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- Convenors:
-
Clayton Goodgame
(Princeton University)
Nicholas Lackenby (University College London)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 24 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
What does it mean to be “rooted”? What is the value of describing a connection to a place this way and how are such profound connections “undone"? This panel seeks papers that consider the experiences and social conditions of rootedness and uprootedness.
Long Abstract:
Around the world, discourses of ancient roots and national origins inform a wide range of political and social movements, as well as everyday senses of belonging. But what does it mean to be “rooted”? What is the value of describing a connection to a place this way and how are such profound connections “undone"? This panel takes up these questions from a cross-cultural perspective. It is concerned with experiences, discourses, and practices of rootedness and what happens when one becomes uprooted, be it through war, political persecution, economic pressure, environmental disaster, marriage, education, or medical conditions. How does one become “rooted” somewhere, sometime? How do some people become more rooted than others, and how are such conditions disputed? What registers do different peoples use to describe their connection to land, kin, and the collective past, and how do they differ from one another? What temporalities and historicities are involved in the experience of connectedness to a place, and how do they change? What are the political stakes of such debates, and how do they inform larger processes of colonialism, nationalism, or racism? This panel seeks papers that consider the experiences and social conditions of rootedness and uprootedness. We invite contributions from anywhere in the world that investigate these terms and how they are mediated through any number of factors, including kinship and gender relations, racial and ethnic categories, economic processes, and religious traditions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 24 July, 2024, -Thi Anh Thu Dinh (University of Milano-Bicocca)
Paper short abstract:
Taking example from an ongoing ethnographic study in a local community in central Vietnam, this presentation explores ancestor worship as a practice of rootedness that is linked to gentrification and transnational labor migration.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation explores ancestor worship as a practice of rootedness linked to gentrification and transnational labor migration. Following an ongoing ethnographic study in a local community in central Vietnam, I will present how migrants maintain their rootedness abroad through ancestor worship, using the lens of gentrification and spatial rejuvenation.
Anthropological research sees gentrification along with different social-spatial reconstruction processes such as displacement, social stratification, cultural reproduction, etc. I describe a form of rootedness in a rural commune in central Vietnam with a large population of its citizens working abroad, unpacking how the infrastructure transformation of a rural neighborhood has absorbed itself with transnational economic process and religious traditional praxis. Particularly, by investing remittance in building and renovating family ancestral houses, migrants maintain their connections with homeland, secure and eternalize their material contributions all the while redeem for their absence from the place. This study exemplifies a socio-economic process of redressing local community in which the social actors are embedded within a larger context of traditional conservation in a global flux of capital exchange. The discussion leads to a critical view at the socioeconomic and religious diversification of the local community as well as the social construction of personal ties to homeland that are redefined based on economic advantages. More importantly, it reveals a gentrification process braid within a power structure that dictates individual privilege to inhabit space and religious position.
Simashree Bora (Cotton University, Guwahati Assam)
Paper short abstract:
The paper seeks to comprehend the relocation of Vaishnavite (Hindu) monasteries situated in an island in Assam, India due to flood and erosion. What happens when they are dislocated from their place of origin and relocated/transferred to a new place?
Paper long abstract:
Situated on the river Brahmaputra, Majuli, a river island in the northeastern state of Assam, India, encompasses the complexities of natural and human world; and provides an amalgamation of both static and dynamic aspects of nature and culture. The island is a home to the most prominent and prestigious seats of Vaishnavite monasteries, the Sattra, which represent the island as a sacred landscape, a heritage site and an ecologically unique habitat. Over the past decades, flood and erosion as continuous process has transformed the landscape, that includes dislocation and displacement of people and places. This paper seeks to explore uprooting and dislocation of monasteries from their place of origin, by documenting the events of floods and erosion as ecological and political processes. What historicities are involved in seeking connections in the events of relocation/transfer of monasteries, especially outside the island? The paper looks at ‘temporality’, ‘dislocation’ and ‘relocation’ of institutions through the lens of monks and devotees, and their memories of the past. The paper argues that the complexity of such process is embedded in the political economy of the monasteries and their entanglement with the state.
