Paper short abstract:

How is a rocky Turkish shore seemingly more sacred to Australians than the nation’s own red centre or the monolith of Uluru? This ethnographic account of an immersive domestic pilgrimage illustrates state-sponsored efforts to forge a renewed national identity by retelling a heroic tragedy a century old – and very far away.

Paper long abstract:

White Australian autochthonic claims remain entangled with the outback and Uluru, yet the increasing inaccessibility and climatic hostility of these places has coincided with the resurgence of a Turkish peninsular as the focus of Australian nation-building. Gallipoli holds a singular place in Australians’ imaginations.

To mark the centenary of this catastrophic military defeat, some 40,000 Australians joined their local staged military camp for the inaugural Camp Gallipoli. Through rhetoric, ritual, and symbolic objects, people imagined themselves at Gallipoli a hundred years ago, immersed in narratives of suffering, heroism and fear that Camp Gallipoli marketed as the ‘spirit of Anzac … in the DNA of every Aussie’. Participants embodied this spirit through ancestor worship, moral crafting, virtuous nostalgia, reverence, fun, and purchasing branded merchandise.

Here, Anzac serves as a key symbol (Ortner 1973) for Australian citizenship, in which state symbols are brought within hegemonic ideologies like egalitarianism. By creating corporeal experiences of related, though not equivalent, sacrifice, Camp Gallipoli imprinted collective memory on individual bodies and linked this to the transcendent, so that participating became ‘a small thing, after what the diggers did for us’. Turner noted that reanimating a symbol’s meaning requires energy, which often comes from dramatising well-known conflicts (1967: 38). Camp Gallipoli’s interplay between affect, the senses, agency and state-sponsored ritual demonstrated that, a century after the first Anzac services, these have been almost completely reworked symbolically with a marked banal militarism far more aligned with state interests than ever before – and reasserted that Australia’s most sacred soil lies in Turkey.

Paper short abstract:

I explore how members of an American land-based intentional community embrace a romanticized ideal of "the land" as a stable place and time that could return after capitalist modernity fails, arguing that practical uses of and disputes about the soil destabilized settler imaginaries from within.

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a rural, land-based intentional community in the U.S., this paper analyzes how "the land" in back-to-the-landism serves as a tacit reference to an America of another time. I argue that an idealized notion of the land fosters belonging in a community that simultaneously critiques American political economy and values, as it models itself aesthetically on the image of Jeffersonian agrarian Americana. By advocating a "return" to the land through homesteading, proponents invoked a purified, nascent nation of the past, prior to industrial capitalism. In doing so, they idealized the small scale, rudimentary technology, and rugged bravery iconic of the heyday of American settler colonialism. At the same time, the notion of "return" was often imagined in the context of an apocalyptic collapse, thus positioning the community less as an intervention into contemporary American life than as a place outside of time that could re-animate some version of a vibrant evolutionary past only after the future destruction of the modern nation. Such abstract imaginaries of "the land," however, proved irrelevant to the day-to-day practices of working the soil, which generated very different ideas about the community's purpose and future. Elaborating "the soiled imagination," I thus argue further that the agrarian ideal is both a site of aspiration and contestation, as disputes about exactly how the soil should be cultivated could tentatively unsettle the purity of settler common sense about temporality, place, and property that so often accompanied invocations of "the land."

Paper short abstract:

The political strategies of Mongol elites in northwestern China involve portraying animal mobility as congruent with state spatiality, in order to defend pastoralism against state environmentalism. This invites us to reconsider the relationship between animal bodies and national geo-bodies.

