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- Convenors:
-
William Skinner
(University of Adelaide)
Alison Dundon (University of Adelaide)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Life on Earth
- Location:
- WPE Moriac
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 23 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
Short Abstract:
This panel engages with concepts of 'liveliness' in landscape. What makes a landscape alive? Does 'aliveness' emerge from landscape itself, or does it spring from intimate relationships between places, people, and the more-than-human, based on a care and attentiveness that must be maintained?
Long Abstract:
In recent decades, anthropological focus has emphasised landscapes as repositories of lived experience, meaning and belonging. Far from being simply a collection of interlinked and imbricated places, landscapes draw attention to the mutuality of places, people, and the more-than-human. The liveliness of landscape is evident in multitudinous ways: through teeming multispecies animal, vegetal, fungal, microbial worlds and, beyond, into the material, spiritual and ephemeral. It has become customary in the age of the Anthropocene to emphasise various ways in which landscapes are changing and dying: the result of destructive processes associated with late capitalism, which appears to threaten the very vitality of the earth itself. While this remains an ongoing concern and important analytical theme, this panel seeks to emphasise the continuing 'liveliness' of landscapes.
We ask, what makes a 'lively' landscape? Does 'aliveness' emerge from landscape itself, and/or does it spring from intimate relationships between places, people, and the more-than-human, based on an attention and care that must be maintained? Might we, by dwelling in and living with landscapes, enliven them through our own (or other's) attentiveness? As such, this panel seeks papers that engage with, and interrogate, living landscapes and liveliness in all its forms, including: landscapes of lived realities and imaginaries; landscapes of power and governance; violence; equity and inequity; belonging and exclusion; care, attentiveness and intimacy; slow and fast landscapes; landscapes of technology and infrastructure; production and consumption; generation and degradation; fraught and fragile landscapes; and processes associated with decolonising landscapes.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 23 November, 2022, -William Skinner (University of Adelaide)
Paper short abstract:
In Australian wine producing regions, appropriate use and management of water is a fundamental concern. This paper explores the diverse meanings and values that water of different types can hold in South Australian viticultural landscapes, arguing for a conceptual focus on 'hydrosocial terroir'.
Paper long abstract:
The taste and qualities of a wine or other agricultural product are often said to be fundamentally influenced by terroir: geographical specificity and the interplay of emplaced natural and human processes. Wine producers and regions therefore trade on understandings of value bound to place. Traditionally, this has related most specifically to soils and geologies, but in many Australian wine regions a more fundamental question revolves around access to and management of water. This paper, based upon ongoing ethnographic research in the McLaren Vale and Langhorne Creek wine regions of South Australia, explores the way agrarian landscapes are understood through peoples’ complex, emplaced hydrosocial relationships: with ground and surface water, and the technologies, governance and social relations of irrigation regimes. In these regions, an ethical imperative to conserve and appropriately manage water resources in the face of water scarcity and climate risk is reflected in a valorisation of practices that minimise water wastage, including water recycling, minimal-irrigation and dry-growth viticulture. A hydrosocial terroir perspective thus emphasises the role of water in production and brings into focus the sometimes-difficult relationships between viticulture and other land uses. It raises questions about how we value water: as an economic resource for production? As a common good? As a precarious source of life and liveliness? We often conceive of water as a homogenous substance approached quantitatively and volumetrically, but in this paper I argue that it is best instead to think of waters as plural and heterogeneous, with vastly different meanings, qualities and implications.
Lucy Bonanno (James Cook University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between people and waterscapes in an ethnographic analysis of Local Marine Authority Committees in QLD. The site of the LMAC meeting is one of confluence between different interests and is rich for unpacking the co-constructedness of water/human relationships.
Paper long abstract:
Water has always been crucial to human survival and development as a source of bodily sustenance but also as an organisational unit or conduit of self and place-making. Watersheds, confluences, and places of watery fecundity are as much constructed and constructing ideologies as they are physical places. These watery places are often represented as distinct, bordered areas or jurisdictions (on maps for instance) but are materially and figuratively intertwined and connected with the wider ecology and surrounding discourses. In contrast to viewing such landscapes as fluid and interconnected, management and protection bodies and authorities often try to delineate jurisdictional boundaries and bureaucratic systems that are at odds with this fluidity. In fact, these rigid structural boundaries and systems often serve to re-enforce power hegemonies even when seemingly trying to undo or disrupt them. For instance, community engagement in water and resource management is touted as a way for those who live in such communities to become part of the management process. However, it is all too easy for community engagement and consultation to become a performative process that mostly serves to re-make extant power relations. Viewing the human/environment relationship as a material process suggests the community engagement process may benefit from a more fluid approach where, rather than thinking about water, it may help to think like water.
