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- Convenors:
-
Lydia Gibson
(Columbia University)
Julia Sauma (Goldsmiths, University of London)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to bring together a set of reflections on how anthropological research within, around, and on conservation - and the advocacy, compromises, and narratives that accompany it - reproduces and accelerates particular forms of violence and inequalities across global and local scales
Long Abstract:
Adam Kuper's polemic The Return of The Native sent ripples of furore through the anthropological community, with many arguing for its erasure from our collective consciousness. Some, however, saw amongst its inflammatory, and inaccurate statements an opportunity for serious reflection over the growing role of the anthropologist, not just as witness, but advocate, ally, co-narrator in the natural spaces where big power, big money, big data and small communities collide over resource and representation alike. Over 15 years later, we have yet to see this reckoning materialise.
In this time, we have seen Critical Race Theories applied to the work of advocates and allies within racial justice movements, and the unfurling of the paradox that is the critical importance of visibility and inclusion, and the violence it brings - through its requirements of familiarity, relevance, and strategic performativity as "double consciousness" ruptures identities of marginalised participants. As local communities are stratified into haves and have-nots of specialist knowledge. As non-actors are plunged into an obscurity entrenched in poverty, violence, and trauma. As allies preen and primp their closest interlocutors to secure the best outcomes - the faith is good, the psychological impact not. This panel hopes to lay the foundation of such reckoning, by applying some of these modes of thoughts to environmental justice, reaching beyond the works of Tania Li, Elizabeth Povinelli and others, and the scope of the reflexive turn to uncover our precise role in these crimes - witness, perpetrator, co-conspirator - and how we move forward.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Part of a larger project examining data practices and infrastructures as unexamined sites of power when it comes to environmental justice, this paper explores data violence and data allyship, and suggests anthropology needs to reformulate what it understands as data in order to engage with both.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is part of a larger project which maps out the social and political implications of the emerging digital territories of environmental governance. Although those working in environmental justice rightly focus on how land has been polluted, natural resources exhausted, and people dispossessed in ways that re-inscribe colonial racist logics, relatively little attention has been paid to environmental data itself as a key site of power. Within this, in this paper I will be addressing the questions of data violence and data allyship. Social anthropologists often treat quantification as something reductive and violent, but then stop short when it comes to engaging in more depth ethnographically with the technical aspects of this. There are three problematic implications - the complex machinery of data violence can be assumed rather than opened up, even as this demands that we reformulate what we understand data to be; anthropologists are often unable to to effectively support strategies of data sovereignty, data resistance and data politics; and our reflections on the violence of our own data is often limited to the discursive and textual. To argue these points, I first look to history and information studies to flesh out what I mean by the technical machinery of data violence. I then draw on indigenous data sovereignty movements to point towards what data allyship might be. Finally, I draw on my own experiences working with indigenous environmental agents in the Brazilian Amazon to point to the violences of my own informational practices.
Paper short abstract:
Eugenics has played a deep role in Critical Race Theory. The idea that race is not a social construct can be shown as understated when exploring scientific racism. It was in 1680, when free Whites and Christians where labelled White and Africans or Indigenous Black.
Paper long abstract:
Eugenics has played a large role in scientific racism and critical race theory linking racism, race and power with ideologies from influential leaders such as Francis Gant and Boas to Thomas Jefferson and many others. All were very critical in their ideologies along with their scientific and social works that Africans are generically inferior to Europeans and worse than Natives.
These works presented all over science in the 1700s to the 21 century has lead to White Supremacy permeating itself into the justice system, education, politics and society. It also has given rise to Melanin Theory from prominent African American scholars. That melanin provides Africans physical advantages over Europeans.
Scientific racism, as a result, has spawned a nation of humanity with ideologies that has the potential to heal or harm, stall or rectify through collaborative research and knew theories on the nature of man.
In addition, the classification for a Melanated, African or Nubian today ensued with paper genocide of the same group of disenfranchised people known as Negro, Colour and Black who have been displaced and identity near erased.
Today, Africans worldwide are known as Black, which is a classification meant for degradation in the global system and at the same time once meant White.
Further displacing Africans without a true identity within the political, social and economic landscape today.
Research conducted by an outside entity with no conflict of interest is essential in analyzing the true mental, emotional and spiritual effects of racism through eugenics and scientific racism.
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on the anthropologist as "owner" of particular fieldsites and areas of study in Brazilian anthropology, how this is related to the production of hierachies in the field and in anthropology departments, and how it is obscured by declarations of environmental emergency.
Paper long abstract:
My first foray into the place that would become my field-site for my doctoral research was overcast by a conflict between two professors: my supervisor and the supervisor of two undergraduate students who had already gone to the same site. I got the sense of being an invader very quickly, an invader not into an indigenous realm, but the realm of other Brazilian anthropologists. The weight of expectation bore down on me, and my failure to ask permission to senior colleagues who had already done some research in that place was met with persistent disapproval. Very soon after arriving in the field, as my maroon hosts tried to include me in specific meetings with another senior anthropologist and government officials about Brazil nut extraction, my presence was blocked by the same anthropologist. ‘She has always been very possessive,’ my hosts explained.
Probing my own arrival and research experience in maroon communities in the Brazilian Amazon, this paper will probe relations of ownership, jealousy and possessiveness over fieldsites and interlocutors in Brazilian anthropology, the social hierarchies produced as a result, and what happens when anthropological owners ‘stop talking’ to their friends. It will also delve into how environmental and political emergencies are used to obscure challenges to how anthropologists work in the field.