Format/Structure

This is a regular organized panel consisting of four individual paper presentations.

Long Abstract

This panel brings together ethnographic inquiries into the movements of native seeds, honeybees, citrus trees, and hikers to examine how more-than-human mobilities reshape what counts as ‘natural’ in contemporary South Korea. Drawing on the concept of sojourning, the panel explores forms of being-at-place that challenge the assumption that nature grounds the original places of all things.

These cases emerge amid ongoing discussions over agrobiodiversity conservation, origin labeling, botanical agency, and the management of national parks. As discourses of nature become entangled with territorial governance, the movements explored here interrupt, resist, and refigure anthropocentric regimes of control.

Seeds are circulated across different ecological and administrative regions through grassroots seed-saving networks. As they move and settle in new areas, their origins become blurred, destabilizing the category of the ‘native’ seed and necessitating its redefinition. Honeybees traverse human-imposed borders to forage nectar, defying legal regimes of land ownership and disrupting the logic of geographical indication in honey production. The spread of citrus trees in Jeju Island is tied to sapling migration and technology transfer from Japan, raising questions about cultivar copy rights and botanical belonging. Meanwhile, hikers deviate from state-developed trails to forge unauthorised paths through embodied interactions with terrain, enacting alternative cartographies that emerge through what may be called ecomotricity practices.

Attending to these cases of unruly mobility, the panel highlights the limits of conceptual frameworks that seek to organize nature into stable, settled, and property-aligned categories. Despite being imagined as the anchor of primal order, nature is itself unsettled: it moves, adapts, and sometimes refuses to stay put. Sojourning becomes a lens through which we may rethink belonging as provisional and transgressive of preset categorical boundaries.

Taken together, these stories offer more-than-human ethnographies of movement as a generative force of world-making and as a means of reconfiguring the concept of naturalness.