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- Convenors:
-
Lydia Gibson
(Columbia University)
Sahil Nijhawan (ZSL)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Environment
- Location:
- Examination Schools Room 12
- Start time:
- 21 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel offers anthropologists, social scientists, and conservationists an opportunity to examine constructions of narratives in conservation. It also explores the role indigeneity, positionality, and analytical approaches (to which disciplines are tethered) play in reinforcing imaginings.
Long Abstract:
Conservation is becoming as much about networks of relationships as it is about scientific observations. Increased emphasis on people-centred approaches by international agencies and donors have seen indigenous knowledge and status grow ever visible and increasingly politicised. In this wake, the construction of narratives within conservation, underpinned by imaginings of indigenous identities, can legitimise priorities, satisfy donor criteria and anchor western science to local contexts.
Within the anthropology of conservation, conservationists are criticised for the simultaneous imaginings of indigenous groups as "ecologically noble savages" - interlocuters in conservation efforts - and unrestrained users/adversaries whose symbioses with nature is a by-product of the limited scale and scope of their civilisation. Anthropologists too are guilty of imaginings: under the guise of ontological inferences, indigenous groups are portrayed as distinct, intersecting, conflicting, destroyed, and/or evolving. This panel seeks to consider these imaginings used by conservation scientists, NGOs, states, anthropologists, and indigenous groups themselves whose identities and roles as political actors have been shaped by these narratives. The structure proposed is three 90-minute sessions of four 15-minute talks and discussion, each on an indigenous activity: hunting, protected areas, and ecological knowledge. We invite papers from anthropologists, social scientists and conservationists in hopes of promoting more collaboration in an inherently transdisciplinary topic. In the spirit of the ontological turn (and Kant's Copernican turn), we also hope to encourage collective reflexivity that allows all participants to consider the analytical paradigms of their discipline as not only tools to evaluate conservation efforts, but as objects within these efforts.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Lydia Gibson (Columbia University)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation considers how the construction of conservation narratives both utilises and undermines indigenous identities. In particular, the use of neotropical parrots and indigenous communities as cornerstones of conservation efforts in the Caribbean and the wider Americas are expounded.
Paper long abstract:
Psittacines (parrots/macaws/parakeets) are flagship species that often become the cornerstone of neotropical conservation efforts. They are also a fundamental aspect of resource use in the Americas, with many indigenous groups capturing them as pets. The large degree of speciation and endemic nature of many psittacine species means that conservation efforts around them are often localised, small-scale, and driven by individual conservationists. The data generated, estimations of threat, and policy recommendations become especially amplified given the species' visibility and relative vacuum of land conservation in the Caribbean.
In Jamaica, the Yellow-billed and Black-billed parrots have become central priorities in the campaign against mining in the Cockpit Country forest, which has led to its designation as a protected area. The campaign relied heavily on biodiversity (specifically, parrot) conservation and the indigenous Maroons - who live on the forest's southern border. The autochthonous Maroon identity underpinned discourse around the importance of preserving the region's cultural heritage, while data outlining the rapid decline of parrot populations supported the outcry for stringent enforcement measures around domestic and international pet trade. My research so far has discovered 1) that until now nobody is aware of how - or even if - Maroons currently use the forest (this includes their relationship to parrot hunting) and 2) the impact of hunting on population numbers may have been vastly overestimated. In this presentation, I seek to explore the impact of these discoveries on conservation spaces in the Caribbean, whose narratives are often dominated by singular western voices.
Ngamjahao Kipgen (IIT Guwahati)
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to explain the relationship between nature and culture and argues that indigenous Kuki community - particularly women have close connection to nature and embedded knowledge to manage, nurture, and conserve the resources better.
