Paper short abstract:

Contrasting care for plants in a botanical garden and a hi-tech urban farming lab, this paper considers the material semiotic entanglements of plants and humans. On our way to (or away from) a ‘greener’ Earth, this paper will not only reshape our ideas about growing plants, but also about what it can mean to be human in a naturecultural world.

Paper long abstract:

In face of talks about a looming environmental crisis, concerns about desirable ways to live 'together with' nature are spreading widely. Notably, particular consideration is given to practices of food production and environmental management. Within these, and parallel to the current focus on meat production or fishery, forestry and agriculture constitute a field in which much debates, activism, local practices and technological innovations have recently emerged.

Plants have been a bio-geo-chemical force in shaping our planet and our species, while being reciprocally and deeply transformed: like Pollan's apple (2001) that seduced man into being diffused throughout the planet, plants are increasingly intertwining with Earth's 'greener' future. To map different ways of caring for plants, this paper follows the relations between different species, juxtaposing a botanical garden and a techno scientific lab which promises to offer a solution to urban farming through hi-tech environmental chambers and led lights. In the entanglements that care produces, man emerges as an absent/presence: growing plants, humans are hovering as carers, knowers, consumers, masters, and/or eaters. Simultaneously, the plants also stem as critical actors, shaping the ways in which the care (and production) relations afford to grow. In this sense, material semiotics not only allows our ethnographies to have a different grasp of 'naturecultures' and their ongoing entanglements, but also to shape a different understanding of what it is to be human, how and whom with this is or can be done, and what this requires and affords.

Paper short abstract:

The paper serves as a counterweight to recent celebrations of the political possibilities inherent in the recognition of “non-human agency.” Drawing on empirical data from the Dow Chemical Company and recent STS-inspired political philosophy, it explores the deployment of ideas about “distributed agency” by corporate personnel.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last decade, there has been a pronounced move all across the social sciences to critically rethink and horizontalize the relationship between 'human' and 'non-human' - from Bruno Latour's "parliament of things" (2004) to Marisol de la Cadena's indigenous "cosmopolitics" (2010) to Thomas Berry's "earth jurisprudence" (1999). Such moves have productively encouraged us to recognize forms of agency in the non-human world that we had hitherto neglected or named otherwise. This paper takes up the question of non-human agency by exploring what the political philosopher Jane Bennett has recently called, "more distributed agency" - that is, forms of "vigorous materiality" that challenge the "grammar of agency that assigns activity to people and passivity to things" (Bennett 2010). While environmental anthropologists have rightly tended to celebrate the political possibilities inherent in the recognition of this kind of expanded agency, the paper suggests that we need also, and somewhat more urgently, to attend to the deployment of such expansions by powerful corporations like Dow Chemical. Drawing on recent advertising campaigns and legal briefs, it argues that we need to remain attentive to the ways in which something like "more distributed agency" may, in fact, contrary to our political hopes, be increasingly used to avoid responsibility for environmental damage and to "manufacture consent" for environmentally destructive practices. The paper concludes by reflecting on the critical importance of ethnographic engagement with corporate reconfigurations of the shifting lines between 'human' and 'non-human.'

Paper short abstract:

Nanotechnology opens up a revolutionary new cosmology envisioning a both dystrophic and utopian future, in which cognition (and reason) is shared by humans, machines, chemical, physical and biological matter alike. This new cosmology challenges old moralities, conceptions of humanity, and existential issues of human mortality and being.

Paper long abstract:

Offering an intricate bundle of future promises, multifarious benefits and potential hazards, nanotechnology presents a veritable challenge to consumers, citizens, policy makers, regulators and industry. One basis for nanotechnology is the capacity of particles at nano scale (1 -9m) to change their (normal) physical (mechanical, optical, magnetic, electronic and chemical) properties and behaviour, manifesting new and surprising modes of matter. Technological creations include ultra-strong and ultra-light materials, self-cleaning surfaces, high-efficient energy provisioning, and "intelligent" drugs that can detect and disarm cancer cells. This contribution explores "Intelligent Nano" as a socio-techno-scientific and symbolic field organized around applications of nanotechnology driven by the attribution of cognitive faculties to physical/chemical/biological matter. A Google search on the expression "Intelligent Nano" is telling of R&D initiatives in biotechnology, biomedicine, synthetic biology, sensor technology, robotics, AI, computer science, material sciences and a myriad of interfaces between such areas. Cognitive capacities comprise thought processes, information storage, retrieval and use, language, speech, feed-back and even decision making. Since medieval times, the faculty of reason, i.e. cognitive powers of analytical and intellectual ability together with moral judgment, has in the West been understood as a unique and defining characteristic of human being. Nanotechnology opens up a revolutionary new cosmology envisioning an at the same time dystrophic and utopian future, in which cognition (and reason) is shared by humans, machines, chemical, physical and biological matter alike. This new cosmology challenges old moralities, conceptions of humanity, and existential issues of human mortality and being.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the patenting of insects, particularly vectors of disease transmission, to probe the role of property law as a means of re-arranging the connections between humans, animals and the public domain.

