Paper short abstract:

Chemicals have become ethnographic objects. Anthropologists are tracing the material, toxicological, and neurological valences of molecular dreamworlds, growing pharmaceutical markets, and landscapes haunted by industrial capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

Chemical ethnography, or chemo-ethnography, owes intellectual debts to Lochlann Jain who has ushered "cancer and its identities out of the closet and into a space not of comfort, or righteous anger, but of mourning, a space where the material humanity of suffering and death informs communicative and collective action" (Jain 2013). As ethnographers start to "follow the chemical species" (cf. Marcus 1995), venturing into the realm of non-life where the pharmakon breaks down, new insights are emerging about multispecies worlds. Encounters between organic and inorganic matter—between rock and water, among biological organisms, metabolites, and toxins—produce distinct entities and agents that do not precede, but rather emerge through, molecular intra-actions (cf. Povinelli 2016; Barad 2014). Sensing technologies, and collaborations with allies in other disciplines, are allowing ethnographers to study chemical species in water, soil, air, human bodies, and emergent ecological assemblages. Theoretical and empirical research is engaging with questions related to processes of corrosion and combustion, the cultivation of non-innocent optimism, state abdication, and capital despoilment.

Paper short abstract:

Environmental assessments carried out under private contact (that might fail to notice certain forms of life) contrast with practices of indigenous ranger teams whose internal collaborations (traditional ecological knowledge plus sciences) increase the reliability of expertise.

Paper long abstract:

What goes unnoticed in country can be the result of the kind of wilful neglect that has atopia as its desired political outcome. Placelessness then allows for a generalised and reduced materiality: to micro-chemical matter that can be extracted and to macro structures for engineering. But it is at the meso-level (Stengers) that lively beings respond to each other's agencies with specific modes of attention. These are arts and skills practised for life-enhancement.

As Indigenous ranger programmes are expanding in number, the collaborations involved are also transforming the sciences' ways of paying attention to country. This paper contrasts the kinds of environmental assessments carried out under private contact (that might fail to notice certain forms of life) with the ranger teams whose internal collaborations (traditional ecological knowledge plus sciences) have effects that increase the reliability of knowledge by extending forms of expertise.

Paper short abstract:

The experience of the divine is influenced by a situational dynamism between people and plants, which depends on the intensity of sensory cues transmitted by certain flowers, as well as on the socio-economic, political and ritualistic circumstances of the encounter between the human and plant.

Paper long abstract:

In the phenomenology of Islam, flowers are earthly representations of the divine (Schimmel 1994; Schimmel 2001). However, few studies have investigated the sensory processes by which divine powers are materialized in human plant relationships. In this paper I argued that the experience of the divine is influenced by a situational dynamism between people and plants, which depends on the intensity of sensory cues transmitted by certain flowers, as well as on the socio-economic, political and ritualistic circumstances of the encounter between the human and plant. Drawing on 15 month of ethnographic research in Tunisia, this paper investigates how the mechmoum, a ubiquitous jasmine nosegay, works as a religious charm through visual and olfactory cues that are said to please both humans and the guardian angels that surround them. The quality of the jasmine, assessed by scent, color and symmetry, plays a vital role in manifesting the Islamic concept of tahara (cleanliness), which is an essential prerequisite for ritualistic efficacy and by extension protects in times of danger. The sensory intensity of certain flowers thus transcend the veil that divides the physical and spiritual world (alam el-shahadaa and alam al ghaib), manifesting one within the other.

Paper short abstract:

This paper thinks comparatively about two recent decisions to grant "legal personhood" to rivers in New Zealand and India. It suggests that this legal "livingness" serves to extend state control over natural resources while simultaneously rendering that control unstable, even ultimately impossible.

Paper long abstract:

In a series of remarkable decisions in New Zealand and India in March 2017, three rivers - the Whanganui, the Ganga, and the Yamuna -- were granted the legal status of persons. While such personhood might come as no surprise to post-humanists who have long taken seriously the agency of other-than-human worlds (Kirby 2017; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Povinelli 1995; Bennett 2010), the complicated politico-legal processes by which this "personhood" is being translated into legal idioms, however partially, unevenly, and at times problematically, remains under-explored (de la Cadena 2010; Blaser 2013; Li 2015). Drawing on recent ethnographic work in New Zealand and India, this paper explores how the multiple forms of personhood at stake in these decisions are being mobilized as part of broader social justice struggles. While government representatives, Indigenous leaders, and NGO activists in both countries have drawn on substantially different legal histories as well as conflicting understandings of what it might mean to recognise rivers as "living entities" with "metaphysical properties," both cases raise thorny questions about how other worlds and "practices of worlding" might fundamentally destabilise juridical spaces still colonised by British imperial logics (de Castro and Danowski 2017). By thinking comparatively about legal personhood for rivers across these two cases, my argument is that we are better able to engage enduring questions about the limitations of liberal rights frameworks while at the same time more carefully considering how the legal "livingness" of rivers might contribute to the ongoing decolonisation of Western legal systems.

