created Marra territory (available for viewing on Vimeo).
We are in a time of thinking differently about the sea. A growing attentiveness to reframing geographies of the sea has led to critical ocean studies, configured through a language of ‘wet ontologies’, ‘slippery ontologies’ and ‘blue economy’. Human curiosity about the sea; what lies in its depths and what floats across its surfaces, continues to define efforts at defending national borders, mapping and resisting human migrations, reducing the harms of global warming, and the endless quest to locate and exploit offshore fossil fuels and renewable energy sources.
The sea is not empty and is full of possibilities from many cultural vantage points.
It may be that the fascination with the sea has grown in step with a degree of resignation as to the inescapable changes that are now occurring across land-based ecologies and environments. The possibility of averting comparable destruction to marine environments reads as a preeminent concern of our time. But turning towards the sea has different histories according to the cultural context in which one operates. The sea is not empty and is full of possibilities from many cultural vantage points.
Figure 2: Animated depiction of sea level rise and fall in northern Australia over the last 65,000 years (Morrison & O’Leary UWA).
As an anthropologist, I have spent the last 25 years learning with Yanyuwa families, members of an Indigenous language group whose lifeworld is distinguished by the presence and influence of the sea. Yanyuwa describe themselves as li-Anthawirriyarra –people whose essence comes from the influences of the sea. Their homelands and waters are replete with the sentient power of Ancestral Beings and it is their ancestral Law which determines the nature and health of the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia. Elsewhere I, with O’Leary and Platten (2022) have written on the depth of Indigenous knowledges of Sea Country, as inclusive of ancient pre-inundation landscapes that lie out-of-sight on Australia’s continental shelves.
Indigenous people’s distinctions of what is referred to as Country melt away the tendency towards separation or perception of otherworldliness as conventionally applied to bodies of water. Sea Country has its own qualities of power and operates through hyper connection between people, and the non-human and the environment. Sea Country is not in between, it is not a space of emptiness, nor a margin, nor a point of becoming. It is full and complete. In the words of Yanyuwa elder, Dinah Norman a-Marrngawi (Bradley and Yanyuwa Families 2007:20),
I will tell you the sea has names, many names, names for the reefs, names for the sea grass beds, names for the sand bars, and the sea has boundaries, we know these boundaries, they did not come here recently. From the time of the ancestral beings and our human ancestors they have been here. Our songs and ceremony are also in the 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.
With this knowledge in hand, I also practice as an anthropologist who provides instruction on cross-cultural ways of knowing the sea, aimed at audiences of expert regulatory decision makers (lawyers, environmental scientists, and engineers) tasked with decision-making on oil, gas and renewable energy activities in coastal waters where regulatory powers and functions have been conferred. My task when undertaking these moments of instruction is to encourage recognition of cross-cultural orientations towards ways of knowing, specifically, Indigenous viewpoints concerning the sea and conceptions of risk and harm.
Figure 3: Offshore oil and gas infrastructure. Unsplash.
Operating within a contentious space, regulatory decision-making on the risk that oil, gas and renewable energy ventures pose to Indigenous peoples’ cultural heritage is a concern which keeps regulatory experts in a state of directive anguish. By way of background, Australia’s offshore oil and gas exploration history stretches back to 1906, with the first offshore well drilled off the coast of Western Australia, where today, over 93% of identified conventional gas fields exist. Since then, Western and Northern Australia have remained focal points for continued offshore mapping, exploration, and extraction and in 2019 “Australia took the crown from Qatar as the largest liquefied natural gas exporter in the world” (Robertson and Mousavian 2021:2).
Working with Regulatory Experts
The short-term ethnographies and instructional events I have conducted in regulatory settings are distinguished by contexts in which Western cultural paradigms dominate and an adherence to the logic of expertise shaped through skill-based proof and merit; I meet experts in their organisational territory. I place an emphasis on the category of ‘expert’, as my anthropological attention is drawn to the culturally and historically specific practices that constitute the expert in their context. Engaging with expertise allows me to focus on what people do with a set of understandings, rather than what people possess in terms of explicit knowledge.
Introducing a pluralist approach to understandings of the sea (one which pursues parallel and competing knowledges of the same phenomena), is a novel addition in this scene. It is also one to which experts have not been averse to possibilities of unknowing expertise as it stands in relation to understanding the sea, and the nature of risk.
Despite all the expertise in the world, there is a sense of scrutiny, the expectations are high. But it’s not just the organisation, its all of us who prop it up who feel the expectation and the need to do it right.
Expert – Marine Scientist
Shifts in the regulatory decision-making space are occurring against the backdrop of socio-political shifts towards Indigenous self-determination and cultural consultation. These shifts offer encouragement for the inevitability of change in long-standing ways of operating in the oil and gas extraction sector. Australia’s marine areas are under increasing pressure from human activities, and to address this the country has established a National Representative System of Marine Protected Areas (NRSMPA). Yet this is juxtaposed by intensive interest in extracting offshore oil and gas reserves off the coast. Mineral exploration and mining activities can only happen in Australian waters with approval from a relevant Joint Authority and an independent regulator. Factoring into the permit process are “maintaining marine boundaries”, “protecting the environment”, “ensuring health and safety”, “safe decommissioning”, and an expectation to consult with interest groups (including communities, conservation groups, tourism and business operators, government agencies and marine users). No explicit mention is made to Indigenous groups and their interests. Despite this, independent regulatory bodies are increasingly expecting, yet not mandating, Indigenous consultation. This final point has raised the stakes in regulatory decision-making, yet can still, in part be side lined.
