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- Convenors:
-
Elizabeth Rahman
(University of Oxford)
Laura Rival (University of Oxford)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Displacements of Power
- Location:
- Julian Study Centre 0.01
- Sessions:
- Thursday 5 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The ethnographic method provides manifold insights into how divergent areas of life converge and anthropology can holistically integrate the 2030 SDGs. Challenging the perception of a less-than-human nature, we foreground the discipline's role in sustaining global socio-environmental diversity.
Long Abstract:
Participant-observation and the ethnographic method provide manifold insights into how divergent areas of life converge; and often unexpectedly influence one another. Equally, an entangled anthropological analysis destabilizes an isolated understanding of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Facilitating an anthropologically-inspired, socio-environmentally diverse model of the "sustainable and desirable economy-in-society-in-nature", this panel invites participants to reflect on how anthropology can support holistic societal transitions. We challenge the perception of a less-than-human nature and seek contributions that are able to convey entanglement, either through an ethnographically attuned understanding of complexity or through the development of a pedagogical method that communicates ontoepistemolgically-challenging insights, or both. We urge contributors to develop a communication strategy that collaboratively engages other disciplines or practitioners, project-leaders and policy-makers, to forward an anthropological understanding of the world that gives voice to all our fine-grained nuances. With anthropology capable of holistically integrating the 2030 SDG, we seek to foreground the discipline's role in sustaining the global socio-environmental diversity on which life depends.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 5 September, 2019, -Jastinder Kaur (SOAS University of London) Richard Axelby (SOAS University of London)
Paper short abstract:
Anthropologists involved in the AHRC-GCRF funded 'Deepening Democracy' project in Ethiopia and Myanmar reflect on the complex set of relationships, hierarchies, and entanglements involved in helping develop international research coalitions in these countries.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on examples from the AHRC-GCRF funded Deepening Democracy project which provides funding and other forms of support to artists, activists and academics in Ethiopia and Myanmar, in this paper we offer some provisional reflections on the complex relationships, hierarchies, and entanglements - including but not limited to the conceptual, geographical, linguistic, institutional, organisational and structural - involved in shaping international research coalitions and contributing to SDGs. As anthropologists we are keenly aware that supporting societal transitions requires more than a myopic focus on achieving SDGs; rather it requires ongoing reflection, critique, and practical action to reorient the unequal structures of funding, monitoring, and evaluation in which we ourselves are enmeshed. This paper is an attempt - as the Deepening Democracy project approaches the final year of its three-year funding - to open up to scrutiny, both within the discipline and beyond, the conceits, constraints and collaborations involved in developing international research coalitions that span cultures and continents.
Thandeka Cochrane (King's College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores small-scale local libraries in rural northern Malawi that form part of literacy projects in the region, unpacking how they are entangled in global webs of moving materials, donations and donors, affective entanglements and space/place.
Paper long abstract:
Sustainable Development Goal number 4 calls for "Quality Education" for all young people across the globe. One of the key ways in which countries in southern Africa seek to address this goal is through a promotion of literacy and literacy activities. Based on ethnographic observations from 18 months fieldwork in a rural village conglomerate in northern Malawi, this paper explores the ways in which small scale local libraries have emerged in these villages. Using the work of Ian Hodder and Tim Ingold, it unpacks the networks, meshworks and entanglements around their material, social and epistemological emergence and presence. The paper focuses on two libraries, one in a school and one that forms part of an independent development project; it examines how these libraries came into being through the knotting of various global threads, from a chance meeting between a Canadian donor and ardent teacher to the material insistence of a stock-pile of books to be housed somewhere. The paper follows the material entanglements of the books that come into and through the libraries, as well as the library buildings themselves. It shows how affective entanglements of relation are built across the globe through relations between donors, volunteers, teachers and villagers, and explores the stickiness and leaking of the libraries into the communities they are built in. In examining rural libraries as globally entangled, the paper shows how small-scale micro projects in seemingly isolated rural villages are embedded in vast, far-flowing and complex global meshworks and entanglements.
Frances Cleaver ( University of Sheffield) Luke Whaley (University of Sheffield)
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses the challenge of researching the interplay between local people's worldviews and community management of land and water. We explore the potential of creative methods (diaries, storytelling and theatre) for generating practical tools to engage development practitioners.
