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Paper short abstract:

This essay argues for attending to other cultural understandings of conceptualizing the political and economic divide between nature and culture and sacred and profane, by thinking through the implicit knowledge excavated through deep histories of material culture.

Paper long abstract:

The ravages of Latin American colonialism commenced on the island of Hispaniola with gold mining and the use of Taino forced labor. In response to the demographic collapse, enslaved Africans replaced them as the primary labor force on the Island, providing the foundation of the plantation economy. As Elizabeth Deloughrey (Allegories of the Anthropocene) has noted, it is only through the elision of indigenous histories that the current climate crisis can be seen as a novel problem. This essay considers how “backstreaming” contemporary ethnography can offer a useful heuristic for excavating implicit popular knowledge about the environment enabling historians to see the operations of Indigenous and Diasporic technologies across time and space. Also, this approach might enable us a more ground-level and local perspective on the Anthropocene than much of the big data research which has been dominated by the global north. Centering upon modes of interaction with the natural world such as the use of ritual stones, plants and earth derived from Indigenous and Diasporic practices in the borderlands, this essay uses the capacious definition of technology defined by Bauer and Norton to expand our understanding of time and space in the natural world. It argues for attending to other cultural understandings of conceptualizing the political and economic divide—and if it all there should be one—between nature and culture and sacred and profane, by thinking through the implicit knowledge excavated through deep histories of material culture.