Water Spirits Research Articles

"Living in the time of the butterfly:" Engaging more-than-human temporalities to rethink biodiversity conservation

This article describes the ecological accounts of Jñato and Hñähñu (also known as Mazahua and Otomi) people who inhabit a territory that is today the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in México. We draw on their narratives, documented through a multiyear historical and ethnographic study, to discuss multispecies temporalities and reciprocal relations across more-than-human entities. Analyzing local environmental knowledge through "deep time" and relational perspectives, we invite conservation and environmental studies scholars to reconsider epistemological assumptions about time and the Anthropocene. We do so by documenting the multispecies rhythms and temporalities maintained in our research sites from time immemorial. In contrast with linear notions of time, these rhythms operate cyclically through reciprocal gifting between plants, humans, and other entities such as a water spirits and witches. The "deep time" lens that such practices offer, we suggest, can enrich biodiversity conservation and more-than-human political ecologies. We conclude by stressing that this relational "world-making" is also power-laden. Political identities are embedded in, and reconstructed through, a complex political economy and uneven relations of knowledge production. Together, these constitute what we call "the time of the butterfly."

Ways of Being: Water Spirits in Mia Couto’s Sleepwalking Land (1992)

ABSTRACT Mia Couto is a Mozambican writer known for an aesthetics of the fantastic in his numerous works. In most of his writings, he blurs the distinctions between the human and the non-human, land and water, the natural and the supernatural. This is particularly evident in his 2006 novel Sleepwalking Land, set in the context of the Mozambican civil war. This paper argues that the elusive figure of the water spirit is an ideal lens by which to read Sleepwalking Land to capture the complexity of the horrendous civil war. Drawing on magical realism, I consider Couto’s use of water-based indigenous beliefs to underscore ideas of flexibility and mobility in a land ravaged by war, while revising the myth of powerful water spirits in line with the raging civil war. The chaos of war is amplified in the novel through actions of spirits that encroach on the human world, influencing events and problematizing the laws of logic, time and space. Their intractability enables Couto to foreground ambiguity and hybridity with characters who assume different forms at different stages of the fragmented plot, mirroring the raging war.

Decolonial Re-existence through Animist Realism: Water Spirits and Shamanic Mantras in Janice Pariat's Boats on Land

Colonialism's deleterious impact on Indigenous epistemologies has engendered an exigent concern in the project of decoloniality, calling for a re-existence of marginalized cosmovisions. To accomplish this, an epistemic delinking from the paradigm of Eurocentric discourses is imperative in the interest of a comprehensive appreciation and recognition of Indigenous knowledge systems. In this vein, the present study employs the literary trope of animist realism to analyze two short stories from the anthology Boats on Land by the Khasi author, Janice Pariat. Her creative writing explores the animist philosophy of the Khasi community who dwell in the humid tropical State of Meghalaya, India. Through an attentive reading of the animist belief in water spirits and shamanic mantra rituals, this paper critiques colonial narratives of Khasi animist worldviews as "satanic", "supernatural", or psycho-pathological aberrations. The paper presents Khasi animist wisdom as a sophisticated and equitable principle of mutual coexistence and respectful relationality between human and more-than-human realms, replete with spiritual, ecological, and cosmological overtones. Indigenous animist epistemologies are indispensable as sustainable alternatives to the knowledge structures of colonial modernity. The present study contributes to the envisioning of a coexistence of Indigenous and Western knowledge systems in the spirit of mutual recognition and constructive engagement within an evolving epistemological landscape in the ongoing decolonial enterprise.