Paper long abstract:
Community based management (CBM) has become the dominant development paradigm for managing natural resources (land, water, forests) in Africa. It is viewed as a key vehicle for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals relating to livelihoods and the environment, and empowering people to participate in local governance.
We know now that CBM doesn't work in practice as intended in policy, partly due to incommensurabilities between the global model and local lifeworlds. Policy makers often poorly understand the entangled ways in which people's worldviews shape their embodied practices of accessing , sharing and using natural resources, often producing unjust outcomes.
The UN Sustainable Development Agenda recognises the importance of culture and local knowledge, and local development agents engage daily with this. However, the significance of particular beliefs (such as the disciplining effects of witchcraft on womens' participation in community management) is mostly overlooked in professional development practice.
With this challenge in mind, and drawing on our research in Uganda, Malawi and Tanzania, we do the following:
1. Review evidence for the significance of local worldviews (and associated ideas of fair shares, just arrangements and proper orders) for community-based development initiatives.
2. Explore the potential of creative methods (solicited diary keeping, story-telling and participatory theatre) to offer culturally sensitive ways of researching the interplay between local worldviews and development initiatives.
3. Reflect on the possibility of also using creative methods to develop sensitising tools and techniques to engage development practitioners with these issues in ways that further more just and sustainable development.
Laura Rival (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the ways in which agroecological projects differ from traditional and indigenous pedagogies and contest mainstream education. It concludes with a discussion of how these findings may help us gain new insights about the interaction between anthropology and interdisicplinarity.
Paper long abstract:
Global challenges are best understood as aspirational goals facilitating a shift in societal values. Sustainability debates arise from a desire to develop economic activities that enhance the wellbeing of people while ensuring the maintenance of integrated social and ecological systems. While promoting novel approaches to human development, capabilities and happiness, sustainability debates also encourage new thinking about the role of education beyond its framing as a capability, a citizen right, or a public good. On-going fieldwork with Latin American agroecology movements provides many insights into the practical knowledge and the values imparted through agroecological learning and teaching. Some of the reasons why many agroecology projects are based on radical pedagogies offering alternatives to mainstream education are examined. I focus more particularly on two specific issues, the nature of 'work' and the characteristics of 'organisation.' I then compare and contrast the pedagogical approaches used in agroecological movements with the more implicit native Amazonian pedagogies that a range of anthropologists and educationalists have been studying over the last two decades. The patterning of commonality and difference between these two bodies of what I call 'vernacular knowledge' has significant implications for the anthropological understanding of cultural knowledge transmission. Such patterning has in turn various implications for understanding dynamic interactions between anthropology and interdisicplinarity.
Elizabeth Rahman (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on SDG4 Education, this paper begs an enlarged understanding of what formal education implies and explores its deeply entangled relationship to other SDG. It examines indigenous pedagogies as a careful biosocial endeavour and their relationship to human and pan-species flourishing.
Paper long abstract:
The learning environment, the methods educational facilitators employ, the social and cultural milieu, the physical space and setting, the palpable atmosphere and the attitude of those present shape the potential for human development and are themselves shaped by humans. While a host of outdoor and forest school initiatives aim at countering 'nature deficit', this paper explores the phenomenon of nature learning and details ways of attending to, being in and caring for the environment. Focusing on ethnographies of childhood within 'animist' ontoepistemologies, this paper recasts the question of learning in the diffractive light of pedagogy, child development, metacognition, neurophysiology, microbiology and epigenetics, enlarging our understanding of how learning takes place and reframing the question of what exactly is being learnt. Teaching a curriculum outdated by research-insights in both the sciences and humanities, perpetuates an inoperative paradigm. The paradigm also endures by associated pedagogic methods and teaching styles in classrooms that instil unsustainable relational habits. With the example of a 30-year strong indigenous intercultural teacher training initiative in Peru, the paper explores how open and abiding attention and intentional attention sit alongside both didactic teaching and dialogic 'knowledge exchange' practices. Paying special attention to how perceptual modes are reinforced through epistemic embedding and the Buen Vivir ethos, the paper forwards a model of learning as a holistic and biosocial human endeavour, with implications for the other 16 SDGs.
Mark Lindley-Highfield of Ballumbie Castle (University of Strathclyde)
Paper short abstract:
The 2030 Sustainable Development Goals set ambitious targets to bring the world to an equitable level in terms of meeting certain basic human needs. The concept of equity, though, is not unproblematic, as we see within education in Scotland. Anthropology offers us a pedagogy of equity to assist.