Paper short abstract:

This paper twists an old concern with the origins of dysfunctional social policy in Indigenous affairs to a belated recognition of the co-dependencies these speak to, tracing the laminations of policies past and present to the existence of militarised mining economies within our collective bodies.

Paper long abstract:

For some anthropologists, the militarisation of everyday life can be tracked in the gradual seepage of war tactics into civilian life, where they become new norms (Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois 2004: 19-22; Shaw 2016). We might think here of the proliferation of security-guarded gated communities, of routine 'stop-and-frisk' encounters at airport terminals, or the harvesting of consumer data from surveillance technologies. Others have noted that war has also affected everyday infrastructural possibilities, from medical technologies and disease management to logistical systems and environmental interventions (Trappen and Clough 2013). Less often traced, even with contemporary permissions to follow uncanny connections, is the relationship between Indigenous rights to land and militarily sanctioned extraction interests. This paper explores these connections as part of an ongoing project to make sense of the insensibilities of Indigenous social policy in Australia and how this relates to everything else that we might take for granted within analysis. It twists an old concern with the origins of dysfunctional social policy in Indigenous affairs into a belated recognition of the co-dependencies these speak to, tracing the laminations of policies past and present to the existence of militarised mining economies within our collective bodies. Extraction feeds and shelters, connecting us to ripped sites; should we be damaged, cyborg technologies might pull us from death, or return some ability, or drag the life that sits inside one body into new forms, organs donated that others may breathe another day. Can we give any part of our militarised existence up?

Paper short abstract:

This paper will trace the history of the statue Baldwin Spencer statue at Museum Victoria from postcolonial pedagogical tool to pseudo-sacred object.

Paper long abstract:

In the mid-1990s, the high point of postmodernism, staff at Museum Victoria planned the new Melbourne Museum. The Indigenous gallery was a major focus at a time when Te Papa and the National Museum of the American Indian were forging new ways of organizing and displaying the Indigenous past. Named Bunjilaka (meaning the place of the ancestral eaglehawk Bunjil), the Indigenous exhibit was a bold expression of community consultation and reflexive museum practice. At the heart of the exhibit, and its most controversial part, was a life size seated sculpture of Baldwin Spencer, anthropologist and co-author of The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899). Under the curatorship of anthropologist John Morton, Spencer was placed in a glass case with a model of Varanus spenceri, the lizard named for him, at his feet. When Bunjilaka was redeveloped in 2012 and replaced with a wholly Indigenous-designed and curated exhibit of Aboriginal Victoria, the giant glass case was dismantled and repurposed but the sculpture was retained by museum staff. Initially sitting awkwardly on a trolley in a narrow room where objects were processed for accession, Spencer himself remained unrecorded in any database. With no official existence but considerable gravity, he ended up housed in the secret/sacred room, surrounded with restricted objects that Spencer the man had collected. I ask: Why was Spencer retained and what might he mean to museum staff? Finally, I consider my own influence on Spencer's fate as my recent enquiries have inadvertently amplified these questions within the museum.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the telling of ghost stories in the context of Indigenous Australian's removed from their families. It reflects on the challenges of such encounters, and asks how we approach the ghost as a real entity as well as a metaphorical, interpretative to understand trauma and suffering.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the telling of ghost stories in the context of Indigenous Australian's removed from their families. Known as the Stolen Generations, this group of people, were subjected to institutionalisation, adoption, and forced removals from their families, friends and communities. In many of my encounters with Stolen Generations, they brought me into their world of ghosts and hauntings. This presentation reflects on the challenge for the ethnographer in thinking with and through such encounters, and asks how we approach the ghost as a real entity as well as a metaphorical, interpretative lens through which to understand trauma and suffering. As "merchants of astonishment'' (Geertz 1984: 275), ghost hunting anthropologists face innumerable challenges in their research and writing. That we can imagine having a relationship with our ghosts and the ghosts of our research participants, that they seem to exist as part of a different and more flexible ontology, is what makes their presence and subsequent analysis all the more interesting. What is terrifying about these ghosts is that they are akin to Nietzsche's abyss, they seemingly have their own agency and unpredictability; it is this predicament that we must manage in our scholarly writings in order to do justice to the lives of our research participants.