Category: Nature

Mobility and identity in the Patagonian Archipelago

Posted on by am17691

By Paul Merchant

Cast your eyes over a map of Chile, from top to bottom, and you’ll notice a strange development. South of Temuco, the lakes become more frequent and larger, and eventually, after Puerto Montt, the land fragments into hundreds of islands, some quite large, like Chiloé, and many that are very small. You can travel by road as far south as the town of Villa O’Higgins in the Aysén region, but beyond that, unless you cross into Argentina, a boat is the only option. In Chile’s far south, the Andes seem to gradually sink into the Southern Ocean.

This remarkable landscape (though perhaps seascape would be a more appropriate term) is home to communities whose lifestyles and methods of travel offer visions of identity and belonging beyond Chile’s current political order.

Quellon on Chiloe Island (image: Wikimedia Commons)

My research project ‘Reimagining the Pacific: Images of Ocean in Chile and Peru, c.1960 to the Present’, which is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, explores how cultural responses to the ocean reveal contemporary ecological challenges and neglected local histories. In Chile, the last ten years have seen increased interest on the part of documentary filmmakers in the past and present of indigenous communities in Chile’s watery south. These communities, such as the Kawésqar and the Yaghan, suffered terribly as a result of the arrival of European explorers, missionaries and colonisers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with many dying from disease and malnutrition, and some groups disappearing entirely.

Yet not all is lost. In Patricio Guzmán’s documentary El botón de nácar (The Pearl Button, 2015), we meet Martín González Calderón, a Yaghan man who explains how the Chilean Navy’s strict control over maritime space has made it almost impossible for him and his family to travel by boat using the skills and techniques passed down over generations.

Guzmán also speaks to Gabriela Paterito, a Kawésqar woman who recounts a long journey by canoe that she made when she was a girl, and the director prompts her to state that she does not feel Chilean at all. In Guzmán’s film, indigenous mobility by water in the Patagonian archipelago is presented as lost to the past, and impossible in the present (I’ve written elsewhere about how Guzmán consistently relegates indigenous experience to a separate timeframe, or even a separate world).

Other filmmakers have taken a different approach to these issues, however. In Tánana, estar listo para zarpar (Tánana, being ready to set sail, 2016), for instance, we meet Martín González Calderón again, but this time at much greater length. The documentary’s directors Alberto Serrano Fillol and Cristóbal Azócar do not provide an explanatory voiceover. Instead, the camera follows González Calderón as he goes about his daily life, and then seeks to build a boat in which he can recreate a childhood trip around the False Cape Horn, near the southern tip of the continent, that he undertook with his father.

Another documentary from 2016, Alas de mar (Sea Wings) exhibits some similar characteristics. Here, the director Hans Mülchi does provide a voiceover, but it is intermittent and reflective. The film follows the journey by boat of two Kawésqar women, Rosa and Celina, back to the region where they grew up. The voices of Rosa and Celina are much more prominent than that of Mülchi, or indeed that of the European anthropologist who is travelling with them.

Yaghan bark canoe, Wuluaia Bay, Chile (image: GrahamAndDairne on Flickr)

It is not only the human voice that counts, though. Both Tánana and Alas de mar contain long sequences in which the only sounds audible are the sounds of travel by sea: the flapping of a sail, the rush of the wind, the crash of waves against the hull, or the roar of a motor. This openness to the sounds of the marine environment allow the spectator to share in the embodied experience of the protagonists in a way that escapes any definitions that might be imposed by spoken or written language.

It is precisely because Alas de mar and Tánana do not offer definitive answers to the question of the relation between indigenous identity and Chilean identity that I find them valuable to think with. The people whose stories are told in these films have been displaced from their childhood homes (as is the case for Rosa and Celina), or are held in place by the state’s unwillingness to allow maritime travel outside of specific, limited purposes (in the case of Martín). And yet we see them strive to retrace past journeys and reclaim certain modes of mobility as an essential part of their heritage.

In fact, indigenous identity itself appears as fluid and mobile in these films. Martín notes that while he understands much of the Yaghan language, he cannot speak it well himself, and in Tánana we see him teaching boatbuilding techniques to family members who are clearly of mixed heritage. In Alas de mar, Rosa and Celina share weaving and construction techniques with their fellow travellers.

At a time when the Constituent Convention in Chile is determining the form of the country’s new constitution, with the participation of many indigenous groups, including the Kawésqar and the Yaghan, these films’ visions of mobile and changing identities present a source of inspiration for a plurivocal or even plurinational political order.

Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens have suggested that an ‘archipelagic American studies’ can offer a way of ‘decontinentalising’ our understandings of space and identity. A way, in other words, of recognising the cultural and political value of apparently marginal or ‘in-between’ spaces like islands, seas, beaches and inlets, and the people who live in them. Perhaps a decontinental understanding of Latin America might allow a similarly generous approach to its many voices and perspectives.

This post was first published on the Migration Mobilities Bristol blog: https://migration.bristol.ac.uk/2021/11/02/mobility-and-identity-in-the-patagonian-archipelago/

Ana Elisa Sotelo Van Oordt (Part 2): Guardian of Guano

Posted on by rebecca.irons

“[The Guardian of Guano] would think like, looked like, and kind of behaved like a bird”

Originally, I was kind of obsessed with the very traditional National Geographic documentaries where you have a narrator and you’re seeing some sort of wonderful natural phenomenon. I wanted to shoot a documentary like that in Peru so I went to the Punta San Juan Reserve, which is the largest colony of Humboldt penguins in Peru. Those are these desert penguins, which is not the image we typically associate with penguins!

So, I went there with that idea, but when I arrived there was already a man from the BBC shooting a film about the desert penguins! First, I was like wow I can learn so much!… but then as a producer I thought why am I going to shoot a film on desert penguins when this guy already started and has all this equipment that is so much better than mine? why don’t I just do something else that’s going to that work better?

Then I spent a couple days in the reserve, which is basically an inlet, like a sliver of land in the water where you’re sitting on top of a load of bird poop (guano). It smells horrible and there’s so much wind, but it’s beautiful with the seabirds, and its full of a sea Lions. Then I started hanging out with the island guard Ricardo Moreno, and he would show me like ‘oh here’s where the penguins hang out’, or ‘this is where you can get the best shot of the sea lions’.

This reserve is under the protection of the Ministry of Agriculture, so in the same way you would have a park ranger, he was there  guarding the island because around these areas  the people like to hunt these birds, eat them, or go into the reserve and fish, because obviously since it’s a reserve there’s going to be a lot of fish that haven’t been depleted.  So he takes care of the birds and then he also reports back on the population and whether or not its growing.

He came from the mountains and he first saw the ocean as a guano collector because there’s not enough population native to the coastal areas to do the job, and at that time there was a lot of terrorism in the mountains. So, he came down as a as a guano collector and then eventually there was an opening as the guard. A couple of years back he got an award for being the guard with the longest service, but now he’s retired.

As I started hanging out with him, I became really fascinated by this man. He would think like, looked like, and kind of behaved like a bird, and I was just very drawn to the fact that he lived there all year on his own just taking care of these birds and kind of like having this really intimate relationship with them.

At first, I thought that the birds don’t have very exciting lives up here… you would think that they just sit and stare, but they’re like looking everywhere in all directions, and are aware of every sound. The first couple of times I would see him go and count the birds I would think it’s incredibly boring, as this guy’s just sitting there! And then, as I kept going I began to think it was an incredibly fascinating activity because he’s looking at one thing then you see one bird fly down, and then you can hear the ocean, or even hear another one, and I think that he adopted these very bird-like conditions where you’re kind of looking and being aware of your environment and feeling very frail… birds are very frail and they’re aware of it, especially when they’re not flying because obviously if you’re on land we have the advantage but in the air, they have the advantage.

One of his tasks there was that twice a week, he would collect the vomit after the birds regurgitated and then he would see ‘oh so this bird has eaten an anchovy, this one has eaten another fish or whatnot’. What was really interesting was that he saw that the birds were eating less and less anchovy because there’s not that many available anymore. And that’s a direct reflection of the depletion of stocks from overfishing, even if it goes on many kilometres away it’s affecting the birds that are in this area too.

Also, you’re always sitting and you’re walking on top of bird poop, so he was like knee deep in bird poop and guts and he was just fascinated! And I was fascinated by the way he talked about birds! I kept asking myself how this man could just have his life revolve around these birds, and he’s here all alone, his families in the mountains he never sees them…then I realised that to him the birds were his family and he I think he identified a lot with the birds, because they were also very solitary.

Watch Guardian of Guano:

Ana Elisa Sotelo Van Oordt is represented by BLOC ART

Seaspiracy, or, Why bother with paper straws when you can become a vegan?

Posted on by rebecca.irons

A new documentary has recently blown up on the Netflix UK chart: Seaspiracy.

