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Silenced Knowdleges and Memories in the Tropics (04)

Coral Reefs That Remember

The Archive Beneath the Tide

Introduction

When we speak of memory and knowledge in the tropics, our metaphors often reach for roots. Forests, soils, leaves — they lend themselves easily to the language of books, of archives, of systems we know how to read.

But what about the sea?

The ocean does not keep memory in bark or rings. It stores it in rhythms. In the way fish return to the same reef ledges, year after year. In the migrations cued not by GPS but by currents, moonlight, and temperature. In the polyphonic hum of coral polyps, shrimp clicks, and whale songs — a layered, underwater text written in vibration.

For centuries, coastal communities across the tropics have been reading those rhythms. And protecting them. Long before marine science brought sonar and satellite imagery, long before conservation zones and coral bleaching reports, there were already systems in place.

Not inspired by ecology — but made of it.

Ritual as Regulation

In the Pacific islands, the Caribbean, and the Coral Triangle, reef knowledge has never been separate from culture. It lives in chants, in lineage, in the precise timing of a ceremony or the season when certain fish may (or may not) be taken. In many cases, these were not rules written down — they were performed. And in performing them, communities ensured the survival of the reef systems that, in turn, ensured their own.

In Maluku, Indonesia, the tradition of sasi restricts fishing in designated zones for specific periods. These restrictions are declared through ritual —bamboo markers, songs, and collective ceremony— and enforced by social consensus. When sasi is lifted, it is because the reef has had time to recover.

In the Cook Islands, the practice of ra'ui governs resource use in designated lagoon areas, often passed down through chiefly authority and linked to ecological signs. The system is oral, adaptive, and relational. It works not because of fines or legal enforcement, but because of trust in the rhythms of sea and season.

Across Afro-Caribbean communities, fishing taboos were tied to moon cycles, ancestral anniversaries, or periods of rest marked by drumming, fasting, or silence. These were not "superstitions." They were management systems encoded in the body — in muscle memory, song, and collective ritual.

And they worked.

The Rhythmic Archive

Unlike the static archive of paper or the indexed herbarium cabinet, reef knowledge is rhythmic. It pulses, retreats, returns. It cannot be consulted at will — only at the right moment. It does not "store" data in one place, but distributes it across bodies, tides, sounds, and memory lines. You don't open it. You enter it.

To understand this is to shift not only what we consider knowledge, but how we consider time.

Western science approaches conservation through linear accumulation: more data, more models, more monitoring. But these ancestral systems followed cyclical epistemologies. They didn't "record" events so much as respond to them — adaptively, seasonally, ritually. They didn't predict based on numbers but attuned based on rhythm.

That difference is not cosmetic. It's civilizational.

When the Tide Was Interrupted

Colonial expansion didn't just redraw land borders — it disrupted marine rhythms. Missionaries banned chants and rituals that governed reef care. Colonial administrators imposed closed seasons and quotas without understanding local systems. Naval expansion and commercial shipping disrupted breeding cycles and sacred zones. And marine scientists —yes, even the "good ones"— arrived with nets and notebooks, extracting fish and data alike, leaving no room for the names or reasons that had long governed those waters.

To name the reef without the chant was to erase the reason it survived.

To declare a marine protected area without speaking to its caretakers was to strip it of its memory.

To model fish stocks by number, but ignore their stories, their songs, their spirits — was to turn a living archive into a resource deposit.

What Got Lost in Translation

The shift from ritual to regulation, from chant to chart, did more than change methodology. It changed who got to speak. It turned knowledge into policy — and erased the people who held it in their skin, breath, and language.

Today, many of these systems are being "rediscovered" by conservation biologists. And that's a start. But let's be clear: rebranding sasi as "traditional ecological knowledge" and citing it in peer-reviewed articles is not the same as restoring its function, power, or authorship.

What's needed is not incorporation — it's restoration. Not cultural flavoring on a Western scientific model, but a return to relational governance: where humans and reefs co-author the story, season by season.

Listening Beneath the Surface

The coral reefs remember. They remember the chants that kept the fish away during spawning. They remember the silence that followed a death in the community, when nets were folded and hooks put away. They remember the rhythm of paddles and the shape of carved canoes. And they remember the noise that came later — the outboards, the trawlers, the tourists, the science ships.

If forests speak in rings and scars, reefs speak in cycles.

They are still speaking. The question is whether we will keep translating their voices into data points — or finally learn to hear them in their own language.

About this post

Text: Edgardo Civallero.
Publication date: 24.04.2025.
Picture: Fragments of coral from the coasts of the Caribbean Sea, Panama. @ Edgardo Civallero 2025.