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- Convenor:
-
Annika Capelán
(Aarhus University and University of Cape Town)
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- Stream:
- Anthropocene
- Sessions:
- Thursday 17 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores notions of precariousness and place in the Anthropocene, by looking at movements, re-orderings, alterations and shifts within human-nonhuman relations. Papers address place-making processes linked to climate change, contamination and landscape transformations.
Long Abstract:
Precariousness has in recent years been discussed as important for our understanding of processes by which relations and worlds are made, unmade and remade (cf Hinkson 2017). While the notion of the Anthropocene draws our attention to the geological scale of human impact, this panel explores precarious aspects of Anthropogenic place-making through dynamic understandings of human-nonhuman relations. By addressing movements, alterations, re-orderings and shifts, papers point towards localised responses, and by bringing in diverse examples from cattle domestication, sheep farming, air pollution and migrations, the panel seeks to theorise on the precariousness of place in times of climate change, contamination and landscape transformations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 17 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
With the link between climate change and air pollution becoming a fact, how do we understand New Delhi becoming the most polluted city in the world? This paper will seek to question how can a space of the most polluted city in the world be created by a free flowing, unboundable entity like air.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2014, New Delhi has been regularly appearing on the WHOs list of most polluted cities in the world. With the link between air pollution and climate change being recently established as a well proven fact, the work of air generally and air pollution specifically in creating a place cannot be ignored (UNEP 2019). Latour (2014), puts forth that the Anthropocene is a period where the politics of human agency 'is pushed to the centre but which simultaneously loses its boundary, consistence and definition because it is tied—morally tied—to all of what in earlier times would have been to use a now famous subtitle, "beyond the human"' (Latour 2014: 13). Taking this line of thought forward this paper will present an ethnography of air through an investigation of two forms of air: air as index and air as transboundary. How do scientific measurements of air allow it to work as an index to facilitate communication and policy, by the state in India, international organisation like WHO and others (Choy 2010)? Further, how does the indexing of air impact how air is experienced and breathed (Fuan 1977; Jee 2016)? This narrative of air as index will be problematized by the nature and materialization of air as a transboundary entity, to ask how can a space of the most polluted city in the world be created by a free flowing, unboundable entity like air.
Paper short abstract:
Exploring the relationship between climate change-induced mobilities, solastalgia and place attachments in migrant communities living through place alterations in the Anthropocene
Paper long abstract:
This paper will present a new PhD project with Wageningen University's Cultural Geography Group about the dynamics of place attachment among populations that, affected by climate change-induced alterations in their immediate environments, fear or have experienced displacement resulting from such alterations. Macro-structural representations of the relationships between migration and climate change as linear and uni-causal leave place-based experience largely unaccounted for in academic, policy and public debates. Given the intrinsic link between place and culture, the project will deploy the concept of solastalgia -- the lived experience of cultural as well as physical and psychological loss due to landscape transformations (Fried, 2000) -- to offer a novel perspective on the ways in which local inhabitants' views, responses and adaptations to climate change emerge (Adger et al., 2012). In doing so, this study responds to calls within the field for humanizing, micro-level readings, facilitating an improved understanding of the role of place and culture in the relationship between climate change and migration across academic boundaries (Hugo, 2008; McAdam, 2010). Utilising interviewing and ethnographic research to investigate differences between those who have stayed in areas affected by climate change, and those who migrate due to its impact will allow a critical dissection of attachment and the idea of 'home', as imagined ideas of 'place' become severed from reality (Albrecht, 2005). Thus, this paper seeks to assert the importance of place in building localized, grassroots responses to mitigate, as well as frameworks to theorise, the effects of shifting ground in the Anthropocene.
Paper short abstract:
The domestication of cattle was carried on in the Paraguayan Chaco in different ways according to varying cultural and economic factors. If on the one hand it produced the existence of wild cows, on the other it led to the transformation of cows into "bare life" and to extreme deforestation.
