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- Convenors:
-
Subarna De
(University of Groningen)
Ximena Sevilla (University of Rhode Island)
Anupama Mohan (Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Iva Pesa
(Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Envisaging A Global South
- Location:
- Room 11
- Sessions:
- Monday 19 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
We encourage interdisciplinary conversations illuminating indigenous bioregional histories and practices across all periods that map/deconstruct/reconstruct the different responses to environmental transitions and transformations, including the human and more-than-human world in the Global South.
Long Abstract:
Over the last decade, environmental history has developed into a progressive field, reconstructing the past and moving towards envisioning a green future that pursues alternatives to fight global climate crises. Against the Anthropocene and Capitalocene’s shallow historicization and complex relationship between humans and nature, it becomes pertinent to understand how indigenous and colonial environments of the Global South renew their communal bonds with their injured lands and how indigenous practices reconstruct the cultural ecologies of place to restore their bioregions. Understanding that a bioregion is a “geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness” (Berg and Dasmann, 1978) that provides a sustainable framework for living in place, bioregional history narrates histories of transformation of place and people over centuries. In current colonial settings, bioregional histories play a crucial role in successfully determining the transitions in climatology, plant and animal geography, natural history and natural sciences within the bioregion. We are interested in exploring the relationship between Indigenous peoples’ culture and environmental attributes in the global south, which can shed light on the different responses to environmental transitions and transformations, including both the human and the more-than-human worlds.
We seek scholarly papers that approach histories, film, geographies, literature, communities, natural sciences, and practices that map/deconstruct/reconstruct the bioregional histories across all time periods in the Global South. Finally, we encourage interdisciplinary conversations illuminating indigenous bioregional histories and practices that fight the climate crisis, the Anthropocene and Capitalocene, and successfully resist colonial and neocolonial impositions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 19 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the role of native communities as keepers of traditional knowledge and its importance in bridging the gaps in documented and published bioregional and environmental history, that is crucial for sustainable planning & development.
Paper long abstract:
The people/ communities living in an area for generations usually understand the lay of the land, local climate, seasonal changes, nature of soil etc., very well since their daily lives are closely linked to it. Historically, in rural and urban settings, people have witnessed patterns of nature around them and developed practices and rituals in response. This is particularly evident in geographies considered relatively resource-parched (in the conventional sense), such as the deserts, as communities judiciously harness the natural conditions and limited resources for sustenance.
Consequently, though unconsciously, native communities become the keepers of this knowledge. However, in due course, the basis for the observation is often lost, and only the practices remain. Revisiting these practices and scientifically deciphering the basis provides valuable insights into the bioregional/environmental history of the places/ sites/ regions. This information can be crucial in the sustainable planning of developmental and infrastructure projects for the areas. It also bridges the gaps in documented and published bioregional and environmental history.
Based on primary research and exploratory fieldwork, the author seeks to share a system of existence in Thar Desert, India, that is shaped by the community’s understanding of environmental history, context, resources available, transformation and constraints, which should be the bedrock of any new development/ infrastructure projects or conservation efforts proposed for meaningful restoration of these ecoregions. Threatened by large-scale infrastructure and industrial projects, Thar eco-region also showcases the native communities' efforts, anchored in their beliefs and traditional practices, in resisting the unsustainable development here.
Paper short abstract:
This paper weaves histories of the Akha and Karen in highland Thailand, and the Ata and Bukidnon in Central Philippines. It asks how indigeneity has been defined and used by governments as tools of cooptation, while probing a just transition for ethnic groups in Maritime and Mainland Southeast Asia.
Paper long abstract:
Discourse surrounding a just transition from actively harmful and unsustainable global economic systems have included conversations initiated by indigenous communities primarily in the Global North (Climate Justice Alliance), with little from those of the Global South.
This paper follows the Akha and Karen through coffee in Northern Thailand, tracing the emergence of coffee cultivation through Christian missionaries and the monarchy. In the Philippines, focus is placed on land grabbing and enclosure in Ata and Bukidnon territories in the Central Philippine island of Negros based on fieldwork conducted in 2017 to 2019.
With coffee as a focal crop, the Karen and Akha story traces early misunderstandings of Karen and Akha planting approaches to scholarly essentialisations of ethnic identity. Contemporary rituals and intentional rites celebrated by an Akha network in Thailand, settled and increasingly supported by state infrastructure, suggest the acquisition of secure livelihoods and wealth is not mutually exclusive with cultural renewal and intentional choice. As the Akha have had to dwell in constant movement from nomadic journeys from Yunnan, China, to Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand, contemporary urban mobility is intersecting with Akha historical experience.
The Philippine conversation, in contrast, revolves around questions of power and disenfranchisement in the process of identifying the Ata and the Bukidnon as indigenous. Fieldwork interviews reveal telling details concerning the imposition of identities and political structures on both these groups, and how these impositions have facilitated both the delineation of Ata and Bukidnon territories, as well as these communities’ alienation therefrom.