Raminder Kaur (University of Sussex)
Paper short abstract:
The paper considers how pilgrimage practices re-root hearts, minds, faith and finances in places that were once abandoned or neglected by minority Sikh groups in the land that came to be called Pakistan in 1947.
Paper long abstract:
The paper considers how latter-day pilgrimage concentrate hearts, minds, faith and finances in places that were once abandoned or neglected in what I outline as re-rooting practices. After the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, millions of Sikhs and Hindus crossed the border to settle in India, while Muslims from India settled in what is now Pakistan. Owing to fraught relations between the two countries ever since, pilgrim visits to places in Pakistan where Sikh gurus were born, lived, and died were treacherous, if not non-existent. By the 1990s, aided by their foreign passports and liaisons with those in India, diasporic Sikhs began to invest time, energy and money in reviving the pilgrimage infrastructure and economy in Pakistan. They were supported by locally based Muslims, many of whom became empathetic to the cause through a shared language and culture and a cross-group respect for the inclusive, spiritual pioneer, Guru Nanak Dev, who was born and died in Pakistan. New connections were forged despite the communal violence and massacres of the past that marred and scarred the birth of the new nations in 1947.
Anishka Gheewala (LSE)
Paper short abstract:
The diasporic tradition of Pushtimarg, Krishna worshippers bring the sacred landscapes of Vraj in India to London. Recreating Krishna’s rural birthplace in temples and domestic spaces gives devotees a sense of rootedness in urban neighbourhoods (un)doing diasporic devotee (un)ease with new contexts
Paper long abstract:
As Pushtimarg devotees circle the recreated Mount Govardhan in a maroon carpeted hall in the UK, the sounds of traffic, songs (kirtan) on the CD player and swishes of traditional Indian sarees permeate the worship space. One devotee recalls her pilgrimage to Vraj, as she circles. Another recalls his seva to the cows in Vraj. Recreating the rural pastures of Vraj in the (sub)urban areas of greater London strengthens and diffuses religious experience rooted in India to devotees around the world.
Boundaries of wild and domesticated, urban and rural, public and private are permeated by the Pushtimarg practice of seva in cultivated settings of sacred space. Seva models on mothering a baby Krishna in the household and in temples by paralleling human caretaking to a divine baby. The sense of rootedness that is created through place-making is not fixed in India but moves with the community. This is not a narrative of the UK diaspora ‘copying’ India. Both settings are equally authentic. However, the Pushtimarg is a fluid community with an increasingly diasporic component. From migratory stories of uprootedness, the lines of connectedness through Krishna mythology are mediated by recreated sacred landscapes. This undoes static representations of so-called traditional religious movements as unchanging, or diasporas as assimilating and losing their identity while accentuating the movement’s connection to the imagery of Indian divine landscapes. This adaptive capacity allows for innovative religious place-making, maintaining a sense of universal Krishna mythology while generating new forms of worship and sacred space in the diaspora.
Candace Lukasik
Paper short abstract:
How is indigenous sovereignty shaped as connectivity—to land, to diasporic scales of rootedness, and to imperial refusal?
Paper long abstract:
Contextualized by the rise of ISIS, their targeting of Iraq's Christian communities, and the Assyrian diasporic response to such attacks in the United States, this paper asks: How is indigenous rootedness in northern Iraq (espoused by transnational Assyrians) shot through secular mediations of ecclesial forms of kinship and contextualized by colonial legacies and imperial presents?
