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- Convenors:
-
Marianne Elisabeth Lien
(University of Oslo)
Elisabeth Schober (University of Oslo)
Penny Harvey (University of Manchester)
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- Chair:
-
Ingjerd Hoëm
(University of Oslo)
- Discussant:
-
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
(University of Oslo)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 0G/024
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Anthropocene effects require the articulation of new research questions around the commons that incorporate the wider ecosphere. This panel proposes future commons as a theoretical space enabling the exploration of diverse modes of commoning as well as novel, unprecedented enclosures.
Long Abstract:
Questions about the commons and its futures have been fundamental throughout the history of anthropology, ranging from a concern with property rights and state power to social integration, reciprocity and general theories of social justice. Today, the implications of Anthropocene effects require the articulation of research questions that incorporate the wider ecosphere without relinquishing classic strengths of anthropological research, such as a focus on social processes, property regimes, and communication. This panel asks how collective rights of access to basic resources and specific modes of autonomy can be defended and/or established across diverse scales of value, across species and across intersecting fields of interdependence. How might broad ecological concerns and deep time better inform human projects? How might a shared sense of purpose and solidarity address incipient scarcity and loss, and mediate and mitigate against polarisation? How is (in-)equality reproduced across different scales, and across the entrenched distinctions of ecology and economy, or society and nature?
This panel suggests future commons as a theoretical space enabling the exploration of diverse modes of commoning as well as novel, unprecedented enclosures. This calls for attention to the mechanisms and content of incipient commons, including recovery and recuperation, but also collectives emerging through ritual, language, social media and techno-cultural artefacts that reconfigure the distribution of human agency, sociality and subjectivity. We invite ethnographic or theoretical papers relating to processes of commoning or uncommoning in shifting configurations of ownership, property, dependency or care in the context of Anthropocene transformations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Roberta Raffaetà (Ca' Foscari Venice University)
Paper short abstract:
I illustrate how health is being reconfigured by technoscience as a more-than-human commoning practice drawing from ethnography in microbiome labs. I take this as a radical example to challenge acritical forms of posthumanism. I'll propose an alternative to truly envisage more-than-human commonings.
Paper long abstract:
My paper will discuss how health is being reconfigured by technoscience as a more-than-human commoning practice within the one/planetary health framework. I will draw my insights from an on-going ethnographic research in laboratories where scientists study the microbiome “across species, across space, and across time” - as they say. The aim of these scientists is that of creating "future scenarios of health for both humans and the environment" thanks to big data and artificial intelligence. These technoscientific practices entangle humans with non-humans, creating new scientifically meaningful categories of biological diversity. Starting from the premise that biology, health, care and sociality are all linked, the aim of my in-progress research is to investigate how these categorization practices are made and what kind of commoning is taking shape after the differentiation between nature and culture, humans and non-humans. Enlarging the frame from laboratories to society and taking laboratories as an ethnographic lens through which analyse debates in social theory, I interrogate acritical forms of posthumanism that risk creating novel, unprecedented reductionism and enclosure. As an antidote, I propose to focus on death, extinction and vulnerability in commoning practices in order to challenge the limits of concepts like human, posthuman and care. I argue that looking at commoning practices from a non-vitalist perspective can shed light to genuine possibilities of envisaging and caring for more-than-human commons.
Aníbal Arregui (University of Barcelona)
Paper short abstract:
The entry of wild boar into cities is driven by intimate alliances, infrastructural side-effects, and global ecological transformations. Interlinking these three levels, the Anthropocene unfolds in the city as an irredeemable commoning of humans, pigs, and other forms of urban wildlife.
Paper long abstract:
I accompany ethnographically the process of wild boar urbanization in Barcelona since 2017. In this city, the ever-growing areas of the outskirts offer a felicitous combination of acorn-rich suburban forests, household garbage, lawns, water resources, and human feeders: a truly ecological heaven for new forms of porcine life.
