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- Convenors:
-
Fiona McCormack
(University of Waikato, AotearoaNew Zealand)
Benedicta Rousseau (University of Melbourne)
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- Location:
- Old Arts-156
- Start time:
- 2 December, 2015 at
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel invites critical, ethnographic considerations of sustainability and resilience. These terms are often used to denote achievable moral orientations that may in turn guide behaviour, programs of reform and management, and provide a measure for proposed and completed courses of action.
Long Abstract:
This panel invites critical, ethnographic considerations of sustainability and resilience as purported ideal states. These terms are often used to denote achievable moral orientations that may in turn guide behaviour, programs of reform and management, and provide a measure by which to judge proposed and completed courses of action. They seem to vacillate between noun and verb, ontology and epistemology, term and category, occupying sometimes unclear and/or shifting temporal locations.
Given this shifting character, the questions that contributors might consider are multiple:
- How do sustainability and resilience as aims become logics?
- How have the terms been captured over time by different groups and for what purposes?
- As achievable moral orientations, what markers have been used as an indicator of success? And what is downplayed in this process?
- Is their a relationship between achieving this moral orientation and the generation of new types of inequality?
- What is the relationship between the terms as an ideal state and the prevailing political-economic context?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Resilience became a catch-all term for describing indigenous experiences of and responses to Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu, March 2015. Here, I consider the logic that resilience enabled, coalescing ni-Vanuatu misfortune and good fortune into a favourable moral characteristic worthy of assistance.
Paper long abstract:
On Friday 13th March, Cyclone Pam moved across the islands of Vanuatu at Category 5 strength. As little as one day later, the contours of debates that would run - often at high levels of emotion - over the next few weeks were taking shape on social media: who was best suited to carry out relief operations?; was - or should - the government take a lead role in these?; and who and where was being ignored in the distribution of aid? As criticisms of the government and relief efforts increased, a counter-discourse arose, tying together ideas about indigenous knowledge in the frequently-asserted quality of "resilience".
Here, I consider how resilience was used to encapsulate the specifics of indigenous preparations and responses to the cyclone, and was then deployed as an ideal that united the nation and precluded criticism of the government approach to relief. I consider the logic that resilience enabled, becoming the explanation for how people got through, the intangible that was helping recovery and furthermore, what it was that "we", overseas, should be supporting. Thus, ni-Vanuatu misfortune and good fortune both coalesced into this favourable moral characteristic worthy of assistance. I link this logic to other terms of relevance to the ethnography of Vanuatu (e.g.: kastom, independence, self-reliance, sustainability) and note similarities in the scalar properties of these terms. Finally, with reference to the broader literature on resilience, I consider how it simultaneously valorises and diminishes indigenous accounts of the cyclone, its impact and the ideal shape of recovery.
Paper short abstract:
Many universities have proclaimed a staunch commitment to the notion of sustainability in their stated commitment to furthering knowledge and moral leadership. This paper examines using a case study from the University of Melbourne how valid this claim is.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing upon our ethnographic experiences in various capacities at the University of Melbourne, we examine the issue of how environmentally sustainable that university and other Australian universities are in an era increasingly impacted by anthropogenic climate change and a global ecological crisis. We argue that while indeed the University of Melbourne has embarked upon a variety of activities and programmes that exhibit some commitment to the notions of environmental sustainability and resilience, it continues to engage in practices that are not sustainable, the most glaring of which is on-going investments in fossil fuels. In this regard, in the neoliberal era that has come to pervade universities in various ways, there is a disjuncture between the lofty stated commitments to societal moral leadership and environmental sustainability on the part of the University of Melbourne as well as many other Australian universities.
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces the evolution of sustainability programs, philosophies and practices in environmental governance, using the quota management system in fisheries as a case in point.
Paper long abstract:
Sustainability shows opportunistic like features by adding a moral orientation to a vast range of interests often pursuing contradictory agenda. An artful rebranding that effectively mutes dissent. This paper traces the evolution of sustainability programs, philosophies and practices in environmental governance, using the quota management system in fisheries as a case in point. Drawing on Medevoi (2010), I propose an alternative, darker, reading of sustainability, one that captures historic understandings of sustain to imply withstanding pain, injury and suffering; a damage which is not so much mitigated as endured; bearing a burden, charge or cost. It is this dark side, I think, which is both obscured and revealed in the zeal with which payment for ecosystem services are being introduced as the way to do sustainable environmental management. Our fisheries, atmosphere, water and soils are asked to tolerate exploitation. At the same time their very ontology enables us to calculate their monetary exchange value in order to service their services, a moral mitigation which ultimately serves to sustain capital accumulation itself.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores resilience and sustainability in contemporary kula exchange of Papua New Guinea. Based on current research, it argues that cash economy and patriarchy are undermining the ethics that govern kula.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will discuss a case of resilience and cooperation between Massim islanders and an anthropologist (me). The elders on Dobu, Fergusson, Egum, and Normanby islands of Papua New Guinea believe that their kula exchange system is currently at risk of losing its relevance. They are actively engaged in a project that aims at promoting kula for the younger generations while at the same time reducing the amounts of money required for contemporary kula. By presenting the key aspects of this project, the paper will argue that sustainability in the Massim hinges on inter-island relationships, on redistribution rather than accumulation of valuables, and on the overarching values of generosity, respect, and self-discipline that are at the heart of kula practice.