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This paper explores the role of indigenous knowledge in managing human-wildlife conflict, focusing on land's significance. Drawing on Igbo traditions and personal experience, it shows how African folk narratives can guide more harmonious human-nature relationships.

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This paper highlights the importance of indigenous knowledge in human-wildlife conflict management contexts. Land is recognized in this paper as the space where human-wildlife conflicts occur, so its relevance to indigenous groups will be studied. The study will briefly discuss the relationship between the Igbo and their land, drawing examples from the author’s personal experience. The study will therefore illustrate how indigenous groups from various African communities use their knowledge and folk narratives to manage conflicts arising from human-wildlife contact. Folk narrative traditions such as these may offer pathways as we try to develop benevolent stewardship of nature.

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In the 1950s Polish explorers returned to Svalbard. Searching through preserved archives, I examine the narratives about relationships with the Arctic landscape. I investigate the relationships they established with the landscape and examine the skills and knowledge they developed in this process.

Paper long abstract

Polish explorations on Svalbard started in the interwar period, when Poland became the signatory of Spitsbergen Treaty. The outbreak of World War II and subsequent repressions by the communist authorities installed in post-war Poland halted these activities. However, in the mid-1950s, a political thaw occurred, and Polish explores returned to Svalbard.

In the 1950s and 1960s Poles mostly subscribed to the international scientific programmes on the Artic, however, as in the pre-war years, they also conducted mountaineering and other exploration activities. These complex and paradigmatically modern expeditions left behind rich source material scattered in various archives – up to this day they have been relatively little researched, primarily by historians or polar enthusiasts. However, even a cursory glance at the archives reveals an incredibly ethnographic record of complex experiences and activities embedded in a unique landscape.

Poles developed a close, intimate, and interactive relationship with Svalbard`s landscape. Apart from a few individuals familiar with the Artic since the pre-war period, the remaining members of the expeditions had to learn Svalbard`s landscape from scratch. This process is clearly visible in the preserved sources, which include texts, documents, images, and material objects. Using methods developed by historical and landscape anthropology, I ask precisely how the process of acquiring knowledge about the Arctic landscape proceeded? What relationships did climbers and explorers enter into with the landscape? What skills did they acquire in the process? And finally - what what narratives on Svalbard have been preserved in the sources?

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This paper explores Yoruba Ifá as a living oral archive of ecology, cosmology, and culture. It examines how digitization reshapes its preservation and meaning, asking what is gained or lost when sacred narratives move from oral performance to digital repositories.

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Ifá, the Yoruba divination corpus, is one of the most sophisticated oral archives in Africa. Consisting of thousands of verses (Odu Ifá) memorized, recited, and interpreted by trained diviners, it encodes centuries of knowledge about cosmology, ethics, medicine, agriculture, and environmental balance. Far more than ritual practice, Ifá is a living archive, an ecological and cultural knowledge system where stories, chants, and proverbs guide human relationships with nature and community.

This paper, From Oral Traditions to Digital Repositories: Archiving the Ecologies of Knowledge in Yoruba Ifá Narratives, examines how this vast oral archive is being preserved, reinterpreted, and reimagined in the digital age. As urbanization, language decline, and generational shifts threaten the continuity of oral transmission, scholars and cultural custodians are turning to digitization projects, online repositories, and multimedia platforms to safeguard Ifá knowledge. While such transitions expand access and visibility, they also raise critical questions: What is gained or lost when a sacred, performative tradition becomes a searchable database? Who controls these digital archives, and how do they reshape authority, authenticity, and cultural meaning?

By situating Ifá as both oral performance and digital resource, this paper highlights the dynamic nature of archives as ecologies of knowledge, adaptive systems where storytelling and memory intersect with technology. It argues that the preservation of Ifá in digital spaces not only sustains cultural resilience but also challenges us to rethink how archives mediate the entangled relationships between nature, culture, and knowledge in a rapidly changing world.

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Indigenous folktales of Australia & North American include detailed, accurate, environmental information like narrative maps that can be used in wayfinding, the location of resources, and to broaden the geographic outlook. Folktales are seen as a scaffold on which information can be memorably hung.

Paper long abstract

An in-depth analysis of narratives of North American indigenous peoples reveals the includsion of detailed, accurate, environmental information. This information can be used in wayfinding, the location of resources, and to broaden the geographical outlook of the pertinent cultural groups. The information includes salient landscape features such as creekbeds, ridges, waterholes, caves, hills, and other features that indicate water and food sources as well as how to navigate through the region. These narratives function like narrative maps.

This analysis involves the inspection of approximately 350 collected oral folk narratives, the development of a specific definition of a ‘narrative map,’ and the use of Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas to establish a geographically representative sample.

The comparison is broadened to include various geographical areas of Australia as well. This analysis indicates narrative maps communicate pertinent local knowledge. For example, narrative maps from the Australian desert make use of rocks and landscape features while those from the heavily forested, wet Arnhem land focus on time spent walking and the direction of the sun. The oral narrative operates as a scaffold upon which explicit information can be memorably hung.

A more expansive understanding of the oral folk narrative is now required because these narrative maps performed a similar function in multiple parts of the world and at multiple times. The ability of the oral narrative to retain and communicate pertinent, detailed information both across time and landscapes is a critical capability which helped mitigate the limitations of biological memory.

