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- Convenors:
-
Pauline von Hellermann
(Sussex)
Clate Korsant (University of Florida)
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- Discussant:
-
Sian Sullivan
(Bath Spa University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Monday 25 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
We are beyond 'people versus parks'. Conservation, communities and anthropology have all changed considerably, making it less clear what 'position' anthropologists should or can take. This panel invites papers exploring new challenges, opportunities and ethical dilemmas in the field and in writing.
Long Abstract:
For anthropologists doing research in conservation areas, our 'position' used to be fairly straightforward: when the creation of new National Parks (etc) involved the exclusion of local groups, our role, if not explicit, was to advocate for the rights and livelihoods of local people. By now, however, many factors have complicated this well-known 'people versus parks' scenario. 'The people' can no longer be imagined as a cohesive interest group (if indeed they ever could). Local actors have multiple and often opposing allegiances and interests between them, including armed loggers and drug traffickers as well environmental activists. And although area protection has largely remained conservation's core principle, 'the park', too, can be many different things: commanding areas and resources of vastly different scale, ranging from large, heavily militarised 'fortress conservation' operations to small community conservation projects with varying degrees of local involvement and 'success'. Radically new conservation models such as Büscher and Fletcher's (post-capitalist, post nature/culture dichotomy) 'convivial conservation' are also making headway. Meanwhile, anthropology itself has embraced explicit applied and activist engagement as well beyond-human, multi-species approaches that further complicate 'people' allegiances, all-the-while grappling both with the imperial roots it shares with conservation and the climate and ecological emergency.
In this context this panel invites papers exploring positionality: reflections on difficult fieldwork experiences, decisions and ethics, and on new ways of researching and writing anthropologically (and ethically) about conservation. We also welcome contributions by anthropologists who may themselves have become conservationists or vice versa.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 25 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Our growing realisation of “who you are creates the story you tell” calls for a deeper reflection from ourselves on the position we occupy and a more careful focus on building more equitable relationships.
Paper long abstract:
Field based research in conservation and social sciences continues to be one of the essential forms of advancing research and intervention. In this presentation, we reflect on our multiple identities as urban, upper caste, young women in India, and our positionality working with rural, resource dependent communities with different caste and class identities. We simultaneously hold the privileges of caste and the disadvantages of gender and age; to some within the community, our urbanness and education gives us authority, while to others, it makes us suspect. Through empirical research and intervention in conservation and local community rights with forest dwelling, rural and coastal communities in India, we present experiences of the process. We examine the differences in the manners of data collection with men and women, and our engagement as young women with government officials. Our experiences from the perspective of being women from specific socio-economic backgrounds speak more broadly to the challenges, advantages and absurdities of conservation practice in India. These experiences have shown us the sensitivities of identities and related positionalities, how they can make or break relationships with people and influence the outcomes of the research or intervention. Our growing realisation of “who you are creates the story you tell” calls for a deeper reflection from ourselves on the position we occupy and a more careful focus on building more equitable relationships.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores whether the concept of conviviality between people and soil offers a place of congruence for local inhabitants and state authorities in a national park in Cambodia. As both an anthropologist and a naturalist, I seek a common path for the human and non-human inhabitants of place.
Paper long abstract:
Kulen National Park in northern Cambodia is a protected area in a state of disarray, with multiple threats to its biodiversity. The park contains multiple villages within its borders, who traditionally subsisted through rotating agriculture and foraging. Archaeological work on the Kulen Plateau shows that the park has been a worked landscape for centuries. In other words, there has always been what Michael Givens has termed commotion and collaboration between humans and non-humans in the convivial process of landscape formation on the Kulen Plateau (2013). Yet in this protected landscape that holds human inhabitants, conviviality is not where the battle lines are drawn. Park authorities and heritage protection stakeholders view park residents as an active threat encroaching on important and fragile sites through agricultural expansion. As a naturalist committed to conservation of biodiversity, I share their concerns and have been dismayed by the scale of forest loss in the past decade. Local residents have tended to view conservation mandates and enclosure as the enemy and employ a variety of strategies to evade and avoid regulations. As their anthropologist I have considerable sympathy for their usage rights and have urged state authorities to recognize longstanding and currently unrecognized claims to residence in pre-war villages within the park’s boundaries. This paper will elucidate how I position myself in this particular people versus park conundrum and examines whether a turn away from the trees to the very ground itself might offer a productive way through the current dilemma.
Paper short abstract:
In the 1990s when Europe was re-integrating, a residue population of the black grouse on the German-Czech border caused a controversy over the permeability of the border and nature protection. We present a retrospective of this controversy based on archival material and other data.
Paper long abstract:
At the end of the Cold War, enthusiasm was high for tearing down borders and re-uniting people and regions. However, the military-controlled border zones, today known as the European Green Belt, provided safe spaces for many species, including rare ones. In the early 1990s, a residue black grouse population lived at the Czech-German border in the Upper Palatine Forest. This remaining population was at the centre of a controversy over the permeability of the border and the need to protect nature.
Based on numerous ethnographic fieldtrips in Czechia and Germany, a review of local media and archival material, we gave a closer look to the arguments of opposing sides as well as approaches of a cross-border project aiming to save the black grouse population. These reached from the exclusion of people from the border area to creating forms of conviviality.
What we show is not only controversies and antagonisms between human species and other species, but also among non-humans. In the retrospective, we can identify people on several sides of these antagonisms, and various animal species that potentially endanger other species and forms of human management that is needed to perpetuate a special type of biotope by cutting down certain plants.
We reconstruct the story in retrospective, however positioning ourselves in this old case was still awkward and not easy due to many interests of many actors, whose needs or claims were legitimate, however contradicting the needs and claims of other actors.