Containing the intertidal island: Negotiating island onto-epistemological visibility and plurality

Abstract

This article departs from the author's own critical ethnographic vignettes in Eastern Indonesian islands, suggesting that islands have not only often been constructed around colonial paradigms of smallness and remoteness but have been framed as ‘islands’ in an attempt to contain the powerful political agency of locales mastering mobility, multi-culturalism, and permeability.

Here, the tidalectics of (intertidal) islands is embodied by bagian: house streams, living matrices neither sea nor land. These island nerves are not just central and controversial features of aquaculture; they ultimately mirror kinship relations, as entanglements that regulate sociality and conviviality. This article explores islands as thriving nerve centres of relations and circulation. Local notions of ‘being’ and ‘belonging’ that generate specific conceptualisations of spaces as places are central to how islands are experienced: a complex and dynamic realm of relations that string out, instead of being a container encompassing fixed places and/or fixed movement patterns. This has consequences for how we study, describe, and theorise geopolitical and politico-ecological matters in marine and island environments. The belittlement of islands dominates in regional politics and environmental policymaking in Indonesia and elsewhere, where islands and sea-based societies are either considered marginal or not considered at all. Actual political and ecological relations and interdependencies of marine and island peoples, that link places but are not confined to places, can be overshadowed in the assumptions of socioenvironmental approaches to island environments. Daily circulations do not take place ‘in the margins’ but in a thriving mesh of movements and relations across and beyond the transboundary spaces of land-sea binaries.