Abstract
Risk has been particularly associated with pain, injury, illness and even death in the studies of organised high-performance sport: in short, physical risk has been the primary focus. In contrast, this article explores the cultural dimensions of risk alongside the physical risk, which are revealed in an in-depth ethnographic study of waka ama (outrigger canoeing),1 an organised sport that is profoundly influenced by indigenous Māori culture. Waka ama participants’ discursive, embodied and agential responses to risk are presented as factionalised stories, a blend of fact and fiction that respects Māori oral traditions as a form of knowledge. The findings related to the influences of cultural concepts on shaping participants’ perceptions and responses to risk emerge as important new understandings of risk in organised sport.
Introduction
In sociological studies, risk is generally defined as the probability of ‘damage, injury, illness, death or other misfortune associated with a hazard’, in which hazard refers to threat or danger (Füredi, 2005: 17). As for the relationship between risk and sport, Frey (1991: 138) has claimed that ‘every athletic contest is a risk event’. As such, physical risk is an intrinsic quality of sports and, consequently, offers the potential for serious or slight, or long- or short-term outcomes. Sociological studies on organised sport published in English language academic journals have largely focused on younger elite males in Western mainstream contact sports such as rugby and soccer 2 (e.g. Howe, 2001; Malcolm and Sheard, 2002; Pringle, 2008, 2009; Roderick et al., 2000). Among these studies, a particular association between risk and physical consequences is evident in descriptions such as the ‘risk/pain/injury nexus’ (Pike, 2000: 161) and ‘the risk-pain-injury paradox’ (Nixon, 1998: 80). In this article, which is based on the results of research involving older indigenous female participants and a non-Western organised sport, we argue that including a much wider range of participants in research reveals important non-Western dimensions of risk, thus raising new considerations for our understandings of risk in organised sport.
In the following sections, we critically review the focus on physical risk in organised sport, which is the context of our study of waka ama. Then, we discuss other important dimensions of risk such as the emotional, social and cultural aspects that have been identified in research on non-organised or alternative sports. Responding to Giulianotti’s (2009) critique that risk is under-theorised in the sociology of sport, we adopt a social constructionist approach (Lupton, 2013) to consider how participants perceived, mediated and responded subjectively and agentially to ‘real dangers’ in waka ama through a Māori worldview.
Risk in organised sport contexts
In research on organised sport, the most influential concepts used to interpret competitive athletes’ responses to risk-taking include Hughes and Coakley’s (1991) framework of the sport ethic and Nixon’s (1992, 1993, 2004) concepts of the sportsnet and the culture of risk. The sport ethic describes a system of norms that is widely accepted by people who work in or around sport, and includes one norm related to risk-taking: ‘[b]eing an athlete involves accepting risks and playing through pain’ (Hughes and Coakley, 1991: 309, italics in original). This norm encourages athletes to normalise physical risk and commit to the game in order to affirm and retain a high-performance athletic identity. For Nixon (1992, 1998, 2004), sportsnets are webs of social interaction that directly and indirectly link sport-related people. Within sportsnets, the culture of risk is one of the shared systems of beliefs (Nixon, 2004). Nixon (1992: 131) concluded that sportsnets ‘trap athletes in the culture of risk and foster a self-abusive pattern of pain and injury’. In this way, Nixon’s conceptualisation of risk is strongly associated with pain and injury. In other words, the culture of risk in organised sport reflects ‘the unquestioned tolerance of pain and injury in sport’ (Safai, 2003: 128). Although Hughes and Coakley (1991) initially proposed the sport ethic as a non-gender-specific system to which both male and female athletes conformed, later research has understood risk-taking and accepting pain and injury as reinforcing or reflecting male participants’ masculinities (e.g. Curry, 1993; Laurendeau, 2008, 2014; Markula and Pringle, 2006; Messner, 1990, 1992; Pringle, 2008; Roderick et al., 2000; Sabo, 2004; Sparkes and Smith, 2002; Young and White, 1995; Young et al., 1994). Discourses of masculinity have also been applied to interpret female athletes’ experiences of risk, pain and injury (e.g. Berg et al., 2014; Charlesworth and Young, 2004; Young and White, 2000).
Roderick’s (1998) critique of the narrow focus on the risk of pain and injury in high-level organised sport reminds us that, actually, risk, pain and injury are ubiquitous at all levels of sport participation (Nixon, 2004). However, the result of the emphasis on elite young males in competitive Western sports (cf. Laurendeau, 2014) is that experiences of participants who are older, non-elite, female and/or competing in non-Western sports are largely unknown. In terms of broadening the narrow focus on physical risk in organised sport, we found support in Nixon’s (1993: 190) early argument that the culture of risk encourages athletes ‘to minimize or ignore pain and injuries as much as possible, but it does not protect them from the physically, socially, economically, or emotionally debilitating or disabling consequences of chronic pain and serious injuries’. In this statement, he hints at the existence of other dimensions of risk, some of which have been identified in the burgeoning literature on non-organised alternative, lifestyle, action or extreme sports (Wheaton, 2004).