The Ritual Solidarity of Masked Processions in Calabar, Cameroon, and Cuba

The Ritual Solidarity of Masked Processions in Calabar, Cameroon, and Cuba

Submerged Narratives: Memorializing Enslavement in Eve Sandler’s Mami Wata Crossing

In Harlem-based artist Eve Sandler’s installation Mami Wata Crossing (2008), text, image, object, and film converge to form an intimate memorial to enslaved ancestors and also honors transatlantic water spirits called Mami Wata. Sandler engages maternal lineages by mobilizing practices honoring water spirits—often characterized as migratory maternal figures—as a lens through which to reconfigure memories of the slave trade and narratives of women’s labor. As a presentation of Black women’s narratives of diasporic belonging within the United States, the installation emerges as an alternative archive of materials that allows for the experiential activation of family histories and Afro-Atlantic ritual practices as lived realities. The installation expands the purview of a slave memorial by combining media whose impermanence challenges the purpose of monumental public art within understandings of Black women’s histories. Sandler seeks diasporic cultural connection by ritually performing historical haunting. In this article, I propose a rethinking of ways that public institutions make room for visual representation of African American women’s histories by reconnecting these histories to Afro-Atlantic ritual practices. I argue that, by activating inherited objects as a sacred material history, Sandler memorializes gendered experiences of enslavement and nonlinear, submerged narratives through the recurrent visual form of the Afro-Atlantic altar. In Sandler’s work, the submerged narrative indicates a historical remix made visible, the remnant contents of family albums, homes, and bits of agrarian landscapes lashed together as a signal buoy for that which remains out of sight.

Water Spirits of the Yangzi River and Imperial Power in Traditional China

Most research on the water spirits of the Yangzi has focused on popular worship and paid little attention to the Confucian discourse and its major role in establishing imperial legitimacy. Yet it is a crucial aspect to understand traditional politics in China. The water spirits of the Yangzi River and its tributaries and lakes were venerated, offered imperial sacrifices, and incorporated into codes of state ritual in traditional China. The canonized sacrifices to the water spirits of the Yangzi River basin symbolized the religious–political legitimacy of the imperial regimes. When an imperial court offered sacrifice to the water spirits of the Yangzi River basin incorporated by previous dynasties, this action demonstrated that the current court directly connected to past regimes and inherited the authority of sacrifice passed down from the ancient and the orthodox tradition of Confucian ritual classics. Since the majority of dynasty capitals in traditional China were located in the north with fewer rivers, worshipping water spirits of the Yangzi River basin would imply recognition and blessing from southern divinities. The practice of granting noble titles and temple plaques to those water spirits would further demonstrate the imperial courts’ control over the divine power. By communicating with and managing the water spirits of the Yangzi River, the imperial courts would also symbolize their political and military administration over the south and they are united, rather than divided, regimes.

The Bestowal of Noble Titles upon the Mountain and Water Spirits in Tang China

In the Tang era, official sacrifices to mountain and water spirits became more methodical than those of the preceding dynasties. What deserves more attention is that the imperial court bestowed noble titles, which were normally awarded to aristocrats and powerful officials, on the twenty-eight mountain and water spirits, including the Five Sacred Peaks, Four Strongholds, Four Seas and Four Waterways. These practices reflected the two-sided attitude of the Tang rulers to the mountain and water spirits. When confronting violent political changes, the rulers yearned for blessings and protection from these natural deities. On the other hand, with the expansion of monarchical power in the secular world, they sought to establish their authority in the realm of divinity. Running parallel in most cases, the bestowal of nobility and the official sacrificial system constituted the official cult of mountain and water spirits, which survived until the first years of the Ming Dynasty.

A Mermaid in a Dry City: A Watery Reading of Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning

Although Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning (1998) has attracted a lot of critical attention, her use of water and the trope of water spirits have largely remained unexplored. Most scholarship on the novel has not examined water as a discursive field, reflecting the broader focus on land as the medium of anticolonial discourse. The essay considers what happens when we decentre land in the novel and foreground water instead. How do the materiality of water and the trope of water spirits represent the world of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)? This essay demonstrates how Butterfly Burning, often read as a drought narrative, works with precolonial hydro-imaginaries as a way of refracting its colonial and gender themes, entangling them in water’s more material properties. The element of water allows Vera to explore the ambiguities and complexities of surviving in precarious Rhodesia and of writing gender. The different forms of water in the novel speak to the harsh conditions of Makokoba. Additionally, in reading Phephelaphi the protagonist as a water spirit, a creature that embodies contradictions, the essay amplifies the complexities of the gender dynamics of the novel. Drawing on the ambivalence, elusiveness, and fluidity of water spirits, Phephelaphi negotiates her way in colonial Bulawayo. She fights to own her life from the moment she emerges from Umguza River until she self-immolates at the end of the novel. Although this act of self-immolation points to immense despair, I read it as a paradoxical gesture of self-determination and catastrophe.

