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The Taxonomy of Absence (04)

Cataloging the Reef

What Libraries Can Learn from Coral Governance

This post is part of a series that reviews decolonialism in libraries, archives and other similar spaces, from the perspective of the Global South and the margins, and how colonialism affects collections, staffing, services, activities, policies, and results. Check all the posts in this section's index.

Memory Without Metadata

In many parts of the world, coral reefs are read as libraries: This coral belonged to that ancestor, that lagoon held the memory of a ritual, and another reef would not be touched until the moon signaled the right time. There is no catalog, no barcode, no metadata schema. Yet everyone in the human communities interacting with the reefs know exactly how to read that submerged world. The sea, in that context, is not an object to be observed or a resource to be extracted — it is a living system of memory, performed and sustained through relationship.

What if librarianship had been built on this kind of logic? What would it mean to understand knowledge not as fixed information stored in institutional containers, but as relational, cyclical, and held collectively through ritual, oral transmission, and ecological intuition?

The Rhythmic Governance of the Sea

Libraries, as we know them, are not neutral spaces. They are infrastructures of epistemic authority, shaped by the conventions of print culture, colonial legacies, and literate privilege. Most of us were trained to value what is written, to trust what is fixed, and to preserve what fits predetermined criteria. But reef governance —like many traditional and local knowledge systems— operates according to a different logic. It is not grounded in permanence or universality, but in rhythm, community, and ecological responsiveness.

Across the Pacific, the Caribbean, and the Coral Triangle, systems such as sasi (in Maluku), ra'ui (in the Cook Islands), and Afro-Caribbean ceremonial practices have governed marine conservation for generations. These were not informal customs or romanticized traditions, but structured methodologies grounded in collective observation and time-tested ecological insight. They regulated when and where to fish, which species to avoid during reproduction, and how to engage with marine territories as living entities rather than extractive zones. Importantly, these systems were enforced not through state sanctions or property rights, but through social consensus, ritual authority, and ancestral responsibility. Knowledge was transmitted not through journals or databases, but through chants, ceremonies, and intergenerational stewardship.

Classification as Erasure

This mode of governance is radically different from the epistemological assumptions underpinning modern librarianship. While libraries tend to treat knowledge as discrete, ownable, and extractable, reef governance treats it as embedded, contextual, and emergent. The "archive" of the sea is not a static collection of documents, but a rhythmic system where memory is enacted in time — in seasons, in cycles, in ritual closures and reopenings. Access is not determined by credentials or infrastructure, but by community position, ethical readiness, and ecological signals.

This contrast highlights a fundamental problem with the way libraries and archives have been built: they rely on classification systems —such as Dewey Decimal, Library of Congress Subject Headings, or MARC records— that reduce the complexity of knowledge into hierarchical taxonomies shaped by Eurocentric worldviews. These systems flatten meaning, erase cultural specificity, and reframe plural ontologies through the lens of legibility, rather than respect.

Just as colonial marine science reclassified reef species and erased local names in the process, our metadata infrastructures rename and misrepresent entire knowledge systems. Local plant uses, oral cosmologies, and community memory practices are often miscategorized or excluded entirely because they don't conform to Western notions of authorship, documentation, or evidence.

Epistemic Violence in the Archive

This is not just an issue of semantics. It is an issue of epistemic violence. When libraries adopt universalist classification systems, they are not simply organizing information — they are participating in the erasure of other ways of knowing. The result is an archive that preserves certain voices while structurally silencing others. It becomes, like many marine scientific records, a memory system built on forgetting.

So what might it look like to build libraries that operate more like coral reefs — not in metaphor, but in method? Reefs are not collections in the conventional sense. They are ecosystems of interdependence, where every element is connected to the others and where the health of the whole depends on relational balance. In a reef, knowledge is not stored — it is regenerated. It is enacted in migration patterns, in seasonal fish returns, in coral spawning timed to moon cycles. It is lived, not archived.

Libraries that Adapt Like Reefs

Translating this into librarianship means rethinking everything from acquisition to access. What if collections were shaped not by quantity or prestige, but by relational ethics — what the community needs, what the ecosystem allows, what the context demands? What if access policies were guided not by neutrality, but by accountability — who has the right to engage with this knowledge, and under what conditions? What if metadata systems were designed to reflect multiple ontologies, allowing for layered naming, narrative context, and cyclical associations, rather than fixed labels?

It also means accepting that not all knowledge can —or should— be digitized or stored. Just as you cannot extract a coral polyp and expect it to regenerate a reef, you cannot isolate a chant, a plant name, or a ritual protocol and expect it to carry its full meaning outside its relational setting. Some knowledge systems require presence, participation, and reciprocity. They require trust, not just citation.

The Reef's Memories

The truth is, the reef remembers. It remembers the periods of silence when no one fished. It remembers the names it was given before colonial renaming. It remembers the ceremonies that governed its rhythms and the people who respected its logic. And it also remembers the disruptions: the trawlers, the tourists, the data collectors, the zoning laws that never consulted those who knew the sea best.

As librarians, we have a choice. We can continue to build memory systems that reflect the logic of extraction and control. Or we can begin to design infrastructures of care, reciprocity, and rhythm.

And we can recognize that knowledge is not just a commodity to be preserved, but a living system to be nurtured.

About this post

Text: Edgardo Civallero.
Publication date: 29.04.2025.
Picture: "Mesoamerican Reef". In The Nature Conservancy [Link].