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- Convenors:
-
William Tullett
(Anglia Ruskin University)
Lena Ferriday (University of Bristol)
Melanie Kiechle (Virginia Tech)
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- Chair:
-
Andy Flack
(University of Bristol)
- Formats:
- Roundtable
- Streams:
- Creativity, Sensibility, Experience, and Expression
- Location:
- Room 5
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 21 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
Histories of cross-species care (Tullett), experiencing extreme environments (Flack), local riverine knowledges (Jones), naturalist fieldwork (Ferriday), and debates about sensitivity (Kiechle), open into a discussion exploring how sensory approaches can reframe environmental history.
Long Abstract:
Crafting histories of the relationships between people, places, and the beings that occupy diverse worlds demands sensory thinking. After all, these relationships are about the ways in which differing bodies have encountered, come to know, and impacted one another. While a small number of environmental historians – and histories of human-animal relations – have engaged with the senses over the course of the past couple of decades (e.g. Coates, 2005; Parr, 2010; Kiechle, 2017; Flack, 2022), there is a pressing need to think about the significance of senses and sensations in the questions that we need to ask, the stories we seek to tell, and the implications of these approaches for our understanding of pasts that are shared.
This roundtable offers a provocative discussion on the intersections of environments and senses, in a wide range of historical contexts. Our conversations will seek to draw out the ways in which environmental knowledge was produced through and about sensory encounter, processes of translation and adaptation that were implicated in knowledge production and the valuation of expertise, the ‘agency’ of the more-than-human in those encounters, and the ways in which those processes unfolded across a range of environmental scales and across diverse sensory worlds. Together, we will demonstrate the value of sensory approaches for emerging environmental histories and propose ways in which historians might place the sensate at the heart of their work.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Wednesday 21 August, 2024, -Contribution short abstract:
Using manuals and notebooks, this paper explores Victorians naturalists’ fieldwork as an embodied practice. It makes a case for the senses’ role in the historical production of environmental knowledge, which has been shaped by researchers’ attendance to the lively dynamics of the natural world.
Contribution long abstract:
In this short presentation, preceding the roundtable discussion, I will utilise conceptual and physical sites of ‘boundary’ (or lack thereof) between human and more-than-human bodies and materialities, as a way of exploring ideas about the production of natural scientific knowledge. I consider the interplay between bodies and instruments that took place in the field, which often disrupted researchers’ expectations of their own corporeality. As such I seeks to tell a story of an increasingly embodied collection of natural history knowledges, produced by sensing individuals and through sensory encounters. These researchers frequently diverged from assumptions regarding objectivity and standardisation that have often been attributed to nineteenth century science. The paper thus argues that diverse encounters between bodies in the field formed an explicit part of the research practice and thus that a sensory approach allows us to trace the intricate processes by which ‘official’ scientific knowledge has been produced, via the experiences of those who shape it.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper sets out a conceptual framework for understanding interspecies chemo-sensory relationships in in environmental history: the molecular commons. It uses early modern beekeeping and early nineteenth-century avian conversation practices to explore this concept in practice.
Contribution long abstract:
The project that this paper is drawn from aims to trace the history of interspecies relationships mediated by smell from the seventeenth century to the present. In doing so it develops two key concepts. The first is the 'molecular commons', which describes the range of volatile organic compounds that are emitted by animals and environments as a resource for habitation, communication, and exploration mobilised by multiple species. The second is the chemocene, a chronological term that describes the period from the late eighteenth century onwards in which anthropogenic environmental change has been caused by the invention and use of an array of new chemicals. By examining a range of actors from anglers, farmers, and odour pollution experts to birds, bees, and fish, the project seeks to understand how the chemocene has transformed the material structure, human knowledge of, and the ability of species to engage with the molecular commons.
Contribution short abstract:
How has "sensitivity" affected conceptions of the environment and environmental changes? Melanie Kiechle will use examples from the nineteenth-century U.S., where individuals identified 'nuisances detrimental to health' through their senses, to argue for the importance of considering sensitivity.
Contribution long abstract:
Environmental historians have been engaging the senses more and more, but have yet to explore the category of sensitivity. Yet all sensory interactions with the environment are premised upon the physical and emotional sensitivity--real or proscribed--of the sensing body. In this presentation, Melanie Kiechle will use examples from the nineteenth-century United States, where individuals identified 'nuisances detrimental to health' through their senses, to argue for the importance of considering, defining, and analyzing sensitivity.