Crossing Merfolk Narratives of the Sacred: Nalo Hopkinson’s The New Moon’s Arms and Gabrielle Tesfaye’s The Water Will Carry Us Home

This article defines what I call the ‘crossing merfolk’ narrative, the idea that African people who jumped or were cast overboard during the Middle Passage became water-dwelling beings. While critical attention has been increasing for 1990s’ electronic music duo Drexciya, whose sonic fiction contains the most well-known example of this narrative, this is actually a recurring tradition in Black oral and artistic culture that can be traced to West and Central African religions. I focus particularly on what I call ‘crossing merfolk narratives of the sacred’, M. Jacqui Alexander’s term for African diasporic religious traditions anchored in West and Central African cosmologies. Analysing the role of the sacred in two crossing merfolk narratives, Nalo Hopkinson’s 2007 novel The New Moon’s Arms and Gabrielle Tesfaye’s short film The Water Will Carry Us Home (2018), I argue that these texts expand the Black Atlantic imaginary and transform mermaid lore. I develop the term ‘diasporic collage’ to describe the ways in which Hopkinson and Tesfaye reference and combine water spirits and ritual practices from multiple African diasporic traditions into narratives that intersect mermaids and the Middle Passage.

Witness to a passing

Water stories told in Kilimanjaro Region, such as Mami Wata narratives conveyed across Africa and the Atlantic, give horrific insights into morally problematic forms of wealth acquisition through environmental destruction. This paper approaches farmers’ stories of water spirits and water management practices as indices of farmers’ witness to their own social displacement by government-backed agribusinesses. Analysis shows that farmers are drawn to, and are already part of, a system that waits and watches for their death. As perverse as many forms of necropolitics can be, this form of social devivification, duplicitously advanced in the name of environmental conservation and sustainability, is all too familiar and ordinary. This article unveils agro-industrial conceits about water management and contrasts these conceits to farmers’ life-sustaining practices.

The veneration of “land-water” in the tradition of the northern Khakas — Kyzyls (late 19th — mid-20th century)

The paper discusses current scientific issues related to the study of the traditional worldview and ritualism of the Khakas people. The work is focused on the analysis of the traditional festival of veneration of “land-water” by the Kyzyls — an ethnic group of the Khakas living in the northern part of Khakassia and in the south of Kras-noyarsk Krai. The characteristic of the ritual complex associated with the worship of the host-spirits is presented: the land spirits (mountains) — tag taig, and the water spirits (springs, lakes, rivers) — sug taiyg. The main sources of the research are unpublished field ethnographic materials. Archival ethnographic information related to this topic, collected in the 1970s by M.S. Usmanova and other researchers from the Tomsk State University, are introduced in the scientific discourse. In the process of studying the indicated problem, it was found that in the culture of the Khakas, including the Kyzyl people, an important place was given to the worship of their native land — sher-sug taiyg. In the religious-mythological consciousness, its specific personification was the spirit-masters of the mountains — tag eezi, and the water spirits — sug eezi. This worldview was due to the natural landscape of the territory in which they live. It features a mountainous terrain with a range of diverse water bodies — the streams, rivers, lakes, etc. The daily domestic life and economic activities of the ethnic community in question were directly related to them. It is argued that in the worldview of the people, connection between the human and nature goes beyond the framework of rational interaction. They were convinced of the close mystical interrelation of natural objects with the life and well-being of people. One of the common ways to maintain a steady balanced relationship between them was the rituals of sacrifice and celebration of these supernatural beings. It was found that in the cult practice of the Kyzyls, the sher-sug taiyg included two or even three specialized rites — tag / kol / sug taiyg, which were closely interconnected with each other and formed a single ritual complex. This sacralized event was held on a regular basis. It had a collective nature with a strictly defined structure, incorporating the leader and other immediate participants, as well as the victim themselves.

