Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how ancestral spirits and corporate sorcerers shape the form and outcomes of ritual among indigenous Marind in West Papua. These conflicting supernatural forces speak to broader transformations in Marind cosmology arising from ecological destruction and capitalist incursion.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in West Papua, this paper examines the 'failure' and 'success' of two rain-making ceremonies - one hosted by an indigenous Marind expert, the other by an Indonesian oil palm corporation. Participants conceived the failure of the first ritual as a punishment meted by ancestral spirits against Marind who support agribusiness expansion. Meanwhile, the success of the corporate ceremony confirmed rumors that corporations wield foreign and powerful forms of sorcery. Drawing on Gregory Bateson's notion of the double bind, I suggest that the ritual outcomes dramatize the irreconcilable demands placed on Marind by custom and capitalism. Attempts to endorse agribusiness incurs ancestral punishment, while efforts to oppose it are thwarted by the superior power of corporate sorcerers. In this context, I argue, the moral implications of the corporate ritual's unexpected 'success' prove just as problematic as those of the customary ritual's dramatic 'failure'. At the same time, the ritual outcomes described in this article add another level of meaning to Bateson's double bind by pointing to an asymmetry in power between the two figures of authority from whom Marind receive contradictory injunctions. On the one hand, ancestral spirits affirmed their power by thwarting Marinds' attempts to end the drought. But these same ancestral spirits proved incapable of preventing corporate sorcerers from bringing the rains. Co-opted yet efficacious, corporate rituals point to a new social order in which both Marind and their ancestral spirits find themselves subjected to foreign sources of supernatural control.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation offers a preview of Feral Atlas, an interactive website co-curated with my colleagues Anna Tsing, Alder Keleman-Saxana and Feifei Zhou. Feral Atlas brings art, science and the humanities into dialogue to offer a description of the more-than-human Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation offers a preview of Feral Atlas, an interactive website co-curated with my colleagues Anna Tsing, Alder Keleman-Saxana and Feifei Zhou. Feral Atlas brings together more than sixty field-based observations from scientists, humanists, artists and indigenous activists to offer a description of the more-than-human Anthropocene. Through these reports, the atlas constructs a method. This method asks researchers to hold their attention to the scene where infrastructures create feral dynamics.

This talk will focus on the artful play of form and content through which Feral Atlas orchestrates its argument. Plastic bags, radioactive woodchips, cane toads, deadly plant pathogens, underwater noise, water hyacinths: these and other feral entities lead users through a website designed to reveal unexpected connections and moments of reflection, while simultaneously attempting to destabilise the sense of mastery that digital technologies have trained us to expect. By bringing together art and science, combining moments of affect and empirical observation, Feral Atlas refracts new ways of seeing the Anthropocene—so helping us to recognize how certain humans and non-humans are co-creating our current earth crisis, while encouraging us to pay closer, careful attention rather than simply turning away in horror.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I explore the value of time and nostalgia in an Asmat community. More specifically, I focus on their perceptions of pasts that are becoming increasingly distanced (the "Goliath" Age) and the ways Asmat attempt to reconnect to them by means of religious rituals and artistic practices.

Paper long abstract:

Recent socio-cultural changes of Asmat society (Papua, Indonesia) have provoked a widespread sense of nostalgia for distanced pasts. Asmat people say that in the olden days they were stronger, bigger, healthier and braver, a kind of "Goliaths" (Wosten). In the 1950s, the arrival of the first Dutch missionaries and government officials are seen to have accelerated time and to have ignited polusi (Ind. 'pollution'). This term does not merely identify the process of physical and environmental contamination. Rather, it signals the increasing detachment of Asmat from their mytho-historical pasts that, in turn, is considered as the main cause for Asmat current sense of dependency and frailty. Prompted by a public screening of Asmat historical footages in the brand-new Jakarta-sponsored village of Amanamkai, I explore the related perceptions of time with reference to people's current desires for historical knowledge and reappropriation, and the new meanings that are given to history. In particular, I focus on the tension between pasts that are becoming more and more remote and pasts that people long for, as it emerges from local religious and artistic practices. This exploration helps us to cast light on the impermanence of history in Asmat and develop, outside temporal linearity, a seemingly foretold - but ever-changing - destiny.

Paper short abstract:

Many cultures across Australia and the Pacific acknowledge the existence of little people who are not human. In New Ireland (PNG) we call them kipang. What do encounters with and stories about kipang and their little people fraternity tell us about humanity, the world, the environment, and life?

