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Accepted Contribution:
Vernacularizing the environmental humanities - from southern Africa
Sandra Swart
(Stellenbosch University)
I focus on a missing issue in Environmental Humanities: the indigenous archive. I discuss the transdisciplinary nature of using such archives ethically, writing better 'more-than-human histories'. So I tackle 3 neglected issues in E.H.: multispecies research, Deep Time, and traditional knowledge.
Contribution long abstract:
I want to contribute both thematic and geographic specificity to this roundtable. My work is on animal history, local ecological knowledge and the idiographic contours of human-animal relations over the longue durée, on a project called Beasts of the Southern World: multi-species history and the Anthropocene. Thus my research contributes to this roundtable by focusing on a key issue missing in the Environmental humanities: using the indigenous archive. I want to discuss the transdisciplinary nature of the ethical creation and use of such archives, to write stronger 'more-than-human histories' of southern Africa, reaching back into Deep History. So my part tackles three often-neglected issues in Environmental HUMANnities: multispecies research, deep time, and traditional ecological knowledge. I deploy different time scales (from very recent to millennia ago). I explore vernacular knowledge (or traditional ecological knowledge or indigenous knowledge systems). I also propose that such an approach can advance a ‘usable past’ that helps both animals and humans in the present.