Formation of the Traditional Chinese State Ritual System of Sacrifice to Mountain and Water Spirits

Sacrifice to mountain and water spirits was already a state ritual in the earliest dynasties of China, which later gradually formed a system of five sacred peaks, five strongholds, four seas, and four waterways, which was mainly constructed by the Confucian ritual culture. A number of modern scholars have studied the five sacred peaks from different perspectives, yielding fruitful results, but major issues are still being debated or need to be plumbed more broadly and deeply, and the whole sacrificial system has not yet drawn sufficient attention. Applying a combined approach of religious, historical, geographical, and political studies, I provide here, with new discoveries and conclusions, the first comprehensive study of the formational process of this sacrificial system and its embodied religious-political conceptions, showing how these geographical landmarks were gradually integrated with religious beliefs and ritual-political institutions to become symbols of territorial, sacred, and political legitimacy that helped to maintain the unification and government of the traditional Chinese imperium for two thousand years. A historical map of the locations of the sacrificial temples for the eighteen mountain and water spirits is appended.

SOCIALIST AND EUGENIC: CZECH FAIRY-TALE FILMS AND THE NATION’S HEALTH

The article embeds the three most popular fairy-tale films by Vaclav Vořlíček (Girl on a Broomstick, 1971; Three Wishes for Cinderella, 1973; How to Drown Dr. Mraček or the End of Water Spirits in Bohemia, 1975) in the socialist campaigns orchestrated by the Czechoslovak government in the late 1960s and early 1970s, whose goal was to introduce women to new practices directly relating to reproductive behavior. I explore this cohort of “crazy” comedies stemming from the story of domestication of women as a historical continuity in the development of the comic female Bildungsroman, one of the mainstream genres interrogating nation-building and popular culture in the Czech lands from the second third of the nineteenth century until today. The core frame of the Czech female Bildungsroman, namely the binary opposition of “us/them” related to the Czech-German relationship, ascribing to women the risk of Otherness, and the call for their Czechinization through intercourse with Czech men, are deconstructed through infiltration by eugenic motives disseminated in the public discourse concerning the nation’s health between the 1960s and 1970s.

The New Ju-Ju: Ijo Masquerades and the Office of War Information in Second World War Nigeria

In May and June 1943, a photographer with the American Office of War Information (OWI) photographed West African men who he identified as ‘witch doctors’ engaging in masquerade dances dedicated to water spirits. However, rather than the typical aquatic-themed headgear, these ‘witch doctors’ wore model planes – reproductions of British, French, and American aircraft. The photographs and their captions constructed a narrative of a ‘new ju-ju’, in which an indigenous community incorporated model aircraft into their traditional masquerades in order to reflect upon and support the power of Allied armies, which had supplanted their previous notions of spiritual power. However, despite their absurd and over-contrived captions, these photos were never published, demonstrating that the narrative of ‘new ju-ju’ was too complex to fit within the standard propagandistic narrative of widespread Allied support. This fascinating story provides insight into how indigenous communities in Nigeria coped with massive societal changes throughout the Second World War period, reveals the constructed narratives of American wartime propaganda, and, overall, demonstrates the uncontrollable nature of photographs as sources that insist upon revealing distinctive forms of agency and telling their own stories.

Other-Than-Human Persons, Mishipishu, and Danger in the Late Woodland Inland Waterway Landscape of Northern Michigan

