Kupenga, Knots, Haveknots

(Kupenga means net in Maori)
pp.77-88 in Jarhmann, Margarete, Schneebauer, Christa (ed.)
Intertwinedness. Reflecting the Structure of the Net/ Ueberlegungen zur Netzkultur
Ars Electronica Center Linz, Ritter Verlag, Klagenfurt and Vienna, 2000

Like any culture, Maori culture is permeated by a wealth of more-or-less ritualised protocols that structure community living. Compared with many people, the Maori people have a particularly strong culture of the net, understood both literally and figuratively. Moreover, as accredited inventors of surfing, as inveterate ocean-goers and navigators, their mores and traditions and legends offer some strikingly original tacks on cyberspace. As a Pakeha (white, of European descent) born and raised in Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud, the Maori name for New Zealand, I shall call on this legacy in an attempt to spin a yarn, tangle some story lines, weave an intertwined mesh of words and images. Maori culture impregnates New Zealand life, the musicality of its words resounds throughout our language. Paramata, Paekakariki, Raumati, Paraparaumu -the landing places that stretch up the coast from my home beach at Titahi Bay, meandering round Mana and Kapiti islands, are places where we swim, surf, cast our lines and our nets. The thread that follows is a tenuous line between real physical ocean surfing, an essential part of Pacific culture, and surfing on the net. Between certain aspects of traditional Maori culture and of new planetary infoculture.

These parallels are not drawn lightly. Maoritanga is steeped in notions of mana and tapu which endow it with unique life and weight, and the desirability and opportuneness of disseminating elements of Maori culture should be gauged carefully here, as with any culture one pretends to respect. Then again, the question of how, whether, and when to recontextualise specific cultural knowledge in a broader environment remains an ethically central question in today’s so-called information society, which tends to function along strictly cumulative lines, in the race to constitute «cultural capital» (1). This reflection tries to constructively reformulate and shed some light on this issue.

 



Media and Immediacy

The fact that a piece of writing is being established – i.e. the text that is in the throes of being elaborated at this very moment when I am writing, which is not the same as this very moment when you are reading -as a consultable counterpart to an oral presentation, is in itself a questionable (as opposed to condemnable) practice, that nevertheless too often goes unquestioned. The relationship between textually mediated information ostensibly blanched of its human giver, and the physical immediacy of the spoken word and the speaking moment, is complex and equivocal, and one that needs to be reassessed in our new communications spaces with their fusions of «real-time», time-bound elements (e.g. live video, sound) and codified static elements (e.g. texts, still images). Insofar as their manifestations and mnemonic functions differ radically, these elements convey very different experiential qualities, and their hybridised forms in today’s net culture could thus do with closer, more sensitive scrutiny. The relationship between the written and spoken word has been largely debated within the Maori community, where great importance is attached to oral tradition, and speakers do not use notes_ a speaker’s mana is a function of memory, of recalled proverbs, genealogies, tribal stories and songs. Valuable, transmissible knowledge is that which is actively withheld and remembered, as opposed to that which is mechanically stocked (2).

In short, this text is not my talk and vice versa. On May 26th the Ars Electronica Skyloft housed not just my physical presence and spoken words, but was moreover inundated by images of the Pacific Ocean. The glass wall of the skyloft that overlooks the Danube was screened off so that looped footage of Titahi Bay surfers could be projected throughout the presentation. The booming, sighing sound of the waves filled the room. This was a way of inviting you to my home, of intertwining spaces, of welcoming you to another place via a rudimentary form of telepresence, of going surfing with Central Europeans in a country without ocean boundaries, seated above a river that has to run all the way from the Black Forest to the Black Sea before it can even catch a whiff of salt spray. Taking you to my home and bringing my home to you in this manner is no readily reproducible act. Poaching pictures of the Skyloft against a backdrop of Pacific-surf-on-the-Danube will not restore the immediacy of that evening. To those who gleefully wield ultra-sensitive digital camcorders, convinced that real experience can be captured and conveyed at the push of a button, the obvious must be restated, loud and clear : it cannot. What is captured and conveyed is something of a very different order.