Before the United States' Civil War, sanitarians had agitated for public health reform through the argument that everyone with working senses could identify 'nuisances detrimental to health.' These nuisances included stagnant water, pestilential stenches, and other manifestations of environmental change. When health boards emerged after the Civil War, their members confronted tremendous numbers of complaints that were difficult to address, and these nascent boards began considering the "sensitiveness" of the complainant before investigating a complaint. This consideration of "sensitiveness" was not new, but premised upon existent beliefs that women's bodies were overly sensitive and that non-whites and laborers had "tolerant" bodies that were insensitive to many environmental stimuli. And yet the emerging field of psychology and diagnosis of neurasthenia promoted a discourse about sensitiveness that challenged both longstanding arguments for public health and the ability of complainants to have their concerns taken seriously. Ultimately, considerations of sensitivity became arguments for enduring rather than regulating the industrializing environment of American cities.
Contribution short abstract:
The artist-naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946) based his wildly popular “realistic” animal stories on provocative insights into animal lives gained by engaging firsthand with the “interlinear matter” of their sensory worlds.
Contribution long abstract:
Best known for his collection of widely –and wildly– popular “realistic” animal stories Wild Animals I Have Known (1898); the Anglo-North American artist-naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946) spent a lifetime seeking to legitimize his hard-won insights into the “interlinear matter” of animal lives against the rising tide of modern experimentalist science, including behaviourism. Born in England and raised in Toronto in a Scottish Reformed Presbyterian tradition that emphasized both righteous criticism and humanity’s redemptive duty of stewardship toward nature as a lost Eden, Seton found solace –and a way forward for his lifelong love of living animals– in a post-Darwinian world shaped by his reading of contemporary works, including art criticism. Practising a “new” natural history infused by its late-19th-c. biological turn, Seton gained his most provocative –yet ultimately his most influential– insights into animal behaviour by engaging firsthand with the sensory worlds of birds and mammals expressed as adaptations to environment. Alternating between pioneering fieldwork in Manitoba, Canada and urban life among the museums, galleries, and publishing houses of New York and Washington, Seton applied evolutionary theories of the day to seek meaningful translations of animal agency in a revised understanding of instinct through expressions of will and feeling. The resulting challenge not only to longstanding Cartesian mechanistic assumptions about non-human minds and bodies, but also to more recent claims about the inaccessibility of other inner worlds, garnered painfully sticky charges of “nature faking” and “sentimental” anthropomorphism, yet nevertheless inspired 20th-c. ecological reimaginings in animal studies, including ethology.
Contribution short abstract:
Soil color plays an important role in the assessment of soil health. This contribution examines the use of soil chromatography as a sensory method for participatory, public engagement with soils that can ideally lead to increased feelings of belonging and environmental responsibility.
Contribution long abstract:
Soil color plays an important role in the assessment of soil health and the interpretation of soil histories, vulnerabilities and potentials (cf. Landa, 2004 and Ugolini, 2010). Recent observations at contemporary art exhibitions, festivals, and residencies point to an increasing use of soil chromatography as a visual method for site assessment, communication and community building. Developed in the 1950s by Erenfried Pfeiffer, an associate of Rudolf Steiner, soil chromatography has been promoted in biodynamic farming circles as an easy and inexpensive method for visually analyzing the organic content, mineral make up and microbiological activity of a given soil (Pfeifer, 1984). To make a soil chromatogram, a soil sample is mixed with a solution of sodium hydroxide to break down the mineral and organic components of the soil. The mixture is then applied to a round filter paper treated with silver nitrate, resulting in a radial image of channels and spikes that emerges as different components of the soil are soaked up at different rates. While the technique has long been abandoned by the soil scientific community because of its lack of statistical reliability, artists and environmental activists, such as Debra Solomon, Claire Pentecost and Scott Hunter, among others, have embraced the technique for its aesthetic potential as sensory means of public engagement. This contribution examines the use of soil chromatography as sensory method for participatory, public engagement with soils that can ideally lead to increased feelings of belonging and responsibility for soil health in gardens and farms, urban spaces, backyards, and beyond.