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- Convenors:
-
Stuart McLean
(University of Minnesota)
Richard Irvine (University of St Andrews)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 26 University Square (UQ), 01/005
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
How might the perspective of geological deep time be mobilized to challenge the more restrictive spatiotemporal visions of contemporary neoliberalism and ethnonationalism, and to imagine in their place a new kind of commons? We welcome both paper presentations and creative/audiovisual projects.
Long Abstract:
Since the nineteenth century, the biological and earth sciences have shown how humans are embedded within the larger-than-human timescales of terrestrial evolution and geology. The perspective of "deep time" reveals humans themselves, their territorial boundaries, and the seemingly fixed forms of physical geography to be ephemeral presences, here today but (perhaps) gone tomorrow. More recently, proclamations of an anthropogenic climate crisis have, arguably, heightened awareness of the ways in which long-term processes of environmental change can impact human lives. Nonetheless, the present seems characterized equally by the ascendancy of more restrictive and parsimonious spatiotemporal visions: enclosure, privatizations, minutely quantified work-time, the strengthening of borders, and the narrowly exclusionary conceptions of identity and history often promulgated in contemporary "culture wars." This panel asks whether the invocation of more than human temporalities might have the potential to expose as transitory and contingent (and thus susceptible to transformation) conceptions such as ownership, private property, national identity, sovereignty, and territoriality that are currently mobilized to delimit and restrict access to both time and space. By refusing the enclosure of time, might deep time enable us to imagine new kinds of commons? Topics might include (but are not limited to): how expanded time horizons might transform the language of social and ecological description; the kinds of alliances, solidarities and collective mobilizations that deep time awareness might enable; and the work of artists and writers who have appealed to deep-time imaginaries. We welcome contributions in the form of academic papers, creative writing, performances, and audiovisual presentations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Muskoxen live through geological epochs and are creatures of deep time. Following muskoxen in Greenland, this paper explores the deep temporalities embodied in muskoxen, and in the ecologies that sustain them. Can muskoxen help mobilize times that defy human-centered categorization and pave the way for alternative more-than-human commons?
Paper long abstract:
Muskoxen (umimmak or ovibos moschatus) defy categorization and confinement in time and place. They have ruminated their way through continents and geological epochs, and are seen, by some, as living relics of past geological times, or creatures of deep time. Geneticists wonder how current populations can be thriving, taking into consideration their extremely low genetic variation.
This presentation follows a population of muskoxen in present-day Kangerlussuaq, West Greenland that has been thriving and growing since the 1960s, when 27 individuals were translocated to the area, after being caught in East Greenland. The population, now estimated to be of some 20.000 individuals, has become the object of various forms of resource-imagining and making: subsistence and commercial hunting for meat, wool production, trophy hunting, and tourism - resulting in different forms of regulation and new modes of territorial ownership.
Experimenting with genres of writing and audiovisual materials this paper tries to capture and unfold the deep and complex temporalities embodied in muskox bodies and pathways, and in the (disturbed) tundra ecologies that sustain them. If muskox deep time holds the potential to trouble and overthrow time as we know it, then what are the materialities and registers through which such muskox temporalities become available to us? How can more-than-human temporalities be grasped and accessed by humans/anthropologists, and how can muskoxen and their landscapes help us mobilize deep and other time-space forms that defy human-centered categorization, resource-imagining, and confinement, and pave the way for alternative more-than-human commons?
Paper short abstract:
Since the Brexit vote of 2016, Britain’s island character has often been figured in defensive and exclusionary terms. As a challenge to this view, I explore here the work of writers, and artists who have engaged the material presence of islands as sites of experimentation, encounter, and becoming.
Paper long abstract:
Characterizations of Britain as an island nation have enjoyed renewed currency in the wake of the 2016 Brexit vote. More specifically, Britain has been portrayed as an island under threat. Recent films such as Dunkirk and Darkest Hour (both 2017) revisit fears of German invasion during the early stages of World War 2. The anti-immigration rhetoric of Boris Johnson’s right-wing, English nationalist government and of neofascist groups such as Britain First and the English Defense League evokes the political, economic, and cultural threat allegedly posed both by immigrants from the countries of the EU and beyond, and by refugees and asylum seekers (visualized most pointedly in the form of those attempting to cross the English Channel by boat from France). In each case, Britain’s island character is portrayed in defensive terms, the sovereignty and identity of the island nation needing to be protected against the perennial danger of foreign incursion. But do islands inevitably lend themselves to such paranoid and exclusionary political imaginaries? This presentation explores the very different vision of islands that finds expression in the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, film-maker Bertrand Mandico, novelist Michel Tournier, and in the curatorial vision informing the Papay Gyro Nights Art Festival, held annually on the island of Papa Westray, Orkney, between 2011 and 2017. Islands feature here not as embattled enclaves of sameness, but as sites of experimentation, the setting for strange encounters, unforeseen combinations, and wayward becomings, affording potentially transformative openings to pre- and post-human vistas of deep time.
Paper short abstract:
Based on new ethnographic fieldwork among Jehovah’s Witnesses in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, this paper examines how Witnesses imagine the soon arrival of the eschaton an escape from the abyss and into deep time.
Paper long abstract:
Based on new ethnographic fieldwork among Jehovah’s Witnesses in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, this paper examines how Witnesses imagine the soon arrival of the eschaton an escape from the abyss and into deep time. As Witnesses live during the present ‘last days of this wicked system of things’, the nearness of Armageddon inspires hopeful acts of ‘imagining a paradise home ahead’. In this eternal future, the millennium is a busy period of mass bodily resurrection, deep spiritual reeducation, and total environmental renewal, culminating in the establishment of a New World. But what will life in Paradise be like? Will everyone be youthful? Will children be born in the New World? How will the planet heal following the environmental horrors of Armageddon? Because no death exists in the New World, will everyone be vegetarian? What will it feel like to live to be billions of years old? Considering how such questions are pondered by Witnesses, this paper aims to show what happens when ultra-rational scriptural reasoning reaches its limit, and then pivots to allow continued pondering via what I term ‘circumspect speculation’. Far from being what Witnesses would call ‘foolish and ignorant debates’, circumspect speculation describes a careful extension of ‘reasoning from the scriptures’ via tentative Biblical inference. Always offered with the warning that ‘we can’t know for sure’, circumspect speculation allows Witnesses a hermeneutically guarded way to extend hopeful imaginings of deep time about which neither the Bible nor Watchtower literature offers definitive statements, while still remaining tethered to both.