Paper short abstract:

This paper, based on long-term water justice work in Appalachia, considers water as a collective of droplets passing through, evading capture or ownership, conveying death by toxins or inundation as readily as sustaining human bodies and spirits, with equal disregard: dancing humans toward justice.

Paper long abstract:

Water is equitable in that it equally sustains and infects and carves and flows and freezes and disappears through sinkholes and appears in torrents. As a commons without containment, water molecules connect us by constituting a Himalayan stream, a salamander in the Qualla Boundary, a great white shark in the Coral Sea, and toxic sludge. It has no use at all for status. Water justice is what we learn from water – its lessons are the opposite of and the antidote to capitalist logic. Thirst and toxins are concentrated most in the bodies of those humans most politically, socially and economically marginalized (usually quite intentionally by those who are richer, whiter, and further away). Humans are responsible for taking from upriver without care for the well-being of those downriver; for rerouting and privatizing and polluting water without care for current and future generations of all the beings water constitutes and connects. Instead of reversing and restricting the courses of rivers, we need to reverse logics – seeing mountain communities as the vital tenders of headwaters, whose well-being matters for all, instead of as peripheries, backwaters and sacrifice zones. Examples will be given in this presentation of learning from water's dance in Appalachia in transnational and transdisciplinary collaborations. Poetry and art, for example, are powerful conveyers of the imperviousness of water to being hoarded and withheld and choked with microplastics. And anthropology brings close listening - to the plurality of waters and to what humans learn from water's powerful collectivity.

Paper short abstract:

Based on my fieldwork in Odisha, I will focus on the sacred logic of various indigenous justice movements to protect their mountains and spiritual identity from the large-scale extraction based economy undertaken by states and profit-oriented multinational corporations.

Paper long abstract:

Indigenous people view land and natural resources as sacred - living, thinking, and acting beings. Indigenous land, forest, water, and mountains are currently under pressure, commodified, and objectified from the dramatic expansion of large-scale extraction activities and neo-liberal development ventures taken up by states and profit-oriented multinational corporations. Previously, I have discussed mountains as powerful sacred actors in indigenous people’s efforts to organize and protect their regions from irrevocable destruction through mining activities (Pandey and Kingsolver, 2022). It is well known that the problems faced by the indigenous peoples are universal. They suffer from the consequences of historic injustice, including colonization, dispossession of the lands, territories, and resources, oppression and discrimination, and lack of control over their ways of life. Colonial and modern states have primarily denied their right to progress and development in pursuing economic growth.

Consequently, indigenous peoples often lose out to more powerful actors, becoming one of the most disadvantaged groups in the country (UN 2010). In India, despite the presence of several laws to protect the Adivasi and their habitats, such as Schedule V, PESA (Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas 1996), FRA (Forest Rights Act 2006), and Land Alienation Act (non-transfer of Adivasi lands to non-Adivasi), all of which have been systematically violated and encroached upon by mega national companies and multinationals for extraction of minerals and other natural resources available on their land. In this paper, I will present indigenous wisdom on their land, medicine, livelihood, and spiritual identity as the logic to fight against the coercive state and profit-making corporations. Based on my longitudinal fieldwork in Odisha, I will focus on the sacred logic of various indigenous justice movements to protect their mountains and spiritual identity.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the interaction between indigenous sovereignty and embodied knowledge in society, Taiwan. Based on the sensory ethnographic research, it explores their concepts and body movements of walking in the mountain, and how they, by walking, shape and reshape meanings of the environment.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the interrelationship and interaction between indigenous sovereignty and embodied knowledge in the contemporary Bunun society. Bunun people is one of the Taiwan’s indigenous groups. Bunun people were used to living in the forest in the mountain. However, they were forced by the Japanese colonial government to settle down in the reservation areas in the plains since 1930. Even though their current living areas are far from the mountains, some of the Bunun people still use their own indigenous knowledge to work and live in their ancestors’ places. This paper is based on my sensory ethnographic research and use phenomenology anthropology to explore Bunun people’s concepts and practices of walking in the mountain. For the Bunun people, walking is a way of learning embodied knowledge in the forest, of remembering and creating stories, and of interacting with the environment in the forest. While they walked in the mountain, they also communicated with their ancestral spirits and their history at the same time. Track and path are not only cultural and natural landscape, but also sacred places and historical sites. In this paper, I will illustrate how the Bunun people, by walking, shape and reshape meanings of these places. Secondly, I will discuss how walking in the mountain contributes Bunun people to reflecting and rethinking the implications of colonialism for them, and how their embodied knowledge can play a role in pursuing indigenous sovereignty in the contemporary.

