Our intention in this volume is to make an original and innovative contribution to the ethnographic record of Oceania while also contributing to global debates about rivers and fresh water.Given the historical tendency for human societies everywhere to situate themselves near rivers, lakes, streams and other sources of fresh, flowing water, one might expect to find abundant, detailed descriptions of rivers in the early ethnographic record.But this is not the case.Before 1950, when anthropological publications focused specifically on fresh water, the topic was most often folkloric in nature, about water beings, water divining or water symbolism (e.g.Hongi 1894; Holmes 1898; Piddington 1930).References to rivers as geographic markers were also very common, as when Murray and Ray (1918) published their article on 'The People and Language between the Fly and Strickland Rivers, Papua', but articles that actually describe rivers are rare indeed.Arthur Hayes (1906) published a description of the people of Abyssinia in a book entitled The Source of the Blue Nile, but wrote almost nothing about the river itself or about the riverine adaptations of the people he described.A 1912 article by Emmons about the Kitselas of British Columbia
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.