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- Convenor:
-
Victoria Stead
(Deakin University)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Michele Dominy
(Bard College)
- Stream:
- Landscapes, resources and value
- Location:
- Old Arts-129 (Theatre B)
- Start time:
- 2 December, 2015 at
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
Changing forms of connection to land and place prompt complex and often intractable moral dilemmas. The panel explores the moral dimensions of human connection to land, including in relation to land disputes, modernising processes, mobility, labour, leisure, and the interventions of anthropologists.
Long Abstract:
The ways in which people connect to land and place at once reflect and inform their moralities. The entanglements of different forms of connection to land and place in turn bring different moral horizons into complex, shifting, and sometimes intractable encounters. In a context of global change land is variously—often simultaneously—articulated as property, territory, birthright, resource, cultural heritage, homeland, a site and object of belonging, a site of memory and identity. These multiple articulations give rise to multiple moral discourses, practices, and imaginings.
This panel invites papers that engage with the moral dimensions of land and place. The shifting moral horizons to which presenters might respond include, but need not be limited to:
- The moral dimensions and imaginings of land disputes;
- The moralities claimed by, or ascribed to, different human roles in relation to land, including customary landowner, investor, owner, guardian, producer, indigene, defender, exploiter;
- The shifting moral horizons created as experiences of mobility transform the relationships which people have to the lands and places they leave, as well as to the lands and places they encounter;
- The visions of the good life which people seek to realise through their engagement with land as a site of labour and leisure;
- The moral dilemmas that emerge through anthropologists' interventions into land and place, including as codifiers or describers of forms of connection to land, and as allies or interlocutors in indigenous struggles for land rights.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Land, as birthright, memory and belonging, is central to Icelandic identity. The recent increase in tourist numbers, however, has disrupted the connection to land, and disturbed the landscape of memory and belonging. This paper explores the nature of this disruption.
Paper long abstract:
Land is central to Icelandic identity. It is birthright, heritage, a site of memory and belonging; mountains, waterfalls, pastures and fjords are the stuff on which Icelandic dreams are made. However, in recent years Icelandic land has been invaded, by foreign capital, in the form of overseas firms seeking to exploit Iceland's rich energy resources, and by tourists. While the former has in the main been resisted, the latter has not. Icelanders are opening their homes, via websites such as AirBnB, and their land to tourists, whose numbers have doubled since 2007. While tourists are welcomed for the money they bring, and most stay for only a short time, Icelandic people are somewhat ambivalent as to the impact of tourism on the Icelandic landscape, both the physical landscape and the landscape of memory and belonging. Older people of Reykjavik comment that the language they hear most often in the streets during summer is American English, and the topic of a tourist tax, and fencing parts of Iceland off, are debated on the Net and in coffee shops. Something about their land, and their sense of themselves in it, seems to be slipping away. This paper explores the Icelandic connection to land, and assesses to what extent that connection is changing as Iceland becomes a 'hot' tourist destination.
Paper short abstract:
Higaturu, PNG, is a place shaped by human and non-human acts of violence, including wartime killings, retributory executions, and a devastating volcanic eruption. In the wake of colonialism local understandings of these converge, giving rise to ambiguous moral reckonings.
Paper long abstract:
Located in Northern Province, Papua New Guinea, Higaturu is a place marked by multiple intersections of violence. Originally established as an Australian colonial headquarters, in 1943 it was the site of execution of at least 21 (and possibly as many as 60) Orakaiva Papua New Guinean men convicted of treason during the Second World War. The men were hanged, first from a breadfruit tree and then from a gallows constructed for the purpose, by Australian soldiers and colonial officials. Their crime was the handing over to occupying Japanese forces of Australian Anglican missionaries and an American solider, who subsequently met vicious deaths—bayoneted and beheaded on nearby beaches. Then, eight years after the executions, the nearby Mt Lamington volcano erupted, killing thousands and devastating Higaturu. Today Higaturu remains uninhabited but laden with memory and meaning. The Mt Lamington eruption has been conceived both as a retaliation for the violence of the executed Orakaiva men and as a retaliation for the violence of the Australians who executed them. This paper explores Higaturu as a site of emplaced memory and narrative, and of ambiguous moral reckonings. Shaped by the violence of men and by the violence of land, Higaturu is a place where understandings of both converge and are transformed in the shadow of colonial pasts.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines moral anxieties in a post-conflict society.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I look at U-Vistract, an infamous money scheme with its origin in Port Moresby and Bougainville Island (PNG) that over time has reconfigured itself into a monarchical regime of sorts known as the Kingdom of Papala. The piece adopts U-Vistract primarily as an entry point into an analysis of local anxieties and concerns about the transformative effects and influences of social change and identity politics. The paper deals with various and often competing understandings about money, investment, wealth and certain ideas about what a good life constitutes. One issue the paper addresses pertains to the question about whether it is sufficient to explicate the workings of U-Vistract within the primer of economic calculus and fraud, detached from ideas about history, kinship, land, and myths, to which ideas about the entity have a powerful affinity. I examine the extent to which U-Vistract may be an articulation of deeply entrenched and complex cultural manifestation of moral anxieties and concerns in a society in the throes of a long and painful recovery from a costly conflict. More importantly I explore the extent to which notions about kinship, land, and myth underpin certain ideas about U-Vistract. For, part of what I intend to explore is the relation between the Panguna mine and U-Vistract as the locus of particular ideas about wealth generation, economic prosperity and the sensibilities about trust and betrayal that reverberate through the history of both the Panguna mine and U-Vistract.