Intending to deliver a somewhat sensationalist, hard-hitting view into the evils of the fishing industry, the film’s overall message is quite clear: stop eating fish if you care about the ocean.

In the three short weeks since its UK release, the film has already caused quite the storm, from accusations of misrepresentation and out-of-context interviews, a reliance on older and questionable scientific data, exaggeration of the facts, total lack of important stakeholder contributions or opinions (including fisherman and other marine workers), denial of sustainable fishing when it does in fact exist, overlooking global lived realities of people who eat fish and expounding a discourse of food privilege, to perpetuations of the white saviour narrative.  

It may be so that these issues, and more, exist with the documentary, and I would encourage the discerning viewer to do their own research into them before implementing significant lifestyle changes (if you can get past watching the astounding entitlement exhibited by director Ali Tabrizi when he gets in a huff after his impromptu appearance to demand an interview at the offices of the Marine Stewardship Council is denied, that is). However, for me it was not what the documentary highlighted that was of interest, but what it pushed to one side as secondary: plastic pollution.

The documentary opens with Tabrizi discussing his personal efforts to engage in beach clean-ups and limit the plastic pollution that is tarnishing the oceans (and his opinions on Asian whaling…though that is a discussion point for another day). Yet, plastic is promptly discarded as a key threat (or at least one to be directly targeted), to instead focus on the fishing industry.

For example, we are told that in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, 46% of the plastic comes from fishing lines. Conclusion? Fishing (and our part in fuelling the industry through eating fish) is actually causing the greatest plastic pollution via discarded nets. The viewer is also told that only 0.03% of ocean plastic comes from straws. As such, what is the point of using paper straws, reusable bags and cups, and household recycling, this documentary seems to ask, if you continue to eat seafood?

But as some reports show, this may conveniently overlook some facts that should be noted. Fishing nets do contribute a great deal to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but this may be because ‘thin’ plastics like bags and straws (the kind that are targeted in environmentalist campaigns) disintegrate and sink to the sea bed. If we bear in mind that microplastics come from the breakdown of larger plastics, then the ghastly fishing nets sitting atop the ocean may suddenly seem less threatening, at least to those of us interested in microplastics. It is the plastics that we don’t see, the straws and the bags that are broken down and washed away, that the fish are ingesting.

This kind of discourse reminds me of the Peruvian microplastics campaign that I have been researching, ‘No quiero esto en mi ceviche’ (‘I don’t want this in my ceviche’). In that campaign we are told that using plastics will result in humans eating bits of microplastics in their seafood ceviche dishes- we don’t want that. However, it does not attempt to address the wellbeing of the actual fish who are eating the plastics, and they are only mentioned as a food source.

Seaspiracy also seems to neglect the fish eating those microplastics, unless in a context of being eaten. It is all well and good to stop eating seafood and contribute to the diminishment of the ‘evil’ fishing industry, but this arguably needs to go hand in hand with attention to plastic waste. If not, it seems to me that we run the risk of leaving marine life to its own devices, only to keep pumping microplastics into their environments anyway.

Image from Pixabay.

World Water Day and the Día del Mar

Posted on by paul.merchant

There’s been an odd sequence of themed days this week. Monday 22 March was World Water Day, a day instituted by the United Nations in 1993 which is part of an effort to advocate for the sustainable management of freshwater resources. The following day, Tuesday 23 March, was the Día del Mar (Day of the Sea) in Bolivia, commemorating the loss of the country’s coastal Litoral department in the War of the Pacific against Chile (1879-83).

This project is about the ocean, rather than about freshwater resources, and isn’t (directly) about Bolivia. So why am I bothering to write about the near conjunction of these two dates? Well, for a start, the more conversations I have with artists, curators and NGO members in Chile and Peru, the more I realise that it doesn’t really make sense to consider the ocean as separate from the other parts of the water cycle. In both of these countries, freshwater resources like lakes and glaciers are under threat from climate change and from activities like mining, and there are a quite a number of recent artistic interventions drawing attention to this issue. Here are two examples: Cecilia Vicuña’s ‘Menstrual Quipu‘, an installation which protested against the effects of mining on the Glaciar del Plomo in Chile in 2006, and the work of three Peruvian artists exhibited online this week to mark World Water Day.

Bolivia’s Day of the Sea, conversely, enshrines a vision of water as territory which can be claimed by a nation: this week, the Bolivian president Luis Arce reiterated the country’s demand for sovereign access to the Pacific Ocean and called for a new round of negotiations with Chile.

