Paper short abstract:

This paper combines ethnography, archaeology and environmental science to describe different modalities of human and animal dwelling at Yarte - an ensemble of sandy hills and lakes in mid-Yamal. This paper contrasts the shifting moral narratives at this site with reference to climate change.

Paper long abstract:

The Yuribei River bisects the High Arctic Peninsula of Yamal forming alternately a resource and a natural barrier to human movement. Its high sandy banks have created a dwelling space for mobile hunters and reindeer herders for thousands of years. This paper combines insights from ethnography, archaeology and environmental sciences to describe the many different modalities of human and animal dwelling at Yarte - an ensemble of sandy hills and lakes in mid-Yamal. For scientists, the constantly eroding banks of the river provide both a marker of human/animal action as well as a moralistic maker of anthropogenitic "impact". For local Nenetses, a competing moral narrative traces the emergence of underground forces onto the middle plain where humans live today. This paper contrasts the shifting moral narratives at this site with reference to the contemporary challenges of climate change.

Paper short abstract:

Ma communication abordera les ruptures qui s’opèrent dans les modalités symboliques et sociotechniques d’habiter le sable et d’adaptation aux aléas de la vie au désert, entre, d’une part, le milieu pastoral et la vie sous la tente et, d’autre part, le milieu urbain et la vie dans des espaces fixes et bâtis.

Paper long abstract:

Dans cette communication, il s'agira d'identifier les continuités et les ruptures qui se manifestent dans les représentations, les attitudes et les capacités d'adaptation des populations ouest-sahariennes face au milieu désertique sableux et à ses aléas, en comparaison de celles à l'oeuvre en milieu urbain.

On s'intéressera tout d'abord aux techniques et savoirs mobilisés par les populations nomades pour faire face aux événements climatiques qui perturbent les paysages dans lesquels ils vivent, des événements qui sont toutefois prévus dans les modes de représentation et d'habiter le désert, et qui sont gérés avant tout par le déplacement.

On questionnera notamment le rôle de la tente dans l'enveloppement de la cellule familiale face aux risques extérieurs, le rôle du tissé et la souplesse d'utilisation de la tente dans un contexte de changement environnemental. La tente permettra sans cesse de reconstituer l'habiter à l'identique et d'assurer, malgré les changements de lieu de vie, une continuité dans la vie sociale et matérielle au désert. On insistera sur la normalité de ces attitudes d'adaptation, recourant à des techniques et à des savoirs éprouvés.

Puis on mettra ces matériaux ethnographiques en relation avec des observations faites en milieu urbain, dans une capitale ouest-saharienne, Nouakchott, dont l'extension frénétique se fait sur des cordons dunaires qui encadrent la ville au nord et à l'est. Il s'agira de montrer en quoi les incidents climatiques fréquents (inondations, menaces de raz-de-marée, tempêtes de sable) révèlent les difficultés d'une population urbaine à l'habitat fixe et bâti, à affronter les « risques » environnementaux.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to build a preliminary Historical and Socioecological narrative of the Lambayeque Valley (2000 BC to 1450 AD), Northern Coast of Peru, and paradgmatic case to understand the socioecological interactions between people and climate change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to build a preliminary Historical and Socioecological narrative of the Lambayeque Valley (2000 BC to 1450 AD), Northern Coast of Peru. In addition, we point out some important historical links between climatic events and major sociopolitical changes. Lambayeque Valley is part of the cultural region of the central Andes, which from the Atacama Desert to Ecuador. In the east-west axis, four great eco-geographic areas - coast, sierra, mountain and high selva. Although these landscape features are considered key features to understand the socio-ecological relations in the Andes, the evolution of these interactions has always been problematic. The Lambayeque valley was notarized in the 1980s by the discovery of Sipan Tombs. However, the great complex socio-environmental landscape and complex material culture have been known to archaeologists since early twentieth century. Major historical changes in archaeological cultures such as Moche and Lambayeque-Chimu seem to be, at least, partially linked to a chronic environmental instability caused by cyclic climatic events such as El Nino since 2500 b.C., at least. Despite this apparent instability, a resilient culture of pyramid building, complex irrigation systems and macro-regional exchange networks persisted throughout millennia. A resilient praxis appeared to have overcome ideological control of local and alien elites, making Labayeque valley long history a paradigmatic case to understand the socioecological interactions between people and climate change.

Paper short abstract:

Instability is an important feature of Timor production systems: irregularity in rain, natural events, climate change, political events. The paper will address the agricultural and symbolic solutionswhich express a deep understanding of the fragility and uncertainty of the environment.