Paper long abstract:

Recent work on infrastructure has shown how roads and railways play a central role in the projection of state power over territory. Conversely, the use of pack animals has been associated with peoples and places where state territoriality is weak, or even with 'subversive mobility' (Shell 2015). In official modernising discourses the mobility afforded by animals has often been temporally stigmatised as 'backward'. This paper, by contrast, discusses recent positive representations in the Chinese media of the role of camels in the 20th century state territorialisation of western China. Such representations help to create space for the defence of pastoralist land use in a part of the world where expanding deserts have led to large-scale state intervention. The paper describes how ethnic Mongol elites in the desert region of Alasha, Inner Mongolia, deploy these representations of the camel's 'loyal mobility' as they seek to defend traditions of open-range grazing against the state's policies of grassland enclosure, forced destocking and afforestation. I use this case study to question a tendency of some recent literature in a posthumanist vein to focus exclusively on nonhuman mobility which undermines state territoriality. I show how resistance to the state's projects of environment rule can be carried out instead through the alignment of animal bodies with the geo-body of the nation.

Paper short abstract:

Starting from the notion that politics both defines and is defined by perceptions of nature (Hastrup 2014), this paper explores the ambiguities surrounding the borders and boundaries of the increasing entanglement of the natural and human in a densely populated part of Europe.

Paper long abstract:

Elaborating on the notion that politics both defines and is defined by perceptions of nature (Hastrup 2014), this paper discusses two diverging developments that occurred in the winter of 2018 regarding two Dutch "rewilding" projects. Firstly, the experimental eco-system and National Park Oostvaardersplassen made national headlines as civil unrest grew regarding its management. From its early gestation, this new-nature experiment in the six-by-ten-kilometer reserve has been a topic of debate among experts. However, controversy reached a new pinnacle this winter, when a substantial group of layman citizens rejected the official policy of 'letting nature run its course', and decided to take matters into their own hands by climbing the fences and feeding starving animals. Secondly, whilst these protests against "animal cruelty masked as wildlife" gained momentum, German-born and GPS-collared wolf "Naya" silently spent a month on Dutch soil, apparently searching out a territory to make her own. The recent rise in sightings of wolves in the country has been heralded by nature conservationists as a sign of the success of rewilding initiatives. Indeed, the rewilding ideal is that wolves as top predators will ultimately "manage" the Oostvaardersplassen. This paper then explores borders and boundaries showing the increasing entanglement of the natural and human in a densely populated part of Europe. While the uproar over the enclosed Oostvaardersplassen turned into a politicized debate on national identity and sensible ecology, wolf Naya embodied the encroaching of new nature, thereby revealing the inevitable porosity of a "national order of things" (Malkki 1995).

Paper short abstract:

This paper situates the increased incidence of poisoning from spiritual aspects of landscape with respect to the order and systemization central to Soviet-era moral and social progress, tracing the confusion of body and landscape today as index of acute concern for the health of both body and nation

Paper long abstract:

In contemporary Mongolia, increasing worship of natural landmarks as a means to both revere the nation and heal the body exists alongside reports of heightened poisoning from spiritual constituents of landscape. Nature (baigal) was portrayed by interlocutors as increasingly unstable and ferocious (dogshin) in the 'age of the market', the cause of which was narratively related to decline in national moral character and recent political economic developments, such as widespread mining and rapid urbanization. Angered spirit masters mobilize to retaliate; 'In the valleys, rivers and mountains bad entities are running', as one healer stated. Calamity strikes (gai dairah) as incensed spiritual masters/aspects of landscape (lus, gazariin/uuliin ezen) chase after the offender to deliver punishment, colliding with innocent bystanders along the way.

As natural landmarks are increasingly used for medicinal purposes, reports of incorrect usage circulate; therapeutic landscapes can also poison and kill. Rituals to remedy such afflictions typically involve severing the spiritual entity from the patient (e.g. lusaas taslah) or removing the ailment it left in the body. This is representative of wider trends in the maintenance of health to keep the environment out of the body, especially the cold and wind, by following particular protocol (gam barih). Given the socialist state's role in promoting the centrality of order and systemization to the advancement of social and moral progress, this paper will trace the ways in which increased confusion of body and environment in marketized Mongolia indexes profound concern for the health of the body and nation.