Understandings of risk in alternative sports
Studies of risk in alternative sports have included a much broader range of participants and explored dimensions beyond the physical, including the emotional and social aspects of risk. In this area of research, three elements that often intersect – age, gender and culture – emerged as particularly relevant to our study. For example, Brown and Penney (2014) found that the intersecting effects of youth and gender produced both constraining and enabling discourses in the media coverage of a 16-year-old female’s solo circumnavigation of the oceans in the southern hemisphere. The constraining discourse appeared in coverage of the parents’ duty and responsibility to protect their child from harm, whereas the enabling discourse emphasised children’s agency and freedom. The impact of age was a key factor in the cautious and careful attitudes towards injury and pain shown by male and female middle-aged and older surfers (Wheaton, 2017a, 2017b). The moderating effect of older age was also evident in West and Allin’s (2010) study of rock climbing, in which older climbers tended to be more self-reflexive and engage in sensible risk-taking. These climbers distinguished between normal risks (i.e. climbers at the top kicking loose stones on to people below) and abnormal risks (i.e. completing difficult routes driven by one’s self-esteem). Thus, they were self-reflexive in judging their physical abilities and commitments to other climbers and their families and then chose the routes they wanted to complete. Findings in relation to older alternative sport participants differed from the masculine rebellious risk-taking behaviour and willingness to take physical risks associated with the primarily middle-class, professional, younger, white men who dominate action sporting spaces (Booth and Thorpe, 2007).
Overall, this body of research implies that many alternative sport participants have complex views of risk, according to which risk-taking/risk-management, risk/non-risk or risky moments/daily ordinariness are understood as intertwined rather than separate (Robinson, 2004). This research also explicitly identifies emotional dimensions to risk-taking. For example, Saville (2008) found that risk-taking in parkour concurrently produces and is restrained by emotions: the anxious and excited fear stirred up by risk both restricts the body’s movement (for protection), as well as liberates the body’s creative movement. Thus, as Booth and Thorpe (2007: 181) have argued, both the perception and experience of risk are highly subjective, meaning ‘an activity that one individual defines as risk free, another may consider high risk’. In addition, Messner and Musto (2015: 347) argued that risk is contextually specific, ‘generated within institutional contexts, imposed differently upon different groups, applied in very different ways in different contexts, and differently accepted, resisted, and interpreted by differently situated people’. A recent study of indigenous Māori and Pacific people taking part in bodyboarding in New Zealand highlights the intersecting nature of gender and culture in surf-related studies (Nemani, 2013; Nemani and Thorpe, 2016). Nemani (2013) found that some Māori and Pacific female bodyboarders decided not to risk surfing big powerful waves due to fear of injury. Nemani and Thorpe (2016: 227) also pointed out that both female and male Māori and Pacific bodyboarders generally prefer to show ‘respect, humility and considerate behaviour’ in surfing contexts, for example, waiting to ride waves so giving other surfers chances to catch them. Their ‘brown’ demeanour of surfing contrasted with a more self-centred ‘white’ way of surfing (Nemani, 2013: 168), which is described as white male surfers ‘catching all the good waves regardless of anyone else’ (Nemani and Thorpe, 2016: 227).
These contradictions indicate that aspects of gender, age and culture, which have been insufficently explored in previous studies of mainstream organised sport, are likely to influence participants’ responses to physical risk and their perspectives of other dimensions of risk. In this article, we mainly focus on exploring Māori cultural influences on risk-taking in a non-Western mainstream sport. We demonstrate the influence of culture through evidence from an in-depth ethnographic study of the ways in which Māori cultural beliefs and practices shape older female Māori participants’ experiences and perceptions of risk in relation to waka ama paddling.
Theorising risk within a Māori worldview
A Māori worldview guides us to search for a theoretical framework that can help us to understand Māori participants’ experiences and perceptions of risk-taking. Within an overarching framework embedded in Māori cultural concepts, we integrate conceptualisations of risk that highlight the influence of social and cultural values in determining which risks are highlighted or downplayed. Both Douglas and Wildavsky’s (1983) cultural theory of risk perception and Lupton’s (2013) weak social constructionist approach see the identification and understanding of risk as a social process. As Douglas and Wildavsky (1983: 8) point out, it is important to ‘try to discover what different characteristics of social life elicit different responses to danger’. At the same time, Lupton (2013: 44) argues that any risk ‘is not a static, objective phenomenon, but is constantly constructed and negotiated as part of the network of social interaction and the formation of meaning’. These perspectives share similarities with Nixon’s (1992, 2004) conceptualisation of the culture of risk in organised sport, in which socialisation plays a vital role. We agree with Lupton (2013: 43–44) that ‘all knowledge about risk is bound to the sociocultural contexts in which this knowledge is generated’. Further, the importance of our focus on the influence of Māori culture and concepts on waka ama paddlers’ understandings and experiences of risk-taking is evident in both Lupton’s (2013: 44) claim that ‘there is a cultural pattern in ways in which certain phenomena are identified and dealt with as risks’ [italics added], and Douglas and Wildavsky’s (1983) argument that dangers are culturally selected. This perspective views risk as ‘an objective hazard, threat or danger that is inevitably mediated through social and cultural processes and can never be known in isolation from these processes’ (Lupton, 2013: 50). It helps us to view risk in water as a real danger due to uncontrollable factors such as wind, tides, waves, currents and undertows, but at the same time we need to understand that these dangers are perceived and responded to in Māori cultural ways. Furthermore, informed by the research on alternative sport, we propose that individual participants’ agencies in responding to risk are congruent with a weak social constructionist perspective. To understand how Māori waka ama paddlers responded to risk, we drew upon cultural concepts embodied within a Māori worldview that enabled us to perceive participants’ reactions as discursive, embodied and agential.