In short, the sequence of these two very different commemorative days shows us how water is never just one thing (to put it rather inelegantly). It is both a universal resource that transcends national boundaries and, in some forms, highly contested territory. To borrow a phrase from the geographer Jamie Linton, ‘water is what we make of it’. Our social and cultural attitudes to this fundamental element of global ecosystems can and do shape the current state of the world’s bodies of water.

This much is easily visible in Chile, where the current Water Code, which allows for free trading of privatised water rights, has given rise to a range of environmental problems and social inequalities. I’ll return to this topic later this year, as the process of drafting a new Chilean constitution continues.

Next week, I’ll be interviewing Enrique Ramírez, an artist whose work explores the uncomfortable political history of the Pacific in 20th-century Chile.

Seahorse Exports in the Sinopharm era

Posted on by rebecca.irons

Last week saw the celebration of the UN ‘World Wildlife Day’. The date, March 3rd , was so chosen to honour the ratification of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in 1973. Though this year’s theme was on ‘Forests and Livelihoods’ instead of Oceans, the watery neighbours of forest multispecies environments are also home to an abundance of wildlife that deserve our celebration as well. Yet the signing of the global convention to protect wildlife, now almost half a century ago, has not managed to completely stop trade and overfishing of endangered species in the Pacific and beyond. Many species fall victim to illegal activities, but there is one that crops up again and again as a mass-fished commodity along the Peruvian coast- the seahorse (or, as marine biologist Helen Scales has playfully called them, ‘Poseidon’s steed’). But why should we be interested in this particular animal when considering multi-national relations across the Pacific? In answer to this, it is not necessarily just the seahorse itself that is of interest, but the multinational relationships within which it becomes entangled. In this instance, between Peru and China.

In the increasing attention paid to Peru’s Pacific mega-fauna, including the imposing humpback whale, manta ray, and green turtles, the more diminutive figure of the Pacific seahorse may be overlooked. Human-shy and certainly not capable of attracting anywhere near the same tourist dollars as the mega-fauna for their dearth of appearances, seahorses have instead been exploited for another economic motive along Peruvian shores; they are illegally caught, dried, and exported to Asian markets. The quantity seized by port authorities has steadily grown over the last decade, from 16,000 in 2012, to 8 million in 2016, to an astonishing 12.3 million in 2019, making Peru the second largest exporter of Pacific seahorses in the world, second only to Mexico.

Due to destruction of marine habitats, direct and by-catch, the Pacific seahorse makes it onto the CITES IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) red list as a vulnerable species. Though it is illegal to fish seahorses in the Peruvian Pacific, this practice continues unabated on an apparently enormous scale. Illegal fishing in itself is an important and relevant topic of enquiry for imaginaries of the Pacific and coastal community cultures, however seahorses in particular hold a specific interest when thinking about the international connections involved in maritime relationships, and how these may change with the ongoing development of geopolitical considerations.

So why are seahorses caught and dried in Peru in the first place, if not for domestic use? The short answer is that they hold a special value for the export market, and it can be profitable for fisherman to source them even at the risk of being caught and sanctioned. Principally, seahorses are sent to Asian countries where they are in high demand as an ingredient for use within Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). On the motivations behind this use, Kumaravel et al. (2012) write that:

“Seahorses, a syngnathidae fish, are one of the important candidate organisms which have been used in Chinese traditional medicine from time immemorial. It is believed that seahorses have the potential to cure infertility, baldness, asthma and arthritis”.

Whether or not these claims are scientifically substantiated is a matter of ongoing debate, however it is the relationship between the export and import countries, and medicine, that is of greater interest here. What do Peruvians think about the depletion of an endangered species living within their waters, in order to satisfy a foreign demand for medicinal benefit that may never reach Peru itself? What is the Peruvian perception of Chinese medicine and relationships with China more generally?

Undoubtedly these are all pressing questions that would have been worthy of exploration when the very first illegal vessel carrying dried seahorses was seized. But now, in a pandemic-era Pacific, the question may become more complicated still as it has been China and Chinese-developed vaccines that are leading the way in Peru.