Paper long abstract:
Equity is at the heart of policy and the current educational curriculum in Scotland. Pupil Equity Funding (PEF) seeks to bridge the gap between the disadvantaged and the advantaged by allocating economic resources to those schools where - within their catchment communities - they are at their most scarce. Bridging the Attainment Gap is concerned with the transformation of this inequity into a level playing field so that those from more economically challenged backgrounds have a better chance of achieving their full potential.
Looking outward, the curricular focus on social justice and global citizenship demonstrates a commitment to global equity and developing an understanding amongst learners of equitable rights yet inequitable realities. The 2030 Sustainable Development Goals commit to the transformation of these rights into realities, and this is where anthropology steps in.
Anthropology permits a critically supportive pedagogy of the concept of equity, where equity does not have to mean identical. Cultural hegemony and western imperialism together write a picture of the world that mirrors some of our own society's preconceptions. Anthropology allows us to untangle these intermingled understandings of equity and development to appreciate what development means in other societies' terms. Furthermore, rather than helping other societies to follow us, anthropology can encourage us to allow others to step ahead, becoming the pioneers of future developments rather than the followers of regressive footsteps through to progression.
This paper explores the role of anthropology in developing a pedagogy of equity in terms of delivering the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.
Helen Wadham (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Paper short abstract:
SDG 15 (Life on land) challenges us to rethink our relationship with other species. This paper offers a critical reflection on human/nonhuman agency by bringing together new materialism and Critical Theory via an ethnographically informed study of human-horse entanglements.
Paper long abstract:
Sustainable Development Goal 15 (Life on land) challenges us to rethink our relationship with other species. New materialism offers a promising framework for such an analysis by emphasising society as comprising interactions between myriad human and nonhuman actors (e.g. Latour 2007), Ingold; 2008). However, a critical approach requires we consider how this human/nonhuman agency is embedded within broader socio-political networks. This article responds by drawing on longstanding but overlooked ideas from Critical Theory to examine how nonhuman agency intersects with relations of place and power. When combined with recent research into human-animal relations within anthropology and beyond, Critical Theory contributes to the debate in three ways. First, the ideas of Horkheimer and Adorno in particular help us understand the mutual marginalisation of animals and people in industrial society, in a way that enriches our understanding of agency and other concepts like citizenship. Second, Critical Theory provides a framework through which we might challenge that marginalisation. Habermas' notion of deliberation is especially helpful here, enlivened by multispecies research into the role of embodiment and affect. Third, Critical Theory posits an alternative vision of a "good life" for humans and animals, in which ethical relations may be possible even within relations of power. Human relationships with domestic animals are especially distinctive and revealing. In particular, horses hold a unique place in our collective unconscious and I therefore illustrate the analysis throughout with examples of horse-human relationships drawn from existing research and exploratory ethnographic fieldwork in the UK.
Andrés González Dinamarca (Universidad de Chile)
Paper short abstract:
Several interpretations on the 'religious system' of the Mapuche have been developed over the latest century, most if not all of the time rooted in an 'external' auto-placement of the observer. I discuss these analyses from an ethnographic critical review of the nature of Mapuche spirits.
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims to discuss the place of the Mapuche spirituality within and outside the modern society of Chile, by confronting the very roots of their respective ontologies. In this way, it must be noted that even if the very category of 'spirit' as a master signifier which procedes from hegemonic western languages forcely leads to a miscomprehenssion about what could be called the 'spiritual life' of the Mapuche, yet it pervives in most of everyday and ceremonial practices and discourses, commonly treated by ethnologists as 'beliefs' or less, but actually being more close to an empirical based corpus of knowledge than usually admited. Thus, Mapuche spiritual categories will be explored in order to develop (or unreveal) a 'language of spirituality' on its own terms, which can give light to certain controversial topics such as what is the actual nature of the indigenous 'faith', whose are the so called 'deities' of a 'pantheon' in classic literature, and so on. This critical review, rooted on an ethnographic work systematically held since 2015, will finally permit to debate the political status of anthropologists's heterologies, since representation may have been influenting a major transformation of the experience through various instances of mediation, in such a way that not only interpellates the traditional imagery of a neutral positioning of the researcher, but remarks the need for reset the coordinates of a discussion that has been monopolized by a 'scientific' skepticism whose main assumptions actively oppose the foundations of indigenous spiritual life.