visual documentation of traditional breath-hold divers in Hava’u (Tonga) and Mie (Japan), work-in-progress from June/July 2023
Photography by Karl Frost, PhD
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture
Photo exhibition January through April 2024
lobby of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
open hours Monday- Friday 9h-17h
(Visual documentation as part of
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Dr Adrian Bell, anthropologist from University of Utah, recently turned his attention to the practice of breath-hold diving in Tonga, important for both local subsistence and market fishing. While there has been some scientific work recently on the sea-bound life and diving of the Bajau people in Indonesia, in Tonga, diving is relatively understudied.
Adrian invited me to join him in June 2023 for 3 weeks to document the divers. For cross-cultural comparison, i followed this with 3 weeks documenting traditional breath hold diving in Mie, Japan. In both sites, i was able to document divers and the community around the diving.
Read below for short description of project and sites.
Click on the links below for photography, video montage, and more detailed background on the traditional breath-hold diving practices of Tonga and Japan.
In Tonga, the divers, all men, hunt at night primarily for fish, spiny lobster, octopus, crabs, and squid. They work with mask, snorkel, fins, tights and long sleeve sports shirts, wearing the latter primarily for abrasion and sting protection, rather than warmth, given the 24C+ warm waters. For hunting, which is year-round, they use an underwater flashlight and a spear with elastic lanyard. As Tonga is a kingdom, the spearfishing regulation framework of the islands is set by the offices of the king, with established marine protected areas, open access fishing areas, and zones set aside for management by local communities.
In Japan, there is a long history of women divers (“ama”), parallel to that of the women divers on Jeju Island in South Korea (“haenyo”). Diving is regulated locally through fishing cooperatives. In the summer months, diving is primarily for shellfish and sea urchins, in the winter for spiny lobster, and in the spring for the maintenance of seaweed gardens (wakame). Diving is done with neoprene diving suits, fins, and older style face-masks, without snorkel; technological limits are part of local regulations.
One can find paintings and writings about the ama going back for centuries. A long standing tourism industry to “see the divers” has existed since the early 1900s, and photography of the ama since the introduction of photography to Japan. In both S Korea and Japan, the women divers are officially recognized as “intangible national historical heritage”. This creates an interesting context for documentation with established protocols and contracts in many places for photography or interviews in parallel to the tourist industry. However, while the national narrative is of women divers and the existing institutions for documentation funnel photographers and film-makers to these women, 40% of the divers currently are men, and this seems to have been the case since records were first kept of the industry. Visual documentation of male divers is rare in comparison to the flood of documentation for women divers.
In 2023, i was able to join divers in Hava’u (Tonga) and in Mie (Japan). I hope to be able to return in 2024 to continue the project, documenting more of life around the diving as well as to get deeper into the diving itself.
Summer 2023 has been exploratory research. The first intention is to document culture and cultural difference/similarity. Second, from the evolutionary science perspective, the work has been exploratory to see what larger questions might be answerable by looking at the specific context of breath-hold diving.
These potential questions include…
• How are fine hunting skills acquired: socially through teaching and observing others or through independent experimentation and individual learning processes?
• Are differences in physical capacity for diving driven by development, long-term gene-culture coevolution, or those more fit to the practice being more drawn to it?
• What does variation in the development of institutions for sustainable harvest practices tell us about the conditions under which they may or may not be expected to develop?
PS. As 2023 was the “year of AI”, as it were, I used photo editing AI to work on many of these images. Some of the new AI photo processing techniques introduce ethical issues around “veracity” of images, even if seemingly minor. One image in the series has a small instance of the use of “object removal” which i experimented with and wrote about here in this linked blog.
This project is part of my work at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture
