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- Convenors:
-
Alexander Cullen
(University of Cambridge)
Riamsara Kuyakanon Knapp (University of Cambridge)
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- Discussant:
-
David Sneath
(Cambridge University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This session explores how powerful places and beings play significant, yet often overlooked roles in the performance, contestation and articulation of conservation politics. It provokes engagement with site-based conservation through empirically supported ideations on ‘cosmopolitical ecologies’.
Long Abstract:
This session seeks to explore how powerful places and beings play significant, yet often overlooked roles in the performance, contestation and articulation of conservation politics. Political ecology has proved resiliently adaptive for interrogating contested claims to land, environmental values, usufruct rights and bio-material management, but greater attention is needed beyond socio-natures and social constructivist approaches to multi-natures and world making. This panel seeks to provoke further engagement with conservation through ideations on ‘cosmopolitical ecologies’ to offer more holistic analytics and improved vocabularies for seeing and understanding the diversity of other-than-human and cosmological worlds around us. This involves ‘taking seriously indigenous concepts of power and local sovereignties, that puts movement, embodiment, and lived encounters between the human and non-human into view’ (Campbell 2013: 32). For example, in introduced arrangements of restrictive bio-capture and renewal, it is not only ecological flows and its potency that is re-territorialised – but also that of the cosmological. By considering multi-natural metabolisms and their ontological politics, risks to biological and cosmological potency in conservation capture can be made evident, and attention to place-based values of the spiritual in biodiversity outcomes and its care, made possible.
We are interested in papers concerned with (but not limited to), the following:
• ecologies of practice and care in ontologically complex landscapes
• symbolic and cosmological analysis of government power in relation to conservation
• the deployment of ‘traditional’ knowledges and practices in place-based environmental politics
• relationships between communities, cosmos and state governance
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper looks into the politics of 'biocultural landscape' through mobilizations against transgenic and extractive projects in Mexico among Totonac and Nahua indigenous communities. It points out how local cosmopolitics and knowledge are mobilised in the defense of Indigenous territories.
Paper long abstract:
Taking the perspective of the Totonac- and Nahua-speaking inhabitants of the Sierra Norte of Puebla in Mexico, I reveal the epistemic distance that exists between the local cosmopolitics of territory (and 'world-making', Descola 2011) and the abstract notions of landscape and biocultural heritage. Following the approach of the 'apprehension of the environment' (Ellison 2013), I show how the relationship between person, community and territory is based both on a socio-cosmic relationships and praxis-based perceptions of the environment (Ingold, 2000). This, beyond its symbolic aspects, is concretely anchored in the practices of cultivation (especially of 'native' maize) and of daily reproduction of life. Taking the example of community responses to both transgenic contamination and top-down conservation of agrobiodiversity (in the form of local land-races of maize), I thus point out how local knowledge systems are mobilized in the patrimonial dynamics used in the defense of Indigenous territories, at the same time that they are transformed by these.
The proposed paper therefore addresses both the "ecologies of practice and care in ontologically complex landscapes" and "the deployment of ‘traditional’ knowledges and practices in place-based environmental politics".
Paper short abstract:
In Timor-Leste understandings of human wellbeing are closely related to understandings of human/nature relations. This presentation examines how relational flows between such ‘bodies’ and things open up cosmopolitical spaces for the creation and negotiation of intergenerational wellbeing.
Paper long abstract:
In north central Timor-Leste, multi-sensory ecological engagement is deeply entangled with conceptualisations of and approaches to people’s wellbeing. How people understand human health and wellbeing is closely related to how they understand nature or more particularly human/nature relations and distinctions across multiple timescales. Working through complex cosmopolitics and activated through cross-temporal more-than-human ‘mutualities of being’, kinship networks are attuned to relational flows between ‘bodies’ and things. Rather than concentrating on the disjunctions created by the differences in the natures of beings or their ritual separation, this presentation examines how relational flows between such ‘bodies’ and things open up cosmopolitical spaces for the creation and negotiation of intergenerational wellbeing.
In Timor-Leste understandings of human wellbeing are closely related to understandings of human/nature relations and distinctions across multiple timescales. This presentation examines how relational flows between such ‘bodies’ and things open up cosmopolitical spaces for the creation and negotiation of intergenerational wellbeing.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I explore how indigenous understandings and practices of possessing the earth and of sovereignty are being translated and scaled up in to revolutionary new modes of conservation, in the form of the Salween Peace Park of southeast Myanmar.
Paper long abstract:
In the highlands of Southeast Myanmar, long ridden by armed conflict, the human inhabitants here regularly treat their landscapes as possessed, in the dual and entangled senses of being both haunted and occupied, by a whole host of hungry ghosts, ancestors, and other spectral persons. Following this, humans do not so much own the land as they borrow it temporally, by way of constant haggling and propitiating. As such, ownership in these uplands is always negotiated and nesting, ultimately resting in the spectral hands of the k’sah, the “lords” or “owners” of the water and the earth. Thus, rather than seeing this area as a “zone of no sovereignty” (Scott 2009: 60-61) we might better grasp these lands as being held under Spectral Sovereignty.
As war envelopes these hills once more, a growing movement is attempting to draw on these indigenous understandings and practices of possessing the landscape and sovereignty to radically rethink both revolution and conservation.
In this paper, I first explore indigenous practices such as Spectral Sovereignty, then examine how an ensemble of activists, subsistence farmers, and armed groups are attempting to translate and rescale them into a 5,500 km2 protected area known as the Salween Peace Park.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the role of other-than-humans (camel and mangrove) affective relationalities in the conservation politics in the Indus Delta of Pakistan. These relationalities shape the deltascape and are important in cosmopolitical ecologies and conservation politics.
Paper long abstract:
The Indus Delta in Pakistan is degrading due to hydroelectric dams and irrigation infrastructures upstream on the Indus River that have altered the flow of the Indus River towards the delta. This causes saltwater intrusion, inundating the deltaic lands - villages, mangroves forests, and agricultural fields, among others. Governance institutions are planting and conserving the mangroves to impede saltwater intrusion. And of many challenges that governance institutions say they are facing; one is to keep the camels away from grazing on mangroves. However, the camel grazers argue that their camels have been grazing on Tamer (Avinccia marina) for centuries, which constitutes 97% of mangrove forest in the delta. As camels do not eat other types of mangroves, they have developed an affective relationality with the Tamer. The reason when camel grazers left their villages and mangrove landscapes as saltwater intrusion engulfed those landscapes, they spread and planted Tamer seeds, where they go, throughout the delta. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, in this paper, I explore the affective relationality between other-than-humans (camels and mangroves) in the ontologically complex landscapes of the delta, and ask, how such an affective relationality informs and shapes the politics of conservation in the Indus Delta? The conservation practices located within the colonial and western paradigm leave other-than-human affective relationalities behind, the relationalities which engender a different kind of practices of care, and play important role in Indigenous conservation practices, however, require an ontological space of their own.