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- Convenor:
-
Tanya King
(Deakin University)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Living with Others
- Location:
- NIKERI KC2.214
- Sessions:
- Thursday 24 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
Short Abstract:
This panel extends anthropology’s ongoing enchantment with multispecies ethnography, and extends the scope of discussion to include those engaged in overlapping debates in other disciplines, including ecology, human geography and marine biology.
Long Abstract:
"Multispecies ethnography as an anthropological modality mirrors other ‘animal’ or ‘post human’ turns in disciplines such as human geography, sociology and conservation biology. While there are no doubt overlaps in terms of theoretical considerations, this panel invites a practical consideration of how insights in a range of disciplines impacts on the lives, ‘bare lives’, deaths and annihilations of animals (including humans), non-humans, cosmologies, and ecosystems. The panel invites considerations of:
• Interdisciplinary overlap;
• Interdisciplinary clash;
• How conservation theory is reflected in development frameworks targeting human groups;
• The ongoing fetishization of ‘wilderness’ and ‘wildness’;
• (How) can conservation organisations incorporate theoretical insights into policy and legislation?"
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 24 November, 2022, -Tyler King (Deakin University)
Paper short abstract:
Viewing urban environments as multispecies places is crucial for inclusive planetary justice in the Anthropocene. This paper attempts to address the issue of multispecies recognition in cities by exploring the kin-making relationships in community biodiversity projects.
Paper long abstract:
The inclusion of more-than-human others in urban planning has been discussed widely by scholars who recognise that urban planning and development has historically viewed cities as separate from nature (Houston et al., 2018), even though cities have been created by the ‘raw’ materials of the more-than-human world (Wolch, 2002).
However, these dualistic boundaries between the urban and ‘nature’ are socially and culturally constructed and are reproduced through “colonial ways of knowing and being by enacting universalizing claims and, consequently, further subordinating other ontologies” (Sundburg 2013, p. 33). As we move towards the next geological epoch of the Anthropocene, with all its unknown climatic futures, cities need to be reimagined as multispecies places.
My paper attempts to address the issue of multispecies recognition in cities by exploring community biodiversity projects in Melbourne, Australia. Building upon Houston et al. call to “Make Kin, Not Cities!” (2018), I will be drawing from participant observation and interviews, exploring how the multispecies kin-making relationships that emerge in urban environments are both resisted and encouraged through uneven power dynamics between people, plants, and non-human animals.
I argue that by engaging more with the lifeworlds of more-than-human others, often through the ties and entanglements of those human communities most intimately connected to them, more inclusive forms of planetary justice come into view.
Tribute Jabulile Mboweni (The University of Queensland)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the contemporary interactions between people and elephants in Mapungubwe National Park, in Limpopo province, South Africa. The paper seeks to create an understanding of how these human-animal interactions shape people’s relationship with the place.
Paper long abstract:
Although Mapungubwe National Park is a protected area in terms of South Africa’s National Environmental Management: Protected Areas Act (57 of 2003), it is also a World Heritage Site and was the first of South Africa’s national parks to be inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. Mapungubwe was listed as a site of significance for the “important interchange of human values” which produced important changes in southern Africa from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries AD (UNESCO, 2019). Despite the fact that people moved in and out of the area at different times, there has been a continuous human presence in the area, and to this day, it is surrounded by farms, communal lands, and other protected areas. Using ethnographic material, this paper examines the interactions between visitors and people who live and work in the Mapungubwe region and the elephant population whose numbers have increased significantly since the establishment of the national park. The paper seeks to create an understanding of what it means for people who currently interact with this area to share this environment with elephants and how these human-animal interactions shape people’s experiences of, and relationship with the place. Additionally, I discuss the elephant management strategies that conservation managers employ in protected areas and how these strategies have led to the influences that elephants have in shaping protected areas and the lives of the people who live in and around protected areas.