This is neither a plug for the uniqueness of «my» event nor a diatribe against recording devices and technologies, which obviously have their values and a vital social role to play. The point I am trying to make is that we must sustain and whet our powers of discrimination sufficiently to recognise differences between various types of experience, as a function of how they occur and are mediated. The specificity of experience enabled through the net can only be grasped through this broader understanding. Fine-tuned recognition of the contexts within which certain events are transmissible and others are not is indispensable, if we really wish to make shared virtual spaces more fully and humanly inhabitable. In Maori culture (as in many cultures with strongly articulated transmission protocols), fear of the dissolution of treasured knowledge through its wholesale delivery to the world at large is in some cases leading to quiet death of that knowledge, borne to the grave for want of a sufficiently comprehensive human relay, a vital new carrier. Too much human wealth is going gentle into that good night for precisely such reasons.



Foreward/Apologia : Kupenga

Some years ago, in the course of readings which craved the musicality of Maoridom, I stumbled across a word that seemingly evoked Polynesian net culture, and began to embroider it with meaning to the extent that it has since become a very intimate part of my thinking. Yet this word, «kahenga», has resisted all my recent attempts to track it down. Off-and online Polynesian dictionaries do not mention it, although Charlie Tawhiao, a correspondent met on the net, has kindly provided the following indication as to its etymological plausibibilty : «I do not know the word ‘kahenga’ but it looks and sounds like a real word. It is possible that the word is used by a particular hapu (clan) but was not picked up by the dictionary makers in the old days. There are many words in current local use but these are being lost as young people increasingly acquire their language not from their parents and old people but from a school or university (…).One possible explanation is that it is actually two words_ ka and henga. Henga is the name of the board along the side of a canoe that joins the hull to the sides. Ka-henga could thus refer to the bringing of something (a fishing net?) alongside, and against the side of, a canoe.» (3a)

However reassuring, this response does not dispel all doubt, and misgivings about the use of an untraceable term are far from alleviated by the fact that negligent use of words is severely looked upon in Polynesian culture, where the power of the word is extremely strong. According to an old saying, «He tao rakau e taea te karo, he tao kupu e kore e taea te karo»/ «A wooden barb can be parried, but a verbal barb cannot» (as Sam Karetu points out, an interesting twist on the Pakeha saying «sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me» (4)). Consequently, this hapless drift-word «kahenga» is hereafter replaced by the word «kupenga», a widely recognised term that designates the net.

Another frequently used word is «hao», which refers to the net itself as a physical object, and to the act of fishing. The Maori Senior Public Servants network in Aotearoa is called «Te Hao Roa», which literally means «the long net». Among recent net terms, «kotuitui» means interlace or interlacing. One poetically potent designation for the Internet is «Ipurangi». Rangi in Maori means the heavens or the sky (Rangi is the Sky God and primal father), and «ipu» means a vessel or container. Internet, the vessel of the heavens. Charlie Tawhiao, who elucidated these terms for me, sees network language as follows : «I prefer the metaphor approach, so I consider a network of people such as that presented by the internet to be a weaving together of people similar to how a mat is woven: raranga or whiriwhiri refers to the weaving of a whariki (mat) or kete (basket). The internet community could therefore be described as raranga tangata or similar to describe the weaving together of people.» (3b)

Maori language data bases show a recent proliferation of terms to designate the net – at least a dozen refer specifically to networking. This activity should be set in the context of a culture traditionally characterised by powerful community structures and activities, seeking to renew this cohesion via new communication tools. In parallel, Polynesian net culture is battling for its place in the real world : after much controversy, the 1996 New Zealand Fisheries Act formalised concessions to and management by Maori of taiapure, local fisheries of customary or spiritual significance. Maori participation in fisheries management decisions has likewise been prescribed by law (5). This is a belated but significant rectifier to prolonged injustice, and hopefully augurs a more equitable future (by virtue of its strategic position, Aotearoa’s coastal jurisdisction extends over a large area of the South Pacific). Thus, at literal and metaphorical levels, Maori networking is growing fast. In keeping with the traditional saying, «Ka pu te ruha, ka hao te rangatahi»/ «The old net is cast aside, the new net goes fishing.» (6)

