Contribution short abstract:

In western Kenya, the Catholic Church promotes commoning to combat environmental degradation, inviting farmers to care for the land as a ‘common home’. This requires intertwined processes of individual and collective self-cultivation, with hope and care creating a virtuous but fragile circle.

Contribution long abstract:

In western Kenya, climate change and environmental degradation are creating increasingly harsh conditions for smallholder farmers. To get by, many farmers have turned to extractive practices such as sand mining and charcoal burning, which further exacerbate the environmental crisis they are trying to escape. In the midst of this challenge, the Catholic Church – to which most farmers belong – has emerged as a key advocate for environmental restoration, calling on farmers to see the environment as their ‘common home’, worthy of care and stewardship, rather than simply a resource for personal exploitation. Drawing on fieldwork with farmers who have responded to the church’s call, I show that the church’s vision of commoning depends on intertwined processes of individual and collective self-cultivation. Cultivating themselves as hopeful subjects enables farmers to resist the lure of environmentally destructive practices and inspires acts of love towards human and more-than-human others. These acts of love form the basis of a community of mutual care, which in turn is essential for sustaining hope within the self. I argue that this intertwining of individual and collective self-cultivation is a defining feature of commoning projects, and represents both a strength and a vulnerability: while the intertwining creates a virtuous circle, failures at either level put the project at risk.

Contribution short abstract:

Timor-Leste’s permaculture interventions combine critical pedagogy with localised knowledge and expertise. They reveal the short-sightedness of the bureaucracy-obsessed, capital-intensive, and project-oriented mindsets of many international aid and national government conglomerations.

Contribution long abstract:

Timor-Leste’s permaculture interventions, which carefully combine critical, embodied, and emplaced pedagogy with localized knowledge and expertise, reveal the short-sightedness of the bureaucracy-obsessed, capital-intensive, and project-oriented mindset of many international aid and national government conglomerations. A permaculture-based school curriculum works in the opposite direction, prioritizing the increasingly existential concerns of the growing number of communities that do not feel heard, seen, and cared for in ways that speak to their needs instead of forcing them into abstract systems of 'universal education' and 'agricultural development'. Whereas hegemonic pedagogical frameworks and neoliberal project logics obfuscate local knowledge, they remain essential and central in permaculture’s minor utopias and pedagogies of hope. They contest inequalities and marginalities by respecting and revitalizing local and Indigenous knowledge in combination with critical permaculture pedagogy that works and sweats with teachers and students in vulnerable soils instead of exploiting them.

Permaculture-based school curricula steer away from buzzwords of 'international development' and 'education for all' that often homogenize learning practices and infrastructures based on Eurocentric values that devalue local and Indigenous knowledge. Permaculture-based school curricula emanate hope through decolonial practices of learning together with ecological and cultural environments instead of disciplining, extracting, and exploiting them. Instead of investing in capital-intensive technologies of learning and knowing, learning institutions and political organizations in other parts of the world might also benefit from taking a few steps back and reflecting on the power of permaculture experiences and Indigenous practices that social actors acquire and deploy to work towards more sustainable futures.

Contribution short abstract:

The presentation describes some individual and collective trajectories among the Mebengokré people in the Brazilian Amazon to show how they actively and creatively face non-Indigenous society and how these actions affect their relations with anthropologists.

Contribution long abstract:

In the last decades, the Mebengokré people in the Brazilian Amazon have faced different challenges and creatively responded to them in plural ways. The construction of the Belo Monte hydrodam dramatically affected the socio-environmental panorama, while constituting the background for the Mebengokré’s engagement in the growing Indigenous movement in Brazil. The arrival of internet, as also for non-Indigenous people, concomitantly brought the danger of fake news and the possibility of creating new alliances and partnerships. Moreover, new educational policies in Brazil that support Indigenous people’s access to universities resulted in the enrolment of the first group of Mebengokré in academic studies, also shaping their relations with anthropologists. Together, these dynamics affect the the Mebengokré’s individual and collective choices and options of self positioning. My paper introduces some of these trajectories, including women’s engagement with economic and cultural projects as a form of authonomy and resistance, university students’s appropriation of non-indigenous knowledge in local schools, and the use of the internet and digital tools to form friendships and relations with non-Indigenous actors. As the paper shows, despite these wide-ranging dynamics, the Mebengokré’s choices are consistently grounded in a social life shaped by the commoning of the different outcomes of these different approaches in economic, epistemological and political terms. All the while, they also shape the possible collaborations with anthropologists. In this light, the paper also reflects on how these dynamics have shaped our twenty-year-long relation, and how they led us to reciprocally create innovative scientific and political partnerships.

Contribution short abstract:

My contribution examines experimental self-cultivations of 'neo-villagers' in Turkey who reject an urban middle-class ‘work-life-balance’ ideal. I explore how their alternative ways of (making a) living in a vibrant rural community are mutually shaped by processes of commoning and its limitations.

Contribution long abstract:

Moving ‘back to the land’, understood as the proactive pursuit of alternative modes of being outside the city, is trending in Turkey in response to multiple crises. My contribution investigates the experimental self-cultivation of so-called ‘neo-villagers’ (yeni köylüler) in a rural northwestern district. I argue that their alternative ways of living, and the ways of making a living required to sustain them are mutually shaped by processes of commoning and their limitations. In rejecting the specific consumption patterns, daily rhythms, and prestige associated with urban white-collar existence, neo-villagers develop adaptive economic strategies that challenge the urban middle-class ideal of a work-life-balance and conventional understandings of work. They redefine various (re)productive activities as meaningful value production by supplementing wage- or gig-labor with non-monetary incomes through horticulture, foraging and bartering, alongside the integration of minimalist practices into daily life. Driven by the experience of self-efficacy, these liminal efforts hinge on individual and unequal constellations of financial capital, skill, and motivations. Simultaneously, they rely on mutual solidarity and practices of commoning like sharing knowledge, skills, tools, or co-producing goods. A nuanced analysis of the extent to which neo-villagers are able to detach themselves from urban capital flows is exemplified by an emerging informal craft sector: Self-taught neo-carpenters provide services to neo-villagers, but also to other newcomers with a higher purchasing power. This sparks ideological debates about where and how to employ capitalist practices of branding and marketing. My contribution further explores what anthropology can offer in examining such alternative economies and their limitations.