Other-than-human persons and the role they play in transforming social, economic, and ideological material realities is an area of expanding interest in archaeology. Although the Anishinaabeg were an early and vital focus of cultural anthropological studies on nonhumans given their significant relationships with other-than-human persons, known to them asmanitou, emerging archaeologies advancing this topic are not largely centered on ancestral Anishinaabeg sites and artifacts. This article analyzes a set of nonvessel ceramic artifacts from Late Woodland archaeological sites in the Inland Waterway in northern Michigan, which are interpreted to be ceramic renderings of manitou. I argue that these were manitou-in-clay, vibrant relational entities that are brought into being for and through use in ceremonial perspective practices related to Mishipishu—a complexly powerful, seductive, and dangerous nonhuman being known as the head of all water spirits. I contextualize the making and breaking of Mishipishu manitou-in-clay as acts of petition by hunter-fishers who had been seduced by this manitou in dreams, as they headed out on necessary but high-risk early-spring resource harvesting in the inland lakes of the Inland Waterway. This case advances insights into how relationships with other-than-human persons were coproductive of the world in the northern Great Lakes region during the Late Woodland period.

Water Mamas among the Makushi in Guyana

This article examines folklore concerning water spirits among the Makushi Amerindians in Guyana. Makushi accounts of spirits called ‘water mamas’—twingram or Tuenkaron in Makushi—associate these beings with white people in both past and present. The case is presented here that this folklore reflects Makushi histories and experiences of European contact, colonialism in Dutch and British Guiana, and ongoing relations with Europeans and other outsiders. The themes of abduction, enticement, capricious wealth, and exotic ‘palaces’ found in stories of water mamas relate to these histories and experiences and inscribe them into the present landscape in Guyana. In addition to describing beliefs in water mamas and examining Makushi histories of interaction with Europeans, the article begins to explore the comparative context of this folklore in relation to other beliefs in water spirits across Amazonia and beyond.

Collections Care Challenges and Innovations for Ephemeral Altar Assemblages

This contribution evaluates the installation of (inter)active altar assemblages in museums from the underexamined perspective of collections care practice. Based on ethnographic research at the Fowler Museum at UCLA – which has been exhibiting altars for over two decades – this article investigates the details of constructing, maintaining, documenting and conserving altars. Firstly, it examines the Fowler’s innovative use of registration categories to contend with the fluid identities, status, and functions of individual altar components referred to as “TRs”, “Props”, and “Offerings”. Secondly, it offers a comparative analysis of curatorial and conservation documentation for three entire altars – one of which was also a contemporary artwork – in the 2008 exhibition Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas. This study reveals challenges of exhibiting ephemeral altar assemblages, provides examples of museological innovation to meet those challenges, and highlights the vulnerabilities of such innovations that museums should consider moving forward.

How Do You Know a Mermaid When You See One? How Do You See a Mermaid When You Know One? A Photo Essay

