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- Convenors:
-
Kristinn Schram
(University of Iceland)
Tiber Falzett (University College Dublin)
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- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
Exploring verbal and visual art, performance and archival material this panel seeks to broaden notions of cultural relations into more-than-human spaces. With a focus on islands, coasts and littoral areas, it delves into how human and non-human entanglements are expressed within lived experience.
Long Abstract:
Exploring verbal and visual art, performance and archival material this panel seeks to broaden notions of cultural relations into more-than-human spaces. With a focus on islands, coasts and littoral areas, it delves into how human and non-human entanglements are expressed, sensed, and reimagined within the cyclical ebbs and flows of lived experience. Special emphasis will be placed on the power of such narrative to challenge and reckon with the complex and dynamic relationships with perceived others in the midst of immediate and existential environmental, and socio-cultural threats. In the archival context, e.g. the salvaged ethnographic datasets extracted all too often from communities facing such crises, we also invite questions on how future community-driven engagements may be envisioned that empower new ethical modes of documentation, representation and renewal through such lived systems of traditional ecological knowledge. Through recentering our focus from false binaries toward these tangles of relationships, or naturecultures, found within the contact points of land- and seascapes, might we open potentialities and uncertainties whether by way of the banality of everyday or extraordinary lived circumstances? Could we discern the dynamics of how we engage with and are engaged by more-than-human personae at these shifting boundaries? What insights might be gained into how such shared experiences inform how the supernatural relates to the natural at the emic nexus of personal experience narrative, folklife and belief?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper Short Abstract:
Coastal ecosystems face increasing anthropogenic climate change, with algae blooms as powerful actors within emerging multi-species entanglements. Based on fieldwork in Mexico and Germany, I explore how marine biologists narrate algae as both antagonists and companions in the Anthropocene.
Paper Abstract:
Coastal ecosystems increasingly confront the pressures of climate change and anthropogenic disturbance. Algae blooms, often harmful, like Sargassum in the Caribbean represent a powerful example of more-than-human entanglements in coastal ecosystems. This paper engages with ethnographic insights from fieldwork among marine biologists in Mexico and Germany to explore how these scientists articulate their interactions with algae within the broader discourse of the Anthropocene. By examining the complex narratives surrounding Sargassum blooms, I investigate how marine biologists come to view algae not simply as ecological burdens, but as agents of interaction, acting as both disruptors and companions in addressing anthropogenic climate change. Sargassum blooms, often perceived as purely detrimental due to impacts such as obstructed beach access, economic losses in tourism and fisheries, and health risks from biomass decomposition, also provoke new perspectives on interspecies agency and more-than-human responses to environmental change. This paper examines how such narratives of both algae as “antagonist species” and "companion species" provide a means of recentering algae within shared coastal lifeworlds, inviting a shift toward collaborative relationships. Through these lived encounters, I address how scientists narrate Sargassum as both a symbol and an actor within the complex, unstable rhythms of coastal life, challenging traditional binaries between humans and non-human ‘others’ in these critical, transitional spaces.
Paper Short Abstract:
Based on more than a decade of field research, this paper explores human-environment entanglements as expressed through archaeology, place-names, legends and anecdotes, and the lived experience of pastoral farming in Inishbofin off the west coast of Connemara.
Paper Abstract:
The use of triads to encapsulate traditional wisdom has a rich history in Ireland. This presentation will adopt that form to distill local reflections on human-environment entanglements on the island of Inishbofin. Seven kilometres off the coast of Connemara, Inishbofin is home to nearly 200 people, who strive to balance the stewardship of local heritage and a burgeoning tourist trade. Small-scale pastoral farming remains an important source of identity and livelihood, one increasingly tied to agri-environmental subsidies. A distinctive tradition of maritime pastoralism, involving the seasonal movement of livestock by boat between small islands in the Inishbofin archipelago, endures but is in steep decline. A decade of participant observation with some of the last practitioners of this tradition reveals how place-names, local legends and anecdotes, and daily experiences of working land and sea act as venues for reckoning relationships between islanders, strangers, and the other-than-human world. What emerges is a model of human dwelling premised on the creative adaptation of traditional ecological knowledge and embodied skills to foster the entwined livelihoods of various creatures. In particular, I will argue that a key pastoral skill - to imagine the world simultaneously from multiple other-than-human perspectives - offers an alternative to 'rewilding’ as a template for environmental stewardship.
Paper Short Abstract:
Using video and autoethnography, this study applies vā, a Pacific concept of relational space, to examine how Indigenous or place-based languages can influence decolonial approaches to (re)shaping human and more-than-human relationships in coastal landscapes.