The view of Māori concepts as discursive has been identified by Māori scholars (e.g. Bishop, 1996; Hoskins, 2017) drawing on Foucault’s genealogical investigation of the relationship between power, knowledge and discourse, in which discourses form when knowledge joins with power, meaning that new discourses can be created, even ‘subjugated knowledges’ that lack power may become discourses (Foucault, 1980: 82). In research, and following the Māori cultural renaissance and political revitalisation in the 1970s (Durie, 2017), Māori concepts and ways of knowing – aligned with the term kaupapa Māori – have successfully transformed from subjugated knowledge into a discourse. Thus, kaupapa Māori, which can simultaneously mean a Māori approach, topic, customary practice, principle, Māori theoretical framework or set of methodological guidelines (Hoskins and Jones, 2017a; Moorfield, 2011), can be understood as discursive fields and practices created by Māori that did not exist previously (Hoskins, 2017). In some New Zealand sporting contexts, kaupapa Māori concepts such as mauri (vital essence of life), whenua (land) and whānau (extended family), and practices such as karakia (prayers or ritual chant) and haka (vigorous dance with actions and rhythmically-shouted words), have been adopted by Māori and non-Māori participants, coaches and teams, including at elite levels (Erueti and Palmer, 2014; Hippolite and Bruce, 2010, 2013; Palmer, 2016). However, it is important to understand that Māori are not a homogenous group, and that different Māori iwi (tribes) and hapū (sub-tribes) have different beliefs and practices. In this article, we specifically discuss cultural concepts such as tapu (restriction/prohibition), karakia (prayer) and rāhui (temporary ritual prohibition) that are shared among different iwi and hapū (Durie, 1998). We also discuss an iwi-specific cultural belief related to taniwha (a mythical creature or power).
Māori concepts reflect an embodied relationship with the world that is important in understanding participants’ embodied experiences of risk in paddling. Hoskins and Jones (2017b: 48) point out that ‘Māori take for granted that the material things of the world—whether a forest, a lake, or a building—can “speak” to human beings; we are always already in relation with certain material objects’. This embodied relationship can be better comprehended from scholars’ discussions of a fundamental Māori concept – whakapapa. Literally, whakapapa can be translated as meaning genealogy and through it individuals and groups can trace themselves back to ancestors who can be human and non-human (Taonui, 2011). Whakapapa provides a pathway along which Māori people establish ‘blood, bodily related’ connections (Bishop, 1996: 216) with humans, non-humans and the surrounding environment. Hoskins and Jones (2017b: 51) highlight the embodied element, explaining that it is widespread among Māori today to talk about a river, a mountain, an entire tribe, or an ancestor that lived hundreds of years ago as yourself: ‘Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au’ (‘I am the river and the river is me’). This statement is not simply a metaphor but a deep visceral identification as the animated embodied river, mountain, or ancestor.
In relation to agency, this formerly subjugated knowledge became a discourse in 2017 when the New Zealand Parliament passed a bill that granted the Whanganui River ‘rights of personhood’, meaning that the river ‘can act as a person in a court of law’ (Tanasescu, 2017: para. 18). Thus, agency includes people, and non-human elements such as nature.
Conducting ethnography in an indigenous context
As an organised sport and a cultural practice, waka ama is especially embraced by Māori communities (Wikaire and Newman, 2013). In addition, it is not a traditionally male-dominated sport. Statistics from Waka Ama New Zealand (2018) show that registered female waka ama club members have consistently outnumbered their male counterparts, particularly in the Open, Masters (over 40) and Senior (over 50) divisions. This pattern was evident in the waka ama club the first author joined as the site of her 14-month ethnography. In this club, female paddlers and coaches dominated. In total, 10 core club members (6 female, 4 male), including the three club coaches, participated in the study.
Waka (canoes) hold historic, symbolic and spiritual meanings for Māori and have long been an integral part of Māori culture. Waka represent ‘tribal identity, mana 3 and territory’ (Walker, 2004: 38), because many Māori can trace their genealogy back to specific, named waka that have enabled Māori migration across the Pacific to Aotearoa New Zealand for the past 700 years (Taonui, 2005). Historically, waka, in different forms, offered a practical way to carry goods and people and engage in war, fishing, ceremonies and recreation (Wikaire and Newman, 2013). Having learned about the close connection between Māori culture and waka ama, an ethnographic approach was vital for the first author, a Chinese international student who knew nothing about waka ama when she first arrived in New Zealand in late 2013 but was interested in understanding the influence of cultural difference on New Zealand sport (see Liu, 2018). 4 Thus, before and during the fieldwork, she attended classes on te reo Māori (Māori language) and Māori health and wellbeing, and seized opportunities to experience Māori events such as pōwhiri (welcome ceremony on a marae), hui (meeting) and sharing kai (food). She befriended Māori students and university staff, including a Māori adviser who was an experienced waka ama paddler and introduced her to Club Moana, 5 the site of her fieldwork. Concerned about whether Māori participants would accept her into their cultural and sporting environment, she also explored Māori–Chinese relationships in New Zealand. She discovered that from their first encounters in the late 1800s, the Chinese and the Māori existed in harmony based on similar cultural beliefs and practices, such as, feeling strongly attached to the land, honouring ancestors and emphasising kinship and extended family (Ip, 2008). However, 100 years later, since the mid-1990s, new Asian immigrants have been perceived by many New Zealanders as having a predatory nature in relation to land and natural and economic resources, and most overseas-born Chinese felt vulnerable and disempowered, given their perceptions of Māori as being in a powerful position in the nation’s ethnic hierarchy (Ip, 2009). Based on Ip’s (2008, 2009) findings, the first author expected to find her position somewhere in between friendship and tension. Nevertheless, the bulk of her fieldnotes identified how participants welcomed her, and helped her to learn waka ama padding and understand the connections between waka ama and Māori culture. Only once, in the early days of her fieldwork, did she hear a male paddler question ‘since when do Chinese paddle?’ Establishing mutual trust over time meant that participants trusted her with reporting their experiences, and she trusted them to keep her safe on the water because she could not swim and had no prior experiences with water sports.
