Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Commodities

Gifts

Felix Stein — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 12:47:55 +0000

University of California, Los Angeles

Initially published 7 Jul 2020

Abstract:

As one of the oldest forms of social actions that bind people together and as an arresting example of the universality and diversity of humanity, gift exchange has long been a focus of anthropological inquiry. This entry starts with the distinction between individual gifts and collective gifts which explains some cross-cultural misunderstandings, and moves on to review the two basic theoretical models on the engine of gifting—the spirit of the gift and the principle of reciprocity. While revealing that the highly diversified patterns of gift exchange derive from different perceptions of the relationship between culturally-constructed notions of personhood and material objects in the larger social setting, the anthropology of the gift also unpacks the nuances of social life by examining patterns of gift-giving behaviour all over the world.

Introduction

When Europeans first arrived in North America and received presents from the Native Americans they encountered, they could not understand why an equivalent return was expected by their hosts. Many Europeans believed they owed nothing in return, because a gift should be free and with no strings attached. They also assumed the Native Americans were merely pretending to be generous; hence the expression of ‘Indian gift’ or ‘Indian giver’ for objects and people given merely in hopes of future returns (Wilton 2009: 166-7). The famous American explorers Lewis and Clark, for example, often suspected such motivations to be guiding their Native hosts when being presented with gifts. They even rudely refused to accept them, referring to the Native Americans as impertinent and thievish in their journals (see Slaughter 2004). Yet the Native Americans considered gifts to be initiating cycles of social exchange. They felt insulted by the Europeans who either refused to accept gifts in the first place, or who did accept them but did not want to reciprocate. In their eyes, both stances proved their unfriendliness and untrustworthiness.

Thanks to the anthropological study of gifts and gift-giving, we can now see clearly that beneath the racist expression ‘Indian gift’ or ‘Indian giver’ lies the European settlers’ imposition of a culturally specific understanding of gifts onto Native Americans, who saw their function and meaning in a quite different light. To somewhat simplify the matter for the sake of clarity, I hereafter refer to the former as the individual gift that is imagined as a token of a person’s affection with no strings attached, and to the latter as the collective gift that is part and parcel of a series of collective actions with wider and profound social implications. At surface level, they represent two different prototypes of gifts and two different systems of social exchange, which are often diametrically opposed to each other. The individual gift emerged in the modern West along with the rise of individualism and the expansion of the capitalist market economy, while the collective gift has been a major system of social exchange all over the world that creates sociality through a sense of indebtedness (see Graeber 2011) and can be found in various forms in different cultures. At a deeper level, their differences are actually more rhetorical than behavioural, and more in degree than in kind. Behind the discourse of the individualised pure gift in modern times, there are still rules of gifting, expectations of returning gifts, and the social function of strengthening social ties through gift-giving, all of which are similar to their counterparts in systems of traditional collective gifts. Yet, without knowing the cross-cultural differences and similarities between the two basic types, we may be biased to place one against the other, or to misunderstand both of them.

In the following pages, this entry briefly introduces two well-known examples of the traditional and collective gift—the Kula ring and yam exchange, which both occur in the Trobriand Islands—highlighting their features in contrast to the widely-held assumption of modern individual gifts. It then introduces two major theoretical models—the spirit of the gift and the reciprocity principle—that emerged out of scholarly efforts to better understand the origin and driving force of gift exchange. The scholarship shows the main commonalities between the two basic types of gifts, as well as some important differences which in turn lead our inquiry to a deeper level: the cultural understanding between persons and things. In the last section, the entry demonstrates the richness and complexity of the world of gifts that has been explored by scholars from different academic disciplines in recent decades.

Obligatory gifts

A striking feature of collective gifts is their obligatory circulation among the same group of givers and recipients, as illustrated in the Kula ring and yam exchange in Melanesian society. Kula is a ritualised form of intertribal exchange of red shells necklaces (soulava) and white shells armbands (mwali) carried out among men of influence in the Trobriand Islands, a region now part of Papua New Guinea. Predefined partners exchange these gifts in a closed circle across several islands, and they always circulate the gifts of necklaces clockwise and exchange armbands in the opposite direction. These gifts are made for exchange only and have their own names, identities, and histories. The exchange relationship is a lifelong one, but the gifts of necklaces and armbands always flow among fixed partners. Kula exchange voyages from one island to another customarily take place twice a year, and it will take one or two years for a given Kula object to return to its original owner. More importantly, each Kula voyage is highlighted by the interisland trade of many other objects, and in this sense the Kula ring also reflects the economic system in this region (Malinowski 1984 [1922]; Leach & Leach 1983).

An equally important form of collective gift exchange in the Trobriand Islands involves yams. Trobriand men spend a great deal of time and energy cultivating yams, but local people normally eat other fresh produce, including sweet potatoes, greens beans, squash, fruits, and taro. The yams are mainly used by men as gifts to their married-out daughters and sisters who will display them publically in a special yam house. The obligation to participate in gift-giving is in this instance dictated by the local kinship system. People in the Trobriands traditionally adhere to matrilineal descent and patrilocal post-marital residence. This means that when a woman gets married to a man, she moves to his village but her husband continues to belong to his mother’s lineage. The woman who married him will in turn belong to her own mother’s lineage. The gift of yams from a man to his sister or daughter brings the woman prestige and status because it shows how many strong supporters she has from her matrilineal kin. The gift of yams thereby recognises the woman as the actual owner of the matrilineal group. In return, her husband, who will receive some of the yams that she is given, will similarly be obligated to produce and send yams to the house of his married-out sister or daughter who, again, will be living in her husband’s matrilineal community.

These interlocking exchange relationships between men and their married-out sisters or daughters do not stop at the exchange of yams. By giving yams to one’s sister and thereby to her husband, one obligates one’s brother-in-law to give a return gift. This must come in a particular form—bundles of banana leaves given by women. When a man dies in a matrilineal village, all female descendants of this matrilineal lineage who are already married must come back to participate in the funeral as the kinswomen of the deceased. More importantly, they return as the true owners of the matrilineal group. During the funerary ritual, these women give away their special wealth—bundled banana leaves or banana-leaf skirts—to funeral guests. They also mourn the deceased and contribute to the ritual with labour. The woman who gives away the largest number of bundles and skirts is recognised as a ‘wealthy woman’ (Weiner 1992).

Here the links among a woman, her husband, and her brother are made visible and embodied in the flow of yams and banana leaves. The production of yams and banana leaves is in fact so important that it occupies a central place in the local economy, keeping both men and women busy all year around. Importantly, they are not busy for their own consumption needs; rather, they work hard in order to have more gifts for others and expect to receive return gifts as well.

On the surface, gift-giving in both the Kula ring and the exchanges of yam and banana leaves is an obligatory act with specific expectations about the time of return and the volume of the returning gift that takes place between persons as representatives of their own familial/kin groups. These gifts serve socio-political functions while forming an important part of the local economy, motivating economic behaviour and ‘making the world go around’. This contrasts sharply with contemporary understandings of individual gifts, which should be non-obligatory and have no strings attached, especially not specific expectations of return gifting.

Yet this difference become less striking in some customary gift exchanges in the modern West, for example the exchange of holiday greeting cards. More importantly, the expectation to offer gifts but also to receive them and then to make counter-gifts is clearly present in the family tradition of Christmas gift exchanges. This is similar to the yam exchange among Trobriand Islanders, although the value and content of Christmas gifts should be individualised. Truly free gifts seem only to exist in discourse. As Marcel Mauss notes (1967 [1925]), the three obligations of giving, receiving, and returning gifts constitute the foundation of gift-exchange systems all over the world, notwithstanding special cultural and temporal differences.

The engine of gifting: the spirit of the gift or the principle of reciprocity?

Anthropologists have been debating for many years about what motivates gift-giving around the world. Although not the first to explore the subject, Mauss offered the first theory on various gift-exchange systems in non-Western cultures that continues to provide inspirations for the study of the gift. He highlighted the paradoxical and ambiguous nature of gifts being simultaneously obligatory and free, material and spiritual, with interest and disinterested. He started this intellectual journey by asking the fundamental question, ‘What force is there in the thing given which compels the recipient to make a return?’ (Mauss 1967 [1925]: 1). Mauss finds his answer in the Maori concept of hau—a mystic power that lies in the forest and in the valuables (taonga) given by one person to another. According to studies of the Maori that Mauss had access to, the hau always wishes to return to its place of origin, but can only do so through the medium of an object given in exchange for an original gift. Failure to return a gift can result in serious trouble, since not returning the hau can cause the death of gift recipients. It is the hau in the gift, Mauss asserts, that forces the recipient to make a return, and he calls this ‘the spirit of the gift’ (1967 [1925]: 8-9). According to the Maori, to receive a gift is also to receive a part of the gift-giver’s own spiritual essence. Thus, one must make a return gift to keep the original giver intact.

The Maussian notion of the spirit of the gift, however, did not convince Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the founding figures of modern anthropology. Prior to the appearance of Mauss’ classic 1925 work, The gift, Malinowski had already published the famous ethnographic account of Kula exchange in Melanesian society (summarised above) and had described in detail the local system of transactions, ranging from ‘pure gifts’ to ‘real barter’ (1984 [1922]). Rejecting Mauss’ interpretation of the spirit of the gift, Malinowski retracted his category of the ‘pure gift’ in a later book (1962 [1926]) and articulated the principle of reciprocity to explain the Trobriand system of economic transactions. Malinowski argued that the binding force of economic obligations lies in the sanction, which either side may invoke to sever the bonds of reciprocity. One gives because of the expectation of return, and one returns because of the threat that one’s partner may stop giving. He thus concluded that the principle of reciprocity serves as the foundation of the Melanesian social order (Malinowski 1962 [1926]: chapters 3, 4, 8, and 9).

Inspired by Malinowski's work, Raymond Firth argues that among the Maori in New Zealand, exchange is driven by reciprocity (locally called utu). The Maori attach great importance to the idea of ‘compensation’ or ‘equivalent return’ (Firth 1959: 412ff). According to Firth, Mauss misinterprets the hau by imputing active qualities to its social construction, which Maori people do not recognise; Mauss also allegedly confuses the hau of the gift with the hau of the gift-giver (Firth 1959: 419-20). In a similar vein, Claude Levi-Strauss went so far as to call the spirit of the gift a mystification:

Mauss strives to construct a whole out of parts; and as that is manifestly not possible, he has to add to the mixture an additional quantity which gives him the illusion of squaring his account. This quantity is hau. Are we not dealing with a mystification, an effect quite often produced in the minds of ethnographers by indigenous people? (1987: 47).

The most effective advocate for the accountability of the principle of reciprocity, however, is Marshall Sahlins, who introduces a tripartite division of exchange phenomena—generalised reciprocity, balanced reciprocity, and negative reciprocity. He identifies three variables as critical to determining the general nature of gift-giving and exchange: kinship distance, sociability, and generosity (1972:191-210).

The principle of reciprocity was so frequently employed to explain various patterns of gift exchange that it quickly became something of a cliché, as Geoffrey MacCormack warns: ‘the description of all types of exchanges as reciprocal easily leads to an obscuring of the significant differences between them’ (1976: 101). Ultimately, the principle of reciprocity is nothing more than saying that no one will do anything for nothing. As Annette Weiner commented, such a rational and overly general notion of reciprocity is deeply rooted in Western thought and has been used to justify theories of a free market economy since Thomas Hobbes (1992: 28-30).

To truly understand what motivates various systems of gift exchange in non-Western cultures, therefore, one must go beyond Western assumptions of economic rationality and the notion of Homo economicus, which is exactly what Mauss did in 1925 (see also Graeber 2001). The Maussian notion of the spirit of the gift was therefore revitalised from two directions. First, in South Asia studies, anthropologists have explored the Hindu idea of giving without expectation of material return. As early as the 1970s, Ved Prakash Vatuk and Sylvia Vatuk (1971) noted some asymmetric gift-giving relationships in the context of caste hierarchy. Here, people of low castes were generally not expected to return the dan gifts they receive from their superiors. Further investigations reveal that the dan gifts, which are offered by the dominant caste to lower castes during various secular and religious rituals, serve to transfer dangerous and inauspicious elements, such as illness, death, and misfortune, from the donor to the recipient. The acceptance of these gifts is intended as a vessel of evil and inauspiciousness, like swallowing poison. The recipients of lower castes are required by caste ideology to receive this type of poisonous gift without returning it. As a result, the institutionalised flow of poisonous gifts from the dominant caste to subordinate castes creates a mode of cultural domination (Raheja 1988). These findings seriously challenge generalised models of reciprocity. They led Jonathan Parry (1986) to interpret the absence of reciprocity in the Indian dan in terms of an ‘evil spirit’ of the gift. This denies Mauss’ original argument that the spirit of the gift elicits a return gift. Realising this difficulty, Parry writes: ‘Where we have the “spirit,” reciprocity is denied; where there is reciprocity there is not much evidence of “spirit.” The two aspects of the model do not hang together’ (1986: 463). James Laidlaw argues that the notion of the non-obligatory pure gift exists in all world religions, albeit often in obscured forms, such as the case of the dan gift to Shvetambar Jain renouncers in India, and it carries as many important social meanings as the obligatory gifts (2000).

A solution to the tension between motivating spirits and merely secular reciprocity is found in studies of Pacific island societies. One can see both the ‘spirit’ and the social obligation to return. Rather than accepting Mauss’ interpretation of the Maori hau, many anthropologists have employed the notion of inalienability to explain the existence of spiritual, non-utilitarian ties between giver and recipient. Frederick Damon discovered that not all Kula objects are in the endless circle of exchange; the Muyuw islanders, for example, separate particular types of conus shell valuables known as kitoum from other Kula gifts. They may take the kitoum gifts in or out of the circle at their individual choice. This is because they represent the ‘congealed labor’ of their individual owners and because ‘no matter where a kitoum is . . . it can be claimed by its owner’ (Damon 1980:282). All Kula valuables are brought into exchange by the labour of specific individuals whereby they constitute one’s inalienable kitoum (Damon 1980: 284). Similar views are developed by Christopher Gregory in his analysis of the difference between gift-debt relations and commodity-debt relations, positing that gift-debts involve a transfer of inalienable objects between mutually dependent persons, whereas commodity debts result from the exchange of alienable objects between independent transactors (Gregory 2015). Interestingly, the inalienability of certain valuables may explain not only the motivation to return but also the original motivation for participating in competitive exchange such as the Kula (Feil 1982).