Paper Abstract:
Language shapes how we view and interact with the world. While many Global North narratives retain colonial dualisms, Pacific cultures often perceive in-between spaces not as voids but as relational dimensions that transcend binary notions of space and time. In Samoan, Tongan, and Niuean cultures, vā describes relational, emotional, and metaphysical connections. Samoan writer Albert Wendt defines vā as ‘the space between all things which defines and makes us a part of the unity that is all’ (quoted in Va‘ai 1999: 46). Grounded in wa Thiong’o’s directive to first decolonise the mind, we undertake this autoethnographic study to challenge ourselves, as scholars from the Global North, to (re)view landscape through an Indigenous language lens. In doing so, we explore how language shapes landscape, thus collapsing the perceived boundaries around the objects of Linguistic Landscape (LL) studies. In allyship with Indigenous and decolonial scholars, we pioneer a multi-modal, co-creational methodology. Each author first explores and analyses a natural space, observing the semiotic elements present. After engaging with scholarship on the concept of vā, we revisit the same space to record video reflections, documenting shifts in perception as well as insights into the space between the co-authors. Through collaborative analysis of these audiovisual encounters, we reveal new relational aspects of the landscape made visible through vā. This innovative methodology offers empirical evidence of how place-based languages can alter how non-Indigenous people perceive landscapes, and offers a model for fostering transnational and remote collaborations by connecting with and through our local ecologies.
Paper Short Abstract:
The traditional "Marriage with the Sea”, a Venice patriarchal ritual of domination on a feminized blue-scape, inspires the desire of a feminist and queer shake-up, becoming an alternative collective performance to inact with my island community.
Paper Abstract:
In 1000 the Doge, Venice highest authority, married the sea. The union took place where lagoon and sea meet. He was clad in ermine and a gold ring was thrown into the waves. The formula says “I marry you, the sea. In sign of true and perpetual domination”. The doge was a male, the sea was feminized. The ceremony, still practiced today by the mayor, represents a human-male taming nature, the female-bride-sea, through a patriarchal and heteronormative marriage. The political and economic value of dominance over the seas is clear.
Here three inversions are proposed, giving form to a proposal of an alternative Venetian collective performance: from assigning a gender to the sea and enacting patriarchal domination to a fluid and non-binary relationship with it; from exploiting water resources to an ecological human-bluescape perfomance; from a hierarchical structure, male over female-nature, to an horizontal and queer inclusivity.
This project focuses on the value of the sea in the global sea level rising crisis, in the nexus of water-based artivism, and on how academic research can stimulate a live collective art performance to share and build with my own Venice community, and interconnecting it with other islands’ cultures and perfoming arts.
Paper Short Abstract:
The paper sheds light on how current socio-cultural and ecological dynamics are influencing the living conditions and cultural status of the Atlantic puffin in Iceland. Particular attention is given to visual and material representations of the bird.
Paper Abstract:
The paper sheds light on how current socio-cultural and ecological dynamics are influencing the living conditions and cultural status of the Atlantic puffin in Iceland. These developments include abrupt climate change, increased human and more-than-human mobility, and the massive extinction of wild animals, frequently described as the sixth mass extinction. According to the European Red List of Birds published in 2021, the population size of puffins is estimated to have decreased by 68% over the past 50 years. The paper investigates the role and symbolic meaning of the puffin and how it has developed through the ages from mainly being a food source towards becoming one of the key tourist symbols in Iceland and major attraction for adventure seeking global tourists who want to come close to the living animal. Particular attention is given to projects and performances by several contemporary Icelandic artists who have engaged with the puffin as a complex naturecultural symbol and harbinger with dark and gloomy ecological message attached, concerning climatic collapse and rapid animal extinction.
Paper Short Abstract:
Based on recent ethnographic research, this presentation will focus on how a contemporary folk healer from Scotland organises annual pilgrimages to the Inner Hebrides with the aim of bringing his spiritual groups closer to the local nature and the local myths connected to it.
Paper Abstract:
Based on ethnographic research from 2015 to 2020, this presentation will showcase how a contemporary Scottish folk healer with shamanistic knowledge organises annually pilgrimages for his spiritual groups to the Inner Hebrides, and specifically to the islands of Iona, Mull and Staffa, and the Isle of Skye. This neo-shaman/healer aims to connect his followers to the local nature as well as to the local myths associated with it. During the pilgrimages, the healer leads the group to "sacred sites", narrates stories about local heroes, the Fae Folk, and the local deities, while also leads magical ceremonies alongside them. The paper aims to highlight how contemporary folk healers manage to connect the natural and the supernatural, and how this interplay manifests itself in their own individual beliefs, approaches and practices. It will focus on the importance that spiritual practitioners, such as the one examined in this paper, give to local "sacred" places and the profound spiritual relationships that are developed between these places and their practices through time. The presentation will also focus on how this interplay is interpreted by some of the attendees at the pilgrimages as well. Issues of identity, the role of sites of high spiritual value in supernatural practices, as well as the reconstruction/reinvention of past local practices will be among the issues discussed in the paper.