The ecclesiastical divisions among Christian communities—Chaldean, Syriac, Assyrian—in and beyond Iraq are not simply an illegible theological divide. Instead, ecclesiastical division should also be re-conceptualized through the colonial context—of missionary work, imperial conquest, and campaigns of genocide—that divided a community across modern national borders and fractured their claims to land and resources. Partially, this logic not only argues that the study of the secular is relevant here—in demarcating Christian universality from indigenous particularism—but that in tracing the shadows of secularity in the geopolitics of concern over Middle Eastern Christian suffering, we may be better able to parse a decolonial approach to the intersections of Christianity and indigeneity in the Middle East, that exceeds Western, neo-colonial instrumentalization. In so doing, this paper does not answering the question of who is indigenous—as recognized by the state, but instead asks the question of how indigeneity is shaped as connectivity—to land, to diasporic scales of rootedness, and to imperial refusal.
Katharina Lange (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient)
Paper short abstract:
The paper asks how human and arboreal biographies in Afrin/Syria intertwine materially and metaphorically. It probes how in forced displacement, representations of human-tree-relations may express (dis)connectedness to specific places through analogies and metaphors as well as practices of planting.
Paper long abstract:
Syria’s Afrin region shows that the displacement of agrarian populations may add material and embodied layers to metaphors of up-/re-/rooting, which are often used to describe forced displacement and emplacement of humans in conflict situations.
In Afrin, agriculture, notably olive cultivation, has long sustained livelihoods, provided income and work; and has been closely associated with specific local, ethnic, and political identities. The region’s occupation by Islamist militias under Turkish control in 2018 brought far-reaching demographic, political and ecological change. It not only displaced a large part of the region’s Kurdish population to refugee camps in Syria, to neighbouring countries or to Europe, and brought an influx of settlers opposed to the Asad regime (many of them forcibly displaced themselves). Violence has also touched the non-human population. Since 2018, thousands of olive trees have been cut, sold, and uprooted, literally putting an end to long-standing, rooted connections between farmers and their land. On the other hand, parties on different sides of the conflict have engaged in tree planting projects, investing ostentatious acts of “rooting” with heavy symbolic and political claims to territory.
Drawing from reports and accounts on social media as well as conversations with former inhabitants of the region, the presentation maps these violent changes, asking how analogies drawn between human and arboreal lives and deaths serve to support political claims. It traces how uprooted humans from Afrin seek to put down new roots through practices of planting in places of exile, and probes the limits of vegetal translocal connections.
Ekin Kurtic (Northwestern University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the governmental project of salvaging and relocating trees and fertile soils in dammed landscapes in northeastern Turkey. I argue that the governmental act of enrooting a post-submergence life builds upon more-than-human uprootedness.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the governmental project of uprooting and enrooting more-than-human life in dammed landscapes in northeastern Turkey, specifically focusing on the Yusufeli Dam. Situated on the Çoruh River, renowned as the ultimate frontier for large-scale hydropower expansion in Turkey, the Yusufeli Dam is part of a series of ten dams. Praised as the country’s tallest dam, its construction began in 2012 and continued for a decade until its inauguration recently in November 2022. In this landscape, dam-led displacement and resettlement implicates not only the people and the built environment but also more-than-humans. The Municipality and the District Directorate of Agriculture undertake a project to salvage fruit trees and fertile agricultural soils before the flooding occurs, relocating them to the resettlement site. These salvaged ecologies, they envision, would enact the possibility of enrooting a new life in the face of approaching uprootedness due to submergence. This paper pays ethnographic attention to governmental practices of uprooting and enrooting trees and soils to demonstrate that rather than countering or mitigating destruction, the act of salvage is bound up with ruination that is rendered inevitable. What emerges from this practice is a “movable nature,” indexing the continuation of not only life but also ruination. Going beyond approaching salvage as a mere object of analysis, this paper contends for the significance of salvage as an analytic framework. It elucidates how the governmental act of enrooting a post-submergence life builds upon, both figuratively and materially, more-than-human uprootedness.