The inalienability of gifts is at the core of an innovative theory of exchange by Weiner (1992), arguably the sharpest critic of standard anthropological studies of the gift which routinely rely on the principle of reciprocity. She maintains:

[w]hat motivates reciprocity is its reverse—the desire to keep something back from the pressures of give-and-take. This something is a possession that speaks to and for an individual’s or a group’s social identity and, in so doing, affirms the difference between one person or group and another (1992:43).

It is this principle of keeping-while-giving, rather than the norm of reciprocity, that can explain the obligation to return a gift (Weiner 1992: 46). Weiner also believes that Mauss is right about the Maori hau: ‘[t]he hau as a life force embedded in the person is transmitted to the person’s possessions and thus adds inalienable value to the objects’ (Weiner 1992: 63; see also Godelier 1999; Graeber 2001; Thompson 1987).

Weiner’s theory of the inalienable gift may be hard to apply to gift-giving practices in some complex societies, where most gifts are purchased commodities and where gifts are often individualised. For example, in China, money plays an important role in ceremonial gift-giving, and most material gifts are consumer goods, such as wine, cigarettes, or canned food. Altogether the monetary expenditure on gifts among Chinese villagers costs about twenty percent of household income, making it literally a gift economy (Yan 1996). Moreover, in contrast to the Melanesian and Polynesian cases, which involve the endless circulation of valuable shells, fine mats, or cloaks, the commodities-turned-gifts exchanged among the Chinese are rarely recycled as return gifts; instead, it is expected that gifts will be consumed by their recipients soon after their acceptance. In this sense, not only is a gift alienable, it must be alienated; to return the same gift would be considered a gesture of insult and rejection (Yan 1996).

While posing a challenge to the notion of inalienability, the Chinese case suggests that the spirit of the gift can be understood at two levels. Inalienability as elaborated by Weiner, among others, can be seen in the Melanesian case, where gifts are believed to contain hau or some similar spiritual essence and thus cannot be disposed of freely by the recipient. This is the empirical evidence upon which Mauss bases his argument; but, as an empirical observation, it may not be true in other societies. Therefore, the key issue in any society is to determine what people think about the message conveyed by the gift—love, friendship, caring, obligation, competition, or a supernatural spirit—and the essential implication is that a bond between individuals or groups can be created through the association between persons and things.

The person in the gift

Indeed, the underlying theme in almost all anthropological discussions of the gift and the gift economy is the relationship between persons and material objects. The bonds created by gifts (inalienable objects) are often considered to be the same as the mutually dependent ties between persons. Here we can see that the fundamental issue in Mauss’ analysis of the gift is to determine how people relate to things, and, through things, how people relate to each other. As John Liep notes, both Karl Marx and Mauss are concerned with the alienation of people from the products of their labour, which correlates to the development of a world capitalist market economy (1990: 165). But unlike Marx, who focuses on the system of commodity exchange in modern societies and discovers the secret of surplus value, Mauss concentrates on gift exchange in pre-capitalist societies and seeks answers from indigenous belief systems. To compare the archaic, personalised gift economy with the modern, impersonalised system of commodity exchange, Mauss draws a three-stage, evolutionary scheme: social exchange begins with ‘total prestations’, in which the materials transferred between groups are only part of a larger range of noneconomic transfers. The second stage is gift exchange between moral persons who represent groups, leading finally to commodity exchange between independent individuals in market societies (see Mauss 1967: 68-9).

Jonathan Parry (1986) pushes Mauss’ thesis further by first showing that the Maori and Hindu ideologies of gift exchange represent fundamentally opposite types: the former requires the reciprocity of every gift given, while the latter denies reciprocity. However, the Maori gift and the Indian gift share one thing in common: namely, the absence of an absolute disjunction between persons and things. The separation between persons and things is, according to Parry, a product of Christian cosmology: ‘Christianity—with its notion that all men are fashioned equally in the image of God—has developed a universalistic conception of purely disinterested giving’ (Parry 1986: 468, italics in the original). Furthermore, the strong faith in freedom and rational choice also leads to the belief that ‘those who make free and unconstrained contracts in the market also make free and unconstrained gifts outside it’ (Parry 1986: 469).

In line with Parry’s view, James Carrier argues that the ideology of the perfect gift in the West is shaped by the rise of industrial capitalism:

Free and disinterested givers and recipients who transact unobligating expressions of affection come into cultural existence with the shift of production out of the affective and substantial relations that exist in the household to the impersonal relations of wage labor and capital (Carrier 1990: 31).

This ideology, however, does not always guide everyday practice. Instead, modern American gifts are often predictable and socially regulated (see Caplow 1984; Cheal 1988). The obligatory gift relations characterised by Mauss for traditional societies also exist in capitalist societies (for a further discussion of these themes, see Sanchez et al. 2017).

One important implication of Parry’s and Carrier’s works is that, although gift exchange exists in all human societies, the form it takes varies greatly depending on the particular culture within which it is rooted. Hence we may find multiple ‘forms’ of the gift—the Melanesian gift, the Indian gift, the Japanese gift, the American gift, and so on. At a deeper level, different forms of gifts tend to reflect different customs in the cultural construction of personhood. In Melanesian societies, for example, the person is relationally constructed and in turn represents a set of social relations in his or her social acts, including gift-giving. A primary feature of relational personhood is that ‘persons simply do not have alienable items, that is, property at their disposal; they can only dispose of items by enchaining themselves in relations with others’ (Strathern 1988: 161). By contrast, the free, autonomous individual defined in neoclassical economics has nothing intrinsic to his or her personhood but the ‘bare undifferentiated free will’; everything else is alienable (Radin 1996: 62). In other words, the differences in personhood provide us with a key to better understanding why the Melanesian pure gift is inalienable and thus obligatory, while the Western perfect gift is free and thus must be unconstraining. Moreover, personhood also explains the idiosyncratic differences between the two prototypes of gifts and gift-exchange systems: the modern individual gift and traditional collective gifts.

Particularly noteworthy is that a Western-centric understanding of personhood may easily contribute to the misunderstanding of the gift in non-Western societies. At the core of the debate about the nature of the gift is its essential ambiguity; that is, gifts are at once free and constraining, self-interested and disinterested, and are motivated by both generosity and calculation or expectation of return. Although Mauss initiated the anthropological discourse on the gift by taking a both/and approach in examining its ambiguous nature, most subsequent studies focus on one side or another. As a result, the principle of reciprocity, the inalienability of the gift, and the dichotomy of gifts vs. commodities have taken turns dominating the study of the topic. Underneath all these theories, there is a Western notion of a pure gift based on the belief of the autonomous and free individual that has been used as the ultimate measurement to examine gift-giving activities all over the world. As Mark Ostern points out:

We have met the enemy and he is us: the perfect altruist is nothing more than the obverse face of Homo economicus…[w]e will achieve no deeper understanding of gift exchange and their relationships to economic and social behavior until we discard or at least modify the notion of persons as free, unconstrained transactors (2002: 240, italics in the original).

The inability to think beyond Western economic rationality is precisely what caused cultural misunderstandings between the early European settlers and Native Americans, discussed at the outset of this essay.

The multifaceted gift in the real world

Anthropologists have explored a great number of social functions of gifts as well as the explicit and implicit rules governing gift exchange, which in turn help us to better understand a wide range of social phenomena. The enigma of the gift continues to draw more scholars to such an intellectual endeavour, and the study of gifts has gone far beyond anthropology to become an interdisciplinary enterprise in its own right. This section can only make a few brief observations thereof, barely scratching the surface.

Gifts are commonly exchanged in ritualised contexts and can even constitute a rite in and of themselves, such as the presentation of a wedding ring. Thus we can make a distinction between ceremonial and non-ceremonial gifts. The most common examples of the former include gift-giving activities in rites of passage and holidays, such as weddings, funerals, and the Christmas holiday. An occasional gift offered to a helper to express gratitude or some regular exchange of presents among family members or friends may be considered as the latter.

Yet, one possible classification is to see the social identity symbolised by the gifts. Do two persons exchange gifts on behalf of the respective group that they belong to, such as family, lineage, or village community? Or is the gift exchanged between two autonomous individuals? The custom of bridewealth and dowry constitutes a good example of collectivist gift-giving; by contrast, most gift-giving activities in contemporary Western societies occur between two autonomous individuals.

In general, most collective gift-giving activities are institutionalised and ceremonial because collective identities and group interests are at stake, while most individualistic gifts occur in non-ceremonial occasions. But there are exceptions. The exchange of Kula valuables is an institutionalised ceremonial activity but remains a highly competitive enterprise whereby individuals act as free agents. On the other hand, the offer of an engagement ring in contemporary Western societies is a highly ritualised and institutionalised act of individual gift-giving.

Once we place gift exchange in the larger social context, we can see the difference between horizontal and vertical gift exchanges. Horizontal gift exchange occurs among social equals, while vertical exchange cuts across the boundaries of social status. Both types of gift-giving activities may coexist on some occasions. Taking Christmas gift-giving as an example, the horizontal exchange of gifts among friends, classmates, or coworkers goes side by side with vertical exchange of gifts between employers and employees, patrons and clients, hosts and service providers, and to a lesser degree, between senior and junior generations in a family or kin group. Because the obligation to return a gift places its recipient in the inferior position of being indebted, gift-giving is often used as a way to create political authority and dominance, such as in cases of the Melanesian big-man and the Polynesian chieftainship (Sahlins 1972). It may even become a weapon to fight against one’s political opponents, such as in the cases of potlatch among Native Americans on the Northwest Pacific coast.

This superiority of the gift-giver, however, may not work in complex societies with a clearly defined class hierarchy and/or a centralised state authority. For example, in her study of the repayment of Japanese on gifts (benevolent favours from superiors), Takie Sugiyama Lebra (1969) demonstrates that, given the hierarchical context of Japanese society, the gift-donor who is in a subordinate position can never balance what has previously been received from a superior. In Chinese society, a particular type of gift known as xiaojing, which is rooted in the cultural promise of filial piety, unilaterally flows up the ladder of social status and no equivalent return is expected. Recipients remain socially superior because their acceptance is already regarded as a favour to the gift-giver, showing that the principle of hierarchy overshadows the principle of reciprocity in this context (Yan 2002).

Gender constitutes another important dimension in the world of gifts. Many earlier studies of gift-giving in non-Western societies seemed to be gender-blind because they tended to focus on institutions of ceremonial exchanges in public life where women were thought to play only a trivial role. Annette Weiner’s 1976 book, Women of value, men of renown: new perspectives in Trobriand exchange, represents one of the first significant breakthroughs in this regard. Weiner argues that women in the Trobriand Islands are by no means the object of gift exchange by men; on the contrary, women play an autonomous and crucial role in certain ceremonial gift exchanges in public, such as the mortuary exchange described above. In it women reclaim their unique role in the matrilineage and restate matrilineal solidarity (Weiner 1976, 1992). Marilyn Strathern pushes the theme further by pointing out that, in Melanesian culture, women and men not only have their own domain in gift exchange but also separate realms of power and domination which are gendered by the gendering of gift exchange (Strathern 1988, see chapters 2, 4, 5 and 11). In contemporary Western societies, women not only give more but also receive more gifts than their male counterparts, and gift-giving is regarded as an essential part of a feminised ideology of love (Cheal 1988; Caplow 1984). How to assess women’s dominant role in gift-giving, however, remains to date a debatable issue (Komter 1996).

If we look at the purpose of gift-giving, we can see that a gift may serve an expressive or an instrumental function, or both. In expressive gifts, the existing status relationship between the giver and the receiver determines the conditions of gift exchange (the kind and value of gifts to be given), and gift-giving supports the status relationship. By contrast, if the conditions of exchange (the nature and value of the gift) determine or alter the respective statuses of a giver and recipient, we are likely dealing with instrumental gifts. In other words, expressive gifts are ends in themselves and thus often reflect a long-term relationship between a giver and a recipient; instrumental gifts are a means to some utilitarian end and ordinarily indicate a short-term relationship. Nevertheless, in practice, the pure types of expressive and instrumental gifts never exist; rather, elements of expressivity and instrumentality coexist in almost all gift-giving activities, but in different ratios and combinations. In post-socialist Ukraine, for instance, a small payment of cash presented to a doctor is regarded as a gift instead of bribery, as long as the recipient did not explicitly demand it (Polese 2008).

In a broader sense, the exchanges of greetings, assistance, and moral support are often regarded as gifts from one party to another. Their nonmaterial nature often makes the giving a more disinterested act and thus closer to the idealism of the pure gift. In this connection, donations, charities, and especially online gifting to strangers are particularly noteworthy gifts that build impersonalised ties between the givers and the often-unknown recipients. The best example is the donation of human blood, tissues, organs and bodies, which are more often than not transacted from anonymous donors to unknown recipients. These altruistic yet unconventional gifts also raise new ethical issues in both Western and non-Western societies (Bolt 2012; Simpson 2004).

The economic implications of gift-giving are enormously far-reaching in post-modern and developed countries, as well as in small-scale and pre-industrial societies. Malinowski had long argued that the work incentives of the Trobriand Islanders could not be explained in terms of materialistic self-interest. Instead, they produce extra yams so that the harvest may be given to exchange partners and chiefs and eventually rot in storehouses for the sake of earning prestige. Similarly, they actively participate in the inter-island Kula exchange primarily to obtain the armbands and necklaces that have no practical value except to become renowned (Malinowski 1984 [1922]; Weiner 1992; Graeber 2001). The exchange of Kula valuables therefore constitutes the very foundation of this prestige economy in Trobriand society. The cattle complex in Africa is another example in which the production and exchange of cattle mostly serve social, political, and ritual purposes, and people have an exaggerated and emotional personal attachment to their animals (Evens-Pritchard 1940). Gift exchange may be seen as a different type of economy even in the narrowest sense of the term: Christmas gifts alone amount to a multi-billion-dollar business in contemporary American society (Waits 1993). The global expansion of the capitalist market economy and consumerist ideology has pushed the gift economy to a higher level, leading to new ceremonial occasions like Mother’s Day and more convenient ways of gift-giving like gift cards (Otnes & Beltramini 1996). The most intriguing and perhaps excessively individualistic invention is the gift given to oneself, known as self-gifts (Mick 1996).