Benedicta Rousseau (University of Melbourne) Jennifer Day (The University of Melbourne)
Paper short abstract:
We explore connections between place and displacement for residents of Port Vila without formal leasehold for the land they live on. Prompted by Kapila (2022), we consider the relations that emerge from dispossession, and how relationality springs from insecure or threatened connections to place.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the connections between place and the experience of belonging and/or displacement for residents of Port Vila without formal leasehold for the land they live on. Prompted by Kapila (2022), we consider the relations that emerge from dispossession, and how relationality springs from insecure or threatened connections to place. The seeming coherence of co-located “communities” does not always match with the processes followed to enable access to land and also to dispossess people of rights to occupy land. Those processes are often personalised, while the act of dispossession plays out publicly in a depersonalised manner. Evictions in Vila are often referred to by the name of the location affected – Destination, Bladinieres, Snake Hill, Vila North – giving the sense that it is whole “communities” being removed, rather than specific individuals. Eviction is seen as an indiscriminate tool, wielded against the community without consideration of individual circumstances. Yet our interviews with Vila residents at risk of eviction show that within the same locations, there are often significant differences in how residents have ended up living there, who they have made agreements with and /or payments to, and how secure they feel their right to occupancy remains. This can occur in parallel with different definitions of community – shown in alternative names, boundaries, access to infrastructure, and recognition of authority. We consider how these differences then inform their sense of security and future plans in relation to each other and the landscapes in which those relations occur.
Nathalia Dothling Reis (The University of Queensland)
Paper short abstract:
In this work, through the local narratives, I explore the complex relation between quilombola people from Aldeia, Brazil and their territory. This relation is marked by buried navels and treasures, memories about the Lagoa de Ibiraquera and the elderly people, who are gone, but remains there.
Paper long abstract:
During my master’s research I had the opportunity to work with two quilombola communities in the southern region of Brazil, which are black rural traditional communities located in different regions of Brazil. In the quilombo called Aldeia, many narratives and ethnographic scenes made me think about the concept of territory. Quilombola and Indigenous communities face many difficult situations since Brazil was colonized and with the current government of Bolsonaro, they are being more persecuted and having their fundamental rights menaced. These actions are part of the global capital interest in these lands, which Arturo Escobar (2015) calls modern ontology. On the other hand, we have the traditional people, such as the quilombola communities who express a totally different relation with the territory, being in what the author calls relational ontology. Through the local narratives, I explore the complex relation between quilombola population from Aldeia and their territory, which can be considered a lively entity. This relation is marked by buried navels and treasures, memories about the Lagoa de Ibiraquera and the elderly people, who are gone, but remains there.
Alison Dundon (University of Adelaide)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I explore interconnected, embodied and intimate relations between animals and Ancestors in an ancient migration to ‘lively’ places in PNG, and argue that the bodies and capacities of Ancestors and animals were transformed as they moved in and through these dynamic and powerful places.
Paper long abstract:
Ancestral stories prominent among the Gogodala speakers of Papua New Guinea, foreground the role and agency of animals as intimate companions of the Ancestors in their travels and actions throughout the original migration from the ‘the first place’ to the spaces villagers continue to inhabit. The Ancestral stories narrate the movements and role of these non-human animals as attentive agents, who once shared a language with the Ancestors during the time when the environment was ‘alive’ and places engaged with animals and Ancestors, alike. These stories note that the Ancestors were the first to discover ‘alive’, powerful, and engaged places, followed closely by non-human animals, who walked, talked and worked with them. In these ‘alive’ places, Ancestors and animals as well as canoes, bushes and palms spoke to each other in a common language with cassowaries, birds-of-paradise, bush wallaby, dogs, crocodiles and pigs. In and through the experiences of the Ancestral migration, the bodies and capacities of both Ancestors and animals were transformed, as they moved in and through these lively places. In this paper, I explore the interconnected and intimate relations established in and through these places in the motions and actions of animals and Ancestors via an analysis of the complex and multidimensional aspects of the relations between non-human animals and more-then-human beings. Such relations and actions continue to shape not only the living world of Gogodala Ancestors, but also their human descendants living in Papua New Guinea.