How Do You Know a Mermaid When You See One?How Do You See a Mermaid When You Know One? A Photo Essay Tracy C. Davis (bio) In twenty-first-century Westernized culture, mer-creatures are currently understood to take a specific form: a human (usually female) upper body that becomes scaly from the hips downward, lacking legs or feet and culminating in a double-fluked tail. Prior to the Enlightenment, this was not the case: mer-creatures in illustrations and sculpture could be dual-tailed or, very often, take entirely human form, yet still be understood to represent the water spirits of seas, lakes, rivers, or wells. As the extraordinarily rich graphic collections of the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung (TWS) of the Universität zu Köln demonstrate, the nineteenth-century theatre was crucial in reconciling the varied forms into one, particularly through two operas common in the Germanic repertoire: Albert Lorzing's Undide (1845) and Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold (composed 1853; first produced 1869). Unlike painting, sculpture, and literature, the theatre not only asserts the existence of mers in relation to the human world, but must depict them (through bodies, voices, and movements) via human performers. Whereas Lorzing did this through a non-tailed water spirit, Wagner envisioned tailed mermaids. Baroque spectacles utilized real water, with mythic and allegorical sea creatures moving on the surface. Romantic ballet dispensed with the real water and made water spirits etherealized creatures who moved on the land (and somewhat above the stage floor). Lorzing made a radical breach from both traditions by culminating Undine with a sequence in which the stage was (narratively) engulfed by water. This was the pretext for a transformation scene into the underwater realm of the Danube, revealing the throne room of sovereign beings who were the essence of water but otherwise looked and locomoted like humans. Wagner began his opera in precisely such a realm, with the three mermaid sisters of the Rhine deep in their water element. Elevated by machines (and after the turn of the century, suspended on wires), they appeared to "swim," with leg-hugging gowns and trains trailing below. In both operas, audiences recognized mermaids. These staging conventions, which included grottoes, water flora, and the refraction of light into water creatures' domain, were [End Page E-23] adopted into aquariums, which were popular from the mid-nineteenth century, and later explored in underwater painting and photographic techniques. The costuming conventions for mers, utilizing green and blue draperies, red coral accessories, and weed-like dripping hair and hemlines connected mers back to Germanic folklore and forward to twentieth-century interpretations of the iconic Hans Christian Andersen novel in animated film and staged versions. Their form, coloration, and movement are distinct from early twentieth-century revue figures of other (non-mythical) sea creatures that represent various kinds of fish, mollusks, and crustaceans. Not only nineteenth-century theatre audiences but also twenty-first-century consumers of mass media of all sorts have learned to recognize mermaids when they see them. Multiple instances of stage practice spread over decades amounts to a repertoire of intelligibility that guided the collective imaginary to understand and accept specific conventions, both of the tailed and non-tailed manifestations of mers. This supersedes changes in style—nineteenth-century pictorialism, modernist abstraction, and post-modern deconstruction—to consistently refer to cogent conventions of scenography, physiological form, and iconic silhouettes. In my print essay for the September 2019 (71.3) special issue of Theatre Journal on "Theatre and the Nonhuman," I explore the specific stage innovations and conventions for depicting female water spirits (naiads, Nixe, Meerjungfrauen, mermaids, and all the other names by which these creatures are known), emphasizing the importance of German-language theatre in putting these figures onstage into environments and costumes that accommodate locomotion as well as habitus. This establishes the patterns and precedents still in use in the twenty-first-century theatre; Disney's adaptations of Andersen's tale demonstrate the now-global reach and intelligibility of these practices. This photo essay expands the imagery offered in print and allows readers to see the importance of color as well as depth in both scenography and costuming. Much more can be explored...

Managing Floods and Droughts by Invocating the Water Spirits: Analyzing Prayers for Rain (<em>daoyu</em> 禱雨) and Prayers for a Clear Sky (<em>qiqing</em> 祈晴). With Some Examples from Local Source Material of the Song 宋 Dynasty (960–1279)

The praying for rain or the stoppage of rain as part of the Song administrative procedure may be understood as a reaction to climatic variations. The Song dynasty was a period during which, due to volcanic and solar activity, heavy rains and severe droughts occurred. This also becomes evident from local source material in Hangzhou (capital city since 1127, renamed Lin'an). With the spread of Buddhism, Buddha and bodhisattvas had taken over the command of the dragon deities who were considered responsible for rainfall. They were invoked for rain, as shown in the analysis of prayers written by the prefect of Hangzhou, Su Shi. Among the dragon temples and monasteries that were honored by the government for their responsiveness to rain prayers, the Upper India Monastery of bodhisattva Guanyin became most prominent and was frequented even by the emperors.

Desiring The Shore: Adolphe Lalyre and the Sirens of Carteret

Adolphe Lalyre was a high-profile French painter in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who has now largely fallen into obscurity. Seemingly unmoved by the series of movements in Modern Art that came to prominence during his lifetime-including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism-he persisted with a style of painting derived from Symbolism, initially favouring religious themes before moving on to a series of works representing (human-form) sirens during an extended residency at Carteret, on the coast of Normandy. The French term sirene refers to both human-form female water spirits and fish-tailed ones of the type usually referred to in English as mermaids. This article explores the aesthetic and cultural dimensions of Lalyre's sirene paintings and discusses the pleasures and temptations they offered the viewer at an historical moment when Modernism, and Modernity more generally, was in its ascendancy. Our analysis examines Lalyre's work within the specifically local context of Carteret and, more broadly, with late 19th and early 20th Century France, focusing on the importance of the artist and visual representations in the process of place-making and especially with regard to shifts in the meaning of sea and shore, along with the rise of the tourism industry.