Riding the tidal wave of global consumerism, self-gifts can be found all over the world and are more popular among millennials. In the village community where I conducted a systematic study of gift exchange (Yan 1996), I found that the emergence of self-gifts is part of the much larger and important trend among young villagers to embrace the modern individual gift in their practice of gift exchange. Most of these individual gifts are not offered through ritualised family ceremonies; neither do many of them lead to long-lasting cycles of giving-receiving-returning between the donor and recipient. The occasions of individual gift-giving are not only personal but often ad hoc or situational, such as celebrating a friend’s promotion in the workplace or bringing something nice or exotic to family members from a trip back home. More intriguingly, the motivation of offering such a personal gift is also highly personal—as villagers put it, they did it because they had good feelings toward the recipient and they felt good after offering the gift as a token of their fondness toward the recipient. The influence of consumer individualism is obvious here, as all kinds of commercials and products of pop culture promote the importance of affection and emotional ties in the context of commodification. An emphasis on feeling good may have replaced past requirements of being or doing good; hence, personal gifts for feeling good replace obligatory gifts for being good. The implication here is that the two prototypes of gifts that we examined at the outset of this essay not only coexist in our time, but also influence and transform each other, creating new possibilities in the world of gifts.

The give-and-take of gifts in everyday life creates, maintains, and strengthens social bonds—be they cooperative, competitive, or antagonistic—which in turn define the identities of persons. Scrutinising gifts and gift economies may therefore provide us with an effective and unique means of understanding the formation of personhood and the structure of social relations in a given society. Lastly, although gifts are given and received among peoples all over the world and throughout human history, the specific rules of gift exchange vary from one culture to another. Gift exchange thereby crystallises the universality and diversity of human cultures.

Conclusion

To conclude, the anthropology of the gift is particularly important for understanding social life for several reasons. Gift-giving has long been one of the major forms of social exchange, along with redistribution and market exchange. Yet, unlike the other two, it encompasses multiple domains of social life and carries rich meanings above and beyond the economy. Moreover, the study of gift-giving reveals the social origins of economic institutions and provides insights about the value of human labour that have long been obscured by modern economic theories. They include the relationship between persons and things, or what drives people to work beyond their basic consumption needs. Gift-giving basically debunks the cornerstone assumption in neoliberal economics that human beings only aim to maximise individual utility, and thus has greatly enriched social theories. Additionally, the give-and-take of gifts in everyday life creates, maintains, and strengthens various social bonds—cooperative, competitive, or antagonistic—which in turn define personal identities. An examination of the gift and the gift economy, therefore, will provide us with an effective and unique means of understanding the formation of personhood and the structure of social relations. Furthermore, although gifts are universal and are given and have been received throughout human history, the specific rules of gift exchange vary from one culture to another. Therefore, gifts represent a crystallization of the universality and diversity of human cultures.

Finally, it is noteworthy that the gift is no longer the preserved subject of anthropology. Scholars of humanities and social sciences alike have joined forces to explore the dynamic, complicated world of gifts from different disciplinary perspectives and approaches, such as antiquity study, history, literary critics, philosophy, sociology, law, economics, and marketing research (see Cheal 1988; Davis 2000; Davies 2010; Hyland 2009; Kolm & Ythier 2006; Marion 2011; Osteen 2002; Otnes & Peltramini 1996; Satlow 2013). The growing literature also shows that, as the human interest in and capacity of doing gift exchange are consistently changing in response to a rapidly shifting environment of social life at large, the enigmatic gift will likely remain to be an attractive subject in anthropology and beyond.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers and Felix Stein for their insightful comments on early drafts and advice for improvement.

References

Bolt, S. 2012. Dead bodies matter: gift giving and the unveiling of body donor monuments in the Netherlands. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 26(4), 613-34.

Caplow, T. 1984. Rule enforcement without visible means: Christmas gift giving in Middletown. American Journal of Sociology 89, 1306-23.

Cheal, D. 1988. The gift economy. London: Routledge.

Carrier, J.G. 1990. Gifts in a world of commodities: the ideology of the perfect gift in American society. Social Analysis 29, 19-37.

Davis, N.Z. 2000. The gift in sixteenth-century France. Oxford: University Press.

Davies, W. 2010. The languages of gift in the Early Middle Ages. Cambridge: University Press.

Damon, F.H. 1980. The Kula and generalized exchange: considering some unconsidered aspects of The elementary structures of kinship. Man 15(2), 269-92.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1940. The Nuer. Oxford: University Press.

Feil, D.K. 1982. Alienating the inalienable. Man 17, 340-2.

Firth, R. 1959. Economics of the Zealand Maori. Wellington: Government Printer.

Godelier, M. 1999. The enigma of the gift (trans. N. Scott). Chicago: University Press.

Graeber, D. 2001. Toward an anthropological theory of value: the false coin of our dreams. New York: Palgrave.

––––––– 2011. Debt: the first 5000 years. New York: Melville House Publishing.

Gregory, C.A. 2015. Gifts and commodities. Chicago: Hau Books.

Hyland, R. 2009. Gifts: a study in comparative law. Oxford: University Press.

Kolm, S.-C. & J.M. Ythier (eds) 2006. Handbook of the economics of giving, altruism and reciprocity. Amsterdam: Elsevier Ltd.

Komter, A. 1996. Women, gifts and power. In The gift: an interdisciplinary perspective (ed.) A. Komter, 119-31. Amsterdam: University Press.

Laidlaw, J. 2000. A free gift makes no friends. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 6, 617-34.

Leach, J.W. & E. Leach 1983. The Kula: new perspectives on Massim exchange. Cambridge: University Press.

Lebra, T.S. 1969. Reciprocity and the asymmetric principle: an analytical reappraisal of the Japanese concept of on. Psychologia 12, 129-38.

Levi-Strauss, C. 1987. Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Liep, J. 1990. Gift exchange and the construction of identity. In Culture and history in the Pacific (ed.) J. Siikala, 164-83. Helsinki: The Finnish Anthropological Society.

MacCormack, G. 1976. Reciprocity. Man 11, 89-103.

Malinowski, B. 1962 [1926]. Crime and custom in savage society. Paterson, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams & Co.

––––––– 1984 [1922]. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press.

Marion, J.-L. 2011. The reason of the gift (trans. S.E. Lewis). Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Mauss, M. 2016 [1925]. The gift, expanded edition (ed. and trans. J.I. Guyer). Chicago: Hau Books.

Mick, D.G. 1996. Self-gifts. In Gift giving: a research anthology (eds) C. Otnes & R.F. Beltramini, 99-120. Bowling Green: State University Popular Press.

Osteen, M. 2002. Gift or commodity? In The question of the gift (ed.) M. Osteen, 229-47. London: Routledge.

Otnes, C. & R.F. Beltramini 1996. Gift giving and Gift giving: an overview. In Gift giving: a research anthology (eds) C. Otnes & R.F. Beltramini, 3-15. Bowling Green: State University Popular Press.

Parry, J. 1986. The gift, the Indian gift, and the ‘Indian gift’. Man 21, 453-73.

Polese, A. 2008. ‘If I receive it, it is a gift; if I demand it, then it is a bribe’: on the local meaning of economic transactions in post-soviet Ukraine. Anthropology in Action 15(3), 47-60.

Radin, M.J. 1996. Contested commodities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Raheja, G.G. 1988. The poison in the gift: ritual, prestation, and the dominant caste in a north Indian village. Chicago: University Press.

Sahlins, M. 1972. Stone age economics. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Sanchez, A., J.G. Carrier, C. Gregory, J. Laidlaw, M. Strathern, Y. Yan & J. Parry 2017. ‘The Indian gift’: a critical debate. History and Anthropology 28, 553-83.

Satlow, M.L. 2013. The gift in antiquity. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Simpson, B. 2004. Impossible gifts: bodies, Buddhism and bioethics in contemporary Sri Lanka. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(4), 839-59.

Slaughter, T.P. 2004. Exploring Lewis and Clark: reflections on men and wilderness. New York: Vintage Books.

Strathern, M. 1988. The gender of the gift: problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Thompson, D. 1987. The hau of the gift in its cultural context. Pacific Studies 11(1), 63-79.

Vatuk, V.P. & S. Vatuk 1971. The social context of gift exchange in North India” in Family and social change in modern India (ed.) G.R. Gupta, 207-32. Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press.

Waits, W.B. 1993. The modern Christmas in America: a cultural history of gift giving. New York: University Press.

Weiner, A. 1976. Women of value, men of renown: new perspectives in Trobriand exchange. Austin: University of Texas Press.

––––––– 1992. Inalienable possessions: the paradox of keeping-while-giving. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wilton, D. with I. Brunetti 2009. Word myths: debunking linguistic urban legends. New York: Oxford University Press.

Yan, Y. 1996. The flow of gifts: reciprocity and social networks in a Chinese village. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

––––––– 2002. Unbalanced reciprocity: asymmetrical gift giving and social hierarchy in rural China. In The question of the gift (ed.) M. Osteen, 67-84. London: Routledge.

Note on contributor

Yunxiang Yan is professor of anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles and adjunct professor of anthropology at Fudan University, China. His research interests include family and kinship, social change, and the anthropology of moralities. He is the author of The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village.

Prof. Yunxiang Yan, Department of Anthropology, 366 Haines, Los Angeles, CA 90095, United States. yan@anthro.ucla.edu

Water

Felix Stein — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 14:42:27 +0000

Veronica Strang

Durham University

Initially published 9 Dec 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19water

Abstract:

Because water permeates every aspect of human existence, ethnographic accounts describe many forms of engagement with it: for example, its centrality to modes of production; its influence on how societies organise themselves socially and spatially; its role in leisure activities and the enjoyment of its aesthetic qualities. Human relationships with water, though culturally and historically specific, share common themes of meaning, recognising water’s essentiality to life, health and well-being at every scale. This often translates into the use of ‘living water‘ in religious rituals, such as baptism or mortuary ceremonies, in which water expresses important ideas about social identity and spiritual movement between material and non-material domains.

The material control of water has long been recognised as vital to gaining and maintaining political power. In recent decades anthropology has focused increasingly on debates about water ownership and rights of access to water, and considered how the control of water reflects social, economic and political relations. There is growing interest in water infrastructures, and how they have often enabled unsustainable practices in water use and management. Today, as the world faces an anthropogenically-created ecological crisis, water issues are central to concerns about climate change, global warming, and increasing volatility and uncertainty in water flows. This has encouraged a new area of anthropological focus on non-human as well as human rights in relation to water. Thus the anthropology of water extends from its multiple uses in everyday life to the major issues that all societies urgently need to address.

Introduction

As the element essential to life and to all processes of production and reproduction, water permeates every domain of human existence. It has always had a background presence in anthropology’s ethnographic literature, where it appears in religious rituals; shapes human spatial organization around water sources; and structures people’s lifeways and modes of production, as well as their ecological knowledge and environmental engagement. However, water itself has not been the focus of anthropological studies until relatively recently. It came to the fore with growing interest in the relationship between the control of water and political power and, more strongly, when environmental anthropology emerged as a lively subfield in response to increasing concerns about sustainability. As societies have begun to realise that the world is facing a human-made ecological crisis, water has become the focus of intense research in multiple disciplinary areas. Anthropology brings to this a vitally important capacity to illuminate its diverse social and cultural dimensions (Hastrup 2011, Hastrup & Hastrup 2015, de Wolff et al. 2019, Wagner 2013).

Human engagements with water take place on every scale, beginning with the most basic physical needs for clean water to maintain health and to ensure bodily and domestic hygiene. Recognition that water is literally essential to all biological organisms means that it has cross-cultural meaning as the ‘substance of life’. This understanding supports important concepts of water as a common good, to which everyone must have rights of access and use, and this fundamental principle permeates many discussions about water ownership and governance. Yet many people lack access to clean water and sanitation for a variety of reasons, including the overuse of limited local resources; disruption of rural lifeways; economic imperatives to migrate to marginal and poorly served urban areas; and insufficient fiscal or technical capacities to create infrastructures for water supply. Such a lack of access to clean water is a key indicator of governmental capacities to provide for people’s most basic needs, and of the deep inequalities existing both within and between societies.

Religion, health and wealth

Anxieties about meeting basic human rights of access to sufficient clean water tend to obscure other aspects of people’s immediate engagement with it, but these are also powerful influences on how people respond to a range of water issues. Water’s essentiality to life means that it has a central place in multiple religious belief systems. In many place-based societies, where what are often described as ‘nature religions’ pertain, its elemental powers are frequently manifested in deities responsible for rain, fertility, and the creation of life. For example, in Africa, Mami Wata, a water goddess valorised in many parts of the continent’s west coast, provides all of these things (Drewal 2008). In Aboriginal Australia, water is the source of cosmogenesis in the creative era known as Dreamtime, in which the world was formed, while the Rainbow Serpent, which is a manifestation of the powers of water, continues to generate life from within the land (Merlan 1998, Strang 2009). In the monotheisms of larger societies, water features as a vital manifestation of a humanised deity’s divine beneficence or, in the form of floods or drought, as an expression of god’s wrath. Thus for many people, access to sufficient and timely water carries an important moral and religious dimension.

