Increase Rituals and Environmental Variability on Small Residential Islands of Torres Strait

ABSTRACT

A rich ethnography on increase (zogo) rituals and shrines is available for Torres Strait Islanders of tropical northeast Australia. Most zogo shrines are associated with increasing garden produce and associated nourishing rains. Furthermore, zogo shrines tend to be associated with small (mostly <1 km²) residential islands of the Central and Eastern Islands which experience the lowest rainfall in the region and periodic droughts. To help offset dry season environmental stresses and associated food shortages, the Central Islanders imported garden produce from the Eastern Islanders. Increase ritual shrines expressed inter-island social relationships with Central Islander zogo shrines, often incorporating stones imported from the Eastern Islands and many Eastern Islander zogo shrines featuring stones and shells imported from the Central Islands. In this sense, the exotic stone and shell materiality of zogo shrines was an explicit metaphorical expression of the embeddedness of increase rituals within broader social processes of exchange relationships and subsistence risk buffering strategies. As ethnographic patterns reveal that relative use of the increase rituals correlated with regional horticultural and rainfall variability, it is hypothesized that long-term trends in use of increase rituals intensified with environmental stress, especially extended periods of drought.

Keywords:

• increase rituals
• subsistence
• exchange
• materiality
• environmental stress
• Torres Strait Islanders

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An earlier version of this article was presented at the session “Life in the diminutive realm: human adaptations to smaller island environments” at the Society of American Archaeology conference in San Francisco in April 2015. Special thanks to session organizers Scott Fitzpatrick and Aaron Poteate for the invitation to participate and for other session participants for helpful feedback. Thanks to John Bradley, Bruno David, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on drafts of this article. Permissions to reproduce photographic images were kindly provided by the British Museum and Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.