Club Moana is located beside a bay where city dwellers commonly take part in water activities such as swimming, boating, sailing, kayaking and stand-up paddle boarding. The bay is also close to the ancestral land of a local Māori hapū on which some club members live. The 10 participants, all in their 40s and 50s, were representative of the club’s demographic. Like most club members, they had participated in regional or national Masters women’s and men’s competitions. The advantage of older participants with long-term involvement was their ability to explain how Māori cultural concepts and practices have been embedded into waka ama culture, particularly within their club. The club had three regular training sessions per week on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and on Saturday or Sunday mornings. An average of 15 to 20 members attended each session.
The first author actively participated in waka ama (Figure 1), learning to paddle and receiving coaching, as well as recording fieldnotes and writing vignettes about participants’ and her own experiences. She and the participants also met outside the club to learn more about each other, often having lunch together after weekend training. Towards the end of the fieldwork, she conducted individual semi-structured life story interviews with five Māori women who were affiliated to three different iwi. Two were club coaches and also kaihāutu (skipper or steersperson) on the waka. By conducting data analysis while continuing to participate in club training sessions, she was able to verify her interpretations by either talking to participants or through further observation.
The first author engaging in waka ama training (second from rear). Photo credit: Linxiu Dang.
In part because Māori knowledge is often shared through oral traditions, including kōrero (narratives and stories) (McRae, 2017; Rameka, 2016), we present the evidence in the storied form of faction (also known as ethnographic fiction), which straddles fact and fiction in an attempt to make verifiable claims to truth and simultaneously engage readers (Bruce, 2019; Sparkes, 2002). Factionalisation is a creative form of storytelling that is based on the claim to have been there and gathered data in a systematic fashion while bringing research to life through a blend of observation and imagination (Bruce, 2019; Sparkes, 2002). We embrace storying as a way to bring Māori cultural dimensions of risk to life and provide ‘a deepened, complex, and thoroughly partial understanding’ (Richardson and St. Pierre, 2005: 963) of the intersections of gender and culture in understandings of and responses to risk in waka ama. Palmer (2016) calls for academics to embrace indigenous storytelling methodologies as a way to reveal truths about indigenous people and empower them. Importantly, we also agree with Palmer (2016) that telling stories which embody indigenous and female perspectives is one way of challenging the masculine and Western discourses that dominate existing research on organised sport.
The findings are presented as four factional stories. Three are presented as dialogues between I, a fictional researcher identity, and Huia, a fictional character constructed by integrating information from five in-depth interviews, the first author’s ethnographic fieldnotes, and personal vignettes and reflections on paddling by both authors. One story involves four characters. Each story is a blend of fact and fiction that attempts to respects Māori oral traditions in which the ‘telling and retelling of stories has always been critical to retaining knowledge of the past and transmitting it down the generations’ (Rameka, 2016: 392; also see Palmer, 2016).
Māori cultural dimensions of risk
Before discussing how strongly Māori concepts and worldviews influenced the participants’ understandings of risks on water, we first explain how two other elements of physical risk – boat safety and injuries – were managed. First, following the New Zealand maritime waka ama safety rules, before on-water training, paddlers and coaches checked on-board equipment to make sure there was a lifejacket per person, bailers, spare paddles and white lights for evening paddling (Maritime New Zealand, 2011). Second, in stark contrast to the culture of risk in organised sport (Hughes and Coakley, 1991; Nixon, 2004; Safai, 2003), coaches discouraged training with injury or illness, which aligns with the Maritime New Zealand (n.d.) ruling that the kaihāutu or coach needs to know the crew’s medical conditions. Further, reflecting a collective worldview, three coach participants agreed that paddlers who did not declare injuries put other paddlers’ health and lives at risk. One said, People’s lives are in your hands …. You can’t just go and paddle. You have to learn how to paddle properly, so you can handle any situation … because your life is in my hands, and everyone else’s life is in your hands.
As a result, club members regularly sent text messages to coaches or posted items on the club’s Facebook page if a workplace or other injury prevented them from attending training. One female paddler discussed her asthma condition with the kaihāutu and then took her inhaler on board. Over their paddling careers, the five interview participants reported shoulder, lower back, rib, thumb and wrist problems, which reflect the most common waka ama injuries: shoulder (35%) and spine (27%) (Bell et al., 2013). No injuries had a permanent impact on the person’s performance and all were cured after medical intervention and/or sufficient rest. No injuries were observed during training. This absence may reflect the purposes of training – team-building, group timing and focus on correct movement – meaning that training was often of a lower intensity than competition racing. It may also indicate the coaches’ safety orientation, which conceptualised injuries as a group rather than individual risk. Overall, compared to many organised contact and high-risk alternative sports, waka ama presents a relatively low physical risk, the most severe part of which is the possibility of drowning (Dyson, 2005). However, drowning during taking part in waka ama appears relatively rare: Water Safety New Zealand staff confirmed that there have been no waka ama drownings since 1980 (personal communication, January 17, 2019).
