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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:
- Thursday 28 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 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
St. Croix is home to one of the world’s largest oil refineries, and one of the most negligent. This paper describes how petro-pollution surpasses property as a leading vehicle of enclosure within the American Empire of Oil and shows how anthropology can help lay the groundwork for future commons.
Paper long abstract:
The plight of St. Croix offers a parable for our age of unearthly upheaval. Fittingly, it is a parable whose end is not yet written.
The Hess/Limetree Refinery bent the island of St. Croix into an imperial conduit of cheap gasoline for the US: close enough to seize the gain but far away to avoid any responsibility. This Caribbean outpost in the American Empire of Oil now stands atop an entangled history of harm often grasp as discrete events: colonial dispossession, environmental disaster, economic addiction, climate superstorms, and carcinogenic fears. For residents, this onslaught is coming into focus as a single continuum of fossil fueled disaster, one that must be broken.
Another accounting takes shape at the desks of decision-making, where the refinery is being recast as the most reasonable plan to generate revenue adequate the need of now. Oil refining decimated coastal fisheries, poisoned aquifers, ruined farmland, and assaulted health, all of which now conspire against any easy return to self-sufficiency. Perversely, ecological devastation naturalizes oil refining as the only viable economic lifeline. Here, endemic pollution surpasses privatization in advancing a new regime of enclosure.
But all is not lost. This paper is rooted in 4 years of collaboration with residents struggle to hold the refinery accountable and build a better future. Reflecting on this ongoing fight, this paper argues that the most transformative ‘future commons’ must come from the struggle for justice today and that anthropology has an instrumental role to play in that struggle.
Paper short abstract:
This paper takes as its starting point future commons as a theoretical space to explore how anthropogenic effects on rivers, canals and agricultural wetlands in coastal Bangladesh helps to expand concepts of enclosures and uncommoning and its effects on the 'rice and fish [that] make a Bengali'.
Paper long abstract:
This paper takes as its starting point future commons as a theoretical space to explore how anthropogenic effects on rivers, canals and agricultural wetlands in coastal Bangladesh helps to expand concepts of enclosures and uncommoning. The fluid materialities of capitalist extraction, pollution and property regimes impact local use rights and material qualities, nutrition and safety of 'the rice and fish [that] make a Bengali'. The Bengal Delta is a fluid commons in a social landscape of rampant and rising inequalities. Looking at various forms of capitalist land use and emerging industrial projects taking place in the Sundarbans [mangroves] coastal region of Bangladesh, it asks how land collective rights of access to previous fluid commons are impacted by the materiality of pollution as it transverses this complex wetlands ecology. Furthermore, as land erodes and silted waters accrete and transform into new lands - how does the loss of land and the claiming of newly-formed lands shift current configurations of ownership, property, dependency and care? It expands on future commons to discuss the potentials of 'fluid commons' to understand how enclosures and shifting ideas of ownership are complicated in an industrialising wetlands ecology.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses commoning in early sustainability debates, and uses a case study from Nepal about community forests and domestic biogas energy technology to consider the role of socio-ecological commons in emerging frameworks for sustainable multi-species livelihoods in the Anthropocene.
Paper long abstract:
Commoning recognises collective rights of environmental use and access that anthropologists, geographers and historians have researched extensively. In early phases of the sustainability paradigm this positive evidence displaced the tragic inevitability of Hardin’s thought experiment; even if rational actor individualism and corporate group membership supported the dominant narrative (Ostrom) of how such systems operated. As new sustainability challenges of planetary boundaries are coming to the fore, the possibilities for commoning attract renewed attention. This paper explores pathways towards grassroots renewable energy transition, with discussion of research, conducted during COVID constraints, concerning the proliferation of domestic biogas systems in an example from southern Nepal. The biogas programme was promoted initially as a technology to wean villagers out of the habit of collecting firewood from what had been de facto forest commons, but in the post-civil war period, actors with radical agendas accelerated the expansion of biogas systems as a socially-inclusive energy transition technology for all villagers, dependant on access to community forest pasture lands. The paper critiques state-centric versions of commoning, by reviewing histories of dispossession at work in southern Nepal, and dominant accounts of community forestry. It looks forward to renewable and just energy transitions research that situates the role of socio-ecological commons within the context of normative shifts concerning what passes for sustainable at the level of domestic technology preferences ‘at the heat of the hearth’, and in relation to new prospects for sustainable livelihoods in the Anthropocene that reconfigure relations between people, multi-species, territories and things.
Paper short abstract:
Building on fieldwork in the commercial fishery in Louisiana, USA, this paper discusses illegal fishing as a mode of commoning at the intersection of environmental and economic precarity, shedding light on complicated and contested practices of protecting and managing present and future commons.
Paper long abstract:
This paper builds on ethnographic fieldwork in the commercial fishery in south-east Louisiana, USA, in the context of intersecting environmental and economic precarity, and addresses the commons as a space for ongoing negotiation, speculation, and contestation, and commoning as a complicated, contested, and at times contradictory practice.
The spectacular eventfulness of social and environmental disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the 2010 BP oil spill, along with the well-documented ongoing land loss crisis in coastal Louisiana, have posited the region within wider discussions of disaster and environmental crisis associated with the Anthropocene (e.g., Adams 2014; Barra 2021; Bond 2013). In this paper I suggest that wider questions of environmental protection and concerns with environmental sustainability and the protection of contemporary and future commons unfold on the ground in intimate relation with the protection of livelihood.
Taking the context of what I suggest to be gradual enclosures of the commercial fishing grounds related to a dual development of a recreational fishing industry, I propose to view instances of illegal fishing and the illegal taking of species as less disruptive than at times represented, but rather as a form of commoning. Illegal fishing as transgressions of state law can in this vein be approached as a measure of solidarity related to industrial protectionism in the context of a globalized fishing industry, but also as claims to modes of environmental knowledge, that are in tension with traditions of scientific expertise associated with the official management of the fishing grounds.
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses how 'the commons', elaborated in critical relation to ideas and practices of property and ownership, is extended to address issues of environmental responsibility. Highly radioactive nuclear wastes have become a problem held in common, connecting current and future generations.
Paper long abstract:
This paper notes the strong parallels between climate change policies and nuclear waste disposal policies, both of which seem to hinge on the notion of a problem held 'in common’, and a determination or need to produce a sense of shared responsibility to address ‘the problem’. Drawing on a mix of ethnography and research that looks systematically at the historical relationships between commons and property, I explore how the nuclear industry composes ‘the problem’ of nuclear waste as a problem ‘in common’, as it seeks a site for its disposal. Currently in the UK the policy is to identify a deep geological site, although previous alternatives included both outer space and the deep oceans. A deep geological disposal site requires access and agreements with respect to materials and territories that are clearly owned (even if public ownership) but that extend (potentially) into spaces where ownership becomes more hazy 1km below the surface. Furthermore these spaces are designed to become passive sites that once closed will require no further human intervention, and might plausibly be forgotten about altogether. At the same time there is already a clear sense that future generations might have the technological capacity to unearth and exploit the buried materials. The contemporary push to identify a disposal site is also producing new epistemic controversies where efforts of collaborative knowledge making intersect with various modes of proprietary expertise.