Paper short abstract:
The age-long practice of matching naked in the community, with which indigenous women have pressed home their demands, is represented in Ifeoma Nwoye’s Oil Cemetery, as women match against oil corporations. With ideas from ecocriticism, I undertake a bioregional analysis of the novel Oil Cemetery
Paper long abstract:
The oil rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria is a home to many indigenous peoples. These ethnic societies face different kinds of environmental destruction as a result of extractive capitalism in the region. But they have also resisted governmental and multinational forces behind the extractive capitalism. One of the ways in which indigenous women in the region confront ecological and socio-political predicament in their communities is to mobilise themselves into a group (usually age groups) and take communal actions. Such actions could be in form of launching collective complaints, withdrawal of civic responsibilities, and, strangely, matching around the community stark naked. This age-long practice with which indigenous women have pressed home their demands is represented in Ifeoma Nwoye’s Oil Cemetery, as the women, frustrated by the patriarchal, institutional, and multinational forces that unleash eco-destruction on their community, mobilise themselves, throw away their clothes, and match against the oil corporation in their community. With ideas from ecocriticism and feminism, I undertake a bioregional analysis of the novel Oil Cemetery to make the point, among others, that indigenous practices, often neglected because of (post)modernity, remain potent means through which to preserve ecological balance and demand for environmental justice.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the response of Afro-Jamaican smallholders in late-colonial Jamaica to the banana crop killing fungus known as Panama Disease. It analyzes how smallholders' responses to the disease shaped both the trajectory of the disease and of Jamaica's agroecosystem more broadly.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how Jamaican farmers grappled with Panama Disease, a fungus that infects and kills any banana plant it comes into contact with, in twentieth century Jamaica.. It argues that Jamaican smallholders were the human heart of the multispecies assemblage that formed around the disease. These smallholders cultivated many of the bananas exported and relied on the trade for much of their income. Throughout their days, they interacted constantly, both knowingly and unknowingly, with the microbes behind Panama Disease and the plants it affected. Through their constant mobility, both to and from the island and across it, smallholders acted as carriers for the pathogen, as it latched onto their boots, cutlasses, and clothes. On their farms, they worked to manage the disease once it was discovered, having to choose between their vernacular knowledge about cultivation that offered little in terms of disease mitigation and the imposed orders from colonial officials that would result in the forced destruction of often the entirety of their crops to prevent further spread. Faced with this difficult choice, many smallholders opted to abandon the potential profits of bananas in the hopes that sugar, which could be grown without problem in Panama Disease infested soil, would provide a stable base for economic success. This decision, repeated by countless smallholders throughout the island, put Jamaica's agricultural outlook on a path that resulted in a shift towards sugar and away from the volatility of banana production, resulting in a sugar revitalization
Paper short abstract:
By looking at the meanings that Indigenous Amazonian people of Peru ascribed to the Upper Amazon region during the 19th.century, the paper explores the role of Indigenous peoples who obstructed outsiders' economic interests in promoting the commercialization of cash-crop resources in the area.
Paper long abstract:
The Upper Amazon region of northeastern Peru has a long history as one of the main places of cultural and economic exchange of goods between the high Andes and the lowland Amazonia since the precolonial period. Due to its location, at an elevation of above sea level of 2,167 feet, this area not only is well-known for its fertile soils and its strategic location close to navigable rivers considered as part of the main tributaries to the Amazon River, but it has also benefited from an intense flow of people, goods, and knowledge associated to the ecological and cultural practices which persist until today among the Indigenous Kichwa people. Based on the bioregional history of this place, this paper argues that despite the intentions of outsiders to turn this space into a strategic hub of commercialization of native and non-native resources produced in this region over centuries, indigenous groups' ties with their landscape have allowed them to protect their identity as well as the forest that surrounds them. By looking at the meanings that Indigenous peoples, scientific explorers, and national elites ascribed to this mountainous region during the nineteenth century, the paper will focus on the role of Indigenous peoples who denied their participation in commercial activities that would have resulted in the depletion of the landscape, their own identity, and their ancestral connections with one of the most biodiverse regions in the world.
Paper short abstract:
Modern administrative units or districts have boundaries based on considerations other than ecological. Historical data shows that prior to districts the spatial units were ecologically homogenous. The modern and historical spatial units can be integrated to yield superior development.
Paper long abstract:
Colonial rule in India overlaid a system of administrative units over the landscape known as districts. These were based on logistical convenience and revenue yield. Prior to the districts the sub-continental geography was based on spatial entities distinct from each other by way of varying natural conditions, the boundaries between them occurring where the natural conditions of one entity gave way to another. These were etched over centuries of observation in the human mindscape.