Paper short abstract:

At the interface between anthropology and ethnosciences, I discuss the relationships and coexistence between human and arboreal beings among the Bugun of Arunachal Pradesh (eastern Indian Himalayas).

Paper long abstract:

With an increasing demand for the decarbonization of the global economy to reach carbon neutrality in 2050, and the loss of biodiversity, forests represent a key lever for climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation. The eastern Indian Himalayas, listed as biodiversity hotspot by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) are characterized by a mountainous and rich forest environment, where trees play a fundamental role both in maintaining soils (thus helping to limit landslides) and in regulating the water cycle (helping to reduce flooding on the scale of the Brahmaputra basin).

The Bugun lifeworld is entangled in the Himalayan forest, a dynamic local knowledge system, and in modern forest management policies at several scales (from local to international). In this context, using ethnographic and ethnoscientific approaches, I question the ways in which the Bugun co-exist with different categories of trees (forest trees, isolated trees and cultivated trees). Within which local categorisation system trees are integrated? What are the roles attributed to these different arboreal beings and the dynamics of associated practices? And how are market economy and forest conservation policies transforming modes of co-existence between human and tree?

By providing some answers to these questions, I show how an anthropology of the living allow us to understand the complex socio-ecological dynamics of a mountain environment such as the eastern Indian Himalayas.

Paper short abstract:

Violins are made from mountain wood. Discussing the ecological knowledges, practices, and industries that surround the sourcing of mountain “tonewood” trees as building materials for violins, this paper addresses how Alpine ecologies play an integral part of musical experiences around the world.

Paper long abstract:

To make violins, we need mountains. The “tonewood” (coming from European spruce and Sycamore maple trees) that the instruments are carved from requires a range of highly specific qualities that cannot be found in lowland plantation trees but rather exist only in mountain trees from niche Alpine habitats: good spruce tonewood, for instance, usually comes from trees growing at over 2000 meters altitude on a South-facing slope with many ravines, where environmental conditions cause trees to grow slowly, making a dense wood with low resin content. In the German Alps, a world-renowed hub for lutherie, the heritage practice of violin making is thus deeply entangled with various ecological knowledges, practices, and industries that revolve around the local mountains and their sonorous trees.

This paper explores the interconnections between instrument making heritage in Germany and the mountain ecologies that have shaped, and that have been shaped by and for the crafting of violins. Through the circulation of instruments and musical practices around the world, these mountain ecologies play integral parts in global musical industries. Furthermore, the extraction of other construction materials, such as the threatened Pernambuco wood endemic to Brazil’s tropical forests that is used to make violin bows ties the violin making industry to colonial ecologies and landscapes facing immediate pressure from climate change. This paper provides an early insight into ongoing research, which pursues multispecies methods to address how the lives of European Alpine trees are integral part of musical experiences around the world.

Paper short abstract:

Thinking with Tibetan pastoralists around the notion of "sabchu" or “essence of the soil”, this presentation explores the entanglements of soil, plant, animal and human vitalities in a context of climate and environmental change.

Paper long abstract:

“Sabchu” (Tibetan for “essence of the soil”) is a life-giving force sustaining the more-than-human pastoral communities of the Tibetan plateau: vegetation nutritiousness, livestock health, and herders livelihoods all depend on it. "Sabchu" can be debilitated or strengthened depending on the ways people interact with the land and its spirit masters. In the past years, mobile pastoralists in the Tibetan plateau have sensed a weakening of their land’s "sabchu", which they link to activities consisting in digging and extracting materials from the soil such as mining, the building of dams or the expansion of the road network. These state-led projects have proliferated in recent years as part of China’s renewed efforts to integrate its Western, resource-rich and minority-populated regions.

Herders think the weakening of "sabchu" influences precipitation and vegetation growth patterns. Because "sabchu" is not directly perceivable through the senses, herders attune themselves to it through observation of livestock health and milk yield. It is thus through the intimate knowledge of their herd animals that pastoralists make sense of a changing climate and environment.

Based on a thirteen-month ethnography of a pastoral community in North-Eastern Tibet, this presentation reflects on the indigenous notion of "sabchu" as a nexus of more-than-human vitalities in a context of climate and environmental change.