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This ethnographic study examines localised narratives of drought and environmental vulnerability in Cape Verde. Drawing on the Oral Traditions Archive and fieldwork, it explores how communities historicise ecological crises and the potential roles of the archive in these discursive processes.

Paper long abstract

This ethnographic study investigates how Cape Verdeans narrate and historicise droughts and environmental vulnerability. Drawing on oral testimonies from the Oral Traditions Archive, compiled in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2022, it explores how these narratives convey local understandings of ecological crises and their connections to political authority across different historical periods.

By tracing oral testimonies across the archipelago, this study highlights the symbolic and practical linkages between environmental crises and culture, while also showing how ecological events intersect with Cape Verde’s political and economic history. Located off the coast of West Africa, this Atlantic group of volcanic islands is characterised by an arid climate and scarce resources. Rooted in orality, Cape Verdean culture reflects a history of colonial domination and unequal power relations, in which oral transmission and memory remained the primary means of preserving knowledge until independence from Portugal in 1975.

The Oral Traditions Archive is therefore an essential resource for understanding shifting perceptions of environmental issues in the archipelago. By placing archival material in dialogue with contemporary fieldwork, this study shows how communal modes of historicising illuminate collective understandings of ecological crises and their enduring relationship with political structures. This approach provides an interpretative framework for considering how such phenomena are understood and represented within culture. The analysis reveals both continuities and ruptures across colonial, post-independence, and contemporary contexts, showing how narratives simultaneously reflect and mediate responses to environmental and political challenges.

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A Tarot of the Weather is a dynamic archive that challenges dominant narratives of place in a period of ecological crisis. As a tool for generating community conversations about climate change, it has the power to help nurture cultural resilience. I invite you to participate in a group reading.

Paper long abstract

A Tarot of the Weather is a set of subverted 24 Major Arcana cards. A card reading can seem random and beyond our control. Similarly, the weather can seem random and beyond our control. I present the Tarot of the Weather as a dynamic archive that both sustains and challenges dominant narratives of place in a period of ecological crisis. As a tool for generating real-time community conversations about climate change, it has the power to help nurture cultural resilience.

This pack assumes that our bodies are sensory data collectors. This pack embodies the entanglement of nature and culture, and when used by groups in real time the archive becomes co-constructed. The deck includes some new, wild cards. The pack also includes some Scottish words for different sorts of weathers, a strategy for anchoring this work in place, as geo-located.

The images are from a collection of polaroid photographs that have been physically manipulated to echo the layers of experience that our bodies acquire through life, and evoking the traces within landscapes that allude to thousands of years of generational and multi-species interactions. The cards are circular. Rectangular cards give binary readings. Circular cards offer more nuance to a reading. This paper will focus on how using the Tarot of the Weather to generate community conversations around climate change constitutes a form of activism.

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The Regional Ethnology of Scotland Project is a collaborative initiative in which trained volunteers interview each other on those aspects of their lives and the places they live which are most meaningful to them. The paper examines how participation has shaped ideas of self, place and belonging

Paper long abstract

The Regional Ethnology of Scotland Project works with people in communities across Scotland to collect material relating to local life and society through recorded interviews.

The RESP is a key focus of the work of the European Ethnological Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh. Research staff at the Centre work in partnership with local people and organisations, such as archive and library services and schools, to reach as many people as possible so that the resulting archive of recordings can endeavour to represent people from across all parts of the community.

The result of this large-scale, multi-year collaborative project is an archive of thousands of hours of recordings, printed publications, film and other media which document communities talking about themselves, their pasts, their concerns, their experiences of change and continuity. Interviews are transcribed in full and are freely available through the project interface. The initiative is self-sustaining; once volunteers are trained up, communities are left continue to collect whatever matters to them, sharing the data with the project website.

As the Project approaches its last two years of funding, the paper offers a reflection on its achievements and methodology, including interviews conducted with those who have taken part over the years. How did participation shape volunteers' ideas of self and belonging? Did a stronger sense of regional identity emerge and if so how did it manifest itself?

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This paper explores ecological relationships and vernacular epistemologies in the Hannaas Collection. It explores the ways in which folklore preserves environmental knowledge and how digitization can recover this knowledge, often obscured by archival structures.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how ecological relationships and vernacular epistemologies are embedded in the Hannaas collection, a folklore collection made by folklorist and philologist Torleiv Hannaas (1874-1929). Now part of the Ethno-folkloristic Archive at the University of Bergen, Norway, and accessible through the digital platform samla.no, the collection encompasses a wide range of cultural expressions, including folktales, legends, ballads, riddles, placenames, customs, and beliefs, that reflect local understandings of nature and human–nonhuman entanglements.

Focusing on short forms of folklore and Hannaas’ documentation of place names and landscape formations, this paper examines how such narratives contain ecological knowledge, even though the collector’s primary focus may have been on other aspects. For instance, place name records often elicit legends and beliefs that reveal human-nonhuman relationships and environmental knowledge. Although Hannaas may not have collected with ecological intent, the material reveals how people make sense of nature through oral traditions.

The presentation also critically engages with archival and cataloguing practices, asking how classification systems and thematic keywords may obscure environmental knowledge and how digitization can help recover them. By tracing how these narratives have been passed down and recontextualized over time, the paper contributes to broader discussions about the role of folklore collections in environmental discourse and the potential of digital archives to shed light on layered, place-based understandings of nature. In an era marked by ecological and epistemic uncertainty, revisiting such collections offers more than historical insight, it invites a rethinking of archives as dynamic, living systems.