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Water Symbolism in Hindu Culture
Abstract
Metaphorically and metaphysically, the Hindu ancient mythologies refer to water as the container of life, strength, and eternity. The cult of water is described in the Vedic literature and followed on vividly in the Puranic literature. Water is one of the five elements of nature. The “wash away sins” quality of water is associated with the power of sanctity and cosmological connotation so much so that the rivers are revered as remover of pollution. Rivers in India are personified as female and are perceived to be nurturing and quenching and when angered cause flooding. As people face the challenge of sustaining the world’s water today and for the future, this chapter focuses on how culture and religion would endeavor to play an increasingly recognized ethical and practical role.
The time is now
For decades, scientists have been raising calls for societal changes that will reduce our impacts on nature. Though much conservation has occurred, our natural environment continues to decline under the weight of our consumption. Humanity depends directly on the output of nature; thus, this decline will affect us, just as it does the other species with which we share this world. Díaz et al. review the findings of the largest assessment of the state of nature conducted as of yet. They report that the state of nature, and the state of the equitable distribution of nature's support, is in serious decline. Only immediate transformation of global business-as-usual economies and operations will sustain nature as we know it, and us, into the future.
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In Canada, the water crisis increasingly felt around the world is being experienced primarily in small, usually Indigenous, communities. At the heart of this issue lies an ongoing struggle to have Indigenous voices heard in the decision-making processes that affect their lives, lands, and waters. As part of ancient systems of Traditional Knowledge (TK), Indigenous people bear the knowledge and the responsibility to care for the waters upon which they depend for survival. A series of internationally developed documents has supported Indigenous peoples’ calls for increased recognition of the importance of TK in resolving environmental crises, including those involving water. Ontario provincial and Canadian federal governments have been developing legislative and regulatory documents to help fend off further water-related catastrophes within their jurisdictions. Despite such efforts, a number of barriers to the successful and appropriate involvement of TK in water management remain. Based on years of community-based and policy-related research with First Nations people involved in water-related undertakings, this article highlights progress made to date, and provides Indigenous viewpoints on what further steps need to be taken. Key among these steps are the need to restore and maintain Indigenous access to traditional territories and ways of life, and the requirement for mutually respectful collaboration between TK and Western science.
The first public product of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is its Conceptual Framework. This conceptual and analytical tool, presented here in detail, will underpin all IPBES functions and provide structure and comparability to the syntheses that IPBES will produce at different spatial scales, on different themes, and in different regions. Salient innovative aspects of the IPBES Conceptual Framework are its transparent and participatory construction process and its explicit consideration of diverse scientific disciplines, stakeholders, and knowledge systems, including indigenous and local knowledge. Because the focus on co-construction of integrative knowledge is shared by an increasing number of initiatives worldwide, this framework should be useful beyond IPBES, for the wider research and knowledge-policy communities working on the links between nature and people, such as natural, social and engineering scientists, policy-makers at different levels, and decisionmakers in different sectors of society.
Traditional knowledge is increasingly recognized as valuable for adaptation to climate change, bringing scientists and indigenous peoples together to collaborate and exchange knowledge. These partnerships can benefit both researchers and indigenous peoples through mutual learning and mutual knowledge generation. Despite these benefits, most descriptions focus on the social contexts of exchange. The implications of the multiple cultural, legal, risk-benefit and governance contexts of knowledge exchange have been less recognized. The failure to consider these contexts of knowledge exchange can result in the promotion of benefits while failing to adequately address adverse consequences. The purpose of this article is to promote awareness of these issues to encourage their wider incorporation into research, policy, measures to implement free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) and the development of equitable adaptation partnerships between indigenous peoples and researchers.
The continued significant impacts of disasters from natural hazards raise questions regarding the epistemic commensurability of measures recommended to achieve substantial disaster risk reduction. Using the case of Flood Risk Reduction (FRR), this study critically reviews key scientific literature on the epistemic foundations of the indigenous, scientific, and integrated knowledge perspectives to disaster risk reduction. Results suggest that the adoption of measures for FRR is determined by how related or detached, in their lived experiences, communities-at-risk are from the perspective into which measures are framed. Yet the increasingly recommended integrated knowledge perspective rarely grasps lived experience. Therefore, an extension of the integrated knowledge perspective is proposed based on an analogy with the philosophical theory of hylomorphism to derive a hylomorphic framework of integrating knowledge for effective and efficient disaster risk reduction. Specific to FRR, this framework elaborates how appropriate knowledge integration (for FRR) should be founded at a composite of two intrinsic elements: the indigenous lived experience of a specific flood-prone context (i.e., the hyle) and the context-specific flood risk science (i.e., the morphe).