In managing multiple forms of risk on water, Māori concepts and worldviews were fundamental to participants’ perceptions and experiences. The first factionalised story highlights the embodied learning and knowledge that paddlers use to understand risks on different bodies of water. It then reveals the intersecting influences of gender and Māori concepts, including taniwha, kaitiaki and tapu, on participants’ understandings of risk on a particular body of water, identified as The River.
The Taniwha in The River
After a hard long-distance training only Huia and I remained, standing at the clubroom windows overlooking the bay. As Huia sipped her recovery potein shake, I idly viewed the many sailboats moored nearby as I continued my dryland practice of the correct technique with a spare paddle.
Knowing that Huia grew up beside The River, I asked, ‘Do you prefer to paddle on the sea or river?’
Huia replied, ‘I started paddling on The River. It’s flat, but it’s hard. When you’re running down, you’re going with the current. When you come back up, you’re fighting against the current all the time, so that’s where you learn how to hold and paddle hard.’ She leaned over and appropriated my paddle to demonstrate the movement and intensity required, before handing it back to me.
‘That’s a totally different dynamic to paddling on the ocean. The ocean is a lot lighter, and you get the enjoyment of the waves and the variety, while The River is either up or down, but it’s still strong. If they open the gates of the lakes above The River, the water is flowing faster, and you get whirlpools. If you see a “plop”, that’s a rock. If you see a whirlpool, you know when your tail or front hits it, it’s gonna spin your waka, so you’ve got to have the speed to go through it. Anyway, you’ve got to be able to read rivers and oceans.’
‘Sounds very challenging to paddle on The River,’ I reflected, thinking of my own anxieties paddling on the relatively calm waters of the bay.
‘Oh yeah. On The River is terrible. If you flip, you’re gone. There are so many undercurrents.’
‘Wow. I’d better try not to paddle on The River, since I can’t swim and I definitely will …’
Huia interrupted quickly to reassure me. ‘No, don’t worry. You won’t die. You’re a woman.’
‘What? How so?’ I was very puzzled.
Turning towards me to make direct eye contact, she explained, ‘It only takes men, not women. The River doesn’t like men. They just found another man the other weekend.’
I frowned in confusion as Huia sat down and continued quietly, ‘All women who died in the river have either died before they got in there or on impact. If you go back to the history of who were those people who have died in The River, you’ll find the majority were the men being taken.’
Giving up on my paddling practice, I joined her on the couch and sought clarification. ‘Is there a reason for that? Or is it a myth?’ I was intrigued by her idea that The River had a gender preference in taking lives.
‘Do you know the saying about taniwha, “He piko, he taniwha”, at every bend there is a taniwha, a kaitiaki?’
‘Yes.’ I tried to show what I had learned. ‘Taniwha are mythical water spirits or creatures.’
Huia smiled in approval and continued, ‘So in The River the taniwha is a woman, a female.’
‘Ah. So it won’t harm me or might even protect me. Good to know that.’
This factionalised story reveals some of the physical and cultural dimensions of risk that Māori participants perceived in relation to being on the water. It reflects Lupton’s (2013: 44) weak social constructionist perspective because historically and geographically shaped ‘real dangers’ are mediated by the cultural concept of taniwha that forms part of Māori participants’ ‘lived experiences, logics and perceptions’. Although some Māori believe that taniwha ‘eat and kill people, or kidnap women’, for others, like the female participants in this study, taniwha are kaitiaki, ‘guardians for a tribe’ (Keane, 2012: para. 3). The participants’ understandings of taniwha as guardians provide them with confidence and security and so reduce their perceptions of the risk of drowning. Thus, as Lupton (2013: 43–44) argues, the participants’ perceptions of risks to them as females are ‘bound to the sociocultural context in which this knowledge was generated’. Furthermore, the story demonstrates that natural phenomena, such as rivers, can have their own agency as they interact with humans. The gendered understanding in this story is supported by statistics showing that Māori men are disproportionately over-represented in drowning cases, comprising 90–94% of recent Māori drownings (Water Safety New Zealand, 2016, 2017). In addition, the understandings reflected in the story are supported by sociological research on male sport participation. For instance, Messner (1992: 74) concluded that ‘the internal structure of masculinity’ drives men to endanger themselves in sports, foreshadowing the general observation that in comparison to females, males tend to overestimate their abilities and underestimate the risks associated with their activity on the water (Water Safety New Zealand, 2017). Indeed, Moran (2011: 296) attributes the disproportionately high rate of New Zealand male drowning deaths to ‘dangerous masculinities’ (also see Young and White, 2000: 108).