Peru was one of the countries originally enrolled for China’s Sinopharm vaccine trial, hinting at an increasingly strengthening relationship between these neighbours across the Pacific. With an order of 38 million doses, Peru’s largest vaccine purchase, Sinopharm will now make it into the arm of a significant number of Peruvians. Putting the ‘vaccinegate’ scandal in which politicians and their relatives clandestinely jumped the vaccine queue to one side, the fact that Peruvians will rely on Chinese-produced inoculations to combat the pandemic might lead us to wonder how the Peruvian public views on medicine and China might develop. On this, we might query whether TCM might become more favourably viewed in the country following the Sinopharm rollout. If so, what might this mean for the seahorse (and perhaps, other marine animals used in TCM such as manta rays)? Might their protection be overlooked in order to maintain and nourish medically-minded international collaborations?

Interesting questions indeed, and though they are not to be answered here, it may be worth keeping a close eye on the entanglements of marine life, exports, and changing pan-pacific relationships as pandemic-influenced geopolitics influence international relationships.

Images from Pixabay

A Ceviche Question

Posted on by rebecca.irons

The smell of fresh fish fills the air as hawkers cry out the prices of that day’s menu popular in Mercado San Jose. I have been visiting this same ceviche stall in Lima’s Jesus Maria neighbourhood for many years; a non-so-hidden gem as I’ve often had to bustle for the chance to perch at the counter on a rickety stall around lunchtime.

Plates of the emblematically Peruvian seafood dish ceviche are piled high with sweet potato and toasted corn, and doused with an extra helping of leche de tigre. If you’re lucky, you can get an extra refill of chicha morada, a highly-sugared beverage made from boiled purple corn, to wash down the meal. As an anthropologist it is always quite the experience, both for my tastebuds as well as my ethnographic eye. Ceviche, and the entire culture surrounding it, is very special indeed.

Whilst Ceviche is a dish that now circulates internationally, it was born of the Peruvian Pacific and is an icon of the country’s gastronomic boom and associated rise in tourism. In recent years, the country has gained increasing international recognition for its gastronomic prowess, having won the ‘World’s Leading Culinary Destination Award’ eight years in a row, and only being beaten off the top spot in 2020 by Italy- a more than fair contender. The catapulting of Peru onto the worlds gastronomic and tourism stage goes hand in hand with a strengthening economy and sense of national identity; all with patriotic elements such as ceviche at the helm of this sea change.

However, ceviche enters dramatically into other important debates of our times too.

In recognition of the troubling rise in plastic waste, a campaign and subsequent changes in legislation were launched in 2018; ‘No quiero esto en mi ceviche’ (I don’t want this in my ceviche). The campaign saw renowned Peruvian chefs sprinkle vials of microplastics over their plated ceviche as a final and foreboding ‘garnish’, alongside the “sale” of microplastic seasoning vials in Lima supermarkets. Yet, such a campaign, and the wider question of contemporary ceviche, raises important questions that deserve attention.

It is true that plastics are fast becoming a significant issue of concern regarding the ocean, highlighted by documentaries such as ‘Blue Planet’ that have influenced significant changes in viewers lifestyles as a result. But plastics also negatively influence human health too- it has been estimated that we may be eating up to 5 grams of microplastics per week, snuck into our digestive systems through food and water.

Plastics are especially concerning when discussing the Pacific, as we need only look to ‘The Great Pacific Garbage Patch’, the worlds largest accumulation of ocean plastic, for evidence of the dire straights we are in. Hopefully, campaigns such as ‘No quiero esto en mi ceviche’ may go some way to address this and change attitudes towards plastics. For example, gaining momentum, the movement led to the Peruvian Ministry of Environment successfully banning single use plastics in coastal areas (beaches, ports) in 2019, with the rest of the country set to follow by 2022.

Whilst campaigns to reduce single-use plastics may certainly be welcome, the local expression of this in Peru deserves further attention for what it tells us about imaginaries of the Pacific. Through ‘No quiero esto en mi ceviche’, Peruvians are encouraged to abandon plastics as they may adversely affect the fish that go into ceviche, and thereby potentially harm national identity and gastronomic prowess if the dish is ‘contaminated’. There is absolutely no mention of the harm that plastics do to living animals though; fish only enter environmentalist discourse as marinated corpses contributing to symbols of national identity. As such, I want to ask an important question: Is the Pacific perceived as a multispecies world deserving of care and respect, or as a resource, filled with other little swimming resources, only worthy of protection when national goals and symbols like ceviche are negatively impacted upon?

It is this important question regarding oceanic multispecies health, Pacific-related national identity and gastronomic booms, and the circulation of ceviche imagery, that I will be exploring as part of the ‘Reimagining the Pacific’ project this year.

Images from Pixabay