Whatever the form of the providing deities, many religious schema also conflate ideas about water and the human spirit, generating visions of ‘living water’, vital to physical and spiritual well-being (Krause & Strang 2013). Such beliefs are central to a host of rituals in which water cleanses, heals, and blesses, and metaphorically carries the spirit between material and non-material domains. The notion of living water is also a response to people’s phenomenological engagement with it as an animated and animating element that is always in motion: shimmering, flowing, appearing, and disappearing. Physical and immediate interactions with water – bathing, drinking, swimming, and observing – provide a range of compelling sensory experiences, which lend emotive weight to people’s thinking about water and what it means (Krause 2016, Strang 2005). Thus, an understanding that water flows through, enlivens, and connects people and places supports important ideas about common substance and identity. These are neatly expressed, for example, in the use of water for rituals of baptism that welcome individuals into particular groups or congregations, or which conjoin them in marriage (Mallery 2011). The inevitable dark side of this understanding is that a vision of identity as literally ‘substantial’ also allows for many anxieties about social and/or physical pollution, and invasions of ‘otherness’ that might compromise individual or collective health and well-being (Strang 2004).

Concepts of holiness, health, and wealth are both etymologically and conceptually related. They express capacities for maintaining (spiritual, bodily, or fiscal) wholeness and flourishing. As well as being seen as fundamental to physical health, the relationship between health and water has seen a transition from assumptions about water’s intrinsic healing qualities (as assumed, for example, in the thousands of holy and healing wells in many parts of the world) to more material notions about the healing properties of water’s mineral content, which led to a major fashion in Europe for spas and baths (Anderson & Tabb 2002). Water’s centrality to processes of production leads to cross-cultural acknowledgement of its essential role in enabling human agency and generating wealth. What constitutes wealth is culturally diverse, but in many societies the relationship between water and wealth is often demonstrated in the ways that the ownership of water, displayed in landscaped gardens, fountains, and pools, provides a key signifier of wealth and social status.

Power and control

As the above implies, the control of water is intrinsically related to economic and political power, and historical and ethnographic research has demonstrated that how water is controlled and distributed provides a precise mirror of social, political, and environmental relations. A classic study of Balinese water temples, for instance, describes the carefully balanced social and hydrological relations mediated by local priests acting as both religious leaders and water managers (Lansing 1991). On a larger scale, it has famously been argued that major infrastructures such as irrigation schemes, requiring the centralisation and coordination of labour, were foundational to the creation of nation states (Hocart 1970). The importance of water in political organization is particularly clear in the historical emergence of ‘hydraulic societies’ dependent upon major irrigation schemes, such as those in Mesopotamia, and in the Indus Valley (Butzer 1976, Giosan et al. 2012, Tvedt & Jakobsson 2006). Karl Wittfogel’s historical analysis of water in China suggested that state capacities to control a vast network of canals was vital for the establishment of powerful imperial dynasties (1957). However, subsequent writers have rejected the argument that the control of water necessarily leads to ‘despotic regimes’, observing that relationships between water and power can take many different forms (Krause & Ley forthcoming).

However, Wittfogel’s more fundamental point, that power and the control of water are inextricably related, remains influential, and contemporary ethnographers have continued to explore how the control of water mediates relations between states and citizens, with access to water often demonstrating persistent social inequalities. For example, the manipulation of weirs, sluices, and water flows in a South Indian irrigation scheme has been shown to reinforce the advantages of village elites (Mosse 2003). In multiple development contexts, gender inequality influences women’s access to and control over water (Coles & Wallace 2005, see also Lahiri-Dutt 2006). The provision of water in Mumbai turns out to be linked to social identity and recognition of ‘hydraulic citizenship’, and leads to the exclusion of marginal groups lacking such recognition (Anand 2017). Shifts in ideology are similarly reflected in water. A strong focus on instrumentalism – a determination to act directively on the material environment – in industrialised societies has been exported, via literal and economic colonialism, to many parts of the world under the guise of development (Lewis & Mosse 2006).

Focusing on the history of the American West, the commodification of water into an asset may mean that ‘capitalism has created over the last 100 years a new distinctive type of hydraulic society, one that demonstrates once more how the domination of nature can lead to the domination of some people over others’ (Worster 2006: 50, see also Escobar 2005, Josephson 2002, Reisner 2001).

Water has its own material powers, of course, in the force provided by water flows. Many societies have harnessed these powers, via channels, water wheels, and mills, to do ‘work’ to support their processes of production, and to direct irrigation to their crops. But water is not always amenable: it also has its own agentive effects in making and unmaking environments and impacting upon human lives. In a world dominated by dualistic ideas of nature as the ‘other’ to culture, water is commonly seen to represent the capacities of the non-human world to reject the authority of human instrumentality. Water’s material forces highlight that such efforts often involve an intrinsic tension – a wrestling for control (Edgeworth 2011). This brings to the fore the reality that every cultural landscape is also a cultural waterscape. Control over water flows is achieved via the imposition of dams, canals, drainage, reservoirs, pipes, and other directive infrastructure that materialises societal ideas, values, and practices in relation to water. As with other forms of infrastructure, such concretization inscribes long-term patterns of human-environmental engagement upon the land and waterscape (Bichsel 2016, Harvey & Knox 2012, Larkin 2013).

Over time, human communities have engaged with water with varying degrees of determination to control its movements and direct its flows into serving their interests. Early societies, and those that have retained pre-industrial economic modes of hunting and gathering, horticulture, and small-scale agriculture, have tended to be conservative in their practices, working with the inherent processes of local ecosystems, and imposing relatively low-key forms of manipulation of the landscape for their purposes. In many larger societies, however, trajectories of human-environmental engagement have been very different, as population growth and technological developments have encouraged more assertive efforts to control water flows. Social and religious changes, in particular movements from nature religions to monotheistic beliefs, have led to notions of ‘dominion’ and the desire to impose patriarchal authority on ‘nature’, often feminised as alternate to male ‘culture’ (Plumwood 1993, 2002). The objectification of nature has also been encouraged by a more scientific lens upon the world, through which ideas about what water is have become ‘disenchanted’, leading to its reconceptualization as H₂O (Illich 1996, Linton 2010).

Greater dominion over water has been realised through new forms of science and technology enabling extensive engineering of the landscape and increasing capacities to direct water flows into supporting the needs and desires of rapidly enlarging human populations. Water usage has risen, in part because of more profligate domestic habits, but also in its use to support societies’ growing dependence on irrigated agriculture, as well as industry itself, which – due to the embodied water in goods and production processes – often results in the movement of water globally from arid environments to densely populated and wealthier temperate regions (Hoekstra & Chapagain 2007, Meissner 2012).

The commoditization of water, and its reductive reframing as a resource or economic asset, has further encouraged utilitarian ideas about the material world as the basis for the provision of ‘environmental services’ or ‘ecosystem services’ to humankind. Patterns of water use in many societies have reflected the dominance of these ideas. In the last century there has been a race to build large dams, canals, and other infrastructures designed to direct water into enlarging urban areas; into hydro-electric generation; and into irrigated agriculture (Khagram 2004). Today over 70% of the Earth’s freshwater is directed into irrigation, and the World Bank has stated that a further 15% will be needed in the next decade to provide sufficient food and energy for the expanding human population.^[1]They are predicting major shortfalls, which raises the prospect of a range of problems, including rising numbers of environmental refugees.

Infrastructure and conflict

Shortfalls in water supply also exacerbate the issues surrounding the management of transboundary water flows which provide opportunities for both collaboration and conflict. The United Nations reports that 145 states share transboundary lakes or rivers (2019). In the last fifty years, 295 international water agreements have been signed, but there have also been thirty-seven ‘acute transboundary water disputes’ and two-thirds of the 263 transboundary river basins lack any framework for cooperative management. With rising demand, and with water flows becoming less reliable (in particular where global warming has diminished the water storage provided by glaciers), there is obvious potential for greater conflict.

Such tensions are readily evident in the controversies relating to the construction of big and ‘mega’ dams, such as the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River (built in 1936); the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River (funded by the World Bank in the 1950s); and, more recently, the Sardar Sarovar Damon the Narmada River, and the Three Gorges Dams on the Yangtze River. 57,0000 large dams have been constructed over the last century: these generate nearly 20% of the world’s energy, and assist much of its irrigation. They have supported worldwide population movement into urban areas, and the development of industries. Thus – like the earlier hydraulic infrastructures noted by Arthur Hocart – they have often been seen as integral to the building and flourishing of the nation state (Biggs 2012, Mohamud & Verhoeven 2016, Verhoeven 2015).

However, the human and environmental costs of such large-scale directive engagements with water have also been massive (Rodgers & O’Neill 2012). As well as increasing the potential for transboundary conflicts, their focus on water storage for resource extraction, urban supply, and cheap hydro-electricity has resulted in many human rights violations and, with concomitant social impacts, the displacement of thousands of people living in riparian rural communities (Hwang et al. 2007, Mathur 2006, McDonald-Wilmsen & Webber 2010, Oliver-Smith 2009). Such projects have also resulted in extreme violence at times – such as the massacre of 400 Indigenous people to make way for the Chixoy Dam in Guatamala in 1982. Thousands more have been killed by dam failures; for example the collapse of China’s Banqiao Dam in 1975 killed an estimated 171,000 people.^[2]Huge dams, because of the enormous weight of water that they contain, have also been implicated in causing earthquakes: thus the Zipingpu Dam in Sichuan is thought to have triggered a major earthquake in 2008.

Many of the costs of dams and related water infrastructures are less dramatic but no less damaging. Financially, large dams tend to be uneconomic: they typically overrun predicted levels of investment by up to 96% (Ansar et al. 2014). They also incur major social, economic, and environmental costs. In disrupting hydrological flows, dams are hugely destructive to aquatic ecosystems, and there are human costs as well in the loss of access to water for downstream farmers, fisheries, and tourism. More broadly, irrigated agriculture in many regions has led not only to diminishing harvests, but also to widespread land salination, rendering vast areas infertile even for native vegetation. This is particularly the case in ecologically vulnerable areas such as Australia, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the southern United States, where irrigation has been aimed at producing profitable – but for arid regions, unsuitable – crops, such as cotton, rice, and wheat.

But, as Peter Bosshard, the policy director for International Rivers (an international NGO seeking to protect rivers) notes, ‘[m]any actors have vested interests in building dams’ (2014). It is an area rife with corruption, in which major engineering contractors, irrigation consortia, and others stand to gain considerably, either through huge profits on construction, or through the gaining of water allocations for massive irrigation or hydroelectric schemes.

A notorious example is provided by Cubbie Station: an irrigation venture in south Queensland, so large as to be visible from space (Strang 2013). Cubbie Station’s directors persuaded the Queensland Government to allow it to buy up over 50 water licences, and to build a series of dams along twenty-eight kilometres of the Culgoa River. The station is situated just above the New South Wales border, and diverts about a quarter of the water that would otherwise flow into the Darling River, and thus into the Murray Darling Basin, one of the most intensively farmed and ecologically compromised river basins the world. Unsurprisingly, this upstream abstraction has fuelled considerable inter-state conflict. As well as depriving downstream farmers and other local communities of water, irrigation has destroyed over 90% of the wetlands in the Basin, which formed critical breeding areas for migrating birds. The major beneficiaries are the station’s owners (an international consortia) its directors, and shareholders, and to a lesser extent the rural community for which it provides some employment and other local economic benefits.

Owning water

Major irrigation schemes such as Cubbie Station, and the thousands of other companies and consortia around the world taking control of water through dam building and the acquisition of water allocations, bring to the fore key questions about the ownership of water. For much of human history, water’s status as a common good remained the norm, albeit with some managerial control exercised by powerful groups: for example, the dynastic rulers of hydraulic societies or, in the medieval period, the Church, whose monasteries often provided communities with hydrological expertise and management (Tvedt & Oestigaard 2010). Although many of the traditional common property regimes described by Elinor Ostrom (1990) have undergone major alterations, water continued to be seen, until recently, as a common good.

Patterns of water ownership changed, however, as societies began to build major urban areas which demanded greater investment in technologies for water supply and waste removal. The Industrial Revolution introduced a new level of complexity, both in enlarging conurbations, and generating increasing levels of domestic and industrial pollution. The impacts of these developments were so challenging as to require major reform. In early twentieth century Britain, for example, water supply and waste removal services were initially provided by a mix of municipal authorities and Victorian philanthropists. The results were patchy, leading to considerable inequality within cities, in terms of access to piped supplies, and between cities and rural areas, the latter often remaining reliant upon local wells and pumps well into the twentieth century. Following the Second World War, democratic ideals demanded comprehensive provision of piped supplies and the public ownership of water. A national network of local water authorities was established, with water users paying for services via property rates. This worked well until the costs of maintaining aging water infrastructures became more pressing, and politicians were faced with the vote-losing prospect of raising charges for water. The Thatcher government, in accord with its conservative ideologies, decided (despite angry public protests) to privatise water, leading to a situation in which British water companies today are largely owned by international corporations (Bakker 2003). This proved profitable for water company directors and shareholders, but as water charges jumped by 60% in the following five years, rather less so for domestic water users (Strang 2004). The UK-based water companies made further profits by exporting to many parts of the world their expertise on how to privatise water.

This process proved even more controversial in countries where increases in water charges have more extreme impacts. In 2000, when the government of Bolivia responded to pressure from the World Bank to pay off its international debts through water privatization, and invited an American company, Bechtel, to enact this, citizens revolted and a violent water war erupted that succeeded in retaining public ownership (Albro 2005). However, although governments internationally have subsequently become wary of such wholescale national water privatizations, the process has continued in various forms: for example, through types of public-private partnership, and through mechanisms such as Government Owned Corporations which, as the name suggests, reform local or regional water authorities along the lines of privatised companies, sometimes separating the profitable operational (supply) side from the more costly infrastructural maintainance, with only the latter remaining a wholly public responsibility.

There have also been more covert forms of enclosure, as illustrated by the example of Cubbie Station in Queensland, Australia. Following the colonial appropriation of land and water from Indigenous groups, European settlers’ rights to water generally came with riparian land ownership. As pressure on limited resources increased, farmers were given volumetric water allocations. In the 2000s, these were effectively privatised and transformed into tradeable commodities, which could be bought up en masse (as with Cubbie Station) or, in other cases, traded away from the related land, leaving ‘dry blocks’. The conversion of allocations into profitable assets meant that those using water for the most profitable purposes (mining, cotton, rice, and wheat production) could readily outbid small farmers, or conservation organisations hoping to preserve wetland areas. This has resulted in higher levels of water use and environmental degradation.