In relation to indigenous culture, researchers attribute the over-representation of both Māori and Canadian Aboriginal peoples in drowning deaths to education and sporting systems dominated by Western perspectives that have failed to meet indigenous people’s needs (Giles et al., 2010) and reflect a disconnection from cultural knowledge (Hauteruruku ki Puketeraki et al., 2016; Wikaire, 2016). Hauteruruku ki Puketeraki et al. (2016: 26) identified the problem of Māori drowning as resulting from ‘a disconnection to Tangaroa’ (spiritual god of the sea and fish), and argued that Māori concepts of water safety stressed the connection with water, as in building and paddling waka, and the learning of traditional knowledge of navigation (see also Day, 2018). This sense of connection was strongly evident in Club Moana, where Māori practices such as karakia aim to establish the connection with Tangaroa and natural surroundings. Karakia invite non-human forces to important events to help to achieve a favourable outcome (Hoskins and Jones, 2017b). In the club, karakia take place before and after on-water training. The opening karakia is usually led on the water by a male paddler when all paddlers are on board the waka. Everyone joins in the last line before paddling the waka away from shore. The opening karakia invites non-human forces, such as winds, land and ocean, to ensure paddlers’ safe activities on/in/through water (Table 1).
Opening karakia.
After training, paddlers pull the waka back on to shore, clean it by unloading all equipment and bailing out water, and then gather to listen to comments by coaches or other paddlers. Finally, everyone joins in a circle to recite a Christian closing karakia together. These actions demonstrate how spiritual aspects of physical activities need to be acknowledged when adopting a Māori perspective in research (Erueti and Palmer, 2014), although this is unusual in traditional Western academic enquiry.
‘Don’t go down there’
Having experienced the practice of karakia for many weeks, I had numerous questions. After a heavy downpour, water accumulated in the hulls of the four waka that are stored in the open air. Arriving first, Huia and I each grabbed a home-made plastic half-milk bottle bailer and began to remove the water from the 12-person double-hulled waka. Here’s my chance, I thought, and blurted out all my questions at once. ‘Why do we do karakia twice in the training? Is it a Māori tradition to say prayers? Why use a Christian version as the closing karakia?’
Glancing up at me across the hulls, Huia thought for a few seconds and then began to educate me in her soft, calm voice. ‘First, the Christian version is easy. A lot of people know it. Apparently, it’s a benediction, so it gives us a blessing. And we had discussed writing our own closing karakia, but it takes time.’ She shrugged, indicating that a new closing karakia was impossible to accomplish with everyone’s busy lives.‘So karakia is an incantation that connects you to the spiritual realm. It doesn’t have to be prescribed. It doesn’t have to be in Māori. It can be in any language. It’s more about the intent.’
I nodded in my usual way of encouraging her to continue.
‘So the opening karakia intends to free people from the burdens of their days and work, whatever they bring in to the session, and asks for safe passage and guidance on water. It also acknowledges Tangaroa’s realm of the ocean. We are visitors, and it is a matter of privilege to be there.’
As her words washed over me, I reflected on my anxious feelings about getting on the waka and going out on the sea.
Huia suddenly noticed that my attention had drifted. ‘Hey girl, don’t slow down. Keep working hard.’
I shook my thoughts away and quickened my bailing, before asking, ‘And then the closing karakia?’
‘The closing karakia is about clearing people and closing that particular event. The training could be a very hard or emotional training, when you’ve been driven and yelled at, and coached and pushed, and you might be feeling upset about it. The karakia is about closing off that particular event, having everybody leave complete.’
Standing to briefly stretch my aching back, I summarised: ‘There are multiple layers of meaning inside karakia, and it’s very spiritual.’
‘Ae,’ Huia agreed with my interpretation. ‘That’s why we do karakia. You say a prayer before you go out there. If you ever feel something is not quite right when you’re paddling, you do a karakia again. You might not know what it is, but you could be going over tapu land, someone could have died, and it could be a sunken ship. Anything could be underneath you that you’re paddling on, and you just don’t know. One morning, I went down on my SUP (stand-up paddleboard) to a nearby harbour. Something kept saying, “Don’t go down there. Don’t go down there,” so I turned around and came back, and ended up they found someone drowned down there, so you have to listen. You have to listen when you get told things.’
‘Listen to …? Where was that voice coming from?’ I tried hard to understand who was talking to Huia while she was paddling alone.
‘The voice. It just appeared,’ Huia shrugged. ‘Actually, it’s a thought. A thought appears in your head. You know when you’re paddling, it’s not just I want to get from A to B. You’ve got to be aware of all your surroundings, the whole environment. You can feel it. It came from a feeling or a knowing. It’s hard to understand but as you paddle, you grow. You’ll mature a lot more, cause you have to be aware of all the senses, not just one or other.’
Huia moved to a battered outside chair and mimicked sitting in a waka, looking into the water.
‘Sometimes, there could be a whale coming up next to you, and no one else can see it but you can. There could be a big shark coming next to you but no one else can see it. You don’t want to scare the whole canoe.’ Smiling to herself at the memory, she said, ‘All you do is have a karakia to the shark, have a kōrero (chat) to the shark, and the shark goes off moving on its way.’
This factionalised story highlights participants’ embodied, agential and even spiritual relationships with the ocean environment and its inhabitants. We can interpret hearing a voice or thought as a synthesis of human senses reflecting a sensuous perception of the world and an embodied awareness of changes in the environment that is simultaneously informed by Māori cultural practices such as karakia that address physical and spiritual dangers posed by whales, sharks, submerged objects or drownings in the bay.
The next story, based on fieldwork and interviews, reveals the multidimensional influences of a Māori worldview on female participants’ experiences that informed their acknowledgement of the agency of nature and people’s relationships with it, rather than reflecting a desire to control or conquer nature. Important here is the impact of whakawhanaungatanga (establishing relationships) and atua (gods), including Tangaroa.
