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This paper draws on the concept of “chimerism”—a term from the natural sciences denoting an organism with multiple sets of DNA—to examine narratives on Japanese spoil tips. Like genetic chimeras, these narratives mutate, propagate, and fuse, defying binary notions such as “industrial” or “natural”.

Paper long abstract

Spoil tips or slag heaps (Jp:ぼた山bota-yama, ズリ山zuri-yama) are mounds formed from the accumulation of the wasted material resulted during the mining process. While composed mostly of sterile rock, the piled material retains a great ability to trap heat, which can prevent the area from ever going green again and exposes it to the risk of spontaneous combustion, erosion or weathering. However, in some cases, vegetation reestablishes itself in these areas naturally or through human intervention. In Japan, people refer to these regreened hilly areas as “yama” (ヤマ), a word that generally denotes mountains, but is also used to refer to the mines that produced these anthropogenic landscapes.

Often conical in shape and situated in urban areas that have long left behind their industrial era, these mountains of waste become local landmarks and mnemonic aids for an era when Japan, through great struggle, transformed itself from a secluded archipelago into an industrialized modern nation. UNESCO`s recognition of several historical sites related to Japan`s Meiji era industrial revolution period as World Heritage in 2015 added a new semantic layer to storytelling once constructed around these areas being dark and dangerous. Moreover, confronted with the challenges of the Anthropocene, local communities view these “mountains” not only as vivid reminders of a common past of industrial glory and societal turmoil, but also as non-human witnesses to the extractive practices that brought upon our world an era of unprecedented climate uncertainty.

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This anthropological paper examines how various people come to live and work with the remainders of housing in late industrial urban America (United States). In particular, I consider the narrative practices that render decaying and destroyed housing a "re-naturalized" grounds of engagement.

Paper long abstract

How do people come to self-consciously engage with the leftovers of industrial life and abandonment? This anthropological paper examines the narrative tropes through which various people come to live and work with the remainders of housing abandonment, decay, and destruction in the late industrial urban Midwest of the United States. I consider how differently positioned salvagers “re-naturalize” landscapes already profoundly altered through urban industrialization, expansion, and abandonment during the 20th century. In particular, I focus on salvagers who understand their work as a kind of pre-industrial lumbering or quarrying. What kind of “grounds” do such narrative re-naturalizations obscure and open up? What kinds of practices (metaphorical, embodied, ethical etc.) do they encourage? How might these practices help us refine our understandings of “second” or “third” nature at a moment more and more people are coming to terms with the direction, degree, and scale of anthropogenic ecological change?

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This paper draws on several case studies, including the movements and lives of birds, wild boar and orcas to reflect on the ways in which shifting animal mobilities across urban/rural and national boundaries forge new challenges and pathways for environmental action in an era of climate change.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates how shifting animal mobilities begin to challenge existing forms of human governance (from national border fortifications to existing practices of conservation) across cities and beyond. It engages with several animal case studies—wild boars rummaging in the German-Polish borderlands, migratory birds traversing the Mississippi flyway over the Chicago skyline, and orcas breaching in the Salish Sea of the Pacific Northwest—that have incited public, scientific, and political debate about animal (and pathogen) movements across urban/rural and national borders.

Drawing on ethnographic research with actors that engage and care for these animals’ movements, including wildlife ecologists, conservationists, foresters, hunters, fishers, farmers, Indigenous groups, and environmental stewards, I show how the shifting dynamics of wildlife mobility become political: they unsettle public, scientific, and everyday practices of ecological care, as well as our understandings of community, nature, the nation, and justice.

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This paper analyzes African-derived oral traditions engaged with narrative dilemmas that follow from the expropriation of land and water as private property.

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This paper analyzes African-derived oral traditions engaged with narrative dilemmas that follow from the expropriation of land and water as private property. Surveying their substance and structure as well as the circumstances of their global diffusion, it argues that these traditions should be understood not merely as ethnographic examples of local knowledge but as collective works in political philosophy keyed to questions of sociability in the natural world.

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In this paper, I show how for indigenous fishers in Mumbai, climate change is the outcome of a centuries long process materialized by colonial modes of intervening in, and “improving” cities with infrastructures that accrete and desiccate its amphibious volumes.