Paper long abstract:
Prior to embracing Christianity beginning from the 20th century, indigenous Kukis were culturally perceived to have a more intimate knowledge of managing natural resources. The transition from traditional to Judeo-Christian religious systems has altered their perceptions about ecological knowledge systems and subsequently contributed to a disjuncture between women and environment. Women's involvement in the socio-cultural sphere is not a new concept among the indigenous Kukis, but their participation is acknowledged and venerated in the distant past. The ceremony of 'chang-ai', wherein women play a significant role in the community space is a case in point. According to Kuki mythology, the person who performed such ritual is believed to have earned uninterrupted passage to heaven. In a sense, this ritual illustrates that women, nature-culture and production of life are inseparable domains among the Kukis. Based on oral narratives, this paper foregrounds the social and ecological worldviews of the Kuki community in relationship to their natural resource uses and belief practices in the past. Drawing upon ethnographic study, this paper attempts to understand the tradional knowledge in resource management through the lenses of ecofeminism. This paper seeks to demonstrate the relationship between nature and culture and argues that women are closely linked to nature. The paper argues that Kuki women's wisdom and healing in the form of both food production and spiritual sustenance comes traditionally through women. Further, it is important to unfurl how the relationship between humans and nature, and more specifically, between women and nature is established, contested, and changed?
Jess Martin
Paper short abstract:
As a critical reflexive ethnography, this paper seeks to develop how we might repractice practices of environmental (land)care, enabling us to move from the era of the Anthropocene and towards a multispecies being-and-becoming-with as part of Haraway's (2016) the Chthulucene.
Paper long abstract:
Reflecting on my time volunteering on bush regeneration projects in and around the Greater Sydney area in Australia, this paper asks how are dominant ontologies embedded in embodied practices of care for the environment? And how, as a result of changing our being-in to a being-with-and-becoming-with the world, might we begin to re-imagine, re-practice, and re-late with one another 'beyond the human'?
Critically engaging with bush regeneration projects currently being carried out by a government run environmental conservation organization as part of a wider, national decolonizing land project, I believe these practices reflect not only a reflexive desire to address ecological destruction and loss but they also illustrate how identity and land are deeply entwined.
I argue that current practices do not effectively decolonize, but merely act in attempt to uncolonized. I suggest that in order to decolonize our landcare practices we need to work in collaboration with Others, ultimately decentring the human. Offering a way of being-and-becoming-with in Haraway's era of the Chthulucene, how can effectively and affectively decolonizing our landcare practices help in developing more empathetic and more eco-considered relations of care? How, by engaging in deep practices of (ecological) listening, may we address the impending concerns brought on by the Anthropocene and develop a deeper being-in-togetherness which will enhance not only our livability but our very survival?
Sahil Nijhawan (ZSL)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the impact of nation-making policies on human-animal and human-human relations in a frontier Indian state. In particular, I discuss how the nationalist agenda is undermining the conservation impact of traditional relations between an indigenous group and the endangered tiger.
Paper long abstract:
The Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh is located at the contentious modern border between India, China (Tibet) and Burma. This peripheral mountainous region, composed of several ethnic homelands, has long been administered through a policy of minimal state intervention with a mandate on governance through local customs. My previous research on the Idu Mishmi people of Arunachal showed that when their local practices - underpinned by a cosmology that intertwines human, natural and spirit worlds into a singular commune - were given state protection, high-value natural resources, including the endangered tiger, were remarkably conserved. However, posturing from an increasingly aggressive China, that claims territorial rights over Arunachal, has led to swift expansion of the Indian administrative state into local lives. Currently, Idu homeland is witnessing rapid military deployment coupled with neo-liberal policies of large-scale infrastructural development and creation of protected reserves. This paper is based on twenty-two months of fieldwork conducted in 2013-15 using interdisciplinary approaches from natural and social sciences. I explore how the process of nation-making impacts human-nature and human-human relations. In particular, I discuss how the ever-expanding state bureaucracy mired in corruption has created a new class of political and economic elite. These elites are driving the process of cultural change with ramifications for tiger conservation. I also highlight that while the Indian government’s nation-building activities seek to fortify the border; the ‘cosmo-political worlds’ of the people on different sides of it intersect, interlink and collide constantly.