The Island is my Mother
Arataki recites the opening karakia, as the four-person waka rocks gently in the water. It feels as if the world is holding its breath. Before we paddle quietly into the twilight, Sweet trails one hand in the water, saying, ‘We acknowledge Tangaroa’s presence,’ before lifting her paddle to indicate she is about to set the training pace from seat one. From the least influential position in seat three, directly in front of our kaihaūtu Arataki, I ask, ‘Why did you say that?’
‘It’s to acknowledge the gods,’ Sweet replies. ‘We have to be ready for whatever it is they might throw at us. Rough sea, calm sea, whatever it is, it’s their choice, but we have to acknowledge that we’re going into their realm.’
Our focus tonight is on developing a shared rhythm so the pace is steady, and there is time for conversation between the regular alternation of paddling sides. After one change, Sweet shares the impact of her ancestral connections to the area. ‘When I’m out here, I’m very conscious of the fact that I’m travelling in areas that my great-great-great-great-grandfathers have possibly travelled as well. So it’s a really humbling and uplifting feeling.’ Our kaihāutu Arataki adds, ‘Ae. Same for me. My father and ancestors used to collect kai moana (sea food) here.’ After the next change, Tichy reflects from seat two, ‘Yeah. My family has a long love affair with the water.’ With a giggle, she adds, ‘They’re not landlubbers.’
In the deepening twilight, the required white light illuminates our path and alerts other water users to our presence. As we paddle directly towards the triangular shape of a dormant volcanic island that dominates the bay, Sweet reveals how, as a teenager living away from her family, she adopted the island as her mother. ‘I was feeling that I’ve got no mother. So I actually transferred my mother’s figure to the island. So when I go down to the bay, I’m down there hanging out with my mum. So I feel my wairua (spirit) comes from there.’
In respect for Sweet’s words, we paddle through several sets in silence except for her ‘Hup’ every 15 strokes indicating the need to change sides. My thoughts turn to my inability to resonate with these women’s embodied emotional and spiritual attachments to the sea and this specific area. I always feel uneasy around water, after nearly drowning when I fell into a pond as a child. I’ve had few interactions with the sea because the bay near my home is a mangrove reserve and a restricted border area dividing Hong Kong and Mainland China. I realise that fear will be an indispensable part of my ethnographic experience, producing bodily tightness and a sick feeling in my stomach. During this training, the contrast between my nervous engagement with paddling and the deep emotional, spiritual and ancestral connections of the women becomes really obvious. I wonder if my emotions might explain my difficulties in finding or feeling the flow of paddling, and determine that I will try harder to find positive connections in this watery space.
The experiences revealed in this story add depth and complexity to our understandings of the multidimensional and powerful influences of culture and previous water experiences on perceptions of risk and connection in waka ama. For these participants, paddling is far more than a way to gain fitness, participate in organised sport or negotiate the physical risk of drowning. Instead, it reinforces their ancestral and emotional connections to the area, and they draw on their cultural knowledge of whakawhanuangatanga, karakia and respect for gods as ways to deeply connect with the water and feel emotionally and physically safe on it. Sweet’s identification with the island as her mother reflects the ‘deep visceral identification’ (Hoskins and Jones, 2017b: 51) that Māori can make with mountains, rivers and islands and their knowing of them ‘in a bodily way’ (Bishop, 1998: 203). In addition, I’s experiences embody both Saville’s (2008) finding that anxious emotions, such as fear, can restrict the body’s movement, and the highly subjective nature of risk perception: in this case, an activity that the participants defined as relatively risk free was considered ‘high risk’ by I (Booth and Thorpe, 2007: 181).
Tapu and Rāhui
One Saturday morning, I stood on the boat ramp, admiring the partly clouded sky, and the nearby headland and islands.
‘Mōrena (good morning),’ a joyful, melodious voice greeted me from behind. Huia approached the ramp with her large short-haired dog, Kuri.
‘Ah, mōrena,’ I replied, ‘Very low tide this morning.’
‘Yes, it is,’ she confirmed. Clumps of brown seaweed and broken branches washed up by the tide lay piled on the dry middle section of the ramp. She picked up a stick from the pile and threw it into the water for Kuri.
Watching the dog splashing into the water, I said, ‘The news says a person drowned near the headland yesterday. Can we still paddle today? Is it tapu to be on the water?’
Her expression sobered as she replied, ‘A teenager was drowned after diving from a wharf, but we’ve been told about this too late to carry out a rāhui. But the tapu is still there.’ Gesturing towards the wharf, she said, ‘To pay respect to the dead, we’ll make sure our club members keep away from that area when they go paddle.’
Wanting to know more, I asked, ‘Usually, how long is a rāhui?’
‘Rāhui is normally a week staying out of the water.’
‘For paddlers, a week is quite long.’
Kuri returned with the stick and dropped it by Huia’s feet. She threw the stick again, much further out this time, as she reflected, ‘Yeah. We’ve been challenged on that, and my position is I don’t care. This is our customary practice. If you don’t like it, go to paddle in another club,’ she said firmly, and there was an inviolable mana in her voice.
She added, ‘Rāhui is a tradition handed down to us from our father and from his father’s father. It has always been practised, back to a time when rāhui was used for protection and preservation. So when my dad was young, local people were collecting kai moana in the bay. They wouldn’t take seafood from the water where somebody has died in it, and their rāhui practice used to be until the new moon, waiting for the turning of the tides and the cleansing of the water. Now the bay is used by people who we can’t control or advise.’