Expertise that Embraces Uncertainty
The first question in the pursuit of expansive thinking, or problematising long-standing knowledge habits, is, where does one start? Perhaps one starts by declaring and appreciating the ways in which we presume to know, that is we spend time looking at how we are enculturated to know and exist in the world according to habits and privileges. This grants us a new orientation that signals a beginning, an opportunity to reveal habits as an ethical first step.
With reflexive awareness comes an appreciation for the specificity and particularity in how we know. With this comes the dawning of what we do not know. Recognising the uncertainty with which we know the world is liberating and it is worth advocating for the cultivation of uncertainty. Cultivating uncertainty is a paradigm shift for holding multiple perspectives, without the impulse to resist them.
It’s like I’m just the accumulation of a million years of knowledge and then one day along comes the scientific method: repeatable and observable, it’s truth. That’s what works in the material world.
Expert – Risk Specialist
Confidence in uncertainty aligns with the Socratic principle of “learned ignorance”, that is, the frank acknowledgement of what one does not know. Unknowing plays an important role in anthropology, where the admission of not knowing is not considered negative but is deemed a condition of learning. This is made truer if we assume that it is not the responsibility of anthropology to reduce complexity, but rather its responsibility is to increase complexity by multiplying knowledge.
Appreciating the current conditions of knowledge creation within regulatory contexts assists with accessing anxieties that might attach to learning on matters of cross-cultural viewpoints and working towards holding multiple understandings. Attention is given to appreciating vulnerabilities in the organisational context, relative to fields of expertise and regulatory constraints. One must avoid tapping into vulnerabilities, for it risks alienating experts (as it does anyone in an educational setting). This means de-emphasizing any lack of knowledge, while creating the conditions for experts to self-determine the limits of their existing knowledge, and envisioning learning as an exercise in greater professional and self-actualization. So too this type of learning is in the interest of corporations seeking regulatory approval, for they do have an interest in demonstrating their sensitivity to Indigenous cultural presence and attachments to sea territories.
Taking the approach of developing online and in-person workshops to explore a series of topics, beginning with a reflexive engagement with ways of knowing, and how knowledge is acquired has allowed me to explore self-interest as a primer for broadening understandings and embracing plural knowledges. Experts are encouraged to mobilise a growing self-awareness and openness to other cultural configurations of the sea through an introduction to Indigenous scholarship and testimonies on environmental values and cultural heritage. This scholarship exists in multimodal formats, including animations, short documentary films, translated oral traditions, authored scholarly works, and direct oral testimonies. In addition, experts participate in one-to-one discussions to explore concerns and thinking on the matter of plural knowledges related to their professional practice and decision-making processes. Presented with this opportunity, experts have, most often, been remarkably candid and open in accounting for their positionality. Many exhibit genuine care and concern as to the potential impacts of their decision-making.
Most of us put our heart and soul into our job. It’s why we do what we do because we’re here to protect the environment and it’s becoming increasingly uncomfortable for us in dealing with the conflict and legal battles.
Expert – Marine Environment Scientist
I’m very much still entrenched in a traditional empirical view of things – a Western view. Truth be told I think the fact is I’m stuck, so entrenched, and that’s a problem.
Expert – Lawyer
At times regulatory experts (marine scientists and lawyers) speak of a prevailing sense of surprise, at the rapidity of change in organisational expectations and the decision-making environment. The intensive onset of demand to comprehend and engage respectfully and knowingly with Indigenous viewpoints of land and sea, in the context of oil, gas and renewable energy operations appears to have destabilised the certainty of some expert’s professional practice. Regulatory experts are tasked with determining risks posed to Indigenous groups and the likelihood of impacts on cultural heritage in areas of exploration and extraction. Most have had no training in such areas of determination and have had little exposure to Indigenous knowledges. What appears to have caught many experts off-guard is the extent to which Indigenous understandings are now expected to be part of their own professional knowledgebase, a presumption which takes place in a social, political and historical vacuum.
With decision-making residing almost exclusively with non-Indigenous experts, few expected they would be required to expand their knowledge base into such spaces, and with this comes a degree of moral discomfort. In many interviews I have documented rapidity of change, and uncertainty in the face of self-proclaimed knowledge deficits as paramount concerns for experts. Many fret over the fact that their comprehension of Indigenous knowledge and culture are having to happen “rapidly”, and alongside “quick regulatory judgements and decisions” around massive energy projects, a reality that triggers a deep sense of unease.
Anxieties around knowing, understanding, and comprehending Indigenous viewpoints, and plural knowledges more broadly configured, are frequently grounded through declarations of people’s actual knowledge base, expertise traced through formal training and professional experience. Circling oneself with parameters of expertise helps to delineate the uncertainty that is felt in the company of Indigenous viewpoints.
