Paper short abstract:

In this presentation we propose to show how the concept of poison in the Apulian cult of tarantism is increasingly reconceptualized with reference to environmental depletion. How are religious narratives inscribed in the understanding of poisoned landscapes?

Paper long abstract:

In 1961, Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino published "La terra del rimorso", a study of Southern Italian tarantism. The title has been translated as “Land of Remorse”, although the Latin-derived term terra more accurately denotes earth or soil. "Rimorso" has a double meaning and indicates both, “remorse” and “re-bite” (from the Italian morso = bite), referring to the bite or sting of venomous animals such as spiders, scorpions, or snakes. The bite of these critters has long been interpreted as a symbolic manifestation of toxic gender and familial relations. The (real or imagined) poison entering the body of a bitten person had to be ejected through ecstatic trance dancing and vomiting in a religious cult attributed to St. Paul, the patron saint against venomous bites. Of recent, the poison is increasingly reinterpreted with reference to environmental issues and thus again more closely connected to the actual meaning of terra.

In the course of our multimodal research we encountered a number of commentaries that link today’s contamination of the environment (through fertilizers and chemical industries) to the presumed contaminating spider bite.

Very soon after we started our fieldwork, another non-human agent - besides the critters, saints and landscapes - entered our fieldwork: Xylella fastidiosa.

Xylella fastidiosa, a phytopathogenic quarantine bacterium, expands exponentially in olive groves; so far it has infected 21 million olive trees. We investigate how the destruction of the environmental landscape affects the religious landscape and, vice versa, how religious narratives are inscribed in the understanding of poisoned landscapes.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the intersection of history, listening, and flows of people and water through Times Square by analyzing composer Pamela Z’s site-specific work of sound art, TimesxTimesxTimes with notions of “liquidity,” where water possesses the power to transform, deform, and destabilize.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the intersection of history, listening, and flows of people and water through Times Square through engaging with composer Pamela Z’s collaboration with Geoff Sobelle and PROTOTYPE: OPERA; a work they titled Times3 (TIMES X TIMES X TIMES) (2021). Times3 is a spatially situated work of sound art, a “site specific sonic journey,” that is part soundscape composition, part sonic ethnography, and part soundwalk a la Hildegard Westerkamp. The piece imagines a Times Square that exists simultaneously in the present, past, and future while centering the pre-colonial body of water that moved through the space. Even though it is not visible (or audible), the stream systems that pass(ed) through Times Square are still evident buried deep beneath the asphalt that now covers the city.

Through a series of sonic ethnographies, I am similarly centering Gaston Bachelard’s notion of “liquidity,” where water possesses the primordial power to transform, deform, and destabilize structures, and it conjures the constant change and deconstruction. This liquidity though is not limited to the now-subterranean flows of water, instead, liquidity is experienced further as the flow of intersubjectivity, because “flesh is not just a medium of liquidity, but liquidity itself.”

Paper short abstract:

A water poetics of the Madrean Sky Islands–a contested region of vital biodiversity–emerges from walk-and-talk interviews with local stakeholders, ethnographic poetry, and an audiovisual portrait from the hydro-social research, Entre Rios: Surveillance and Futurity in the US-Mexico Borderlands.

Paper long abstract:

"A river is a body of water. It has a foot, an elbow, a mouth. It runs. It lies in a bed. It can make you good. It has a head. It remembers everything," Natalie Diaz (Postcolonial Love Poem, 2020: 50).

In her poem, “The First Water Is the Body,” Pulitzer-prize-winning Mohave American poet Natalie Diaz positions her people’s river, the Colorado, as an enactment, an entry point, for reckoning with vulnerability and ongoing white settler violence in the face of environmental crisis. Building from Diaz’s poetry, I seek a water poetics that can be placed into conversation with competing notions of futurity in the Madrean Sky Islands–a vital biodiversity eco-region spanning Mexico and the United States and comprised of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of diverse habitat including desert, subalpine forests, grasslands, and riparian streams (Davidson, 2021). Toward this endeavor, I will discuss preliminary research findings. Drawing from walk-and-talk interviews with local stakeholders, ethnographic poetry, and on-site audiovisual recordings, I will present a first audiovisual portrait of the Sonoita Creek, a tributary of the Santa Cruz River – one of the watersheds in my hydro-social research, Entre Rios: Surveillance and Futurity in the US-Mexico Borderlands. Due to the centrality of water in this arid region, water defense activism, watershed maintenance, and restoration, restoration of habitat and wildlife corridors, and sensor-tracking documentation of borderlands wildlife are conceptualized as hydro-social practices of care that ‘imagine otherwise’ during uncertain times.