Paper long abstract:

Many cultures across Australia and the Pacific acknowledge the existence of little people who are not human. We humans have many names for them: Menehune in Hawaii (although the question of their humanness is sometimes under debate), djan'djari in parts of Australia, kipang in parts of Papua New Guinea, veli in Fiji. They are often described as being hairy humanoids with big eyes, short in stature (about three or four feet tall) and having special skills or insight. In this article, I use case studies from Australia and the Pacific to examine kipang and members of their little-people fraternity in terms of the lessons they can teach us. In particular, I ask, "What do encounters with - and stories about - these humanoids tell us about humanity, the world, the environment, and life?" My methodological approach in collecting and analysing data adheres to the teachings of Epeli Hau'ofa, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith and Irma McClaurin in terms of "Islander-ising", decolonising and bringing a Black feminist framework to anthropology. As an anthropologist of New Zealand Pakeha and New Guinea Islands descent, I draw upon my socialisation as a mixed race woman to bring further insight to the topic.

Paper short abstract:

Contemporary social theory has argued for a 'loving' post-environmentalism based on intimate care. I explore how these ideals map awkwardly onto Indigenous Pala'wan relationships with animals, plants and spiritual entities that hold intimacy in tension with fear, violence and death.

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary social theory has invested heavily in reforming human relationships with the non-human world as an alternative to the environmental destruction and ecological injustices wrought by industrial capitalism and enduring neocolonialism. In addition to the work of Haraway, Latour, Tsing and others who articulate a 'loving' post-environmentalism based on intimate care, this aspiration converges with some Indigenous scholars in North America, Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia whose ontologies are often rooted in kin-based relationship non-human world. Together, these trends have formed part of an influential scholarly discourse that envisions 'care, love and kinship' (Todd 2017) as the solution to the near-apocalyptic social and environmental conditions of the Anthropocene. Drawing on ethnographic work in the Philippines, I explore how these ideals map awkwardly onto Indigenous Pala'wan relationships with animals, plants and spiritual entities that hold intimacy in tension with fear, violence and death. I argue that care-based futurisms present a narrowed field of possibilities for large numbers of peoples seeking to strategically validate their relationships with nature as conservation practice. For Pala'wan people, this primacy threatens to reinforce longstanding biases in which Indigenous Filipinos have historically been positioned as wasteful "users" rather than caring "managers" of their environment - an experience common to many Indigenous communities globally who cannot, or do not, articulate their relationship with the environment through a language of loving managerialism.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the interplay between nation-building, socio-economic development and hrooy (chthonic-ancestral vectors/"spirits") in an ethnic Khmu community in upland northern Laos. It posits hrooy as active stakeholders participating in local engagements with modernization.

Paper long abstract:

The ethnic Khmu community of Sanjing (a pseudonym) has been caught up in the turbulent changes that have swept through northern Laos in recent decades. War, revolution, authoritarian socialism, scientific materialism, high modernism and neoliberal developmentalism have engaged, challenged and re-shaped Sanjing's local livelihoods-politics-cosmology nexus.

This paper examines how local chthonic-ancestral beings (hrooy) have helped the Khmu of Sanjing make sense of and manage these changes. In particular, I trace the jostling between Sert (the erstwhile "master hrooy" of Sanjing's mountain ridge), the modernizing nation-state and the encroaching forces of global capitalism. I suggest that Sert's negotiations, resistance and ultimate acquiescence has enabled locals to engage development with an encompassing impetus and comforting sense of continuity. This has helped locals to reconcile the intense ambivalences surrounding their own ostensible modernization. The story of Sert thus lends ethnographic credence to the claim that ostensibly (un)dead and "sacred" beings crucially participate in local engagements with modernity. It also speaks to the question of how modernism/developmentalism may subvert or reconfigure existing modalities of the "sacred."

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the spectral dimensions of bureaucracies, introducing a concept of policy hauntology to explain the lingering effects of policies past as these linger in bodies, processes and stairwells.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the spectral dimensions of bureaucracies, introducing a concept of policy hauntology to explain the lingering effects of policies past as these linger in bodies, processes and stairwells. It draws from critiques of the anthropocentric bias of studies of human-filled worlds, to better think through the enchantments of policy.

Paper short abstract:

Conservationists see human behaviour as both driver and solution to planetary crises. Individualist and collectivist approaches to socio-environmental responsibility differ in their scope to address the human obstacle to ecological biodiversity. Are more-than-human engagements lacking?

