# Aquatic cultures and regional biogeography  
Given the ubiquity of water in its various manifestations and the social and regional relationships that formed around it, it became necessary to develop the concept of 'aquatic culture', which the Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda proposed towards the end of the 1970s in his fundamental work Historia doble de la Costa $(1979 ; 2002)$. Although the concept came about from Fals Borda's analysis of regions of the Colombian Caribbean at the time, in particular the amphibian areas of Mompox and San Martín de Loba, its theoretical foundation refers to or describes aquatic landscapes and social organizations similar or comparable to those we have already described. In other words, we deem it useful and relevant  
to employ the concept of amphibian culture in analysing and describing the social dynamics of resistance and Maroonism in the Afro-Colombian Pacific. Amphibian society and culture form a structural part of a broader concept and of Marxist genealogy, like the concept of social formation, built on a network of regional links which vary in time, society and space. In particular, the 'concept of amphibian culture contains ideological elements and articulates psychosocial expressions, attitudes, prejudices, superstitions and legends which are linked to rivers, channels, ravines, hillsides, beaches, wetlands and rainforests'. As such, in spatial terms, it defines 'a fluvial area of hillsides, hamlets and villages, flood-prone and dry', both in a linear order and in disparate places 'along watercourses' (Fals Borda, 1979; 2002, pp. 18-19).
![img-16.jpeg](img_ref_17)  
Figure I.
Mapa Costa Pacifica Colombiana.
Source: Revista Colombiana de
Antropología, Vol. 39, Bogotá, Enero-diciembre 2003, pp. 203-235.
U. Oslender (2003, p. 209).*  
DOI: https://doi.org/
10.22380/2539472X. 1241