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that piles of uncollected garbage and streams of sewage have become visceral reminders of the corruption of the Ben Ali regime. Waste symbolizes unfulfilled post-revolutionary aspirations in Tunisia and alters the moral geography of a country with stark regional inequalities.
Paper long abstract:
Waste creates and reaffirms moral geographies and socio-spatial hierarchies. However, little attention has been paid to how the obtrusive physical presence and the associated moral stigma of waste interact with authoritarian environmental ideologies of cleanliness. This paper argues that piles of uncollected garbage, streams of sewage and industrial pollution have become a daily visceral reminder of the corruption of the Ben Ali regime. Waste symbolizes unfulfilled post-revolutionary aspirations in Tunisia and alters the moral geography of a country with stark regional inequalities. The information presented here is based on archival research, interviews and participant observation with Tunisian's affected by the waste crisis and those trying to address it, like NGO workers, activists and government officials. This anthropological study suggests that Ben Ali's rule depended on the myths of the economic miracle, democratization, secularization and environmentalism, which were maintained through the tight control of information and the oppression of activists. These myths were predicated on a socio-spatial inequality, harmony or dissonance with the myths depended on social, spatial and economic positioning. Like poverty, waste and pollution are strong physical markers of that inequality, they signify corruption in both Islamic and Western moral registers. This stigma has the power to infect individuals and regions. "Dirty areas", a common Tunisian euphemism for poor areas with high crime rates and a lack of infrastructure in effect overflow with waste and are different sensuous and moral geographies. After the revolution, waste spilled into formerly "clean areas", threatening to morally corrupt them and bursting governmental myths.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes how, while becoming strong partners of the Northern Province Institution, 2 big NGOs progressively contributed to remodel Kanaks' views and claims on their land in the specific political context of "negotiated decolonization" New Caledonia has been engaged in since 1998.
Paper long abstract:
Since the years 2000 in New Caledonia, and more specifically in the Northern Province of this insular territory, world-wide known environmental NGOs have greatly been involved in environmental policymaking. Their influence on natural resources management within the Northern Province Institution has been so important in the past 10 years than we can currently observe that locals' public discourse on their own land and place is now matching internationally promoted values. This seems to lead to one unique co-built way of describing and claiming connection to land, both by NGOs and locals. And yet it is well known that in New Caledonia land has been the epicenter of both colonial and post-colonial politics, sense of place and connection to land do change consistently according to the actors.
The analysis presented here relies on two empirical case studies of protected areas and hotspots of the Caledonian outstanding vegetal biodiversity which management have been de facto delegated to international NGOs (Aoupinié Forest Massif and Mount Panié). More specifically, this paper aims to describe and analyze how, while becoming strong partners of the Northern Province Institution, two NGOs (CI and WWF) progressively contributed to remodel locals' views and claims on their land in the very specific political context of "negotiated decolonization" New Caledonia has been engaged in since the 1998 Noumea Agreement onward.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the way in which civil society intermediaries practice ‘controlled equivocation’ to make space for agonistic disagreement between adivasi Dongria Kondh people, and Vedanta Aluminium in India.
Paper long abstract:
Across the developing world, vulnerable and marginalized communities are engaged in struggles with government, corporations and development agencies over land. In these struggles, many indigenous communities attempt to assert non-dominant ontologies of land, and non-dominant understandings of appropriate ways to decide upon access to, control, use and ownership of land. These ontologies often collapse the nature/culture distinction that is distinctive of western modernity, and require not multiculturalism, but multi-naturism. Such struggles call for an agonistic approach to disagreement that engages rather than neutralises conflict. Yet, disputes involving ontological difference also test the limits of agonistic political theory in operationalizing an embrace of dissent and disagreement: How is this to take place when different parties are not talking about the same thing? Drawing on a case study of the Dongria Kondh adivasi community of Odisha, in Eastern India, and their (ultimately successful) struggle to prevent mining company Vedanta from acquiring their sacred mountain, Niyamgiri, this paper explores the role of controlled equivocation from civil society intermediaries in facilitating an agonistic engagement not only of a conflict of interests, but a conflict of ontologies.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the connections between place and personhood through agricultural practice in the Philippine uplands. I argue that swidden fields are transient, yet important, sites where human and non-human actors cyclically constitute each other as social and moral beings.