Paper short abstract:

The proposed paper is centred around the role of yak herding as a factor in land allocation process within the post-socialist reform in the Sayan mountains of southern Siberia which has positively influenced the sustainability of land use and allowed land allocation to be less prone to corruption.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper is centred around the role of yaks and yak herding as the determinants in land allocation process amid the post-socialist reform in the Sayan mountains of southern Siberia. Comparing results of the reform in several mountain communities it suggests that a domination of yak in a collective farm herd has allowed pasture allocation to individual households to be less prone to corruption but consistent with the local patterns of seasonal livestock transhumance. The paper presents such natural characteristics of yak as a resistance to cold, wolf resistance, and ability to graze on steep slopes and substitute water by snow as factors permitting local herders to build a viable production despite a shortage of land. Utilizing remote mountain slopes for grazing yaks lowered concentration of livestock on more conveniently located grazing land contributing to pasture sustainability.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on a particular case in the mountainous Northeastern Turkey, which involves the transition of pastures from commons to a private farm in the 1930s, then back to commons in the late 1970s, this presentation problematizes (un)commoning in the more-than-human worlds of pasture-cheesemaking.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation analyzes a particular case in the mountainous Northeastern Turkey, which involves the transition of pastures from commons to a private farm in the 1930s, then back to commons in the late 1970s. Counter-insurgency measures of the Turkish state to achieve national security in the borderlands and dairy infrastructures in the pastures affect the everyday life of agro-pastoralism, circumventing the movements of cows, sheep, shepherds, and farmers on alpine grasslands of Kars. Based on the narratives of the former farm owners and pasture-less peasants on the attacks to the “pasture-farms” in the late 1970s, and on my ethnographic research in these pastures, I discuss the concepts of commons and uncommons in relation to the more-than-human worlds of pasture-cheesemaking. Can the violent attack and occupation be understood as “commoning”? Does the afterlife of the pasture-farm suggest a process of “uncommoning”? What would this imply for our understanding of “common pastures” and the more-than-human communities that make them? How were these processes affect the other-than-human worlds in the mountainous alpine grasslands? And how did the latter circumvent these processes?

Paper short abstract:

Based on an ethnography carried out by the authors in the pastoral commons in the Sierra de Segura and the Sierra de Castril (Andalusia), this presentation accounts for the multiple assemblages which incorporate humans and other-than-human agencies, which have shaped these landscapes for centuries.

Paper long abstract:

Communal management of natural resources is a living but invisible reality in many parts of the world, even more at the periphery that the rural world has become. This is also the reality in Spain, where various forms of communal governance have endured and resisted secular attacks from both the public and private spheres. Based on an ethnography carried out by the authors in the pastoral commons in the Sierra de Segura and the Sierra de Castril (Andalusia), this presentation accounts for the multiple socio-natural assemblages which incorporate not just humans, but also include other-than-human agencies (domesticated and wild animals, “domesticated” and wild flora), which have shaped these landscapes for centuries.

Long-standing practices such as extensive communal livestock farming (mainly sheep) and the cultivation of cereals and olive trees converge, and are assembled and reassembled in the territory, with external agencies that imposed enclosure policies (19th century) as well as policies of forestry exploitation and reforestation (first half of the 20th century). More recently, hunting and wildlife management strategies, agrarian and conservation policies, and tourism and forms of biocultural patrimonialisation have been imposed on the territory. This paper will focus on how these herders have adapted to changing and occasionally adverse scenarios, maintaining -albeit with nuances- their communal organisation. Interviews conducted by the authors as well as the consultation of historical archives will allow us to understand the adaptation and notions of territory that have been practiced in the study area since the second half of the 19th century.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the rearing of increasingly autonomous pigs that are replacing the presence of grazing animals, the paper examines the ways in which multispecies relations as well as the agricultural landscape in the Ukrainian Carpathians are being renegotiated in the face of overlapping crises.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the changing use of grazing land in western Ukraine, which has become increasingly overgrown since the collapse of the Soviet Union and in the course of increasing labor migration to the European Union. Instead of Carpathian buffaloes, cows or goats, it is robustly reared pigs that enable a new, less labor-intensive form of land use. Autonomously living pigs find a new home in scrubby former pastureland or primeval beech forests. With the escalation of the Russian war against Ukraine in 2022, the possibility of labor migration to the EU ended for the majority of men due to potential military obligations. As a result of this development, but also in view of increasing droughts, the keeping of free-range robust pigs instead of grazing animals is becoming a more attractive regional income. Focusing on the rearing of increasingly autonomous pigs that are replacing the presence of grazing animals, the paper examines the ways in which multispecies relations as well as the agricultural landscape in the Ukrainian Carpathians are being renegotiated in the face of overlapping crises.