In Australia and elsewhere, the creation of virtual water markets, whether in the form of allocation trading or as shareholding in water companies, has effectively detached water from the landscape. This process of ‘disembedding’ material things from their local environments and creating virtual global markets (Polanyi 1957) raises some key questions about social and environmental accountability. There is an important recent trend towards more ownership and trading of water (and other resources) by transnational corporations who are not physically present in the social communities or in the material environments where the water is located. Cubbie Station, for example, was bought up by a Chinese consortium; most large oil and mining companies are owned transnationally, as are other extractive industries. Regulating water users, even when these are locally based, is complex and challenging, and becomes more so when regulators have to deal with major transnational corporations. There are more fundamental questions, too: if a government hands control of the country’s most essential resources to external agencies, how does this affect its decision-making capacities about these resources? And does it uphold democratic processes? (Strang 2016).

Similar patterns can be seen in the use of marine resources, where overfishing has led to a process of formalising quotas and creating virtual trading schemes (Minnegal & Dwyer 2010). Competitive economies have done little to address the inequalities that pertain in both areas: customary rights to fishing have often been overridden by commercial interests, just as local rights to freshwater have been overtaken by the commodification of the water industry.

The loss of customary rights of access and the devastation of local waterways by extractive industries have been particularly distressing for place-based Indigenous communities, who retain close and affective attachment to their homelands, and for whom local land and waterscapes are often both sentient and sacred. As their land and other material resources have been appropriated, enclosed, and privatised, many groups have protested, and continue to do so (Berriane 2017, Strang & Busse 2010). Given the meanings of water within their cultural landscapes, the misuse and despoilation of waterways has evoked particularly anguished protests; exemplifed, for example, in response to the downstream pollution caused by mining on the Ok Tedi, in Papua New Guinea (Kirsch 2003), or in relation to rivers in northern Australia (Rumsey & Weiner 2004).

Over the last several decades, Indigenous communities have created international networks, working with each other, and with conservation organisations, to tackle these issues. In 2016, for example, the Dakota Sioux brought together a range of like-minded groups to stage a major protest at Standing Rock about the impacts of an oil pipeline on their land and water. Indigenous communities are challenging not only the appropriation of their traditional ownership of water (Morphy & Morphy 2009), but also the imposition of ideologies that in their view fail to value it properly. In New Zealand, in the 2000s, the Māori Council, on behalf of all iwi [tribes], fought a legal battle to try to reclaim Indigenous people’s ownership of freshwater, taking a case through the Waitangi Tribunal, the High Court, and the Supreme Court (Strang 2014). Although the claim did not succeed, the debates resulted in a robust co-management agreement, ensuring that Māori iwi would have a substantial voice in decisions about their related waterways (Muru-Lanning 2016, Ruru 2013).

Water in the Anthropocene

There is a readily discernible link between the enclosure and privatization of water and constant growth and intensification in the use of freshwater and other resources. Such intensification, and humankind’s impacts upon the planet, have become so extreme that we have now entered an age described as the Anthropocene (see Crutzen & Stoermer 2000, Stensrud & Hylland-Eriksen forthcoming). It is equally plain that water is a central factor – and a key area of vulnerablity – in climate change. As well as melting the ice caps and raising sea levels, higher planetary temperatures are melting the glaciers that store freshwater for many of the world’s major rivers, and destablising global weather patterns. Meanwhile, the clearance of forests and wetlands for further agricultural expansion continues. The result is much greater volatility in water flows, and higher risks of unmanageable floods and droughts.

The impacts on ecosystems are not only felt by human communities, but also by their non-human inhabitants. The Anthropocene marks the first human-caused mass extinction event on par with earlier planetary devastations. In the last century, species extinctions have spiked dramatically: a report by the World Wildlife Fund (Grooten & Almond 2018) documents the loss of 60% of species since the 1970s, and rates of extinction are continuing to rise.^[3]As Donald Worster observed, this pattern of environmental destruction goes hand in hand with an extremely exploitative mode of environmental engagement, and the widespread control of resources by commercial corporations, rather than by local communities with long-term attachments to places:

Whatever they [major corporations] may accomplish in the manufacture of wealth, they are innately anti-ecological. Immense, centralised institutions, with complicated hierarchies, they tend to impose their outlook and their demands on nature, as they do on the individual and the small human community, and they do so with great destructiveness. They are too insulated from the results of their actions to learn, to adjust, to harmonize. That is another way of saying that a social condition of diffused power is more likely to be ecologically sensitive and preserving (2006: 332).

It is not a given that relocating environmental control locally will necessarily produce less exploitative kinds of engagements with land and water. However, it is useful to consider the alternative values promoted by place-based communities in relation to non-human interests. Many retain traditionally egalitarian and reciprocal positionality towards non-human beings, locating humankind within living systems, rather than as rulers over them. This way of thinking has been inspirational for environmentalists, and interactions between Indigenous peoples, conservation groups, and scholars has produced a serious critique of notions of human dominion, and of the anthropocentricity and the entitlement implicit in exploitative practices (Brightman & Lewis 2016, Kirksey & Helmreich 2010, Orlove & Caton 2010). This critique argues that there is an urgent need for a repositioning that – for both ethical and pragmatic reasons – gives greater parity to non-human interests, with a view to halting (and hopefully reversing) the wholescale destruction of ecosystems and their dependent species, including, of course, human communities (Kopnina & Shoreman-Ouimet 2015, Kopnina & Washington 2019). The proponents of this critique recognise the centrality of water in this regard, and thus protecting waterways has become a key part of their endeavours.

Indigenous communities have approached this challenge in various ways. Some, such as the Kogi in Columbia, have spoken up to warn about the consequences of rampant exploitation of the environment (Ereira 2009, see also de la Cadena 2010, Fienup-Riordan 2005: 233). There have been protests (as in the case of Standing Rock), and some have pushed their governments to make constitutional changes. Thus, in 2008 Ecuador passed legislation affirming the rights of nature, and a few years later Bolivia established the Rights of Mother Earth (Pachamama). Some groups have campaigned for rivers (such as the Atrato River in Colombia, and the Ganges in India) to be acknowledged as living persons with concomitant legal rights. In New Zealand, Māori iwi succeeded in gaining legal rights for the Whanganui River. In 2017, the New Zealand government announced that the river had been granted the status of a living entity, ‘comprising the River from the mountains to the sea, its tributaries, and all its physical and metaphysical elements, as an indivisible and living whole’ (Finlayson 2017: 129(1); see also Strang 2019).

At an international level, there is growing pressure from environmental activists to persuade the UN to make a formal declaration about the rights of nature (Cullinan 2003, Gray & Curry 2016).^[4]Some are trying to establish ‘ecocide’ as an international crime.^[5]There is a widening conversation about ecological justice (Baxter 2005, Schläppy & Gray 2017) and the ethics of human-environmental relations, and for some groups this is connected with ideas about spiritual engagement with the world and, most particularly, with water (Sponsel 2012, Taylor 2010). There has thus been a refocusing on the spiritual meanings of water, which as well as permeating traditional religions, has an important role in New Age movements long aligned to environmental activism. New rituals are appearing to celebrate the spiritual or social meanings of water: in the UK, this has taken the form of well dressing, a revival of an ancient Roman ritual, fontanalia; in Australia, there are events such as the Splash! Festival in Queensland, in which people bring containers of water from their home places, and pour them into a central vessel to celebrate the social and spiritual connections between communities (Strang & Toussaint 2008).

The input from Indigenous, environmental, and related groups into global debates, along with widespread concern about societies’ unsustainable direction of travel, has led international NGOs, state governments, religious leaders, and the United Nations to focus on the issue of values. In 2016, the UN established a High Level Panel on Water to focus on water and values, which, in their terms, meant ‘economic’, ‘environmental’ and ‘cultural and spiritual’ values. Their aim was to produce a set of principles for water to underpin the Sustainable Development Goals declared in 2015, with the aim of encouraging heads of state to rethink their policies and practices in relation to water (UN 2018a). This was followed by a wider World Water Development Report, which advocated an infrastructural turn towards ‘nature-based solutions’ (UN 2018b). These aim to work with the processes inherent in ecosystems and to therefore move towards more sustainable practices (Thomé et al. 2016). There are thus concerted efforts to address the urgent issues that societies face in relation to water. Whether these endeavours will change human engagements with water ecosystems sufficiently, and quickly enough, to avert social and ecological collapse, remains to be seen. It is therefore vital that the anthropological study of water continues to elucidate the relationships between human societies, non-human beings, and the material world, and assists efforts to reform these relationships to ensure that the rights, needs, and interests of all are sustained.

References

Albro, R. 2005. ‘The water is ours, carajo!’: deep citizenship in Bolivia’s water war. In Social movements: an anthropological reader (ed.) J. Nash, 249-68. London: Blackwell.

Anand, N. 2017. Hydraulic city: water and the infrastructures of citizenship in Mumbai. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Anderson, S. & B. Tabb (eds) 2002. Water, leisure and culture: European historical perspectives. Oxford: Berg.

Ansar, A., B. Flyvbjerg, A. Budzier, & D. Lunn 2014. Should we build more large dams? The actual costs of hydropower megaproject development. Energy Policy 69, 43-56.

Bakker, K. 2003. An uncooperative commodity: privatising water in England and Wales. Oxford: University Press.

Baxter, B. 2005. A theory of ecological justice. London: Routledge.

Berriane, Y. 2017. Development and countermovements: reflections on the conflicts arising from the commodification of collective land in Morocco. In Development as a battlefield: International Development Policy volume 8 (eds) I. Bono & B. Hibou, 247-67. Leiden: Brill Nijhoff.

Bichsel, C. 2016. Water and the (infra-)structure of political rule: a synthesis. Water Alternatives 9(2), 356-72.

Biggs, D. 2012. Quagmire: nation-building and nature in the Mekong Delta. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Bosshard, P. 2014. Large dams are uneconomic, scientific study finds (5 March 2014). International Rivers (available on-line: https://www.internationalrivers.org/blogs/227/large-dams-are-uneconomic-scientific-study-finds).

Brightman, M. & J. Lewis (eds) 2017. Anthropological visions of sustainable futures. London: Palgrave.

Butzer, K. 1976. Early hydraulic civilisation in Egypt: a study in cultural ecology. Chicago: University Press.

Coles, A. & T. Wallace (eds) 2005. Water, gender and development. Oxford: Berg.

Crutzen, P. & E. Stoermer 2000. The ‘anthropocene’. Global Change Newsletter 41,17-18 (available on-line: http://www.igbp.net/download/18.316f18321323470177580001401/NL41.pdf).

Cullinan, C. 2003. Wild law: a manifesto for Earth justice. Totnes: Green.

De Wolff, K. R. Faletti & I. López-Calvo (eds) 2019. Water and the humanities: transforming currents for uncertain futures. Oakland: University of California Press.

de la Cadena, M. 2010. Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: conceptual reflections beyond ‘politics’.Cultural Anthropology 25(2), 334-70.

Drewal, H. (ed.) 2008. Sacred waters: arts for Mami Wata and other water divinities in Africa and the diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Edgeworth, M. 2011. Fluid pasts: archaeology of flow. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press.

Ereira, A. 2009 [1990]. From the heart of the world: the elder brothers' warning. UK: Tairona Heritage Trust.

Escobar, A. 2005. Encountering development: the making and unmaking of the third world. Princeton: University Press.

Fienup-Riordan, A. 2005. Wise words of the Yup'ik people: we talk to you because we love you. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Finlayson, C. 2017. Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River) Claims Settlement Bill. Government bill. Parliamentary Counsel Office, Te Tari Tohutohu Pāremata, 129(1). New Zealand government, Te Kāwanatanga o Aotearoa (available on-line: http://www.legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2016/0129/latest/DLM6830851.html?src=qs).

Giosan, L., P. Clift, M. Macklin, D. Fuller, S. Constantinescu, J. Durcan, T. Stevens, G. Duller, A. Tabrez, K. Gangal, R. Adhikari, A. Alizai, F. Filip, S. VanLaningham & J. Syvitski 2012. Fluvial landscapes of the Harappan civilization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109(26), E1688–E1694.

Gray, J. & P. Curry 2016. Ecodemocracy: helping wildlife’s right to survive. ECOS 37(1), 18-27.

Grooten, M. & R. Almond (eds) 2018. Living planet report - 2018: aiming higher. Gland, Switzerland: World Wildlife Fund.

Harvey, P. & H. Knox 2012. The enchantments of infrastructure. Mobilities 7(4), 521-36.

Hastrup, K. 2011. Waterworlds: natural environmental disasters and social resilience in anthropological perspective. Copenhagen: European Research Council.

——— & F. Hastrup (eds) 2015. Waterworlds: anthropology in fluid environments. Oxford: Berghahn.

Hocart, A. 1970 [1936]. Kings and councillors: an essay in the comparative anatomy of human society. Chicago: University Press.

Hoekstra, A. & A. Chapagain 2007. Water footprints of nations: water use by people as a function of their consumption pattern. Water Resources Management 21(1), 35-48.

Hwang, S.-S., J. Xia, Y. Cao, X. Feng & X. Qiao 2007. Anticipation of migration and psychological stress and the Three Gorges dam project, China. Social Science and Medicine 65(5), 1012-24.

Illich, I. 1986. H2O and the waters of forgetfulness. London: Marion Boyars.

Josephson, P. 2002. Industrialized nature: brute force technology and the transformation of the natural world. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Khagram, S. 2004. Dams and development: transnational struggles for water and power. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Kirksey, S. & S. Helmreich 2010. The emergence of multispecies ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 25(4), 545-76.

Kirsch, S. 2003. Mining and environmental human rights in Papua New Guinea. InTransnational corporations and human rights (eds) F. Jedrzej & S. Pegg, 115-36. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kopnina, H. & E. Shoreman-Ouimet 2015. Culture and conservation: beyond anthropocentrism. London: Routledge.

——— & H. Washington (eds) 2019. Conservation: integrating social and ecological justice. New York: Springer.

