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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:
‘Beitekrise’, foraging crisis, is the vernacular term for a recurrent phenomenon that hits Sámi reindeer in winter. It refers to feed shortage due to icy conditions associated with Arctic climate change. This paper explores the crisis as a shortage of land, and a crisis of the commons.
Paper long abstract:
Reindeer migration routes have shaped human mobilities for hundreds of years. In the Nordic Arctic, these migrations are the backbone of Northern Sámi husbandry practices, and rely on free access to extensive landscapes, from low mountains and winter pastures in the southern inland regions where the snow is soft and allows access to lichen underneath, to summer pastures along the North Norwegian coast. Recurrent winter episodes of snow melt/freeze have always been a challenge, as it ‘locks’ winter feed under layers of ice, but with changing climate in the Arctic such episodes are now more frequent than they used to be. Some reindeer herders respond to the foraging crises by supplementary feeding of silage which is a major technological operation and expense. Others face the loss of calves and see their reindeer in a poor condition. In this paper, I argue that approaching the locked pastures as a crisis of climate change only, may mask the parallel anthropogenic crises that threaten migratory herding practices through encroachment and dispossession of land associated with the commons. How might attention to shifting and conflicting practices of land ownership illuminate the recurrent crises? To what extent does climate change mitigation exacerbate the pressure on land? How might future commons of the Anthropocene accommodate reindeer husbandry as a viable practice, and what is the role of digitalization in mediating human-animal relations in the reindeer herding landscape?
Paper short abstract:
By focusing on an agricultural area nested between two natural parks and an important industrial hub in South Sardinia, the paper aims to show the response of different species to the careless activities connected to the ecological transition.
Paper long abstract:
In South Sardinia (Italy), the ecological transition is producing new forms of careless exploitation of natural resources. In this context, properties and ownerships are rapidly changing their values and previous commons configurations, while ecosystems are changing their multispecies compositions and landscapes are muting their appearance. By focusing on an agricultural area nested between two Natura 2000’s parks and an industrial hub (Lai 2021), the paper aims to show the response of different species to the activities connected to the emergence of renewable power plants (Meloni 2021). Framed in the theoretical context of Capitalocene (Moore 2015; Latour et al. 2018), the contribution highlights the unequal relationships involving native and imported species. Further, the paper shows how the lives of various non-human species intertwine with hundred years of history of colonialism and agricultural and industrial development in the area. In this sense, by taking on a multispecies perspective (Tsing 2003, 2015), the paper reveals the connections between global changes and the emergence of apparently invisible critters that are striving for survival.
Finally, the contribution suggests that by embedding the local ecological knowledge of people living with other species in the programs for environmental management and energy production, it is possible to design policies attuned to the ‘small agencies’ (Bennett 2010) of fundamental yet neglected species.
Paper short abstract:
This paper deploys the ancient Greek concept of the daimonic in order to imagine and theorise novel modes of social organization in the Anthropocene, capable of reimbuing Bruno Latour's conceptual persona of 'the moderns' with cosmological purpose and ritual action.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropological conceptualizations of the Anthropocene oscillate between calls for secularism and a mytho-poetics revolving around concepts such as haunting, monsters, ghosts and the uncanny. Through a critical overview of anthropological literature, this paper aligns with the latter perspective. More specifically, the paper deploys the ancient Greek concept of the daimonic in order to imagine and theorise novel modes of social organization in the Anthropocene, capable of reimbuing Bruno Latour's conceptual persona of 'the moderns' with cosmological purpose and ritual action. For the Greeks, the notion of the daimonic pertained to a divine, unknowable mode of action, and to a conceptualization of human societies as porous and constantly affected by the intrusions and moods of daimonic entities (Kyriakides 2022). In what ways can non-human entities of the Anthropocene, such as light, radioactivity and oceans, be considered and treated as daimonic (DeLoughrey 2019) - as dispensers of vitality as well as destruction? On the one hand, the daimonic can be understood as an "example" (de Castro 2019) of ontological alterity radically different to the Western paradigms of nature and the individual, autonomous subject. On the other hand, the daimonic occupies an ambivalent yet important position in the history of Western thought, and has to a degree shaped modern perception of human subjectivity, sovereignty and society. The prospect of a daimonic Anthropocene depends on amplifying daimonic undercurrents (conceptual, material, ontological) internal and external to modernity in order to reconfigure relations between nature and the commons.
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic research in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, this paper explores legacies of synthetic chemicals as part of both material processes and stories about a past that continues to infringe on a present experienced as increasingly, albeit unevenly, toxic.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the material, political, and social legacies of past usage of synthetic chemicals as experienced by urban residents living in Dar es Salaam. Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic research highlights the different temporalities and layers of toxic exposures that, though considered ubiquitous, have, and continue to render some parts of the world more exposed while continuing to enclose on the future. While foods, such as pesticide residues lingering on vegetables and imported toxic fish, is of central concern in conversations over routine exposures and the porosity between bodies and broader ecologies, this paper takes soil as its point of departure. Drawing on research with a group of female urban organic farmers and their practices of care for soils, it discusses how health is situated beyond the individual body, and how soil is viewed as playing a central role in ensuring the future commons. Ultimately, this paper brings attention to the ways in which the past is inscribed in both contemporary and future bodies and landscapes, thus calling for broader recognition of the risks and threats still posed by past usage of toxic synthetic chemicals on the future.