Paper short abstract:

This paper will consider crises of environmental damage and Gàidhlig language decline in parallel with each other, asking what we can learn about environmental loss from linguistic and cultural loss, and vice versa.

Paper long abstract:

This paper on recently completed fieldwork undertaken in the Outer Hebrides to compare and contrast discourses of endangerment in relation to the natural environment of the islands and those relating to Gàidhlig, a minority language whose densest concentration of speakers is to be found in the islands. Rich in both natural and linguistic heritage, the islands find themselves continually inscribed in discourses centring around the endangerment and fragility of these resources. Gàidhlig is itself frequently understood as having an intrinsic relationship with the landscape of the islands and the traditional practices that make use of that landscape (e.g. crofting). The islands are threatened by a variety of environmental factors, and the language is threatened by various social, economic and political factors. Thus the loss of environmental lifeworlds comes alongside the loss of linguistic lifeworlds. The two discourses of endangerment are closely connected and difficult to disentangle from each other. The twin crises facing Gàidhlig and the natural environment of the islands come with a variety of affective and political responses ranging from apathy to activism. This paper will consider both crises and their responses in parallel with each other, asking what we can learn about environmental loss from linguistic and cultural loss, and vice versa.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines experience of Minamata disease among the people of Goshoura Island, particularly the perception of mercury-contaminated fish. Through the analysis, this paper suggests that their deep and complex relationship with fish could be regarded as “intimate strangers” in the community.

Paper long abstract:

Goshoura Island is an isolated fishing community located opposite the shore of Minamata in southern Japan. The region has become stigmatized due to widespread mercury poisoning caused by industrial pollution between 1932 and 1968 which became known as Minamata disease (MD). Mercury poisoning caused by the consumption of contaminated fish and shellfish led to not only suffering and death among the victims, but also deep social and political divisions which remain in the community today. Fish are deeply rooted in the dietary culture, traditions and everyday lives of the people living in the contaminated areas near Minamata, including Goshoura Island, where fishing remains the main industry.

This paper draws analysis from the field date and the verbatim accounts of more than twenty people, found in journals and books published by victims’ groups, examines how mercury-contaminated fish were perceived on Goshoura Island. The accounts revealed that some of the residents ate fish even though they knew it was contaminated, suggesting that they had an intimate trust in their fish. At the same time, speaking of MD, including in the context of contaminated fish, has been taboo on Goshoura Island and is regarded as an incident on the opposite shore, despite many residents who were victims. These findings suggest that in order to understand the local experience of MD, we must regard the contradiction between the interpersonal experience of one’s body contaminated, and the fish as an “intimate stranger.”

Paper short abstract:

How can we understand hope and mourning of an indigenous community who has been forcefully evicted from their home? The proposed paper attempts to understand how loss, mourning, and hope are collectively expressed.

Paper long abstract:

Paat-mi: Hope in Mourning in Loktak Lake of Manipur, India

What does it mean for a lake-people to not be dwelling in the lake? How do they live in-between water and land? Drawing on ethnographic data, the paper attempts to understand the hope and mourning of a displaced indigenous community. Paat-mi has been forcefully displaced since 2011 from Loktak Lake of Manipur, India. They have been forcefully evicted by the authorities to preserve the lake from further deterioration.

How does a displaced community strive and live in a contested ecosystem? How do the feelings of losing their home are collectively perceived and expressed? How does this feel result in collective political action? The paper attempts to explore the relationship between a displaced indigenous community and water, which is entangled with loss, mourning, fear, courage, and hope.

Paper short abstract:

Is it possible to portrait an epidemic of plants with the tools of the anthropology of death? The banana population of South Kivu has recently been disappearing due to a destructive bacterium. This loss takes among local farmers the form of a collective event comparable to a cultural grief.

Paper long abstract:

For centuries there has been a deep exchange between the Bashi, native community of the hills around Bukavu, and the banana groves that populate the area. Banana trees are a very important presence of the inhabited space and many gestures and activities take place around it, shaping the Shi symbolic universe. Today, however, banana groves are progressively disappearing due to the spread of a plant disease called Banana Xanthomonas Wilt. Looking at human and plant groups as communities embedded in a network of reciprocal relationships, I analyze the perceptions and consequences related to the loss of banana groves as ecological disaster. In particular, the concept of cultural grief, borrowed from the work of Roberto Beneduce (2004) on politics of death, becomes useful to explain the crisis of presence experienced by farmers facing this environmental transformation, that arouses perceptions of cultural emptiness and a sense of the end of the world. Nevertheless, as Ernesto De Martino (1977) reminded us, the end of a world does not coincide with the end of the world. Every catastrophe brings with it regeneration, the opening of new scenarios and different futures imagined by younger generations. My research shows that this disappearance from the native ecological horizon is generating new cultural processes and practices. From the theoretical point of view, the analysis tries to push the anthropological discipline beyond the human, to introduce multispecies narratives (Haraway 2016) in ethnography, to bring out the importance of the plant social network, and to begin to trace new representations.

Paper short abstract:

In recent years, a number of new reforestation initiatives have been founded in Germany in the context of increasing forest damages. Interviews with the respective founders have laid open both solastalgia as well as eco-anxiety as core motivational forces to go from 0 to 100 in their engagement.

Paper long abstract:

After repeated hot and dry summers in 2018 and 2019 and related massive damages by bark beetles in too often monoculture environments, many German forests have been significantly harmed. In some cases, whole plots have suffered the death of certain tree species. Concern has grown quickly, has been taken up by the media and swiftly spread into the wider public. Partly in response, partly in parallel, numerous individuals who had until then not been environmental activists founded initiatives to support reforestation. The paper presents the data gathered from interviews with their respective founders on their motivation, which significantly hightlights both solastalgia and eco-anxiety as driving factors. Hence, we can see an example of relatively rapid mobilization of activism based on these emotions, which in other contexts have been described as paralyzing.

Paper short abstract:

While peaks and glaciers are falling apart in the Alps, human communities attached to them are forced to accept the loss of their milieu and to craft new ways of relating with it, through a greater attention to sensorial experiences, invented (micro-)rituals, and renewed aesthetic perceptions.

Paper long abstract:

As a result of global warming, glaciers retreat is accelerating, and rocks collapses are multiplying in the high mountains. This geological collapse is disrupting the Alpine landscape and leading to another collapse, that of the perception of these mountains. At the same time, other forms of relationship to them, such as the recent funeral ceremonies for vanishing glaciers, are emerging. Socio-cultural transformations, which concern the imaginary, emotions, aesthetics, and sensitive and ritualised practices in the face of these collapses, are in process.

People who share a sensitive and affective relationship with the mountains of the Mont Blanc range and the Valais Alps: guides, crystal diggers, glaciologists, mountaineers, huts keepers, photographers, artists, etc. express feelings of loss and sadness, but also develop new forms of interrelationships with the mountains and with specific places/beings as ways to mourn disappearing landscapes and to move forward.

The observation of tangible situations of interactions, such as (micro-) rituals, with specific entities like glaciers and the documentation of the changing aesthetic perceptions of a mountain which is disintegrating show that the beyond the emotions of loss, sadness, melancholia, anger, or so-called “solastalgia” (Albrecht 2005), follow strong commitments toward adaptation, in terms of practice but also of perception and relationship. The modernist divide between the humans and their environment sometimes give place to other entanglements with the mountains, with for instance more direct relationships that can be related to what is at stake in the discussions around “animism”.