Paper long abstract:

Instability is an important feature of Timor production systems. Such instability primarily characterizes the environments: rains, which are crucial for the rain-fed agriculture in marginal conditions, is in itself irregular and significant contrasts characterize the distribution of rainfall throughout the year (sometimes the dry season is very long) and from one year to another. Spatial distribution of precipitation is also irregular, with large variations in the different elements of the landscape. Added to these difficult conditions, mythology and history keep track of the occurrence of natural events like tsunamis, and one can perceive today a significant impact of climate change (raise of sea levels, droughts, erosion). What is interesting is that in local myths, past critical events are often related to political events.

Political events such as conflicts, wars, resulting in the division of human groups and resettlement of populations, are also very present in history; the 1975 Indonesian invasion is one of the last events, the most dramatic of course, of a local history jostled by wars, trade deals and colonization.

To overcome these uncertain conditions, both natural and political, people have systematically recourse to a mixed system combining agriculture and foraging of semi-domesticated or spontaneous products, even during good years, in order to keep the system active; for example such system has been strongly reactivated during the resistance to the Indonesians. Other very important management methods involve rituals, supported by a rich mythology, which are themselves an expression of a deep understanding of the fragility and uncertainty of the environment.

Paper short abstract:

Landscapes of uncertainty, unpredictability, rapid change…terms used to describe the temporal unknown. But how exactly do these temporalities manifest? The paper pinpoints distinct features of rapid change and asks how these enable or hinder populations’ adjustment to such fleeting landscapes.

Paper long abstract:

The paper examines the effects of multiple temporalities of rapid change on a community's ability to construct livelihoods in an urban landscape of chronic and unpredictable water scarcity. It draws on a broader ethnographic study on resilience to water scarcity in environments of rapid change conducted with 23 households and 8 institutional stakeholders in an informal settlement in Lima, Peru.

Through the lens of dwelling, the paper examines the effects of uncertainty, unpredictability and reduced decision-making time on residents' perceptions and knowledge of the water scarce landscape, and how the perpetual yet unpredictable alterations of the environment affect the ability to construct livelihoods.

Scarcity of time, mental capacity and economic means mark households' responses to water scarcity and result in wide-spread short-termism, resulting in temporary adjustments which attract significant longer term challenges. Insecure futures arising from lack of land tenure suspend residents' livelihoods within a wider environment of rapid change. Institutional failures to provide enabling conditions highlight the limits of household agency in adjusting to chronic yet volatile changes in the water scarce landscape.

The paper examines how these temporal phenomena manifest in the transformation of the water scarce landscape and households' perceptions of, and adjustments to, this landscape through ways of dwelling. It discusses how these temporalities delineate the boundaries of the community's ability to construct livelihoods within contexts of rapid change, and concludes by analysing the significance of these boundary conditions for theories of rapid change and scarce resources.

Paper short abstract:

Indigenous responses to climate and environmental change within the Bering Strait Region

Paper long abstract:

Climate change does not only challenge the Western world, but also the so-called "non-modern" societies that tend to conceive relations between nature and culture in terms of continuity rather than rupture. However, for many of these societies living in the extreme environments of the Bering Strait Region, climate change and massive extraction projects are disrupting the system of relations to such an extent that established beliefs and values are shaking. In order to deal with environmental transformations, these societies are forced to rethink their relations with non-human entities - divinities, ancestors, plants, animals and atmospheric phenomena. While doing so, they question our own way of relating to these environments, and allow us to finally move away from our pre established categorizations, toward a new form of understanding.

This paper builds on ethnographic fieldwork among the Gwich'in of Alaska and the Even of Kamchatka. The aim is to show how hunter-gatherers societies on both side of the Bering Strait are answering to the global eco-human crisis with an animistic style, drawing its power from the ongoing state of instability and uncertainties at play in subarctic environments nowadays.

Paper short abstract:

The study deals with ecologies of aesthetic transformation in Santa Ursula, a woodcarving community situated in Central Luzon, Philippines. The paper shall focus on the mandukit (woodcarver) after a volcanic eruption in 1991 and a series of floods that carried lahar altered the physical landscape.

Paper long abstract:

The mandukit of Sta. Ursula dwell in the district of Betis, situated in the Municipality of Guagua, Pampanga Province. The municipality of Guagua was called "mouth of a river" because it used to be an entry point of boats coming from Manila (the main capital and port city) and other navigational routes within the archipelago. Before Betis became a district, the place was one of the oldest riverine towns established during the Spanish colonial period. Therefore, the place continues to have some of the oldest churches in the Philippines and has endured a long tradition of carving Catholic imagery on wood.