Paper long abstract:

Individualist approaches to environmental education—shutting off taps while brushing one's teeth, turning off lights not in use, or reusing coffee keepcups—are necessary but limited and ignore the politics of issues such as consumption, food insecurity, and resource depletion. Responsibilising individuals sets aside collective, systemic change and leaves governments and corporations to perpetuate socio-environmental problematic activities unhindered by the critique of an engaged, questioning, and politicised citizenry. Responsibilising individuals, however, does set new codes and standards for the presentational self. With a new set of moral engagements, consumers have a pretext for purchasing products that are good for the environment and enhance self-image. For example, bracelets made from ocean waste, vegan wares, and ethical and sustainable designer brands. In other words, activism and advocacy can become a new excuse for conspicuous consumption. Where does that leave "more-than-human" engagements? More worryingly, given that 70% of the world's population will live in urban areas by 2050, will "more-than-human" engagements fall by the wayside altogether? In the absence of contact with rural and natural habitats, future generations will grow up without an essential understanding of multispecies reciprocity. How do we move the problem currently being ascribed to individuals and their problematic behaviour to a, more critical and therefore useful, socio-political understanding of forces that engages in sustainable patterns of multispecies reciprocity that sees environmental education not only as education in, about and for the environment, but also with the environment?

Paper short abstract:

The Chimaera was a fearful hybrid creature. This term has come to describe anything composed of different parts, perceived as wildly imaginative or implausible. Through a phenomenological and auto-ethnographic approach, this work explores what does it mean to become a chimaera and rethink hybridity.

Paper long abstract:

In Greek mythology the Chimaera was a fearful fire-breathing hybrid creature of Lycia in Asia Minor, one of the offspring of monsters Typhon and Echidna. The Chimaera is usually depicted as a lion, with the head of a goat protruding from its back, and a tail that might end with a snake or a dragon head.

The term 'chimera' has come to describe anything composed of different parts, anything that is perceived as wildly imaginative, implausible, or unattainable.

In medicine and genetics this term indicates an organism containing a mixture of genetically different tissues. How does it feel to incorporate such dreadful hybridity? What does it mean to become a 'chimaera'?

Inspired by a feminist post-humanist approach that recognises a continuity between all living creatures including plants, animals, microorganisms and humans (Haraway 1991), and based on a phenomenological and auto-ethnographic approach to illness (Carel 2016), this exploration investigates how embracing the concept of hybridity (Latour, 1991) can help us overcome dualistic thinking and reshape our relationship to the world.

By looking at 'other' ways of being-toward-the-world (Merleau-Ponty, 1945), and how can we reorient, act, think, move, and feel differently, this work suggests a reconsideration of the relationship to our lived environment and its inhabitants.

This work shows how drawing on embodied knowledge can challenge dominant perspectives and help us explore ways to engage with transformative and uncertain times. It shows how monsters and chimeras can help us rethink our categories and cope with impending threats and radical transformations.

Paper short abstract:

This research aims to build an expanded view of food and nutritional security and sovereignty efforts in contemporary Vanuatu, viewing the 2015 tropical cyclone Pam as a point of rupture. In making space for multi-vocal foodways & contemporary identity, how may not only different groups of people but multiple species and entities be included and considered?

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to highlight the ways that ‘food’ is deeply tied to notions of kastom and as central to the ongoing crafting of contemporary identity and ni-Vanuatu personhood. Gardening and agriculture is often framed as a ‘parenting’ of the land and of plants, requiring a deep engagement with more-than-human entities, ancestors and more, yet food aid during disasters may simultaneously be framed as creating ongoing disasters of NDC’s and a growing reliance on introduced foodstuff.

Engagements with food production attends to notions of agency in the land, plant-human kinship systems and cosmologies, and is seen as spiritually, socially and bodily nourishing. The contemporary Siloa Slow Food Vanuatu Association is working to preserve and promote traditional foodways and a continuation of such nourishment and values, resisting introduced food related values. However, I argue there are significant gendered implications and considerations to be made. This paper seeks to illuminate women’s emplaced plant, gardening and food stories, and sing up both men and women’s intimate relationships with the plants they so deeply rely on for nourishment. It pays particular attention to the grounded ways that women bargain for power through food in public and private domains, complicating universalized prescriptions of human-rights based approaches to participation.

As the climate changes, and as the ‘taste of place’ shifts, particularly in urban Port Vila, food related notions of gendered personhood, power, identity and agency are being reconfigured and creatively ‘remixed.’ Applying a feminist and multi-species lens to build a polyphonic view of food as much more than sustenance, this work engages with sensory ethnography and creative methods to explore alternative food futures and to make audible, visible, or even taste-able, the frictions between past, contemporary and future values, food voices and hungers.