Kahukura and the Discovery of the Net

Polynesian mythology abounds in stories which cunningly account for the parallel evolution of nature and technology, and one of these is the story of the discovery of the net by Kahukura. This mysteriously pale-skinned, golden-haired man was chief of a large coastal tribe, so large that it was difficult for him to feed everybody. Tumatauenga, the god of war – and to a certain extent of technology -endowed humans with spears and lines, but these were not very efficient when one needed to catch large quantities of fish. Kahukura was preoccupied by the problem of how to feed his people, and one particularly restless evening he heard voices telling him to go north, up to the doorway of death, at Rangiaowhia. He set out secretly, travelling for many long days, until one night he reached a northern beach where he could hear the singing and excitement of a successful fishing fleet returning to the land. This was Rangiaowhia, the fishing ground of the fairy people.

As the canoes reached the shore, the Turehu, the fair-skinned fairies leapt out, and hauled onto the shore a strange mass of intertwined ropes filled with hundreds of fresh-caught fish. In the darkness, pale-skinned Kahukura was able to mingle undetected amongst the Turehu, and helped them to remove the fish from the net and string them onto cords. But Kahukura did not know how to knot his cords of fish, and they kept falling onto the sand. One after another, the Turehu showed him how to knot the cords correctly, but even when he had learned these new knots, Kahukura deliberately bungled and the fish continued to fall onto the sand. This delayed the work so much that finally the sun rose and, forced to scatter in the dawn light, the dismayed Turehu realised that they had been infiltrated by a human. They disappeared, leaving the net behind them on the sand. Kahukura gathered up the mass of flax ropes and took it back to his tribe to study the technique whereby the first net, kupenga, was made. Kahukura thus taught the technique of knots to the future have-knots (in traditional Maori society, love messages were conveyed in the form of knotted cords_ here also, the have-knots are the lucky ones).



Navigators in Unknown Seas

As we try to clarify the symbolics and cultural relevance of navigation and mobility on the networks, we fail to do these notions justice unless we look into what they represent within specific cultures anchored in the real world. The Maori people are amongst the greatest navigators on the planet_ the elders say that they read seamarks at the bottom of the ocean just as we read landmarks when we journey. They crossed the Pacific in open canoes a thousand years ago, to reach Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud, a vestige of Gondwanaland that exploded from submarine volcanoes millions of years earlier. There is a sense in Aotearoa that we all come from over the sea. Maori and Pakeha alike, we survey the ocean with a restless yearning for the homeland that is beyond, and at the same time, a deep love for these islands that accepted to harbour our boats.

According to Polynesian mythology, Maui-tiki-tiki-e-Taranga («Maui carried in the cradle of his mother’s hair»), a mischievous half-human, half-god figure, discovered New Zealand. In a way, Maui the trickster is unwittingly the first surfer in Polynesian mythology : he was the unwanted youngest child who was wrapped by his mother in her hair and cast into the ocean, but was protected and gently beached by Te Parata, the monster who controls the breathing of the sea, its ebb and flow. Later in life, using a magic fishhook made from the jawbone of his grandmother, Muri-ranga-whenua, Maui caught the great fish, Te Ika a Maui («the fish of Maui»), later known as Aotearoa.