Paper long abstract:
Practices connecting place and personhood have been considered dialectical by anthropologists (Restikas 2007). Though attendant to historical and political contingencies, these conceptualisations have tended to privilege the agency of human actors in socio-spatial relations. In the southern Philippines, swidden (or shifting) agriculture is the most prominent form of environmental modification amongst indigenous peoples, and remains at the core of everyday social and spiritual practices that connect humans to the non-human world. While prosaic descriptions of swiddening emphasise the clearing, burning and cropping of forest plots as a means to secure subsistence needs, indigenous Pala'wan men and women must also navigate a complex array of human, spirit and animal relationships to modify their surroundings. This paper focuses, in particular, on the mythological origins of rice in human sacrifice to explore the connections between upland places and the performance of 'personhood' across the agricultural cycle. I argue that swidden fields are transient, yet important, sites where human and non-human actors cyclically constitute each other as social and moral beings.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines moral discourses surrounding attempts to restore former farmland in Western Australia. What constitutes ‘good’ ecological restoration, for whom are such activities good, and how do such activities relate to broader concerns regarding decolonization and place-making?
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines moral discourses surrounding attempts to restore former farmland in the south of Western Australia. Given the extent to which the ecology and hydrology of the region has been transformed, what constitutes 'good' ecological restoration and who decides this within a landscape experiencing rapid demographic change? Given contested histories of land occupation, for whom are such activities good, and how do such activities relate to broader concerns regarding decolonization and place-making in post settler societies? For many Australians, growing sympathy towards Indigenous Australians' prior claims to 'country' finds expression in what anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose has termed 'decolonisation'; a process of historical re-examination and social, cultural, political and ecological regeneration. Sensitive engagement with decolonisation may offer non-Indigenous Australians the opportunity to atone for environmental damage and Indigenous dispossession.. Yet such activities which may allow landholders to realize - or assert - a form of 'custodial belonging' akin to that of the Indigenous traditional owners of the land may also risk reproducing historical processes of appropriation and dispossession. Moreover, for many newcomers engaged in ecological restoration activities, their 'naturework' is deemed commensurate with the 'good life', yet how do such values sit alongside other narratives of land, identity and productive labour? In examining these questions this paper combines ethnographic research and textual evidence and interprets it through recent theoretical perspectives on place-based identity and the politics of dwelling.
Paper short abstract:
The morality of kinship and Christianity among the Maututu of West New Britain PNG is being defined by new horizons with the exploitation and commodification of land and forest resources under oil palm expansion and its related population explosion.
Paper long abstract:
Morality among the Maututu of West New Britain PNG is defined in terms of kinship relations located in space. Settlement places scattered across the landscape bear memories of ancestors who continue to intercede with living descendants on moral issues. This negotiated partnership between the contemporary domestic arrangements of villages and residents' continued ventures into the forest and spaces beyond the village has come under radical transformation with state-awarded logging leases, state purchases of large swathes of land for oil palm cultivation by nuclear estates and settlers, and villagers' conversion of village hinterland to cash crops of cocoa and oil palm. The morality of kinship and Christianity is being presently negotiated under conditions of commoditization of land and obligations and the incursion of thousands of oil palm settlers seeking land and marriage partners from Maututu. The moral standards of leadership, lineage membership and village responsibilities are undergoing reexamination that question the meaning of 'custom' and suggest new norms of interpersonal loyalty.
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces the influence of anthropology on the moral discourses of missionaries, focusing on their use of the term ‘birthright’ to describe land in Australia, PNG and Fiji. Though used by the colonisers, it was used to unify and defend Indigenous peoples against the threat of dispossession.
Paper long abstract:
The term 'birthright' has been used by anthropologists, missionaries and Indigenous Christians to assert the need to defend Indigenous rights to land. This paper offers a historical view of the influence of anthropology on colonial discourses around Indigenous land ownership, and how this was used to assert Indigenous rights to property.
Missionaries from the 1930s onwards were trained in anthropology and utilised the anthropological concepts of culture and difference to comprehend their day to day experiences in the mission field. They were thus engaged in the configuration and fusion of moral and anthropological concepts. Using anthropological concepts of morality, this paper explores the exchange of the term 'birthright' between missionaries and Indigenous Christians to describe Indigenous connections to land. The term became a powerful motif, utilised by missionaries to comprehend the processes of colonialism, and by Indigenous peoples to fight colonialism's systematic economic oppression and dispossession. This paper considers the morality of land and 'birthright': a term that both reflected colonial power and that was incorporated into Indigenous articulations of autonomy.