Krause,F. 2016. Making space along the Kemi River: a fluvial geography in Finnish Lapland. Cultural Geographies 24(2): 279-294.

——— & L. Ley (eds) forthcoming. Water, power, infrastructure: ethnographic conversations with Karl Wittfogel. Environment and Planning C. Special Issue: Politics and space.

——— & V. Strang (eds) 2013. Living water: the powers and politics of a vital substance. Worldviews 17(2), 95-185. Special Issue.

Lahiri-Dutt, K. (ed.) 2006. Fluid bonds: views on gender and water.Kolkata, Stree Press.

Lansing, S. 1991. Priests and programmers: technologies of power in the engineered landscape of Bali. Princeton: University Press.

Larkin, B. 2013. The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology 42(1), 327-43.

Lewis, D. & D. Mosse 2006. Development brokers and translators: the ethnography of aid and agencies. Bloomfield, C.T.: Kumarian Press.

Linton, J. 2010. What is water? The history of a modern abstraction. Vancouver: University of British Colombia Press.

Mallery, S. 2011. The Marriage Well at Teltown: holy well ritual at royal cult sites and the rite of temporary marriage. European Review of History 18(2), 175-97.

Mathur, H. 2006. Managing resettlement in India: approach, issues and experiences. New York: Oxford University Press.

McDonald-Wilmsen, B. & M. Webber 2010. Dams and displacement: raising the standards and broadening the research agenda. Water Alternatives 3(2), 142-61.

Meissner, S. 2012. Virtual water and water footprints: global supply and production chains and their impacts on freshwater resources. In People at the well: kinds, usages and meanings of water in a global perspective (eds) P. Hahn, K. Cless & J. Soentgen, 44-64. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.

Merlan, F. 1998. Caging the rainbow: places, politics and aborigines in a North Australian Town. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Minnegal, M. & P. Dwyer 2010. Appropriating fish, appropriating fishermen: tradeable permits, natural resources and uncertainty. In Ownership and appropriation (eds) V. Strang & M. Busse, 197-216. Oxford: Berg.

Mohamud, M. & H. Verhoeven 2016. Re-engineering the state, awakening the nation: dams, Islamist modernity and nationalist politics in Sudan. Water Alternatives 9(2), 182-202.

Morphy, F. & H. Morphy 2009. The Blue Mud Bay case: refractions through saltwater country. Dialogue 28(1), 15-25.

Mosse, D. 2003. The rule of water: statecraft, ecology, and collective action in South India. Oxford: University Press.

Muru-Lanning, M. 2016. Tupuna Awa: people and politics of the Waikato River. Auckland: University Press.

Oliver-Smith, A. (ed.) 2009. Development and dispossession: the anthropology of displacement and resettlement. Santa Fe, N.M.: School for Advanced Research Press.

Orlove, B. & S. Caton 2010. Water sustainability: anthropological approaches and prospects. Annual Review of Anthropology 39, 401-15.

Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the commons. Cambridge: University Press.

Plumwood, V. 1993. Feminism and the mastery of nature. London: Routledge.

——— 2002. Environmental culture: the ecological crisis of reason. London: Routledge.

Polanyi, K. 1957. The great transformation. Boston: Beacon Press.

Reisner, M. 2001 [1986] Cadillac desert: the American West and its disappearing water. London: Pimlico.

Rodgers, D. & B. O’Neill 2012. Infrastructural violence: introduction to the special issue. Ethnography 13(4), 401-12.

Rumsey A. & J. Weiner (eds) 2004. Mining and Indigenous lifeworlds in Australia and Papua New Guinea. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing.

Ruru, J. 2013. Indigenous restitution in settling water claims: the developing cultural and commercial redress opportunities in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal 22(2), 311-28 (available on-line: http://digital.law.washington.edu/dspace-law/bitstream/handle/1773.1/1234/22PRLPJ311.pdf.)

Schläppy, M-L. & J. Gray 2017. Rights of nature: a report on a conference in Switzerland. The Ecological Citizen 1(1), 95-6.

Sponsel, L. 2012. Spiritual ecology: a quiet revolution. Santa Barbara: Praeger.

Stensrud, A. & T. Hylland Eriksen forthcoming. Climate, capitalism and communities: an anthropology of environmental overheating, London: Pluto Press.

Strang, V. 2004. The Meaning of water. Oxford: Berg.

——— 2005. Common senses: water, sensory experience and the generation of meaning. Journal of Material Culture 10(1), 92-120.

——— 2009. Water and indigenous religion: Aboriginal Australia. In The idea of water (eds) T. Tvedt & T. Oestigaard, 343-77. London:I.B Tauris.

——— 2013. Dam nation: Cubbie Station and the waters of the Darling. In The social life of water in a time of crisis (ed.) J. Wagner, 36-60. Oxford: Berghahn.

——— 2014. The Taniwha and the crown: defending water rights in Aotearoa/New Zealand. WIREs Water 1, 121-31 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1002).

——— 2016. Infrastructural relations: water, political power and the rise of a new ‘despotic regime’.Special Issue: Water, Infrastructure and Political Rule. Water Alternatives 9(2), 292-318.

——— 2019. The rights of the river: water, culture and ecological justice. InConservation: integrating social and ecological justice (eds) H. Kopnina & H. Washington, 105-19. New York: Springer.

——— & S. Toussaint (eds) 2008. Special Issue: Water ways: competition and communality in the use and management of water. Special Issue, Oceania 78(1).

——— & M. Busse (eds) 2011. Ownership and appropriation: ASA monographs. Oxford: Berg.

Taylor, B. 2010. Dark green religion: nature, spirituality and the planetary future. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Thomé, A., P. Ceryno, A. Scavarda & A. Remmen 2016. Sustainable infrastructure: a review and a research agenda. Journal of Environmental Management 184(2), 143-56.

Tvedt, T. & E. Jakobsson (eds) 2006. A history of water, series 1 volume 1: water control and river biographies. London: I.B. Tauris.

——— & T. Oestigaard (eds) 2010. A history of water, series 2 volume 1: the ideas of water from antiquity to modern times. London. I.B. Tauris.

United Nations High Level Panel on Water 2018a. Making every drop count: an agenda for water action. High Level Panel on Water outcome document (available on-line: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/17825HLPW_Outcome.pdf).

United Nations 2018b. The United Nations World Water Development Report: nature-based solutions for water (available on-line: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/environment/water/wwap/wwdr/2018-nature-based-solutions/).

United Nations 2019. Transboundary waters. UN Water (available on-line: https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/transboundary-waters/).

Verhoeven, H. 2015. Water, civilisation and power in Sudan: the political economy of military-Islamist state building. Cambridge: University Press.

Wagner, J. (ed.) 2013. The social life of water in a time of crisis. Oxford: Berghahn.

Wittfogel, K. 1957. Oriental despotism. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Worster, D. 2006. Water in the age of imperialism and beyond. In A history of water, series 2 volume 1: the ideas of water from antiquity to modern times (eds) T. Tvedt & T. Oestigaard, 5-17. London: I.B. Tauris.

[1] Water (1 Jul 2019). Topics: understanding poverty. World Bank Group Water Global Practice (available on-line: https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/water/overview).

[2] Fish, E. The forgotten legacy of the Banqiao Dam collapse (8 Feb 2013). The Economic Observer (available on-line: http://www.eeo.com.cn/ens/2013/0208/240078.shtml).

[3] Summary statistics. The IUCN red list of threatened species. Version 2019-2. International Union for the Conservation of Nature (available on-line: http://www.iucnredlist.org/about/summary-statistics).

[4] See also Universal declaration of river rights (17 Sept 2017). Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (available on-line: https://therightsofnature.org/rights-of-nature-laws/universal-declaration-of-river-rights/).

[5] See, for example, the work of lawyer Polly Higgins (available on-line: ecocidelaw.com).

Note on contributor

Veronica Strang is the Executive Director of Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study, and a Professor of Anthropology. She is the author of The Meaning of Water (Berg, 2004), Gardening the World: agency, identity, and the ownership of water (Berghahn 2009), and Water, Nature and Culture (Reaktion 2015). She is currently working on a major volume about long-term trajectories in human engagements with water. See https://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/staff/?id=10491.

Professor Veronica Strang, Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, Cosin’s Hall, Palace Green, Durham DH1 3RL, UK. veronica.strang@durham.ac.uk

Tourism

Felix Stein — Thu, 30 Nov 2017 14:57:29 +0000

Rupert Stasch

University of Cambridge

Initially published 30 Nov 2017

http://doi.org/10.29164/17tourism

Abstract:

Tourism is a new phenomenon in world history, but today more people travel long distances for this purpose than for any other. This entry traces some main contributions anthropologists have made to understanding tourism interactions since starting to study them in the 1970s. One common theme of much of this work has been that tourism often involves the extension of tourists’ home-society ideas and systems into times and spaces of the trip, even though the activity is conceived of as an escape from regular life. The pleasure and value that tourists find in their trips can be explained by an anthropological model of ritual as the embodied, microcosmic enactment of a larger macrocosmic concept. Staging, commodification, and spectatorship are some of the more specific processes that anthropologists have studied, by which tourists’ home systems are projected outward into other spaces. In the 2000s, however, some anthropological work has focused on how tourism encounters generate new structures of experience and social involvement not determined by the orientations of any one set of participants. This work emphasises how actions and experiences of different participants are interdependent, in ways not well-grasped by a stark dichotomy of ‘tourists’ versus ‘hosts’ as whole blocs. This work also emphasises the psychological complexity of all persons' experiences in the encounters.

Introduction: contexts and contradictions

If tourism is defined as leisure travel carried out by broad sectors of a society, it has only existed since the mid-nineteenth century. Yet total international leisure trips have surpassed a billion per year since around 2010, and international and domestic tourism together account for a great portion of global economic activity.^[1] Tourism’s rapid rise from nonexistent to the largest travel practice on earth is closely tied to other new social conditions that arose in Europe across the nineteenth century and now define modern life worldwide. Outlining tourism’s links to these processes is one way to grasp basic features of what tourism even is. These links also give a useful entrée into anthropologists’ specific contribution to the academic study of tourism.

The idea of ‘leisure’ itself came into existence as a shadow or inverted mirror of wage labour, business enterprise, and the structuring of society around market- or state-organised industrial production. In the British Industrial Revolution and its successors elsewhere, societies went from being organised around agriculture to being organised around factories, workers’ sale of their labour, and the purchase of mass-produced commodities. Meanwhile, the French Revolution and other political ruptures demoted the interests of hereditary aristocrats in favor of the interests of businessmen, partly through the spread of ideas about individual freedom innovated by Enlightenment philosophers. These modern revolutions offered people a dream of freedom that was contradicted by their lives’ actual organization around clock-regimented wage labour and the management of enterprises. One early expression of this contradiction was the rise in the late-eighteenth century of the artistic and literary movement of Romanticism, which emphasised the artist’s self-isolating turn away from society, toward his own interior ideas and feelings or toward a sublime and wild nature. Romanticism’s highest good is the exercise of the individual creative will in a personal quest outside of the bonds of established order, as in William Blake’s assertion that ‘I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s’. Ideas initially pioneered by Romantic intellectual and artistic elites later became the mass practice of tourists: the purpose of leisure travel is to get out of regular routines.

In tourism, people thus rather paradoxically seek to flee realities that they have created and that have created them. Many types of tourism are explicitly motivated by desire to escape from work, or even from market-mediated forms of social experience more broadly. Yet tourism is itself an intrinsically industrialised activity, dependent on market-organised infrastructures of transport and hospitality. That tourism has these kind of tensions at its heart is readily visible in basic features of its commercial structure, and in the divided consciousness of tourists themselves. A perception that tourists take their society with them in the act of seeking to escape it is summed up, for example, in popular ideas of the ‘tourist bubble’ or wishing to travel ‘off the beaten track’. So too, tourism professionals and tourists themselves constantly innovate new tourism destinations, trips, or whole tourism subgenres, the value of which is defined by their distinction of being less ‘touristic’ than other alternatives. The category of ‘tourist’ is intrinsically stigmatic, in tourists’ own consciousness. The figure of the tourist circulates widely in many societies, as an image of a bad actor who engages superficially and insensitively with objects of his or her travel (even though special experience of those objects is the travel’s purpose). Tourism is slightly at war with itself. The same motivating logic that makes the activity worth pursuing, and gives people ideas about pursuing it better, also gives people shame and regret.

A trickle of pioneering anthropological works on tourism began to appear in the 1970s (e.g. Smith 1977). This grew to a flood in the 2000s, and the more recent phase of work has been distinctive in including many full-length books by fieldworkers who had focused on tourism as the main subject of their long-term research (Causey 2003, Tucker 2003). Anthropologists’ slow start in studying tourists may have reflected our special investment in distancing ourselves from this popularly stigmatised other with whom we uncomfortably share a defining focus on travel and sociocultural displacement. The more recent routinization of tourism as a research topic has been supported by anthropology’s wider complete shift, toward the end of the twentieth century, from defining its core subject matter as human life outside of institutions of sociocultural modernity, to putting those institutions at the center of its concerns.

Anthropological work on tourism is now so diverse as to defy summary. One frame for seeing unity across this work, though, is the already-noted pattern that while tourism’s goal is the experience of something outside tourists’ own system, in practice it tends to unfold as the imposition of tourists’ systems into places they engage with. In the next two sections of this entry, I sketch some ways that anthropologists have found this pattern to occur across even more levels than is openly acknowledged by tourists themselves. Across the entire entry, I draw many of my illustrations from studies of cultural tourism, in which the way of life of residents of a certain place is itself the focus of the tourists’ attention and desire in making their trips. A more complete survey of the anthropology of tourism would consider a much broader range of tourism varieties (see, for example, Leite & Graburn 2009; Leite & Swain 2015).

Tourism as ritual: directly experiencing a macrocosm

One way anthropology was pre-adapted to the study of tourism is that anthropologists have long specialised in studying social deviations and inversions that relate systematically to structures of normal life. Ritual is a classic topic in this area, and anthropological thought about ritual offers special promise for elucidating tourists’ paradoxical double-movement of both loosening and intensifying their relation to their society’s dominant structures.