Paper long abstract:
The Paraguayan Chaco is today considered an environmental hotspot where cattle ranching is one of the main drivers of deforestation. Historically, cattle ranches have been a source of income and exploitation since the beginning of the colonization of the territory on the part of foreign investors at the end of the XIX century. Due to the extensive nature of the properties and to the lack of control on the animals, during the first half of the century the cattle often escaped from the farms and became wild (in Guarani: sagua'a). At the same time, "domestication" was intended and performed in different ways by different social groups. In the perimetry of indigenous communities, for instance, cattle were left to wander around the village until their final day, while in the big cattle farms cows were progressively disentangled from their life-worlds and transmuted into capitalistic assets: genetic selection, branding, vaccination and accounting practices did the preliminary translation work which was completed in the slaughterhouses of the region. In other cases, small resistant community of non-indigenous cattle farmers continued to raise cows without investing big sums of money and adapting to the environment in a softer way. By taking into consideration these different modes of domestication, my aim is to compare between them the different worlds that are produced by different ways of conceiving human-animal relationships and to envision our possible futures.
Paper short abstract:
This paper develops a critical take on the notion of the Anthropocene as one, drawing on fieldwork on woollen sheep as human-non-human place making agents.
Paper long abstract:
This paper develops a bottom-up and critical approach to the notion of Anthropocene as one whole, focusing on the ways that local knowledges and global imaginaries become intertwined and multiplied within connections among place making of the Global South. It is based on fieldwork which engages sheep farmers, indigenous elderly, laboratory technicians and ambulant sheep shearers on two major southern grasslands - Patagonia and Australia. In telling and showing their version of global wool, analysing their own position within wool networks, and discussing how they understand place making activities of the other site, respectively, the purpose is to investigate anthropologically and geographically, the tensions that arise within a transnational industry, like wool, which remains relentlessly tied to the particularities of places and ecologies. Woollen sheep have played a significant part in human livelihood for millennia, and the distribution of sheep to the grasslands of the Global South was part of European colonial efforts, later intensifying with industrialisation. Today wool production is a global industry which, at a closer look, contains a key paradox: large-scale wool production cannot be divorced from place-specific ecologies and social relations. Wool is an organic sustainable fibre, yet woollen sheep - as they 'naturally' melt into the landscape, have a generative, relational and place making presence which echo southern histories of colonial place-making, including violent confrontations concerning landownership as well as the powerful and devastating effects of volcano eruptions and fierce fires.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers places as 'knots' - encounter of mobile agents - in the context of the migration of a caiçara community affected by climate change in Brazil. This paper discusses the relational re-ordering of agents in place-making due to growing precariousness in the Anthropocene.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on preliminary findings from my fieldwork with the Nova Enseada community in Brazil, this paper discusses how 'anticipated' climate change impacts shapes place-making in the Anthropocene. Nova Enseada is a caiçara community - artisanal fishers from the east coast of Brazil - which had to relocate due to coastal erosion and sea-level rise. A process of community-led relocation started in November 2016 after a cyclone hit the region; a further cyclone in 2017 contributed to the destruction of their home place by making the strip of land where the community lived for 170 years disappear. The community chose and legally fought for a new location within the same Island to rebuild their houses.
In this context of ongoing mobilities, "place" seems to fall under what Ingold (2011:151) described as constellations of encounter and experience. To better acknowledge human, non-human and inhuman interplay, this paper merges "place" through Clark's (2011) use of the Deleuzo-Guattarian notion of different kinds of matter coming together in homogenous aggregates. This notion allows us to analyse the movements within and between aggregates that makes them open to re-ordering. Through 'anticipated' and experienced climate change impacts, the Anthropocene reveals the precariousness of being dependent on the relationships in these assemblages. This paper discusses how the process of place-making in the experience of Nova Ensenada reproduces past 'knots' between mobile agents (human and non-human) as far as possible. However, it also considers the ways that the 'anticipated' uncertainty of the future changes relations in these entanglements.