Conclusion: Indigenous knowledge systems, and the processes for their evolution over time, can support rapid adaptation to complex and urgent crises. Rather than encouraging these knowledge systems to become more “scientific,” we urge a respectful acknowledgement of their distinctiveness and epistemology. We suggest that any effort to solve real-world problems should first engage with those local communities that are most affected, beginning from the perspective of indigenous knowledge and then seeking relevant scientific knowledge—not to validate indigenous knowledge, but to expand the range of options for action. This would make scientific knowledge more acceptable and relevant to the societies that it seeks to support, while critically promoting social justice and establishing self-determination as a key principle of engagement.
Between Indigenous and Settler Governance addresses the history, current development and future of Indigenous self-governance in four settler-colonial nations: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Bringing together emerging scholars and leaders in the field of indigenous law and legal history, this collection offers a long-term view of the legal, political and administrative relationships between Indigenous collectivities and nation-states. Placing historical contingency and complexity at the center of analysis, the papers collected here examine in detail the process by which settler states both dissolved indigenous jurisdictions and left spaces - often unwittingly - for indigenous survival and corporate recovery. They emphasise the promise and the limits of modern opportunities for indigenous self-governance; whilst showing how all the players in modern settler colonialism build on a shared and multifaceted past. Indigenous tradition is not the only source of the principles and practices of indigenous self-determination; the essays in this book explore some ways that the legal, philosophical and economic structures of settler colonial liberalism have shaped opportunities for indigenous autonomy. Between Indigenous and Settler Governance will interest all those concerned with Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial nations.
This article examines how indigenous fisherfolk of the western Solomon Islands survived a magnitude 8.1 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck the region in 2007. I reconstruct this cataclysmic event through local narratives, surveys, and ethnographic interviews collected in villages on Simbo Island and in Roviana and Vonavona Lagoons. I then compare the responses of the Solomon Islanders to reports and analyses of similar survivor stories among indigenous groups affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Results show that disaster analyses tend to relate effective indigenous responses with intergenerationally transmitted oral histories or culturally embedded stories and myths. These codified bodies of traditional knowledge or mental models about previous events are thought to be put into action when a disaster strikes. However, ethnographic interviews and surveys conducted with Solomon Islanders suggest that oral history was just one dimension of a response that involved an assemblage of local and global knowledges coalescing with performative and experiential practices. To more thoroughly conceptualize indigenous responses, I encourage a practice-based approach. I argue that this framework provides a more productive and inclusive analysis of the relationship between indigenous knowledge and responses to environmental hazards, while also facilitating more effective collaborations between indigenous people and disaster experts who seek participatory strategies of disaster risk reduction.
Indigenous peoples with a historical continuity of resource-use practices often possess a broad knowledge base of the behaviour of complex ecological systems in their own localities. They are aware that biological diversity is a crucial factor in generating the ecological services and natural resources on which they depend. Some indigenous groups manipulate the local landscape to augment its heterogeneity, and some have been found to be motivated to restore biodiversity in degraded landscapes. Their practices for the conservation of biodiversity were grounded in a series of rules of thumb which are apparently arrived at through a trial and error process over a long historical time period. It is vital that the value of the knowledge-practice-belief complex of indigenous peoples relating to conservation of biodiversity is fully recognized if ecosystems and biodiversity are to be managed sustainably. Conserving this knowledge would be most appropriately accomplished thorugh promoting the community-based resource-management systems of indigenous peoples. -from Authors
A growing awareness of the value of indigenous knowledge has prompted calls for its use within disaster risk reduction. The use of indigenous knowledge alongside scientific knowledge is increasingly advocated but there is as yet no clearly developed framework demonstrating how the two may be integrated to reduce community vulnerability to environmental hazards. This paper presents such a framework, using a participatory approach in which relevant indigenous and scientific knowledge may be integrated to reduce a community's vulnerability to environmental hazards. Focusing on small island developing states it presents an analysis of the need for such a framework alongside the difficulties of incorporating indigenous knowledge. This is followed by an explanation of the various processes within the framework, drawing on research completed in Papua New Guinea. This framework is an important first step in identifying how indigenous and scientific knowledge may be integrated to reduce community vulnerability to environmental hazards.
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