Kupe is a Polynesian explorer accredited with the historical discovery and naming of Aotearoa, when he sailed from Hawaiki about a thousand years ago. Smaller expeditions followed over the next few hundred years, until the launching of the Great Fleet in the fourteenth century. The main waka or tribal canoes were called Arawa (the Shark), Tainui (Great Tide), Mata-atua (Face of God), Kurahaupo (Storm Cloud), Tokomaru (Shade of the South). Many other canoes left at around the same time, and those that berthed safely gave thanks to the Sea God Tangaroa-whakamau-tai (Tangaroa controller of the tides), the Moon God Rona-whakamautai (Rona controller of the tides), and Te Parata. They established their communities on tribal territories which have since remained strongly etched in the Maori geography of Aotearoa, despite violent dismantling by the European landowners who sparked off the «Land Wars» (long misnamed the «Maori Wars») in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Even today, conversation amongst Maori strangers versed in traditional mores does not begin with naming one another. Rather, one asks where the other comes from -north, south, east, west. Identification of the stranger’s waka allows tribal and thus territorial origins to be ascertained.

This protocol contrasts starkly with today’s globalisation-prone net protocols where the name is often all we have, and even then in a cryptic form, where serverclients with "dot.com" or "dot.org" type suffixes are identifiable as a kind of New World diaspora, as opposed to others branded with "dot.at" or "dot.fr" or "dot.nz" in our enclaves of willful heterogeneity. Our digitally mediated geographies of communication are engendering new concepts of belonging, group identity, virtual society. The privileged connected community is often fired by notions of cultural ubiquity and accessibility, by sometimes vapidly beatific desires to relate to exotic lives and places, to redefine citizenship and terrestrial identity as a function of ideals and feelings, as opposed to flags and chromosomes, race and nation state.

In globalised, nameless cyberspace, we frequently encounter discourse about «out-of-body» experiences, about the post-human race of cybernauts, a community of free-floating, identity-switching sensoria, detached from terra firma and worldly pursuits. At the same time, we who in fact do dwell in cyberspace, who spend hours posted before our screens, know all too well the unromantic physical pains that go with virtual reality, the cramps and the hunger and the decidedly real aches of our sedentary journeys. And we don our HMD’s and submit to the joys of immersion, and we play the machines in arcades and art shows and revel in the profound imbalance of our inner ears and eyes, proudly suffering from VR malaise as forerunners of a world to be, like nineteenth century salon coquettes who found it chic to faint. And the mind-body, body-mind, body-body, mind-mind splits give rise to brilliant sessions of rhetoric and disputation where we sharpen our wits and invariably forget our bodies. Yet all the while, the terms in which we must couch our cyberrevelations, the language we must employ to convey the new spaces in which we evolve, remain stubbornly grounded in the flesh and fleshly experience. The rhythms of our very speech are born as much of our lungs, our lips and our tongues as of our brains.



Surfing

Speaking as an islander to inland continentals, I would like to give an example of a poignant contradiction that seems to have become firmly embedded in the decorporealised double-talk of cyberspace. It has to do with surfing, with this whole philosophy of riding the net, of navigating the data, of sailing and swimming in the information streams, of cybercruising. Cyberculture is full of terminology related to the ocean, to a liquid medium, to «liquid architectures» (Marcos Novak, (7)). Its apparent boundlessness, the way it fosters flowing movement through the digital stratas, have tended to favour the use of such terminology. Surfing has become a key word to describe our activity in networked spaces, particularly in the wide open sea of the Internet. Yet here we run into a first dramatic fallacy, perhaps because most of the people who surf on the net have never surfed in real life.

In common geek language, surfing on the net is characterised by a kind of aimlessness, a notion of not knowing exactly what one is seeking, but simply being caught up in a vague deambulation. Surf-and-click. Static, semi-reflex gestures – and in our frenzied goal-driven worlds, many people consider surfing thus defined as a salutary antidote (they are probably right). The freedom to roam, idle perusal, data vagabondage. This experience, however, is the exact opposite of «real» surfing: one surfs to ride a wave in as fiercely intimate a relationship as possible. The interaction between a surfer and a wave is passionate and physical, exciting and sometimes life-threatening, more akin to coitus – and just as prone to disappointment – than to some nonchalant ramble.

