Paper short abstract:

Reviving traditional navigation in Fiji is not only for re-learning oceanic way finding. Autoethnography of novice navigators and cultural heritage curators reveals how cultural identity, linked with traditional sailing, is connected with marine conservation and adaptation to climate change.

Paper long abstract:

While metaphorical navigation attracts growing interest in complex systems research, navigation in its literal sense is under-researched, especially in relation to conservation and climate change. This paper argues the anthropology of traditional marine navigation has valuable contribution to understanding the coupled ocean-atmosphere system, and highlights the methodological merits of navigators’ autoethnography. Autoethnography can reveal embodied and embedded change experiences that would be otherwise difficult to access. The reflexive process of autoethnography offers insight also into the nexus of cultural identity and sailing traditional vessels, like camakau and drua in Fiji.

Documenting traditional navigation knowledge typically features the teachers, master navigators, elders and their observations of changes over time in ecological and social processes. This paper shifts the focus and gives voice to the learners, who are expected to be silent archetypically. University students’ reflections on their learning to navigate show the possibilities of autoethnography in the anthropology of traditional marine navigation. Their reflections draws on a wide range of experiences including learning the ropes of sailing the camakau and drua, listening to, transcribing and reading archival resources, wondering about the integration of pre-instrumental skills and modern technologies, and the personal-cultural entanglement of their various identities as novice navigators, cultural heritage curators, members of various island communities in Fiji, university students, researchers, aspiring archivists, historians and linguists.

Reviving navigation does not only enable re-learning oceanic way finding and sustainable inter-island transport but also contributes to coping with local consequences of unfolding global changes.