Nelson Graburn (1977) described tourism as a ‘secular ritual’ specifically on the grounds that travelers’ activities invert or suspend norms of the rest of life. Trips to a destination like Las Vegas, for example, involve a dramatic scrambling of regular norms of dress, eroticism, architecture, sleeping, and the interdependence of consumption and labour. This pattern of a break with visitors’ normal practices and experiences at home is partly emphasised, for example, in the highly successful tourism marketing slogan, ‘What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’. To visit this city as a tourist is to enter a time and space of money’s hyper-circulation and hyper-expenditure, in activities of looking, eating, drinking, shopping, touching, and gambling, all separated from the paid jobs through which most visitors earn money for consumption-based living in their normal places.

There is something more specific to tourism and ritual, though, than the bare element of an inversion or break. Rituals are further set apart from the rest of life by how immediately and vividly they make ideas of a general macrocosm seem present in the microcosm of embodied sensory experience (Stasch 2011). Any given leisure trip, like any given ritual, raises an interpretive question of what broader concept is emphasised through the specific break with normal life that participants undergo in it. For example, the concept of a trip to Las Vegas is one of heightened involvement with core structures of the whole capitalist social world of the mediation of sensation by money. In this heightening, some features of life in such a system are specially revealed or intensified, such as the chanciness of financial success or ruin, the routine purchase of bodily pleasures using money, and the idea of turning money into more money. Other features of life in capitalism are specially hidden or distorted, such as the dependence of consumption and wealth on processes of someone actually making the food and other articles people buy.

Another example of the importance of an overarching macrocosmic story to the spatiotemporal structure of tours is described in a classic article by Edward Bruner and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1994), about the Kenyan destination of Mayers Ranch, a homestead and garden complex owned by a British-descended family who, in the colonial era, had run cattle on a larger bloc of surrounding land. When the ranch operated as a tour destination in the 1980s, package travellers would arrive by bus each afternoon from Nairobi, mingle on a lawn near the Mayers’ house, then descend to a performance space in a nearby village occupied seasonally by Maasai and Samburu on paid retainer from the owners. The tourists would watch and photograph these Maasai and Samburu perform dances, buy their handicrafts, then ascend again to the Mayers’ lawn for tea and biscuits, walk around the surrounding English garden complex, and chat with the owners. Finally, the visitors boarded buses to continue on their wider Kenya itinerary.

The macrocosmic story experienced by visitors was thus one of division of the world into two imagined whole ways of human being: savage or pastoral tribal people on the one hand, and cultivated British colonial landowners on the other. The pleasure of a visit flowed from the site’s close juxtaposition of spaces of Maasai dance and English gardening, respectively embodying qualities of wildness and orderly control. Each space threw the other into relief. Relations of colonial difference and domination across world history—and all the ways humans have ever been different from each other and mutually involved—are complex, ambiguous, and difficult to know. Mayers Ranch, though, gave visitors a clear experience of two contrasting types. Visitors experienced this simplified drama not mainly through explicit statements of its terms but through concrete sensations of sight, touch, hearing, and taste, and through their own bodily movements between different physical areas of the ritual site. This pattern of travelers experiencing large cosmological stories in a dense array of coordinated bodily, personal sensations is a main insight that emerges from comparing tourism with ritual.

Big concepts realised concretely in a leisure trip generally come from the society of the tourists. A macrocosmic story experienced on the personal scale of a tourist’s own bodily perceptions might feel like it flows toward the visitor from the visited destination, but usually travelers have acquired their desires and expectations about that destination from literature, mass media representations, and traditions of photographic imagery circulating densely in their home social networks (e.g. the case of Tahiti, discussed by Kahn 2010). Anthropologists have used diverse analytic terms for discussing these patterns of how destinations are linked to stereotyped qualities and concepts, and have looked at diverse practical processes by which the concept of a specific destination is built up and reproduced. One influential category, for example, is that of ‘place-images’ (introduced by geographer Rob Shields, 1991), while a more recent prominent terminology is that of ‘imaginaries’ (e.g. Salazar & Graburn 2014). Whatever the chosen vocabulary, much anthropological work centrally involves putting tourists’ ideas about a destination under scrutiny, as features of the tourists’ own consciousness and own ideological world.

Staging, commodification, and spectatorship

Many factors contribute to a trip’s effect of giving tourists pleasurable, emotionally or morally moving experiences of a macrocosmic story in embodied form. So far, I have emphasised the ideas that tourists carry with them and project onto what they see. But there are also effects fostered by spatial and social displacement itself. When people pass into new places for short periods of time, they are often in a state of simultaneous hyper-ignorance and hyper-knowing. They understand little about what is around them, by comparison to people who live in the place, or by comparison to the tourists’ knowledge of their own normal living environments. But for the same reasons, tourists perceive what is around them with feelings of sensory freshness and heightened potential meaningfulness. Under such conditions, the models, concepts, or macrocosmic stories held by tourists themselves may enjoy a kind of persuasiveness that is less available to a person more deeply familiar with a place.

Additionally, destinations are actively shaped by host communities and professional mediators to match visitors’ expectations and desires. A tourism destination that I have studied is the home place of Korowai people of Indonesian Papua, who are widely celebrated for their ‘treehouse’ architecture and for the other ways that they are thought to embody an archaic condition of tribal, ‘Stone Age’ humanity, characterised by close integration with the surrounding rainforest environment and isolation from global consumer culture. From prior exposure to vast bodies of amateur and professional photographic imagery, tourists have been trained into knowing the concept of tribal humanity by a certain visual look, centered especially on absence of manufactured clothing. In their trips to the Korowai area, this is what tourists most scan for, and are most affected by. Predictably, tour guides and Korowai themselves have conventionalised a practice of staging nudity and traditional dress just for tourists’ benefit, and of clearing out imported articles from houses when tourists are known to be coming. Sometimes tourists know about or explicitly request this staging of appearances, or come to infer that it might be taking place. More often, the visitors are unaware of the special arrangements in place around them, or they ‘do not want to know’ (as one guide described to me the psychology of some clients).

The idea that hosts and destinations are remade in the image of what tourists want is probably the most frequent turn of interpretation developed by anthropologists specifically studying cultural tourism. An early theoretical account of processes of ‘staging’ was given by Dean MacCannell (1976). He posited that the core macrocosmic concept cutting across all tourism was the extreme differentiation of consciousness and activity characteristic of modern society. This differentiation is reflected in people’s pervasive sense that they do not actually know the conditions of their own lives. They expect that any given experience they are having is a ‘frontstage’ appearance, underpinned by ‘backstage’ realities that are hidden from them. MacCannell identifies sightseeing as ‘a ritual performed to the differentiations of society…a kind of collective striving for a transcendence of the modern totality, a way of attempting to overcome the discontinuity of modernity, of incorporating its fragments into unified experience’ (1976: 13). The practical social pattern that results is routine organization of tourism destinations to give visitors an experience of ‘staged authenticity’, by which MacCannell means a systematically produced feeling of passing from a frontstage appearance to a more authentic condition of knowing backstage realities. Tours of commodity production sites like airplane factories, movie studios, or wineries are one kind of match to MacCannell’s template. But an idea of ‘authenticity’ does seem to be a defining preoccupation of human consciousness in modern societies generally (Trilling 1972). This idea was elaborated with special intensity by the Romantic movement, and is often a good descriptive match to tourists’ motives in visiting a variety of destination types. For example, tourists’ visits to Korowai under the sign of experiencing a timeless, anachronistically unchanged ‘Stone Age’ society could be described, in MacCannell’s terms, as following a dream of access to the ‘backstage’ of all of humanity.

Since ‘authenticity’ is tourists’ own problem, practical patterns of staging of authenticity are another example of tourists’ cultural condition extending outward to shape most aspects of actual tourism interactions. The main point of MacCannell’s account is not a game of the academic analyst smugly puncturing the tourists’ illusions, but just a realistic description of the social, communicative organization of the tourism process, in which the most active and knowing roles are often held by participants other than the tourists themselves. Patterns of tourists experiencing a general macrocosmic concept in their immediate sensory experiences of a destination depend on a great deal of socially distributed work. Visited people and mediating specialists co-construct this experience with and for the visitors. ‘One person’s leisure becomes another person’s labor’, as Jenny Chio says about ethnic minority villagers in China, for whom hosting urban Han visitors is now central to their livelihoods and to the physical appearances of their settlements (2014: 9).

Two related themes that anthropologists often document when studying tourism are commodification and visual spectatorship. Destinations and the people or attractions there are often valued because they seem to stand outside systems of commoditised social relating and material provisioning central to the tourists’ home worlds. The tourists are interested in people who produce their material livelihoods directly from their surrounding environment; they are interested in the sublime aesthetics of the natural environment, or the sublime bodily feelings of athletic acts in that environment; they are interested in visited people’s spirituality, their family relations, or their direct embodiment of an ethnic heritage. At the same time, visited people and specialist mediators in tourism encounters are often strongly focused on tourists’ wealth, and the payments or other economic benefits that flow from tourist visits. Greenwood (1989), Bunten (2008), Comaroff and Comaroff (2009), and many others have analyzed tourism as leading to the invention or standardization of local tradition in forms that did not exist independently of tourism itself, and as leading to the commodification of formerly noncommoditised areas of cultural life (as in the new market value of Korowai nudity). These authors have also described how visited people navigate difficult fractures of consciousness and practical tradeoffs between alternative definitions of what is good in life, under the structural conditions of the tourism system.

On the subject of visual spectatorship, consider the documentary film Cannibal Tours (O'Rourke 1988), which is anthropologists’ most widely shared reference point about tourism, due to its frequent use in teaching. The film depicts German, Italian, and American shipboard tourists visiting Sepik River villages in Papua New Guinea. Part of what makes the film painful to watch is how committed the tourists are to interacting with their hosts mainly in a frame of spectatorship and photography. They look at the visited people as objects, from a position of voyeuristic separation. This commitment to a certain frame of visual interaction blocks tourists from perceiving the hosts’ actual ideas, feelings, and ambivalences around tourism, which the film also depicts and which are quite different from what the tourists project onto those hosts.

The prominence of photography and spectatorship in Cannibal Tours is typical of many other tourism interactions. Almost all tourism involves an expanded emphasis on activities of looking, with tourists tending to be positioned as lookers and visited persons or sites as looked upon. The expression ‘the tourist gaze’ was coined by sociologist John Urry (1990) in part to refer to this pattern. Many anthropological studies of specific tourism destinations have dwelt in detail on the importance of certain patterns of sight in the encounters. There are many reasons that spectatorship and photography expand in this way. As has been already noted, ideas of destinations are acquired in advance through the circulation of visual images. So too, in the time of their visits, tourists often think of how their experiences can later be communicated and used socially in their home locations, and photography is suited to those goals. Tourism arose historically in close relation to the nineteenth-century rise of world fairs, public museums, department stores, and other institutions of ‘the exhibitionary complex’ influentially described by Bennett (1988). These institutions turned on a separation of seeing subject from seen object, and on an idea of this ‘spectatorial’ seeing as immediate knowing. The ongoing strength of the link between tourism and looking seems to flow from a basic compatibility between tourism’s grounding in a Romantic model of breaking out of normal experience in order to be affected by a sacred other order, and a widespread modern cultural understanding of sight as a channel of knowing by which the knower has a frictionless or ‘free’ experience of the seen object. There is a match between the feelings of perfection and purity surrounding a photograph’s realistic representation of what it depicts, and the ideal of visited places or people as themselves perfect, pure, and uplifting.

One common anthropological contribution has been to make practices of sight at the center of tourist activity stand out as culturally and socially peculiar, by documenting visited people’s responses to tourists’ visual orientations. Maasai and Samburu people who worked at Mayers Ranch referred to the end of each year’s tourism season as ‘clos[ing] the picture’ (Bruner & Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994: 461). This is an indication of how aware they were that their own bodily presence and actions on the site were already a picture, organised for the visitors’ anticipated spectatorship, before any specific photograph was taken of them. People of Sumba in Indonesia, in a symbolic echo of their experience of tourists’ photography, repeat fearful rumors of ‘long-haired foreigners’ who hang local children upside down in order to drain their blood into ‘metal boxes’, then take the blood home to their electronics factories to wash the radios, televisions, and other devices made there, giving them their superior quality (Hoskins 2002). Miao and Zhuang villagers studied by Chio (2013; 2014) methodically if cautiously follow the Chinese state’s exhortation to make a spectacle of themselves, such as by covering concrete buildings with rustic wood. They are reflexive about the primacy of vision as their meeting ground with tourists, and about the gaps or articulations between visual appearances and other levels of their overall embodied lives, such as economic goals.

The themes of staging, commodification, and spectatorship connect closely with each other and can be seen as alternate faces of a single complex. Even from my brief outline of these themes, we can appreciate the following broad characteristics of that complex. Tourism itself is a kind of system or culture. It is a system that sets up a frame of difference and separation, as well as relating and engagement, between tourists and the people, places, or objects on which their travel is focused. The position of tourists themselves tends to exert more power than other positions, in setting the terms of relation. Complexly, though, visited people and tourism professionals sometimes have more active and knowing roles than tourists, in the processes of staging, commodification, and spectatorship by which tourists experience a personal ritual enactment of a macrocosmic story.

Host-guest interdependence and the creation of new social systems

I noted earlier that tourists tend to be aware of tourism’s paradox of imposing into the world the very structures they seek to escape through their travel. So too with respect to the more specific analytic themes just discussed: not just academics, but publics at large are sensitive to the likelihood of tourism interactions being voyeuristic, tourism performances being artificially staged to match tourists’ desires, and tourism deepening the commodification of social life in visited destinations. The fact that tourists themselves are often aware of these possible patterns suggests not only that the patterns are true, but that other things could be true as well. If part of the culture of tourists is critical disgust toward the figure of the ‘ugly tourist’—who projects his or her assumptions and habits into visited settings, through the processes of staging, commodification, and spectatorship—then there is more to the culture of tourists than the unreflexive projection of their assumptions and habits into visited settings.

