Unflowing Pasts, Lost Springs and Watery Mysteries in Eastern Polynesia

Abstract

With attention to both local and extra-local processes of construal of the cultural place and significance of water on the landscape in French Polynesia’s Gambier Islands, I query the sometimes uncertain character and cloudy nature of water in this part of the Pacific. The molecular constancy of the substance notwithstanding, it seems that water is not always what it was or even where it was in recent pasts. For instance, in Eastern Polynesia the seemingly straightforward and highly culturally salient contrast in the binary opposition between tai and vai, salt and fresh waters, may displace the need to address the current complexity of the situation in which fresh waters on Pacific islands now stand.1 Famously binary cultural logics can mask significant cultural ambiguities and practical uncertainties (Feinberg 1980; Mawyer 2014). Similarly, an enduring and valuable focus on the immensely profound place of Ocean for these ‘peoples of the sea’ (Buck 1938b) and of ‘salt’ (Hau‘ofa 1998),