Paper long abstract

In this paper I dwell in the ways that indigenous fishers in Mumbai navigate the natures of the city. I suggest that for fishers, climate change is not only a recent or a global phenomenon manifest in the models and data of climate scientists or municipal administrators. It is not just a gathering of global effects, materialized in the city–such as rising CO2 concentrations, sea surface temperatures, and the ecologies these bring into being. Climate, for Koli fishers, is understood as the outcome of a centuries long process materialized by colonial modes of intervening in, and “improving” cities with infrastructures that accrete and desiccate its amphibious volumes.

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The aim of this contribution is to highlight the ecological consequences of socialist economic management in post-war Czechoslovakia, the way in which the press and literature of the time discussed nature and the environment, and the role played by science and technology in all of this.

Paper long abstract

At the end of the 1940s, Europe and the world were divided by the Iron Curtain, and Czechoslovakia fell under the Soviet sphere of influence. This brought with it, among other things, a series of inorganic interventions in the structure of the domestic economy, state administration, and the daily lives of the population, all in line with Soviet interests—including the massive introduction of heavy industrial production, the forced collectivization of agriculture, the destruction of the traditional structure of rural and urban settlements, and the promotion of materialistic and consumerist behavior. Nature, which had been severely tested, was cast in the role of an enemy that had to be fought and defeated as soon as possible. The media and contemporary literature spoke of "conquering nature," "subjugating nature," "transforming nature," "controlling nature," "taming nature," and so on. The so-called great constructions of socialism (dams, bridges, large prefabricated housing estates, etc.) were highlighted as evidence of partial victories over nature. The primary tools in this endeavor were supposed to be science and technology, which were forced to grapple not only with solving problems of insufficient industrial and agricultural production in illogical political and economic conditions, technological backwardness compared to the West, and lower living standards of the population, but also gradually with the manifestations of the deep neglect and disregard for the environment, which had been impossible to ignore since at least the 1960s.

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How factory farm workers navigate the dialectic of genetically "modernized" hog minds and lingering traces of seemingly timeless instinct. Focuses on how surprising natures that exceed rote instinct or disciplined behavior -- hog alterity -- manifest and prompt worker critique and refusal.

Paper long abstract

It is surprisingly hard to learn positive knowledge about "the hog" in factory farms, even in cases of intensely intimate labor, such as breeding, when capitalist production presses human and animal bodies together. Managers insist that it is workers' job to replicate "natural" behaviors and instincts in production, even as they engage animals whose behavior and semiotic perception has been deliberately altered in order to maximize carnal productivity. Migrant workers routinely speculate as to whether a particular hog behavior is natural and shared across the species, or the specific product of histories of hog "modernization" in the form of breeding designed to accustom animals to live in industrial confinement. From hog crate chewing to lordosis reflexes, non-reactive docility to violent anger, this paper examines laboring modes of apprehending capitalized animal sentience. The analysis is particularly concerned with a series of odd moments of hog behavior, attunement, and apparent perception that were jarring to my co-workers in an American breeding barn; moments when it became clear that, despite their radical instrumentalization, hogs dwelled in barns in ways that seemed incomprehensible to the human mind. Prompting surprising forms of auto-critique of the very idea of farming animals by those tasked with their mass-production, this talks explores folk narratives and modes of emic factory farm refusal that emerge from events that exceed tropes of knowable nature and controlled modernization.

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This paper discusses a series of land grabs that have unfolded around the construction of the touristic Mayan Train in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. Engaging with perceptions of the environment, the paper asks how people perceive the surrounding rainforest at a time of unstoppable urbanization.

Paper long abstract

This paper discusses a series of land grabs that have unfolded around the construction of the touristic Mayan Train in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. Engaging with perceptions of the environment, the paper asks how people perceive the surrounding rainforest at a time in which the urbanization of the region has become unstoppable. I suggest that people's valorization of a mythical nature inevitably plagues their understanding of how urbanization processes are unfolding on the ground. While their narrative accounts of rapid urbanization express shame that the region around them is changing without their consent, I pay attention to how mythical understandings of both a pristine nature and an imagined modernity become intermingled in people's accounts of environmental change. I suggest that processes of urbanization should be understood through a non-linear approach in which there is no "before" and no "after." Corruption, as a key concept to understand narrations of urban change in Mexico, seems to have constructed an already de-naturalized past and to be in the process of shaping an unwanted urban future. My engagement with corruption and temporality in people's narrations of urban change attempts to de-naturalize mythical understandings of an imagined pristine past and a corrupted present and future. Dealing with Bakhtin's writings on the pastoral, I suggest that the Mayan Train and its aftermath should be comprehended through a logic that undoes the past/future divide in addition to the nature/culture divide.