‘So the club practise rāhui to show respect to the dead?’
‘Also remaining safe. So rāhui for me – I’m not saying this for everybody – for me, it’s about people’s safety. Observing there are bigger forces than human beings at play, and we need to remain connected. You know, in the past it’s just been us. But slowly over time, rāhui has filtered to other clubs.’
I clarified, ‘To other waka ama clubs?’
‘Yes, and also filtered to other sports in New Zealand. Ever since I put the first notice up about rāhui, and expressed sadness for the person who lost their life and for the family and friends, it’s slowly filtered through to other people, stand-up paddle boarders and kayak people, for example.’
This story further reveals the centrality of cultural practices with regard to how Club Moana members engage with waka ama as an organised sport. Rāhui as a practice demonstrates the agency of Māori participants who invoke rāhui in appropriate situations and avoid paddling in those areas affected. In addition, although rāhui has long been practised by Māori, Club Moana’s actions also demonstrate how formerly subjugated Māori knowledges have become discourses that influence other nearby water sport clubs.
Conclusions
Waka ama in Aotearoa in New Zealand provided a unique context in which to explore gendered and culturally mediated perspectives of risk-taking in organised sport due to the historical, cultural and symbolic significance of waka for Māori people and, particularly, Club Moana’s embracing of practices based on Māori concepts. The results challenge and extend current scholarship on risk in organised sport in the field of sociology of sport in exciting ways. They demonstrate how stepping outside the Western-centric focus of current research produces new knowledge about how sport participants negotiate and actively engage with potential risks.
First, the results pose a significant challenge to current understandings of the culture of risk in organised sport that highlight the normalisation, validation and even celebration of risk-taking, including hiding or playing with pain and injury. In waka ama, such actions are discouraged because they are perceived as putting others at risk rather than being celebrated as individual expressions of (masculine) sporting identity.
Second, our findings enrich the research on risk-taking in the sociology of sport. By showing the experiences of older female Māori participants with regard to waka ama, we revealed the influence of culture on how these organised sport participants interpreted and acted in relation to potential risks – understandings that had not been revealed in existing studies of major team sports that younger male elite sportsmen participate in. Our study counters and brings to life the relatively unknown nature of the experiences of participants who are older, female and involved in non-Western sports. If we want to deeply understand the nuances and complexities of people’s engagements with organised sport, our findings point to the value of expanding the research focus to include a much wider range of participants, sports and cultures.
Third, integrating Lupton’s (2013) social constructionist and Douglas and Wildavksy’s cultural perspectives with a Māori worldview provided us with an effective bridge between existing Western and non-Western knowledges, allowing us to demonstrate the influence of culture on how risks are assessed and responded to. We were able to reveal how Māori concepts embody different ontologies and epistemologies that lead to very different discursive, embodied and agential responses to risk in organised sport. For example, the concept of taniwha shaped participants’ ideas of the gendered dimension of risks on a specific river. Grounding our analysis in Māori cultural concepts helped us to theorise waka ama participants’ discursive, embodied and agential responses to risk and water safety within the worldview used by the participants, rather than imposing Western theories upon their experiences. The stories provide concrete examples of cultural practices that helped participants to prepare for and deal with multiple forms of risk on water. These included tapu (respect for the dead), rāhui (no paddling or water activities in areas where someone has died) and karakia (praying for a safe journey on the water). Māori participants not only adopted these cultural concepts discursively, but were also committed to following them. Furthermore, through their own culturally relevant actions, they even influenced the actions of other non-Māori water sport clubs nearby, thus demonstrating how formerly subjugated Māori knowledge had reached the status of a discourse.
Fourth, we gained new understandings of the interactions between humans and nature in organised sport from participants’ practices of karakia to atua and sea creatures to ensure safe passage and their acceptance of islands and rivers as having their own agency. Even though waka ama has an inherent risk due to its aquatic location, participants do not treat nature as an obstacle to be conquered. Instead, through whakawhanaungatanga, they establish spiritual, emotional and corporeal connections with nature, ancestry and atua via paddling. Hence, Māori cultural concepts not only led participants to carefully consider the risks of failing to establish whakawhanaungatanga in paddling, but allowed them to establish multiple embodied emotional and spiritual connections. Participants’ practices of Māori culture reflect the idea that although real risks exist, people’s understandings of risk are negotiated and interpreted in specific sociocultural contexts that determine ‘what dangers should be most feared’ and how they should be engaged with (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1983: 6; Lupton, 2013). For example, waka ama paddlers’ perceptions of and engagements with dangers, such as the use of karakia to ensure safe passage, are starkly different from those identified in the existing literature, which highlights the perceived danger to Western elite athletes of losing their masculine status, playing position or contract with a professional team if they reveal injuries (Roderick et al., 2000).
Overall, our findings lead us to argue that risk-taking in organised sport needs to be explored from contexts that are framed by non-Western ontologies and epistemologies, to include a much wider variety of participants and sports, and to investigate risks beyond the physical, in order for sociologists of sport to develop explanations that reflect the nuances, diversity and multidimensionality of risk-taking in organised sport.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We thank the four anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, Dr Belinda Wheaton for suggesting we look at the literature on alternative sport, Dr Mera Lee-Penehira for introducing Lucen to the waka ama club, and the club members for accepting Lucen into their sport and culture.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.