As said earlier, the Polynesians are accredited with having invented surfing – that is, surfing in its modern guise, with a surfboard, since it is likely that most coastal people drawn to the joys of riding waves are instinctive bodysurfers, and canoes and kayaks all over the globe show that surfboats in various forms are likewise an ancient invention. But the first surfboard designed to be ridden upright was made in Hawai early this century by Olympic swimming champion Duke Paoa Kahanomoku. It was on one such handcrafted board, measuring almost five meters in length and weighing over fifty kilos, that Kahanomoku rode out one of the famous «bluebird» waves (spawned by cataclysmic events like submarine earthquakes or volcanoes, these waves swell over thirty feet). He challenged the gigantic wall of water for one-and-three-quartermiles from Diamond Head to Honolulu Harbour (8). Since those early days, boards have gradually been refined, solid timber planks being replaced by plywood hulks then by fiberglass, shortened and lightened, fitted with a skeg. Over the decades, these littoral prosthetics have been steadily fashioned to form a much more cohesive, intimate unit with the body (windsurfers have recently grafted a powerful wing onto the board base).

So what is surfing for somebody from the Pacific? Surfing consists of riding the ocean currents, throwing oneself into the sea at that timeless moment where the swollen mass that makes a wave is about to begin to unfurl, to unleash its white spiral in a long salty sigh. Surfing is an art of time. Waiting and sensing the right moment to make a move. It is almost a hunting activity in terms of the vigilance it imposes. Te Parata’s deep breathing governs the macro-movements of the ocean, and Tawhirimatea’s winds whip its surface movements. Tawhirimatea is loved and hated and respected by surfers : in parts of Aotearoa, warm winds from the north stir the ocean into a frothy mass of unstructured waves, then a sudden change to a south wind sculpts the waves and arranges them into patterned tunnels, sometimes full-body size, that embrace the surfer as the wave unfurls. The wind change does not last long, the cold grey waves fashioned by the bitter southerly as though by a greenstone chisel (Pounamu – greenstone -is the South Island of New Zealand), are soon flattened into a surly, choppy, uninviting, southerly sea. At Titahi Bay, surfers sleep in the dunes if a wind change is predicted, in the hope of catching that one wave, the tunnel, and living that inhuman moment of being neither man nor fish, of both belonging to and returning to the ocean, our primal medium. Car-loads of surfers suddenly rev up and drive hundreds of miles to follow the whims of Te Parata and Tawhirimatea.

Surfing is goal-driven. You surf to catch a good wave, and catching a good wave is an unforgettable experience. It is an immensely physical activity, where pitch, slant and speed are determinant. The impetus of one’s bodily thrust, one’s position hovering on the wall of still-unbroken water, one’s bodily alignment with respect to wave angle are the only safeguards against wipe-outs, extremely dangerous in high, bulky rollers (Kahanamoku calls the bluebird a «lethal avalanche of water»). Veteran surfers inhabit strange latitudes, precarious fringes of physical space unknown to terrestrial humans. They would be easier to deal with psychologically if they looked as though they were obsessively reiterating our berthing on land, like some convenient recapitulation of our evolutionary story, a phylogenetic remake, if they simply rode the waves shorewards, as we landlubbers do mentally. In fact, though, surfers disdain the shore_ they don’t enjoy being stranded on the sand any more than the other marine mammals, the whales and dolphins that occasionally tragically ride onto the beach. Rather, surfers straddle the beach laterally. Neither here nor there.

 

The Power of Words

There is a tendency amongst online communities towards obsession with physical place and, first and foremost, with bodily presence and sensation, an obsession which is inversely proportionate to our free orbiting electronic status in cyberspace. This is inevitable and important : we are learning to invest spaces that manifest new dynamics, and how we strike some kind of resonance with respect to our physical habits and habitat is a key issue. But at the same time, if our tentative groping towards new forms of bodily identity blinds us to the existing range of physical experiences, leads us to completely overlook and undermine and forget the wide array of corporeal ways of being that are encountered in the physical world, then we are severely jeopardising our chances of exploiting cyberspace in its sensorial specificity. Knowledge of and respect for human physicality in all its multiple forms is a vital prerequisite for the creative flourishing of any «alternative» or «further» life forms, whether in cyberspace or in outer space. Consequently, there is a danger that sloppy flattening effects of cyberhype may one day result in an indiscriminate networked mush of data deadheads, instead of thriving new communities with all their cultural quirks – positive and negative.

