Volumetric and Vertical Ecologies: The Cultural Depth and Breadth of Amphibiousness in Indigenous Sea Territories
摘要
This chapter explores the existence of vertical and volumetric ecologies that shape social worlds and entangle human and other-than-human life. Drawing on ethnographic examples from Yanyuwa territories in northern Australia, the chapter highlights how Indigenous perspectives give complexity to edges and boundaries and decenter geographical logics born of Western epistemes. Exploring the cultural depth of amphibious concepts through a focus on verticality and volume serves to prioritize plural visions of the land and sea and engage with Indigenous perspectives that are inclined towards a density of meaning which relies not on separation but connection. An amphibious lifeworld is one in which the movements of Indigenous ancestral beings blur the boundaries of land and sea exclusivity and instate conditions through which human and other-than-human marine life trace kinship, and where places of importance and expressions of Indigenous Law reside equally in the sea as they do on the land.