While staging, commodification, spectatorship, and ritual realization of tourists’ own macrocosmic stories are major patterns of how tourism is organised, the overall anthropological status of these patterns is that they are questions. Researchers have asked whether and how much these patterns actually occur, and what else occurs as well. My initial statement, that tourists take their social system with them when they travel, should likewise be turned into a question, or a series of linked questions. Can a person leave his or her social system, and in what ways? How much and in what ways is a framework of categories something that people live their lives within? How do categorising frameworks deal with, suppress, or otherwise relate to forms of life that are foreign to them? To what extent does physical location in a given place mean being ‘inside’ a certain social system, framework of categories, or macrocosmic story? Or, conversely, to what extent does being inside a framework of categories mean being in a physical location? In what ways is movement between places something a person does from a stable ongoing position ‘inside’ social systems, categorising frameworks, and stories? In what ways is such movement something that breaks apart existing forms of life and assembles fundamentally different ones? These are questions that tourists themselves investigate practically in their travel, as do hosts and mediators who work with the visitors. They are also questions addressed analytically in anthropological studies.

One illustration of these issues is the shift in interactional relations between tourists and hosts that was regularly fostered by a specific Aboriginal tour guide’s telling of an autobiographical story while working at an indigenous-owned tourism enterprise in northern Australia, during Anke Tonnaer’s fieldwork there from 2004 to 2006. Referring to this guide as ‘Jimmy’, Tonnaer describes how he led groups of non-Aboriginal day visitors on a two-hour ‘bush walk’ (2016). This walk was focused on traditional foods and medicines that could be gathered from the land. In this way, the walk gave tourists a vivid embodied experience of the main macrocosmic model orienting their trips, namely an idea of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people as separated by a temporal chasm of the archaic versus the modern, symbolised by the intimate links between Aboriginal people and wild nature (this is similar to the model we have already seen to be broadly experienced by tourists visiting Mayers Ranch). However, at a certain point on the walk, Jimmy would often point out to guests the remnants of a stone oven, and explain that it dated to a period when the area was part of a ranch. This in turn would trigger his narration of the personal memory of how his own sister had been the offspring of a white ranch worker and Aboriginal mother, and at a young age was removed from her Aboriginal mother into church custody, never to return. This removal was carried out under the wider Australian policy that the tourists would have associated with the history of the ‘Stolen Generations’ (though Jimmy did not reference these categories in relating his personal memory). When Jimmy would tell this story of loss, each tour group would fall into a pronounced silence. Tonnaer perceives the story to have been very moving to them, provoking not only feelings of compassion for Jimmy’s experience (which they would sometimes put into words), but also a more general transformation of ‘the temporal rift between the tourist self and cultural other on which the cultural touristic experience was largely based’ into a relation of ‘coevalness’, or joint involvement in a common and difficult past (180). Tonnaer also considers that the visiting tourists ‘often wanted to listen’ to Jimmy’s story (182, emphasis in original). Being told this story did not make their visit less valuable, but rather was a fulfillment of their tourism’s goals, albeit not goals that had been known or scripted in advance in a specific form. The pattern of interactions between Jimmy and participants in the walk ‘points to a more complex makeup and diverse set of perhaps inchoate motivations of tourists in their desire to meet an Aboriginal person that cannot be captured entirely by the longing for an experience of cultural ancientness’ (Tonnaer 2016: 182).

One tendency of anthropological work on tourism in the 2000s has been skepticism about the dichotomy of ‘tourist’ versus ‘visited people’ as whole blocs, of a kind that informed my discussion in earlier sections. Instead, researchers have focused on differences among tourists, and among visited people, that are also centrally important to tourism interactions; on the complexity of tourists’ own consciousness and actions if these are studied ‘in the round’ rather than as if the tourists were ‘part persons’ (Graburn & Barthel-Bouchier 2001); on the elaborate systems of mediating roles and institutions on which encounters between hosts and guests or destination objects actually depend (Salazar 2010; Satsuka 2015); and on the forms of cosmopolitanism and self-awareness regularly found in the lives of visited ‘local’ people, contrary to stereotypes of tourists as mobile and hosts as immobile and whole (e.g. Causey 2007; Notar 2008; Chio 2014; Swain 2014). Stark divides between visitors and visited are often prominent in the discourse of tourism participants themselves, and the contrasts in economic or political freedom of movement between them should not be downplayed. But it is also important to understand how the identity categories on either ‘side’ of an encounter—and the further identity categories differentiated within those sides or at their edges—are produced through tourism interactions, and do not only preexist them (Meiu 2017).

Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett at one point state that ‘we might say that a new Maasai-and-Samburu-dancing-for-tourists-at-Mayers culture has evolved from the interaction of the Maasai with the Mayers and the tourists, tour agents, film crews, travel writers, and anthropologists’ (1994: 447). This type of insight has been explored with increased subtlety in recent scholarship. Consider an unanticipated outcome of international Jewish tourism to Portugal as described by Naomi Leite (2017). The tourists’ goal was to visit and learn about the famed isolated communities of ongoing underground Jewish practice that had been discovered by folklorists in outlying rural locations in the early 1900s, many centuries after the forced conversion of all Iberian Jews to Catholicism. For certain international tourists, though, what turned out to be the most moving aspect of their visits to Portugal were their encounters with new self-formed communities of urban Jewish-identified persons. The people in these urban networks had not been raised as practicing Jews, nor in many cases even told by anyone they were Jewish. But as adults, they independently came to the conviction that they are Jews by descent, and formed an intense desire for religious knowledge and belonging in this inferred identity. For the tourists, meanwhile, Portuguese historical patterns of Jewish rupture or perseverance were resonantly metaphoric of their own complex relations to Jewishness. The tourists were in a position to help the young urban Portuguese self-identifying Jews, and of wanting to help them. They could offer knowledge, institutional standing, and connections to actual Jewish religious practice. The tourists made repeat visits, set up organizational support networks, and facilitated the urban Jewish-identified individuals’ international passages to Jewish legal recognition as co-religionists.

While this case is an extreme example of forging new ties (and it involves historical processes much larger than tourism), it is increasingly common for anthropological work to focus on tourism participants’ complex mutual involvement, and on the new systems of ideas and social relations they create together, alongside documenting patterns of the kind I discussed earlier of tourists dominantly projecting their home systems of buying and knowing into new settings.

Yet while in many cases a space of tourism encounter is best described as a new and systematic reality of its own, still the participants in this novel system often have different understandings of their relations. Returning to issues of voyeurism and photography, for example, a striking case of disparity of understandings is described by Alex Gillespie (2006). In this study of interactions between foreign tourists and Ladakhis in northern India, Gillespie shows that while tourists routinely say Ladakhis dislike being photographed because it objectifies them, Ladakhis themselves actually approve of tourist photography, as an appropriate celebration of the value of Ladakhi life. The tourists are actually oriented to the views of other tourists about photography, even though they attribute those views to Ladakhis. In a similar structure of mutual misunderstanding, Korowai of Indonesian Papua often say that tourists’ motive in coming to visit them is that they know Korowai are ‘people without articles’, and because of this feel love or longing for Korowai and a desire to come give to them the articles they lack. It is actually true of tourists that they love Korowai because of their separateness from global consumer culture. But the idea that this leads the tourists to want to give Korowai articles is not accurate. Instead it is something Korowai infer from tourists’ payment behavior, against the background of Korowai people’s own norms of regularly sharing with relatives who lack something. It is a widespread irony of structures of working misunderstanding between tourism participants that the tourists desire to be more like the people they visit – in having a close relation to something like ‘nature’ or ‘tradition’ – while visited people desire to be more like the tourists, in having a close relation to wealth and other aspects of urban modernity.

Conclusion: the psychological complexity of images of others

Anthropologists’ commitment to long-term fieldwork is particularly well-suited to the documentation of the marked disparities of understanding held by different tourism participants. The experience of visited people was hardly taken into account in scholarship on tourism in any empirically-grounded manner until the recent wave of new ethnographic studies. The documentation of hosts’ experience has been the deepest contribution of anthropological work on tourism to date.

Because of the transience of encounters between tourism participants, and the force that is thus exerted by stereotypes, images, and speculative reasoning in shaping participants’ experience of each other and their actions, anthropology’s rich theoretical tradition of the study of symbolic representations has been an underlying foundation of anthropology’s contributions. I would suggest in closing, though, that there is a psychological complexity to all people’s relations to the images guiding their knowledge and action that has been difficult for scholars to give its due. This psychological complexity is illustrated by tourists to Ladakh who project onto Ladakhis their fellow tourists’ feelings of the shamefulness of photo-taking; tourists who see Portugal’s urban ‘Marranos’ as a collective embodiment of the macrocosmic story of Jewish destruction and survival (and so do not probe too deeply into any one individual’s upbringing); and tourists to northern Australia, who mainly think of Aboriginal persons as archaic people of nature, but also bear a half-formed desire to understand histories of colonial connection and domination. This layering of what people think or know—the ways in which they could be said to know more than they think they know, or less than they think they know—seem important to the smooth unfolding of tourism meetings, and the unfolding of similar transient encounters across major social gaps in general. Perhaps more nuanced understandings of this issue will be something else that grows out of anthropological work on tourism in the future.

References

Bennett, T. 1988. The exhibitionary complex. New Formations 4, 73-102.

Bruner, E. & B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994. Maasai on the lawn: tourist realism in East Africa. Cultural Anthropology 9, 435-70 (available on-line: http://www.jstor.org/stable/656384).

Bunten, A. 2008. Sharing culture or selling out? Developing the commodified persona in the heritage industry. American Ethnologist 35, 380-95.

Causey, A. 2003. Hard bargaining in Sumatra: western travelers and Toba Bataks in the marketplace of souvenirs. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Causey, A. 2007. ‘Go back to the Batak, it’s safe there’: tourism in North Sumatra during perilous times. Indonesia and the Malay World 35, 257-71.

Chio, J. 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness (prod. J. Chio). Berkeley: Berkeley Media, 2013.

Chio, J. 2014. A landscape of travel: the work of tourism in rural ethnic China. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Comaroff, J. & J. Comaroff 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University Press.

Gillespie, A. 2006. Tourist photography and the reverse gaze. Ethos 34, 343-66.

Graburn, N. 1977. Tourism: the sacred journey. In Hosts and guests: the anthropology of tourism (ed.) V.L. Smith, 33-47. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Graburn, N.H. & D. Barthel-Bouchier 2001. Relocating the tourist. International Sociology 16, 147-58.

Greenwood, D. 1989. Culture by the pound: an anthropological perspective on tourism as cultural commoditization. In Hosts and guests: the anthropology of tourism (ed.) V. Smith, 171-86. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Hoskins, J. 2002. Predatory voyeurs: tourists and ‘tribal violence’ in remote Indonesia. American Ethnologist 29, 797-828.

Kahn, M. 2010. Tahiti beyond the postcard: power, place, and everyday life. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Leite, N. 2017. Unorthodox kin: Portuguese marranos and the global search for belonging. Oakland: University of California Press.

Leite, N. & N. Graburn 2009. Anthropological interventions in tourism studies. In The SAGE handbook of tourism studies (eds) T. Jamal & M. Robinson, 35-64. London: Sage.

Leite, N. & M. Swain 2015. Anthropology of tourism. In Encyclopedia of tourism (eds) J. Jafari & H. Xiao, 2nd ed. London: SpringerReference.

Lew, A. 2008. Tourism is NOT the world’s largest industry - so stop saying it is! Tourism geography journal’s tourism place (available on-line: http://tourismplace.blogspot.com/2008/04/tourism-is-not-worlds-largest-industry.html). Accessed 3 Sep 2012.

MacCannell, D. 1976. The tourist: a new theory of the leisure class. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Meiu, G.P. 2017. Ethno-erotic economies: sexuality, money, and belonging in Kenya. Chicago: University Press.

Notar, B.E. 2008. Producing cosmopolitanism at the borderlands: lonely planeteers and ‘local’ cosmopolitans in southwest China. Anthropological Quarterly 81, 615-50.

O’Rourke, D. Cannibal tours (prod. D. O'Rourke & L.J. Henderson). Los Angeles: O’Rourke & Associates, Direct Cinema Ltd, 1988.

Salazar, N. 2010. Envisioning Eden: mobilizing imaginaries in tourism and beyond. Oxford: Berghahn.

Salazar, N.B. & N.H. Graburn (eds) 2014. Tourism imaginaries: anthropological approaches. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Satsuka, S. 2015. Nature in translation: Japanese tourism encounters the Canadian Rockies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Shields, R. 1991. Places on the margin: alternative geographies of modernity. London: Routledge.

Smith, V. (ed.) 1977. Hosts and guests: the anthropology of tourism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Stasch, R. 2011. Ritual and oratory revisited: the semiotics of effective action. Annual Review of Anthropology 40, 159-74.

Swain, M. 2014. Myth management in tourism’s imaginariums: tales from southwest China, and beyond. In Tourism imaginaries: anthropological approaches (eds) N. Salazar & N. Graburn, 103-24. London: Berghahn.

Tonnaer, A. 2016. Intersecting journeys of past and present in the ‘bush’: unsettling coevalness in the tourist space of indigenous Australia. International Journal of Tourism Anthropology 5, 172-86.

Trilling, L. 1972. Sincerity and authenticity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Tucker, H. 2003. Living with tourism: negotiating identities in a Turkish village. London: Routledge.

Urry, J. 1990. The tourist gaze: leisure and travel in contemporary societies. London: Sage.

Williams, S. & A.A. Lew 2015. Tourism geography: critical understandings of place, space and experience. 3rd ed. London: Routledge.

Note on contributor

Rupert Stasch teaches in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and is the author of Society of others: kinship and mourning in a West Papuan place (2009).

Dr Rupert Stasch, Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. rs839@cam.ac.uk

[1] Promotional organizations like the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) and the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) regularly issue online reports describing tourism as accounting for between 3% and 10% of global GDP, as being the world’s largest service sector industry (compare Lew 2008, Williams & Lew 2015: 3), and as almost exceeding in size the world’s largest goods-focused industries other than fossil fuels.