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Paper short abstract:

Reflecting on decades of ethnography with Indigenous Australians, this paper explores the praxis of ‘keeping company’, a multi-dimensional art of connection that links people to non-human species. This relational ontology inspires thinking through human resilience in times of ecological precarity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on a larger project, entitled, ‘Keeping Company: An anthropology of being in relation’. It anthropologises the praxis of relating, that is, expands the horizon over which understandings of the self and non-self/other in relation are engaged. The drive is to seek out relational lifeworlds of distinction (that is cross-cultural examples), which support and enrich the field of potentials for new ways of thinking through relationships which will support life and being with difference.

I ask, how might there be a return to appreciating the human in relation? Reflecting on decades of ethnography with Indigenous Australians, specifically the Yanyuwa people in northern Australia, attention is given to the praxis of ‘keeping company’, a fine-tuned and multi-dimensional art of connection that links people to one another, to ancestors, to places and non-human species. Yanyuwa have a cultural habit through which they are capable of more-than-human entanglements across the entire field of their land and seascape. This relational ontology and its epistemic roots create the conditions for Yanyuwa resilience amidst experiences of historic violence and prevailing coloniality. This relational ontology provides fascinating points of engagement for thinking through human resilience at a time when ecological crises are becoming crushingly prevalent. Broadening ontologies of relating may prompt more expansive approaches to human interactions with the world, a step that may in turn encourage better acceptance of difference, enchantment with what lays beyond the human and a flexibility in how we exist. This is explored as a praxis of resilience.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how resilience is not just a matter of one’s own will but remains embedded in the wider network of relations as experienced through dreams. These relations, as witnessed by the Nanai during climate crises, reconstitute and bridge sociality and (im)materiality in novel ways.

Paper long abstract:

What does it mean to witness the breakdown of concepts in which people understand things to be happening? The Nanai fishing community in the Amur region of Siberia has been living through numerous challenges, such as disappearance of fish caused by climate change, lack of financial support from the local governments and internal conflicts amongst the Nanai themselves. Within this landscape operates a Nanai shaman, the director of the Buri centre who seeks to develop and promote the Nanai and indigenous cultures in Russia. Despite personal traumas and mounting political, racial and economic challenges, Leonid stoically designs and realises new plans for the centre and the disappearing community. His strength, as he explains, derives from dreams in which he encounters deceased relatives and friends who offer critique, advice and prophecies. Leonid’s resilience remains, therefore, threaded from a distinct oneiric epistemology that is shaped and defined by distinct relations with non-humans. Situated within the frameworks of new materialism and indigenous metaphysic, in this paper I discuss what kind of insights are added to the understanding of resilience by being attentive to the knowledge about the world brought by non-humans in dreams - a distinct productive crossing that natural sciences may never be able to notice. I further explore how resilience is not just a matter of one’s own will but remains embedded in the wider network of agentive, beyond human, relations. These relations, in the face of climate crises and political conflicts, reconstitute and bridge sociality and (im)materiality in novel ways.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper approaches the concept of resilience critically by looking at ontological assumptions of human-more-than-human interactions in Vanuatu. It discusses encounters with new environmental practices in adaptation projects for climate change and how they challenge or re-conceptualise resilience.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses approaches of improving resilience of communities in the face of climate change and shows how in rural Vanuatu horticulturalists reshape approaches to resilience along human-water-soil relations. Discourses about climate change in Oceania often connect resilience with the concept of vulnerability. In Vanuatu, resilience is discussed against the background of a population, which faces immense challenges due to natural disasters and prognosed problems for agriculture due to seasonal changes, including prolonged droughts. Therefore, the aim is to strengthen the resilience of people through adaptation measures; in order to either return to status quo after disasters (McDonnell 2020) or transform agricultural practices in order to secure food security. Participants in adaptation programs for food security are supposed to integrate new globalised measures for horticulture into their daily gardening practices. However, horticulturalists re-organise adaptation methods by interacting flexibly with humans, soil and water. In contrast to following standardised irrigation strategies, ni-Vanuatu explain that the soil shows them how to adapt their cultivation. Based on in-depth ethnographic research in Vanuatu, I approach the concept of resilience critically by looking at different ontological assumptions of human-more-than-human interactions. I explore ni-Vanuatu encounters with new environmental discourses and practices and ask how these encounters in adaptation projects might challenge but also re-conceptualise the notion of resilience.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the regenerative potential of floods and erosion in riverine life. By underlining how riverine flows make it possible to retain land and life in the Brahmaputra floodplain, I ethnographically explore alternatives to resilience expressed through more-than-human alliances.

Paper long abstract:

“We are called riverine people because we follow the river to where it flows.” This is a conversation I had during PhD fieldwork, with a member of a tribal-indigenous community called the Mising in the Subansiri river region on the Brahmaputra's northern bank. Mising community members often asserted that as a ‘riverine people living at the edges of the Brahmaputra and its many tributaries in upper and central Assam, they have historically never feared floods'. These assertions are contrary to flood vulnerability and marginalization narratives in state and media reports about the annual floods in Assam.

The Mising welcome floods for the fish and fertile alluvial soil they bring. They center the possibilities of continued life in the river island shaped by ‘the river taking away but also putting back land, holding it in the river’s womb but helping it reemerge seasonally’. This paper underlines Mising articulations of the river making it possible to retain land and life through the rhythmic seasonality (Harris 1998: 65) of floods and erosion. I ask: What role do the ontologies of the river island play in Mising community experiences of historically having lived with the river’s contingencies without wording it as vulnerability or resilience? Further, I focus on alternatives to resilience expressed in Mising articulations of lively flows between water, soil, seeds, plants and animals (Ingold 2011; Bennett 2010; Raffles 2002) that contribute to the emergence and submergence of the liquid landscapes they occupy.

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Paper short abstract:

This historical study traces the origin of resilience to the problem of pest control. Focusing on the agency of budworms, I argue that resilience originally entails an experts' responsibility to adapt their practices to uncertainties, rather than responsiblizing the public for possible disasters.

Paper long abstract:

This paper begins by scrutinizing the early career of Canadian ecologist Crawford Holling, a pioneer in resilience theory. Attracted to the technology of computer modelling, in the 1950s and 60s he was involved in the control of eastern spruce budworm (Choristoneura fumiferana) in Canada. To defend the legitimacy of models that often struggled to predict budworm population and respond to the challenges of popular environmental movements, Holling and his colleagues emphasized the democratic value of modelling workshops that brought together interdisciplinary scientists and policymakers. By the mid-1970s, he began to promote a resource management paradigm based on resilience, conceived as the capacity of a system to retain its interrelation despite disruptions. For Holling, the unpredictability of ecosystem created a responsibility for managers to facilitate adaptive strategies by enhancing diversity, participation, and communication in policymaking. This paper demonstrates how the more-than-human agency of budworm was intertwined with Holling’s conceptualization of science and institutions. Next, I highlight how this history matters for current debates by examining Holling’s impacts on ecological anthropology in the 1970s, agroecology in the 1980s, and urban planning in the 1990s, which shaped the emergence of popular but contested ideas such as traditional ecological knowledge and ecosystems services. The imagery of the unruly pest continued to persist throughout this history. By questioning the way resilience is operationalized in specific contexts and studying these operationalizations in relation to the responsibility resilience originally entails, I argue that the idea retains critical potential in addressing uneven power relationships in resource management.