Michael Zukosky (Eastern Washington University)
Paper long abstract:
For one ethnic minority Kazakh vernacular thinker in northwest China, the idea of rootedness is important; in his book of proverbs, songs, and prayers, he argued that like the Kazakh ethnic group were like the life of the Siberian Poplar tree, the Kazakh ethnicity’s roots ran deep; the Siberian Poplar was a hardy tree and its roots could grow several times the diameter of its crown. The Siberian Poplar is known to propogate through long distances. For this elder, to be rooted means to maintain an ethnic spiritual and material connection across time and space, event and object, like the figurative Siberian Poplar. Across generations of time and different lifeways, Kazakh will always be Kazakh. The value of this “poetics of expression,” is that it speaks to the younger generation of his community, struggling with the changing political economic life in China and increasing out-migration, struggling with the growing generational gap. For the elder, this spiritual and material relationship among Kazakh from the past and today, those living in Kazakhstan and those abroad, cannot be undone, transcending time and space, and this offers his younger readers spiritual meaning and purpose, belonging and community, comfort and coping, and a sense of security and control. In this paper, the elder writer's analogy is interpreted through an ethnographic textual analysis using oral history and archival research, an anthropology of analogy that draws on theories of language and ethnic identity.
Selcuk Gunduz
Paper short abstract:
The soil being the place where life is rooted, the relationship between humans and soil corresponds to existential, historical, and cultural meanings. In this presentaton, I delve into the relationship between soil and homeland, particularly through the personal narrative of a Syrian immigrant.
Paper long abstract:
Soil has long been intertwined with human history, evident in creation myths and religious narratives. Many creation stories, such as those in Semitic mythology and Christianity, assert that humans were formed from the very soil. In Semitic mythology, the Quran specifically mentions the creation of humans from soil. This connection with soil extends beyond mythology; Considering characteristics such as dwelling on the soil, building a home, cultivating and harvesting the land, and the soil being the place where life is rooted, the relationship between humans and soil corresponds to existential, historical, and cultural meanings.
Through extensive field research, soil emerged as a recurrent element and metaphor for origin. Given these associations, it is understandable why immigrants leaving their homeland might carry a piece of land with them. It serves as a reminder of one's roots and where they come from. In this study, I delve into the relationship between soil and homeland, emphasizing the connection to one's roots, particularly through the personal narrative of a Syrian immigrant, Yazan.
Yazan's story, intertwined with the soil and cactus he brought from his hometown, can be interpreted as an expression of rooting and permanence. Despite being physically distant, these tangible elements create an emotional bond to his homeland. The combination of soil and plants establishes a tangible connection, allowing Yazıcı to remain emotionally tied to his roots.
Santiago Irribarra Palet (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on research with urban Mapuche communities in Santiago, Chile, this paper examines Mapuche relationships with urban land, metaphors of ‘rootedness’, and Mapuche understandings of belonging and ‘nativeness’.
Paper long abstract:
‘People-as-plants’ is a common source of metaphors among the Mapuche people of the Southern Cone; most notably, the idea of ancestors as ‘roots’ through which people inherit personal characteristics and affinities for specific lands. These affinities, crucial to Mapuche understandings of self and personhood, are often presented as fixed and necessarily rural, with complicated implications for a Mapuche population that is now majority urban. In this paper I propose to examine the fixity of Mapuche ‘rootedness’ in the urban context of Santiago, Chile, and contrast it with the concept of ‘nativeness’ as applied to plants. Many plant species which have only grown in Chile since the sixteenth century (e.g. apple trees, rosemary) are described by Mapuche interlocutors as ‘native’ species that are fit for growing, consuming, and religious ceremonies. This speaks to a process, hundreds of years in the making, through which certain plant species have been (literally) rerooted in Mapuche territory, then recontextualised and ‘nativised’. I argue that ‘nativeness’ in this context does not refer to a pre-Hispanic origin, but to the capacity for forming part of a balanced, harmonious ecosystem. In exploring how these processes of ‘rerooting’ and ‘making native’ work I interrogate how they may be extensible to human beings: if people are plants through metaphor, are plants metaphorical (perhaps literal) people? To what extent is it possible for Mapuche persons to become ‘rooted’ in the city and therefore ‘native’ to it?