Paper Short Abstract:
In this paper I am following the workings and appearance of a trashy maintenance space of seaweed piles, tractors, birds and birders in a dark corner of a man-made beach in Malmö, Sweden. Can the concept of poetic space allow for a deeper understanding of the collective workings of this living, littoral, left-over architecture?
Paper Abstract:
In my ongoing thesis I discuss and re-imagine the human relation to nature, wilderness, and others, from a man-made urban beach in Malmö, Sweden. From within the field of urban studies I work with photographic methods trying to raise knowledge regarding how the landscape architecture deal with the particularities of this littoral space. The thesis will be composed as a poetics, with several essayistic poems of architecture, and this paper is meant to be one of these.
This modern beach, constructed in 1920’s and onwards, needs much maintenance. The last 15 years the city of Malmö have been dumping washed up seaweed in a less visited corner of the beach. This dark, formless, wet, smelly opposition to the white, clean beach have turned into a living home to many animals, particularly birds, to the extent that local ornithologists have mapped this place as “the seaweed piles” in a forum-app for digital communication regarding rare bird sightings. Hence, this trashy space is a known locality for seeing birds in general but also more rare birds. The collective work of tractors, seaweed, birds and birders, is producing a trashy aesthetics and particular kind of public space – a poetic space? What can the concept of poetic space add to our understanding of the role, qualities and collective work of public spaces? The concept allows me to linger on the outer threshold of reasonable and civilized architecture and urbanity and to discuss this dark space more in terms of connectivity, changeability and monstrosity.
Paper Short Abstract:
Whether through traditional folk narrative, music, riddles, games or dance various animals appear in their disparate guises and performances and often in hybrid or supernatural forms. This presentation will discuss the study of oral narrative and folk traditions in exploration of how they might express or enable the experience of animality. It will explore how ideas of animal characteristics and agency are performed and embodied in narrative and play. While bringing scholarship on posthumanism, animal mimicry, guising, pranking and protesting to bear recent case studies on the north coast of Iceland will be presented in conjunction with other ethnographies and archival material.
Paper Abstract:
The role of non-human animals is significant in folklore. Whether through traditional folk narrative, music, riddles, games or dance various animals appear in their disparate guises and performances and often in hybrid or supernatural forms. From a posthuman, or more-than-human, perspective these entanglements form a crucial part of our multispecies history. Many scholars, who challenge notions of a nature/culture binary, have also stressed the limitations of language in describing non-human experience. Attempts to name and describe other animals even been portrayed as tools in erasing the radical otherness inherent in these encounters. In response more unconventional and artistic methods have also been called on in the hope they might shake up the anthropocentric foundations of such endeavours. This presentation will discuss the study of oral narrative and folk traditions in exploration of how they might express or enable the experience of animality. It will explore how ideas of animal characteristics and agency are performed and embodied in narrative and play. While bringing scholarship on animal mimicry, guising, pranking and protesting to bear recent case studies on the north coast of Iceland will be presented in conjunction with other ethnographies and archival material.
Paper Short Abstract:
By refocusing my fieldwork on Gaelic aural/oral traditions in Cape Breton Island through the simple forms and multisensory poetics of folk names and mimologisms related to emic multigenerational observations of such interspecies’ entanglements between the feathered and featherless, I will empathetically reconsider the multilayered and intersectional complexities of everyday discourse on being in a place with others and coming to know ourselves through such entanglements with more-than-human others.
Paper Abstract:
Roger Tory Peterson, author of my first dogeared and rebound field guide to North American birds, observed that over half of the bird species in Atlantic Canada are found on both sides of the Atlantic. This paper offers a mid-life auto-ethnographic multispecies reflection on the induction of a young folklorist in learning an endangered minority language and cultural expression in a diasporic context. This revisitation offers a reassessment of the resulting intersubjectivities at play between a teenage bagpiper “from Away” and mother-tongue speakers of Scottish Gaelic in Cape Breton Island. Frequent asides on the names for plants and animals amid focused ethnographic exchanges on the local aesthetics of music and song were, in hindsight, deeply informed by a shared curiosity for the connections between natural and social worlds that reveal complex more-than-human ontologies of migration and dis/emplacements. By reflexively foregrounding these observations through my first experiences in systematic fieldwork, I will consider the impacts that my earliest observation of non-human others tagging and radio-tracking gregarious Canada Jays for the Audubon Society had upon my later training and practice as a folklorist. By refocusing my fieldwork on Gaelic aural/oral traditions in Cape Breton Island through the simple forms and multisensory poetics of folk names and mimologisms related to emic multigenerational observations of such interspecies’ entanglements between the feathered and featherless, I will empathetically reconsider the multilayered and intersectional complexities of everyday discourse on being in a place with others and coming to know ourselves through such entanglements with more-than-human others.