There are authors who effectively stress the importance of idiosyncratic cultural forms of expression as strongholds of diversity, and awaken us to the necessity to recognise the wealth of behaviours that keep culture alive and kicking (recent Interwinedness speaker Erik Davis is one of these). On the other hand, though, we are constantly caught up in this weird terminological skidding and slipping where words are misused and abused, stripped of their meaning, bandied round like the empty husks of a lizard’s tail. Surfing is one such word. As long as we fail to recognise the art of real surfing, worse, as long as we fail to even care whether our cybertalk has any relation to the language it borrows from the real world, then we cannot reasonably hope to grasp the specificity of our internet existence.

This warning should not be seen as some reactionary form of linguistic purism, as pedantic castigation of «loose» words that may well turn out to be the precious purveyors of new languages, concepts and experiences. The real issue runs much deeper. It consists of sharpening our senses in order to recognise the possible emergence of a meaningful parallel language in cyberspace, a language that necessarily has its origins in familiar space and parlance, but is taking on whole new shades of meaning in the purportedly disembodied realm of digital experience. Asking whether those who talk about surfing on the net have actually surfed is vain in more ways than one : we talk, think and dream about innumerable exploits that are not part of our immediate, personal experience, exploits that have become enmeshed in our legacy as a species, that are vital for the collective imagination, that catalyse our projective abilities. On the other hand, querying the disparity between the way we describe movement on the net, and the way we describe and live that same movement in real space, may provide useful clues for our understanding of how we are moving into virtual worlds. Indeed, if we want to understand the implications of cyberspace for human existence and expression, we need to work out how and where this disparity arises, where the carryover fails and why, whether our use of the same terms in both domains is in fact merely incidental and transient, pending the advent of homegrown cybertalk.

What wisdom, what navigational skills, what perception will it take for us to freely roam and surf the new oceans of cyberspace, to be truly worthy of Ipurangi?

 

Notes
1  Certain aspects of the public versus private cultural property debate are raised in my study on «Culture and the New Media Technologies», Unesco Working Paper for the Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural and Media Policies for Development, http://www.kit.nl/kvc/norman.html

2  See Michael King, «Some Maori Attitudes to Documents», pp.9-18 in M.King (ed.), The Mauri Ora, Aspects of Maoritanga, New Zealand, Methuen, 1978.

3a  3b  Personal correspondence with Charlie Tawhiao.

4  Sam Karetu, «Kawa in Crisis», pp.67-79 in The Mauri Ora, op.cit.

5  See «Fisheries Act 1996», http://www.fish.govt.nz/fish_act/fishact2.htm

6  See Alistair G. Smith, «Fishing with New Nets : Maori Internet Information Resources and Implications of the Internet for Indigenous Peoples», http://www.isoc.org/INET97/proceedings/E1/E1_1.HTM

7  Novak’s seminal text on «Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace» is published in Michael Benedikt (ed.), Cyberspace. First Steps, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1991.

8  Kahanamoku’s exploits and life have been well documented by real surfers on the net_ see http://shell2.ba.best.com/~malcolm/surf/legends/duke.shtml

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Charlie Tawhiao, who cast timely advice and encouragement on the net at a determinant moment, and to Jenny MacDonald who tied the knot that made this possible.
Thanks to the anonymous Titahi Bay surfers whose energies flooded the Danube Skyloft.
Thanks to Jacques Sirot, who filmed and edited the surfer footage so that I could bring you to my home by bringing my home to you.