Subsequent typhoons immediately followed the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo. The subsequent floods that often inundated the landscape brought lahar even years after the volcanic eruption. Thus, Sta. Ursula (and much of the terrain in Pampanga) was permanently transformed. How does the imaginative mandukit play an active role in the transformation of the woodcarving tradition after the district suffered from the disastrous effects of the volcanic eruption? The processes of artistic transformation and creative recovery are also situated along the confluence of several factors that ebb and flow. To name but a few, the temporary flight of the United States military presence and the Philippine state's aspiration for progress as a tiger economy are staged in the late 1990s. The paper shall examine the community-based initiatives vis a vis the dynamics of patronage that sustained the mandukit throughout the process of post-disaster recovery.

Paper short abstract:

We’ll discuss how "traditional" dwelling strategies and related knowledge relate to new status and roles locally assigned to "nature" within a Brazilian floodplain landscape. Our focus is on a settlement located in Northeast Brazil undergoing strong urbanization dynamics since the 1980s.

Paper long abstract:

Our presentation explores the ways floodplain dwellers re-negotiate both the role and the status of the landscape they inhabit, in a context of accelerating urbanization. For decades or more, life in Aranha, a settlement located in Northeast Brazil, has been relying on multiple livelihoods (fishing, agriculture, livestock farming, extractivism) that are complementary in space and time. Such a diversity of ways of dwelling enables the people of Aranha to adjust to strong fluctuations of the environment. Indeed, Aranha's environment undergoes complex flooding cycles, due to the combined influence of rain and tides, giving the landscape an ambiguous character between terrestrial and aquatic.

As we will argue, the ways people of Aranha engage with "nature" nowadays must, however, be analysed in a larger frame, due mainly to the accelerated urbanization process taking place in the region. We will show how the question of "nature" is renewed, renegotiated and re-inserted in the context of these changes. In particular, the landscape is revalued throughout new dimensions such as its aesthetic quality, its contribution to wellbeing, its economic value or its potential regarding conservation. "Dwelling", although remaining central in Aranha, thus became one of the multiple ways of relating to this landscape. But how do these various possibilities of engaging with "nature" interrelate locally? How do dwelling strategies and related knowledge evolve within this frame? How is coping with uncertainty reframed in this context? These are the main questions we will address here.

Paper short abstract:

“Chronic uncertainty” has become a permanent condition in L’Aquila. In our joined presentation we will show, by means of photography and the comparison of case studies, the “evanescent landscapes” emerged from the earthquake and the local adaptive manners of coping with post-catastrophic uncertainty.

Paper long abstract:

Nowadays is increasingly evident that "chronic uncertainty" will be part of our common future on earth. This has been particularly clear in L'Aquila after the 2009 earthquake. Indeed the town recovery, as managed by local and national institutions, permitted the emergency period insecurity to become chronic trough the reconstruction process.

If taken as an event that intersects people, society and the environment, the earthquake is able to show the constant mutation of this relation. Anthropology of Disaster extensively revealed that those transformations are good (opportunities) or bad (disasters) depending on the degree of local population preparedness and vulnerability. Thus, by considering the earthquake as a recurrent and cyclical event, our aim is to uncover the more intrinsic and historic human responsibilities that are at play in the post-catastrophic L'Aquila context.

Our aim is also to highlight how human and non-human agencies intertwine by means of different powers and temporalities as co-producers of the post-catastrophic "evanescent landscapes". As such, through photography and by means of our reciprocal and compared case studies, in our joined presentation we will show the "extra-ordinary", unexpected and temporary landscapes emerged from the earthquake.

Finally, we want to particularly emphasize the today's local adaptive manners of interpreting and coping with spatial post-disaster uncertainty. Therefore, the evanescent landscapes arisen from the earthquake could be read, on the one hand, as a way of traditional dwelling disruptions and, on the other hand, as a new embodied form of perceiving and acting in L'Aquila province.

Paper short abstract:

How do people engage with landscape to cope with long-term environmental crisis, in this case chronic water scarcity? Within this context, this paper investigates the ways in which people creatively engage with and materially transform their environment through dwelling, design and imagination.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses how people engage with the landscape to deal with prolonged drought in Almería, in the south-east corner of Spain, which is considered the driest region in Europe. Despite arid conditions, intensive agriculture has been developing there since the 1960s and continues to grow today, which is highly significant in a province where aridity is inseparably tied to historically protracted poverty, a relative lack of development, and social crises of identity, rural abandonment, and inequality. Increasing pressure on water resources and rapid economic growth have profoundly changed conditions of prosperity and inequality in the region, and have had a significant impact, both positive and negative, on the ways in which the desert landscape is creatively imagined and materially transformed.

This paper investigates the ways in which people creatively engage with and materially transform their environment through landscape design and imagination. It interrogates the physical making of landscape, for example through building, dwelling, and engineering, as well as the ascription of meaning to landscapes through individual or collective acts of representation and imagination. Finally, abandonment and ruination are addressed in terms of the deliberate 'unmaking' of landscape, offering a stark reminder that dwelling can be a destructive as well as a creative process.