Paper short abstract:

This presentation analyzes the ways that non-indigenous farmers in Amazonia classify naturally growing "covers" on the ground, including vegetation, but also the covers of the body- hair.

Paper long abstract:

Researchers use remote sensing technologies to classify Amazonian land cover based on geo-spatial properties, with “natural” forested landscapes distinguished from anthropogenic, non-forest covers with clear edges, densities, and patterns. In this presentation, I discuss how non-forest covers are sensed and categorized on the ground. I use the term “covers” to describe the vegetation that grows naturally and which these actors consider non-human or natural. However, I show the ways that people talk about vegetation is similar to how they talk about another type of cover, which grows on the human body—hair. Drawing on research along a deforestation frontier in the Brazilian Amazon, I describe how a range of non-indigenous actors perceive, shape, and judge covers, from agricultural fields at the edge of the forest to urban topiary bushes and lawns to human head and body hair. Comparative analysis across these sites reveals that covers are ranked and ordered, and provides a chance to see more clearly how environmental destruction and human inequality are linked in an overarching conceptual system.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at Amazonian Indigenous experiences of biodiversity from the perspective of deep time, demonstrating that the deep history of human-environment interactions orientate people's lives, as well as the specific intergenerational entanglements of plants, animals and people.

Paper long abstract:

Taking the perspective of deep time and deep history, this paper discusses Amazonian Indigenous experiences of biodiversity. Despite significant scholarship on human ecology, different notions of biodiversity among those who have produced biocultural landscapes for generations have been little addressed in a long-term scale. This paper draws from ethnography, co-living, and conversational interviews with the Apurinã in the Central Purus River, Amazonas State, Brazilian Amazonia. Additionally, I have worked with archaeologists and biologists, which has contributed insights into their different temporal analyses of biodiversity in the region to the study. The paper shows how, for the Apurinã, the deep history of human-environment interactions and memory orientate people's lives, shaping local experiences of diversity embedded in the biocultural landscape. These temporal aspects are also linked to specific intergenerational entanglements of plants, animals, and people, in which respect, reciprocity, and responsibility are crucial values.

Today, there are drastic ruptures in Indigenous social worlds due to large-scale extractive and infrastructure projects. By providing evidence of the nature of ancestral relations with diverse entities, new archaeological and biological data have become crucial tools in shedding light on how Indigenous agency has contributed to Amazonian forests in the long-term. However, different actors' understandings of deep time may differ. Although scientists usually consider time to be linear while local actors perceive it as spiral, different understandings of deep time offer important evidence of changes and views vital for the co-creation of new knowledge.

Paper short abstract:

The author discusses the cross-border experience of serious computer games used in research. Design of a research game tests the argumentation "everything exists equally” (I.Bogost), practically it answers the question of what a sociologist has to go for the partnership with a computer game.

Paper long abstract:

The report discusses the problems of computer game and scientifical practice integration. The computer game as smart technology is presented by the author in the light of flat ontology (M. Delanda, Q. Meillassoux, G. Harman, I. Bogost, A. R. Galloway). The combination of game and science, in the author’s opinion, is possible if it is recognized that a computer game has a set of affordances that cannot be reduced even for research purposes. In this sense, the game acts as the operator or partner of the sociologist in the empirical data gathering. The research game is one of the variants for the development of science games, along with citizen games and gamified online surveys. The term “ludo-epistemologies is used today to justify the tendency for the convergence of the game, the actions of ordinary people, and the production of knowledge. The empirical case discussed in the article is a research game, the creation of which began in 2020 by the efforts of sociologists from St Petersburg University. The research aim of the game is to collect data on the national attitudes of gamers using the Bogardus social distance scale. Based on the experience of creating a game scenario, the author considers the obstacles and compromise that a scientist has to overcome to combine game mechanics and research techniques.