Paper long abstract:

Property rights are a powerful mechanism for drawing the boundary between the natural and the artificial; they establish an anthropocentric vision of the world by conceptualizing a plethora of objects, substances, and beings as human invention. Yet the operations of property law, specifically the patenting of living organisms, tend to throw into disarray the very distinctions - between natural and artifactual, human and animal, technical and biological - that property law seems so eager to uphold. This has become again evident with the extension of patenting to insects, particularly mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are being genetically modified to use their vectorial capacities in disease-prevention strategies, and at the same time have increasingly become objects and carriers of property rights. This implies the patenting of a biological vector - an entity that links up and connects different species of being and in so doing disrupts the distinctions, separations and isolations that are so dear to property law.

The paper explores a few select cases in the patenting of insect vectors as a way of opening up new analytical venues on the entanglement of humans with other forms of being, and as a way of elucidating the movement of (property) law as confounding connector across species.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the limits of anthropology in relation to the recalcitrant materiality of housing, mines and infrastructure on Groote Eylandt in northern Australia, home of the Anindiliyakwa, asking what forms of ethnography might hold the different beyond-human networks within the same frame.

Paper long abstract:

Imagine six houses built at a cost of $28 million AUD (€20.5 million Euros) that have to be bulldozed; replaced by thermally inert cement boxes at unidentifiably larger costs that have no room for washing machines let alone people. Imagine this is a federally-funded, high-stakes and well-scrutinised 'public good' project in a country so affluent recent global financial crises left mere surface wounds. In the Northern Territory of Australia, on Groote Eylandt, site of one of the world's largest magnesium mining operations, the Anindiliyakwa people have been told they pose such risks to themselves and their families they must be externally managed at scales unimaginable since early occupation. New housing is a reward for yielding title to customary lands, residency on which is newly re-seen as part of "the Indigenous problem". But the outcome of more poor housing for the already poorly housed is also the result of nature-culture destabilisations. Technical incompetence; welfare 'reforms'; recycled development arguments; and a rush to future-proof islanders against the immanent end of magnesium meets the corrosions of rust, cyclones, calcification, termites, swamps and rats. This paper considers both the recalcitrant materiality of housing and infrastructure on Groote Eylandt and the limits of anthropology, exploring what forms of ethnographic analysis might hold these different 'beyond-human' scales and connections within the same narrative, without losing sight of the material inequalities that are driven as much by capital as climate.

Paper short abstract:

Largely unbeknownst to anthropology, ecologists and complexity theorists have been making steady progress in understanding human and natural systems. The paper suggests fruitful engagement is possible between anthropology and complexity and may be urgent at a time of critical global transformations.

Paper long abstract:

Debates in ecological anthropology have often pitted proponents of two distinct traditions, one scientific and one humanist. One the one hand we find practitioners of objectivist research strategies who seek to identify causal links and propose scientifically credible explanations for social and cultural facts, with the intention of approaching "truth." On the other hand are found researchers focused on faithful representation of local conceptions of reality, sensitive to political and globalized contexts of their subjects, but sceptical of anthropology's ability to define causal relations or propose truth claims. What is subjectively real to one side may not (or may) be objectively true to the other. While anthropologists struggle with this dichotomy, general ecology and complexity theorists are increasingly bridging it in their own way by increasingly incorporating social science and ethnographic data on human societies, economies and organizations within a unified framework, one that provides space for nonlinearity, uncertainty, and surprise, and where destabilizing forces are important in maintaining diversity, resilience and opportunity. The paper explores both promising and problematic issues with complexity thinking and the possibility of fruitful engagement by anthropology with some of its concepts, notably complex adaptive systems heuristics and critical transition theory. The paper further suggests a synthesis of the latter with the author's default approach (cultural materialism), a "complex materialism" that bolsters the argument that anthropology has continued relevance for the study of society and culture, particularly at this time of critical global transformations.

