The heritage of the Warrau dugout canoe: Persistence of traditional watercraft and culture in a tropical swamp landscape

Abstract

This is a study of the interplay between a people, their physical environment, the means of mobility that connect the two, and how these elements combine in the creation of cognitive and cultural landscapes. Specifically, it examines how Warrau people in the village of Imbotero, Guyana, use traditional dugout canoes in the surrounding swamp forest and on connecting waterways; how the canoes mediate between the Warrau and their landscape; and how the relationship is bi-directional: that is, how people use boats to conceptualise and exploit the landscape while, simultaneously, the landscape influences the culture, cognition, and boat use.
The role of the physical environment upon culture is analysed within Christer Westerdahl’s maritime cultural landscape (MCL) framework, which is applied here for the first time to a contemporary swamp-dwelling canoe culture. The swamp is shown to be fully compatible with the MCL concept, in that watercraft and their daily use play central roles in the people’s phenomenological engagement with the environment, their ontologies, and their identity.
The study traces the history of the Warrau canoe, from the earliest evidence of prehistoric use to the present. Fieldwork conducted in Imbotero was primarily ethnographic in nature, relying upon the methodologies of participant observation and interview. This was supplemented by boat surveys, in which representative canoes were documented with 3D digital photogrammetry.
In addition to describing and analysing the Warrau canoe as material culture, the study addresses the canoe as central to Imbotero’s intangible cultural heritage (ICH), discusses the role ICH plays in the village, and examines sociocultural, economic, and environmental factors that pose challenges to the canoe’s future heritage.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Robert Holtzman: orcid.org/0000-0002-6768-7084

ORCID for Helen Farr: orcid.org/0000-0002-7922-9179

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