These entities had long standing names. Their native natural characteristics [climate, soil, vegetation, topography, geology, fauna, water, etc.] would give rise to cultural expressions typical of that area, in the form of language, architecture, dress, cuisine, music and arts, festivals, deities, etc.
Research showed that the geography of languages mostly coincides with the boundaries of the natural spatial units. Cultural clues, primary and secondary research can combine to create a map of the pre-district spatial entities distinguished by their differing natural characteristics.
The modern district system is an overlayer above the underlying bioregional units. While the districts cannot be done away with, being over 200 years old, it may be possible to align the district[s] with the natural spatial units of yore. The objective would be to attain the ecological regeneration and sustainable development of bioregions by administering them through the instrument of their constituent modern districts i.e. the old bioregion could be aligned with the overlayer of their constituent modern districts and thereby aligning modern development with the imperatives of landscape ecology.
Paper short abstract:
This paper uses the concept of precarity to understand why Poqomam Maya residents have remained in Chinautla despite river contamination and earthquake damage, arguing that their decision to stay put was linked to the bioregion forming an integral part of their individual and collective identities.
Paper long abstract:
This paper investigates how the Poqomam Maya bioregion of Chinautla has engaged with regular flooding and water contamination from the Rio Las Vacas, a result of faulty urban planning in the nearby capital of Guatemala City. Then in 1976, an earthquake exacerbated this disaster, reigniting debates about relocating the town. While some residents left and formed a new town nearby, others exercised the politics of staying put. I utilize the concept of hierarchies of precarity to understand how residents understood the threats they faced and acted in accordance with which precarities they viewed as most threatening. I view precarity as a condition that is historically constituted, contextual, and a matter of perspective. Though tied to working conditions, precarity occasions other forms of political and social marginalization. The Chinautla bioregion tells a story of various growing precarities, not just economic precarity resulting from the informalization of the local economy but ontological precarities that threatened Poqomam cultural and spiritual practices that were inherent parts of individual and collective identities. I argue that chinautlecos who refused to leave based their understanding of precarity not solely on economic conditions but rather attached more holistic meaning to this concept, one that was intrinsically linked to the meanings they attributed to their bioregion. Finally, the paper explores how contemporary Poqomam water rights activists continue to press for the state to rectify the environmental injustice caused by the river’s contamination, thus continuing the exercise of the politics of staying put based on hierarchies of precarity.
Paper short abstract:
Both colonised Barkandji & settlers have tried to defend the Barka/Darling River bioregion in western NSW against damage caused by unpoliced but lucrative irrigation. I trace these attempts, highlighting the effectiveness of Barkandji creative strategies to build alliances to protect the river.
Paper long abstract:
Major fish-kills have occurred for five years in the Barka/Darling River between Wilcannia and Menindee. These massacres suffocated millions of native fish, leaving them gasping hideously as they died, their rotting bodies poisoning the water. The river’s people, both settler and Barkandji, warned of danger – ethnographic research in 2010 confirmed that Aboriginal residents, fishers and graziers had all been begging the government to intervene in unregulated irrigation and ‘rainwater harvesting’. Some settlers developed affiliation with the river over generations. Fishing – now often catch-and-release – further builds their knowledge. But the Barkandji intensified even deeper traditions as their river contact changed. Locked out of their wider lands by colonial pastoralism, the banks were often the only safe places left. Long hours spent fishing on the river were not only essential for subsistence, but allowed continued teaching about that wider lost Country. Settlers have sustained their appeals to protect the Darling, but Barkandji voices have been raised most powerfully and creatively. Stories, songs and making - always central to traditional learning - have brought Barkandji demands to national attention. Barkandji river advocates have found that their music, visual artwork, museum exhibitions and wonderful sculptures of river creatures are ‘kinder’ than their angry words, so they use their art to defend the river. Most movingly their Sydney exhibition features the river’s mud, imprinted with the footprints of many Barkandji people, young and old, who used that river mud to tell their story because, they explain, ‘we are river people.’
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I will examine the bioregional and environmental history of the place to contextualize the ecological and cultural practices of the Kodagu coffee plantations of Southern India within the post-/decolonial framework of bioregional reinhabitation.
Paper long abstract:
Given that reinhabitation is an essential domain in bioregional thought and practice that aims to restore and maintain the natural systems of an injured land, this paper will investigate how indigenous Kodava people decolonize the colonial coffee plantation practices across colonial and post-colonial timeframes. Analysing the complex interrelationships between the reinhabitory practices on Kodagu’s plantations and environment, this paper argues that bioregional reinhabitation in Kodagu takes a decolonial approach to transform the non-native coffee into a bioregional crop in Kodagu and in the process overcomes ecological crises in indigenous landscapes. In doing so, I will examine the bioregional and environmental history of the place to contextualize the ecological and cultural practices of the Kodagu coffee plantations of Southern India within the post-/decolonial framework of bioregional reinhabitation.