Paper short abstract:

Climate change and water are issues of increasing concern in Peru. This paper explores different socio-material practices, technologies and terminologies in the politics of climate effects and water management. It discusses how water is made multiple and how we can understand this multiplicity.

Paper long abstract:

Water scarcity and water conflicts are reported in Peruvian newspapers on a daily basis, and the urge for 'a new water culture' is articulated both by state and non-state actors. Seeing water as nature-culture, this paper discusses socio-material practices, technologies and terminologies used in the production of drinking water, and in the distribution of irrigation water, in Colca Valley in Southern Peru, where water and climate are issues of daily concern. In the politics of water, there is a multiplicity of actors - both institutional (state, civil society, NGOs), nonhumans (springs, mountains, saints), water bodies (dams, reserves, intakes, channels, tubes) and control mechanisms (valves, measuring devices, and documents) - which make up a complex web of relations. Moreover, the classification of different kinds of water produces multiple waters, defined by source, trajectory, use, qualities, and state regulations. The state administration is working to promulgate the new water law, which intends to encompass the new complexities of climate change, mining companies, and urban human consumption. The need for securing safe drinking water, as well as 'the harvesting' of irrigation water, and the necessity of formal water licenses, is increasingly becoming connected to global climate change. This paper will discuss how knowledge about water and climate is articulated by different actors, and how relations of power and control in water management are being negotiated. Furthermore, I will explore how technologies and terminologies of water are mobilized and transformed in encounters with material climate effects and discourses, and how water is practiced and made multiple.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores alternatives to ontologies of protected areas as either pure nature or lost social resources by questioning the foundational dichotomies on which much conservation efforts and social science critique of conservation are based.

Paper long abstract:

The separation of the social and the natural is at its most marked in conservation areas situated in poor countries, economically, politically and ontologically. On the one hand, the very rationality behind the establishment of protected areas is to shield nature from human influence, and mainstream ecology and conservationists performs this human influence as 'disturbance' of nature. On the other, social scientist critical of the negative impacts of conservation areas on people living close to them, often treat these areas as sites of lost livelihoods, and thus as denied resources. As a consequence of this duality, conservation areas are enacted materially and in writings as either pure nature or as part of social production in the form of resources.

This paper begins to explore what an alternative to these ontologies might be. Taking as its example the complex nature-cultures of St Lucia, South Africa, the paper asks what an understanding of conservation areas that transcends foundational dichotomies would entail.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, human-salmon relations in the High North are employed to destabilise agrarian perspectives of animal domestication. With Arctic fishermen in mind, I discuss key terms associated with different definitions of domestication, such as ‘selection’, ‘capture’ and ‘becoming with’.

Paper long abstract:

The agrarian structures entrenched in biological understanding of domestication, places limitations on the uses of the term for anthropological purposes. As Ingold (2000) points out, the biological definition reifies an understanding of domestication as a steady increase in human control over growth and reproduction. Agrarian domestication is closely associated with selective breeding. Such a definition, places us in a position where we act upon nature, ignoring how animals act upon us, and ignoring numerous possible forms of existing animal agency.

Such agrarian definitions have recently been challenged by more symmetrical approaches, treating domestication as a two-way process. Such recent definitions emphasise unintended consequences rather than human mastery (Cassidy 2007, see also Haraway 2007). Ingold argues the significance of capture for the evolution of domestication. Capture here situates humans and non-humans in a relational web, where animals and humans are part of networks of reciprocal interdependency. Capture here, is perceived as a dialogue, where trust is essential, as a combination of autonomy and dependency. Capture however, does not naturally provide a view that fish or game also acts upon man. Following Northern hunter-gatherers, I argue that before capture comes knowledge of relational existence. Instances of salmon and game domesticated in this paper illustrate the necessity of including knowledge not just of immediate human-animal relations, but also to include knowledge of other relations, as there are more actors involved: More than the moment of capture, or the intimate inter-species gaze - Ingolds being with - we must consider Donna Haraway's becoming with.