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- Convenors:
-
Tim Ingold
(University of Aberdeen)
Andrew Whitehouse (University of Aberdeen)
Paolo Maccagno (University of Aberdeen)
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- Stream:
- Extinction
- Sessions:
- Thursday 1 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
What does it mean for life to reach its limit? Does the limit bring life to a close or open up into a space of renewal? This panel will explore alternative experiences of the limit, drawing out their implications both for ways of understanding extinction and for the responsibilities we bear for it.
Long Abstract:
At extinction, life reaches its limit. But is this limit a terminal point, a threshold to be crossed, an asymptote towards which one draws ever closer, or a horizon that recedes on advance? What does it mean to live close to the limit, or even to inhabit the limit itself? Does it bring life itself to a close, or open up from the inside into a space of renewal? Mainstream science, focusing on species and their continuation, tends to equate life with a genetic capital, passed down the generations along lines of descent. Extinction, then, marks the end of the line. Yet a counter-current of vitalism focuses more on the organism and its development, regarding it less as a vehicle of transmission than as a vortex in a current of life, which can hold out only for so long before dissolving back into the flow. Death, then, marks not the end of life but the moment at which a failing body is finally overwhelmed by the intensity of the vital energies from which it was once formed. Here the measure of extinction would lie not in the closure of any particular lineages, or in the extent of species loss, but in the capture and containment of life itself, not least by the machinations of science. In this panel we will explore alternative experiences of the limit, drawing out their implications both for our understanding of extinction and for our ideas of what it means to bear responsibility for it.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 1 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The paper attempts to explore the habitation of ‘the limit’ through the experiences of a displaced littoral community in Loktak Lake of Manipur, India. The idea of ‘the limit’ can help to explore how the littoral community dwells in-between, in water-land.
Paper long abstract:
Water-land: Exploring ‘the limit’ through a displaced littoral community in Loktak Lake of Manipur, India.How do ‘the limits’ of life change when a littoral community is displaced from its floating-huts? The paper attempts to explore the habitation of ‘the limit’ through the experiences of a displaced littoral community in Loktak Lake of Manipur, India. They had previously lived on floating mats of biomass where they adapted to the movement of water and wind as they moved their homes, boats, and the fish they caught for food. This movement restricted and directed them while dwelling in Loktak. This paper discusses how ‘the limit’ is experienced by the littorals on the Lake and how their knowledge of the world grows from these experiences of a floating-life on the water. In 2011, they were forcefully evicted by the state, which argued that the lake was polluted by the community while ignoring the direct impacts on its waters of various state-sponsored projects. Littorals attempted to continue their relationship with the lake while coming to terms with the unfamiliar environment of dry-land. The process of displacement and adjustment to land-based life has brought new problems and new experiences of ‘the limit’. How is ‘the limit’ experienced differently in the everyday life of the littoral community on land? Does this realm, in-between water, and land, create its own knowledge and its own ‘limits’? The idea of ‘the limit’ can help to explore how the littoral community dwells in-between, in water-land.
Paper short abstract:
Departing the Chukchi concepts, Va’irgin and Unatgirgin, this paper discusses what it may mean to live, to die and to go extinct. Life depends on transformations through what we call death. The responsibility of lifeforms is concerned with co-creation.
Paper long abstract:
Departing the Chukchi concepts, va’irgin and unatgir’gin, this paper discusses what it may mean to live, to die and indeed to go extinct. Unatgirgin, which may be translated as simply life, depends on endless transformations through what we call death. Death, for the Chukchi, is always a movement towards a new life. Va’irgin – which may be translated as existence or ‘to be’ – is the life-creating principle. What differentiates va’irgin is the physical form or movement it manifests as. Without the differentiation of pure existence into bodily forms, there would be nothing manifest. There would be no humans, no trees, no rivers, no animals, no sun. In other words, unatgir’gin, is each and everyone’s or everything’s individual and temporal life. That kind of life is a movement; it has to transform. How individual life-forms, humans as well as other, moves into and through death depends on their ways of being with their surroundings. Among the Chukchi, rituals are continuously enacted in order to create unatgir’gin in a way that maintains Chukchi life. The responsibility of the bereaved is to direct the individual life of the deceased into manifesting again as a Chukchi person through mortuary rituals and dream-work. If this responsibility is failed, life, through its creating principle va’irgin, will find new ways of manifesting. It could, however, lead to extinction of one particular form of life – in this case the Chukchi.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how the limit is acutely experienced in a former mining community in Romania. I will tackle some challenges in comprehending endings and discuss endings and beginnings, the ever-expanding limits in the conversations between people and between people and other actors.
Paper long abstract:
The former mining village of Corna, in Romania, has for the past twenty-three years been labelled as disintegrating and destined for extinction. Following the proposal for an open-pit mining project, the community has slowly disintegrated, revealing the importance of continuity of space and time for the integrity of the social fabric in this small village, and vice versa: the importance of stability of social connections for creating and re-creating narratives of completeness and for preventing the dissolution of space and time. In this paper I explore how the limit is acutely experienced in Corna in the gaps, fissures and holes of the social, spatial and temporal fabric. Since the mining project was first proposed, there have been many clashes, revealing edges and limits that had previously gone unnoticed in the seemingly straightforward conversations among people and between them and their surroundings. Today more than seventy percent of the village has moved away, and those who remain live in a permanent state of uncertainty, continually awaiting an ever approaching end. I will show how these unfolding processes have fractured space, time and social-ecological relations, leaving behind a sense of unease.
Paper short abstract:
Faced with catastrophe, Authority might actually reinforce it by promoting unsustainable interventions in the pursuit of human salvation. Among critics of these interventions, however, we find everyday gestures of care that could pave the way for more sustainable ecologies of health.
Paper long abstract:
Humanity is in danger, threatened by increasing climatic disruptions and recurrent epidemics. Never before has Authority been vested with a greater task than to provide the knowledges and technologies necessary to save us, nor has Humanity ever had bestowed upon it a greater duty than to submit to them, in order to be saved. Thus far, Authority's responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have been conceived within a paradigm that boosts biomedical research and industry, while prescribing behavioural norms, biomedical devices, medicines and above all, vaccination, all of which, in their gradual enforcement, are coming to be framed as a compulsory war against disease. At the same time, those who are cautious, critical or overtly opposed to vaccination are being criminalised, as 'anti-vaxxers'. However, in my fieldwork in Spain and Germany, I could find no common denominator to define them, primarily because they are not so much against vaccination as in favour of everyday minor gestures of care for their own and their relatives' ecologies of health. Beyond the entrenched discussions of the pros and cons of vaccination, these gestures of care highlight a more pressing concern. For alongside and at the limits of Authority's conceptions of health, self and life itself run flows of knowledge and materials, pertaining to biomedical research, industry and public health policy, which, far from delivering the promised salvation, appear to aggravate unsustainable ways of living.