Cities such as Berlin, Hong Kong, or Rome, among others, are facing comparable challenges. Human allies (e.g. feeders) and urban infrastructure (e.g. dumpsters) are local effects and always constitute a great attraction for these animals. Yet the emerging urban pig ecologies are also fostered by wider ranging dynamics: it turns out that global warming is an anthropogenic condition in which wild boar populations thrive. While milder winter temperatures follow higher reproductive rates and less mortality, the decreased availability of beechnuts triggers the foraging of alternative food sources in metropolitan areas.
The moves of wild boar into different cities carries the message of an inexorable reconfiguration of the relations between humans and some wild species in the context of climate change. In this presentation, I weave together the intimate, infrastructural and global ecological scales that explain the processes of wild boar mobility, proliferation, and urbanisation. I anticipate an urban Anthropocene marked by the failed efforts to maintain the boundaries between the city and the wild. The ongoing experiments of commoning urban spaces with wild species are certainly risky, technically challenging, and to some extent unavoidable.
Daniel Monterescu (Central European University) Yaara Sadetzki (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology)
Paper short abstract:
We propose the concept of the "wilding city" by examining the relationships between "wild" roosters and humans in order to shed light on the contested processes of more-than-human collaboration and resistance in the gentrifying city.
Paper long abstract:
We propose the concept of the "wilding city" by examining the relationships between "wild" roosters and humans in order to shed light on the contested processes of bottom-up urban conservation and more-than-human commoning in the divided city. In the summer of 2021, following complaints from some Jaffa's Jewish residents about "noise and odour nuisances," the Tel Aviv Municipality distributed leaflets announcing, "a terminal treatment of the wild roosters in yards and public spaces." At the same time, in the wealthy northside of the city, the municipality celebrates "urban nature" conservation projects, according to which "the presence of birds brings animals closer to nature in the bustling city." How does the nonhuman presence in the ethnically "mixed city" map onto the human complexity between Palestinians and Jews, veterans and new residents? While roosters are highly valued in both Judaism and Islam, free-range urban roosters are perceived as transgressors that disrupt regulated social order and unsettle the border between public and private. In the mixed-species and binational city, roosters mediate between languages, temporalities, cultural practices and political identities. Animals engender multispecies collaborations and communal coalitions and highlight growing disparities between rich and poor, Palestinian and Israeli, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, between city and nature, and between Tel Aviv and Jaffa. In this relational socio-natural setting, the untamed agency of roosters animates non-human (un)commoning that reconfigures the boundaries between the different social groups. In the process roosters become contested citizens and agents of cultural conservation with human allies in the context of Anthropocene transformations.
Knut G Nustad (University of Oslo)
Paper short abstract:
In KwaZulu-Natal, trout were introduced by colonial elites from the 1890s onwards. These introductions constituted both a symbolic and material enclosure of landscapes. Contemporary debates about undoing these enclosures are entangled in struggles over property rights and the future of commons.
Paper long abstract:
The translocation of trout from Britain throughout the British Empire from the 1870s onwards was a case of colonial world making and an integral part of the colonial enclosures and dispossessions taking place at the time. Domesticating landscapes through the introduction of alien species constituted a symbolic as well as material appropriation of landscapes, paradoxically making them home by making the wild. In present day KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, efforts by feral amateurs, enthusiasts mobilizing an elite network to establish trout throughout the province, gradually gave way to more professionalized colonial state conservation and environmental management regimes. These transformations led to the emergence of changing forms of dispossession that went hand in hand with the colonial dispossession of land. The paper thus shows that people were dispossessed, and commons enclosed, not just through direct forms of dispossession of land, but also through enclosures that arouse from other forms of appropriations, such as trout introduction and acclimatization. It then goes on to examine how post-apartheid debates about undoing these enclosures have become entangled in contemporary struggles over property rights, expropriation, and the future of commons.