One day you kind of realise that you’re not up to it – and you get thrown into this situation where Indigenous ideas and cross-cultural views are a focus area of your work. It’s like I’m trying to catch up on a lifetime. Where do you start?
Expert – Oceanographer
Invoking a sense of time, couched as lifetimes, allows experts to set the challenge of decision-making under fraught circumstances against a socio-historical backdrop. They are correct in tracing the present moment of cross-cultural anxiety to a protracted reality shaped by settler colonialism.
Casting uncertainty as a hallmark of learned ignorance […] leads to a discussion of resisting the temptation to consume and represent ‘absolute’ answers.
A pressing sense of uncertainty inevitably runs through the exchanges I have with experts in the regulatory decision-making space. Uncertainty at what one should know, how one reaches an understanding and then what one does with that knowledge in the onward course of a career. Uncertainty is what informs a persistent want for answers and solutions.
Casting uncertainty as a hallmark of learned ignorance and a useful professional practice in the decision-making process on culturally prescribed risk and harm posed by oil, gas and renewable energy extraction and production leads to a discussion of resisting the temptation to consume and represent ‘absolute’ answers. This calls for holding multiple possibilities of the sea, along with value/risk/harm in balance, organised around a simple refrain, ‘it might be something’, a turn of phrase often adopted by Indigenous Australians, to indicate that things we might not readily understand may still carry potent meaning and significance (see Povinelli 1993; Kearney 2017: 154-155).
The inevitability of decisions having to be made, which permit or limit oil, gas and renewable energy projects, is a regulatory challenge to accommodating a more diffuse knowledge base. Yet this, summoned through scepticism and defaulting to impossible complexity, is an inhibitor of new understandings.
Decision makers can develop a praxis of their own, in which moral reasoning does factor into determinations. I scope this as a realistic calculation of a fuller suite of potential harms, not the dismissal of harms into culturally uniform or reductive patterns. These contingencies may include procedural steps related to rigor and expectation around ethical practice in cross-cultural consultations and documentation of Indigenous knowledges, weighing up significance of harm without defaulting to a hierarchy of greater or lesser harm and impact.
The new radical proposition is that any, and all harm is significant.
The new radical proposition is that any, and all harm is significant. Decision-making can be focused on harm and impact relative to context and moral reasoning and placed on a spectrum of possibilities, but possibilities that do not compete with one another for merit or significance. Aiming for the co-existence of knowledges, over dissolution into a singular vision of regulatory responsibility concerning impact and harm supports confidence in the uncertainty of decision making. Decision-making by design carries uncertainty, both as a procedural event, and outcome.
The conditions of uncertainty are what facilitate the identification of harm and risk as tracked through multiple options and potentialities, for risk and harm are relational propositions that require relational offsets. Workshopping this with experts returns me to the value in sharing anthropological insights to scope plurality as the adoption of a variety of positions that concern theories and applications of knowledge. It is my anthropological hope to encourage an approach to plurality that acknowledges the co-existence of distinct bodies of knowledge, focusing on the nature and scope of variation but not attaching hierarchical value to them.
Featured image: Pexels
References
Bradley, J. & Yanyuwa Families. 2007. Barni-wardimantha awara: Yanyuwa Sea Country plan. https://maps.northwestatlas.org/files/montara/links_to_plans/NT/7.%20IPA%2047%20Yanyuwa%20Sea%20Country%20Plan.pdf
Kearney, A. 2017. Violence in Place. Abingdon, Oxfordshire Routledge.
Kearney A, O’Leary M, Platten S 2023. Sea Country: Plurality and knowledge of saltwater territories in Indigenous Australian contexts. Geographical Journal 189(1): 104-116. https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12466
Marra Families, Bradley J, McKee B, Martin C, Leone F. 2021. The Sea is Not Empty.Digital Animation, https://vimeo.com/638953224
Povinelli, E. 1993. ‘Might be something’: The language of indeterminacy in Australian Aboriginal Land. Man 28(4): 679-704. https://doi.org/10.2307/2803992
Robertson, B. & M, Mousavian. 2021. Australia’s Offshore Industry. Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. https://ieefa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Australias-Offshore-Industry_A-Half-Century-Snapshot_September-2021.pdf
Sousanis, N. 2015. Unflattening. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Abstract: The sea is not empty and is full of possibilities from many cultural vantage points. Growing attentiveness to reframing geographies of the sea, has shaped critical ocean studies. Human curiosity about the sea; what lies in its depths and what floats across its surfaces continues to define efforts at defending national borders, resisting human migrations, reducing the harms of global warming, and the quest to exploit offshore fossil fuels and renewable energy sources. As an anthropologist I have worked for 25 years with Indigenous maritime cultures, also providing instruction on cross-cultural ways of knowing the sea, aimed at audiences of expert regulatory decision makers tasked with decision-making on oil, gas and renewable energy activities in waters where regulatory powers and functions have been conferred. My task in these instructions is to encourage recognition of cross-cultural orientations towards ways of knowing the sea. Here I reflect on anthropology’s part in encouraging plural understandings of our world.
