Paper short abstract:

The South African rhino poaching crisis has grown rapidly, leading to public outcries that the rhino is close to extinction. This leads to a specific type of luxurious tourism in which tourists can 'enjoy' (through fascination, jouissance) the fight against rhino poaching physically and financially.

Paper long abstract:

Since the end of the 2000s, the rhino poaching crisis has grown rapidly in and around Kruger National Park, South Africa, often leading to public outcries that the rhino is close to extinction. This discourse of extinction is also articulated at the luxurious tourist lodges on private nature reserves to the west of Kruger that attract wealthy tourists. In fact, some lodges have started initiatives in which tourists can join the fight against rhino poaching physically and financially. These tourist activities share important similarities with ‘philanthrocapitalism’, in which the wealthy ‘enjoy’ providing support for charities to eradicate poverty and to support environmental causes. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analysis, I explore the political ecology of such high-end ‘environmentourist’ activities, with an emphasis on the translocations of rhinos from South Africa to neighboring Botswana. These rhino translocations accompanied by tourists, and such philanthropic environmental tourist activities more generally, I argue, are based on a reductionist articulation of the rhino poaching crisis, de-politicizing it from its socio-economic and historical context, while legitimizing privatized, luxurious tourism. Moreover, such excessive ‘environmentourism’ allows accessible ways for wealthy tourists to enjoy ‘doing good’, because tourists can find their ‘jouissance’ in these activities: jouissance is a particular type of enjoyment that goes beyond ‘pure’, conventional enjoyment; it simultaneously includes fascination and excitement for the dark and horror sides of things, such as poached rhinos and the idea that these animals are at the brink of extinction. Pursuing jouissance, wealthy tourists are continually pulled into patterns of excessive consumption as their responsibility of, and within, environmentourism, thereby supporting a local and global politics of enmity.

Paper short abstract:

A small Papuan language called Tayap is dying. What factors influence whether speakers regard the dissolution of their ancestral language as a particularly consequential loss, or not? And how might scholars respond to language loss in ways that go beyond lamentation, or calls for revival?

Paper long abstract:

Language death is an emotional issue for linguists and linguistic anthropologists. In recent years, there has been a spate of publications reporting on language loss, and lamenting it. Books about language death usually include a chapter that asks some version of the question: “Why should we care?” And they offer a number of reasons why we should. These include the idea that linguistic diversity is better than uniformity; that languages express identity; that languages reveal particular knowledge about the world; and that languages are the repositories of a people’s history. All those reasons are all indisputably true and genuinely compelling. But they are bird’s-eye views. They represent the assessment of experts who are privy to a vast panorama. The perspective of people who have lost or are losing their language will inevitably be quite different.

I will discuss the impending loss of a small Papuan language called Tayap, and reflect upon the perspectives of people who lived in Gapun, the village where it used to be spoken. What kinds of factors influence whether those villagers regard the immanent dissolution of their ancestral language as a particularly consequential loss, or not? And how might scholars respond to language loss in ways that go beyond lamentation, or calls for revival?

Paper short abstract:

As soon as cultural primatologists discovered chimpanzee cultures, they realized that they were on the wane. This talk examines the resulting salvage primatology. It concludes with a plea for fatalist acceptance of natural or naturecultural history: eventually, all species go the way of the dodo.

Paper long abstract:

Just like early cultural anthropologists realized that the remote cultures they had just encountered were already on the wane, cultural primatologists recently discovered cultures in nonhuman primates and they too are doomed by their contact with modern humans. This talk describes two scientific responses to the ensuing endangerment sensibility: (1) a big data approach to collect as much information about quickly disappearing chimpanzee cultures as possible; (2) the creation of an ethnographic archive to preserve not primates but primatological knowledge for future generations of researchers who can no longer do fieldwork among wild chimpanzees. While chimpanzee ethnographers also follow in the footsteps of their anthropological forebears in that they make intense efforts to advocate for the communities they study, projections of human demography suggest that they can only play for time. Instead of fostering “biocultural hope,” I plead for a fatalist acceptance of natural (or naturecultural) history, in which all species will at some point have to go the way of the dodo.

Paper short abstract:

By linking two different understandings on what vulnerability means, we discuss the Covid-19 pandemic and its effects, highlighting points of inflexion between the Guarani-Mbyá and biomedicines' narratives. For the Mbyá people, the ending of the Juruá's world might be a sign of new beginnings.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we draw attention to an imminent and long heralded end of the world. Not any world, we must say, but the Juruá world ("Brancos" or non-indigenous) in accordance with the Guarani-Mbyá cosmology. By linking two different understandings on what vulnerability means, we discuss the Covid-19 pandemic and its effects, highlighting points of inflexion between the Mbyá and biomedicines' narratives. For many Mbyá, this invisible threat has the Juruá people as target, not the indigenous peoples. From their understanding, Covid-19 comes to make the Juruá bodies weaker, and to force the Juruá to calm down. However, to most international and national health agencies the indigenous peoples, among others, are considered "vulnerable populations" - a polysemic category that justify, for example, rapid access to care settings and vaccination. The Mbyá seem to not agree with this, pointing out that, from their perspective, it is just the opposite. We therefore propose to explore how the Guarani-Mbyá understanding of vulnerability and ending of the Jurua's world intersect with global and public health concepts of crises and intervention. In this objective, we question how Guarani-Mbyá's experience from past epidemics and huge knowledge about having survived many "permanent" crises can contribute to creative and imaginative beginnings that might emerge from the so-called global emergency. The present work is part of the ongoing research Indigenous Peoples responding to Covid-19 in Brazil: social arrangements in a Global Health emergency, which is funded by the MRC/UKRI.