States of Matter – Joint EnviroAnt and HOLB Networks Conference and Workshop

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We are pleased to announce the first joint conference and workshop of the two EASA Networks: Humans and Other Living Beings (HOLB) and Environmental Anthropology (EnviroAnt).

12-13 October 2023, Edinburgh University, Scotland

Please send your 200-word abstract and a short 50-word bio to the emails

 EnviroAnt.Network@gmail.com  and Easaholbnetwork@gmail.com by 15 May 2023.

The event focuses on the theme of States of Matter with panels on: Solid/Earth, Liquid/Water, Gas/Air. Each thematic area provides an open theoretical-material space to explore the intersections between the physical matter of the environment and the beings that inhabit it. The conceptual openness of the foci is intended to provide a creative arena for the interaction of diverse research orientations and interests. They relate to the interests of the networks, and departments at University of Edinburgh, as well as relevant scientific conversations in Europe and beyond.


This event provides a forum for anthropologists and activists to explore these themes and related questions through bringing their different approaches and experiences into conversation. With its cross-sectorial scope, the event hopes to foster collaborations between participants from different backgrounds, develop the interdisciplinary perspectives of environmental and multi-species anthropology.  Each of the states of matter are explored by a thematic keynote lecture followed by 10-12 min presentations plus questions, and extended discussions. Panels will be followed by workshops, designed to enable practical engagement with the physical matter of solids, liquids, and gases to complement our theoretical discussions. We are planning a face-to-face and in-situ event.


Panel descriptions

Solid/Earth:

On many levels, environmental anthropology is “earth-bound”. The discipline has long been concerned with the ways that humans modify, use, and inhabit our environments in concert with other beings. Far from a mere backdrop on which humans project culture, the earth itself might be seen as an active participant in shaping human biocultural relations. This first panel broadly explores the dynamic interrelationships between humans and the land. It considers the qualities of solidity and immobility, fluid landscapes and complex socio-ecological assemblages emerging over time. The panel hopes to feature reflections on these themes grounded in an exploration of multispecies agency and biocultural hope. 

Please click here for the full description and suggested themes of this panel.

Gas/Air:

Air, the atmospheric, and beings in a gaseous state are topics that are most easy to overlook in the ways we think about the environment. As a state of matter, air/gas is part of our most intimate, internal nature, but it is also an interface that connects us with other beings at many scales, from the breath and exaltations we share with others in daily lives and routines, to the atmosphere that connects us on a global level. This panel broadly explores narratives and logics of gaseous control, infrastructure, and change.

Please click here for the full description and suggested themes of this panel.

Liquid/Water:

Water provides a compelling challenge for the humanities and social sciences, with its liquid state resisting the solid certainties of earthbound thinking, and the inhospitability of aquatic environments for those evolved to live on land. However, increasing overabundance and scarcity of water in a changing climate poses an imperative to grapple with the diversity of ways in which humans and other beings inhabit watery worlds, and how we might do so in the future. Thinking beyond just water, the panel invites reflections on the role that other liquids might play in interspecies and human-environment relationships. 

Please click here for the full description and suggested themes of this panel.

We welcome contributions from within anthropology and related disciplines. Please send a title, a 200-word abstract and a 50-word bio by 15 May 2023 to the emails  enviroant.network@gmail.com and easaholbnetwork@gmail.com.

This event is organised by the Environment and Anthropology Network (EnviroAnt) and Humans And Other Living Beings Network (HOLB) of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA).

For more information, please visit the websites www.environmental-anthropology.com and https://www.easaonline.org/networks/holb/


We look forward to receiving your abstracts. 

Kind regards

Alexandra, Cormac and Katrine, Convenors of EnviroAnt Network

Anibal, Giovanna and Olea, Convenors of HOLB Network. 

Published in 2021: Selected books in Environmental Anthropology

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2021 Environmental Ethnographies

1. EMBRACING LANDSCAPE

Living with Reindeer and Hunting among Spirits in South Siberia

Küçüküstel, S.

https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/KucukustelEmbracing

Examining human-animal relations among the reindeer hunting and herding Dukha community in northern Mongolia, this book focuses on concepts such as domestication and wildness from an indigenous perspective. By looking into hunting rituals and herding techniques, the ethnography questions the dynamics between people, domesticated reindeer, and wild animals. It focuses on the role of the spirited landscape which embraces all living creatures and acts as a unifying concept at the center of the human and non-human relations.

2. LANDS OF THE FUTURE

Anthropological Perspectives on Pastoralism, Land Deals and Tropes of Modernity in Eastern Africa

Gabbert, E. C., Gebresenbet, F., Galaty, J. G., & Schlee, G. (eds)

https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/GabbertLands

Rangeland, forests and riverine landscapes of pastoral communities in Eastern Africa are increasingly under threat. Abetted by states who think that outsiders can better use the lands than the people who have lived there for centuries, outside commercial interests have displaced indigenous dwellers from pastoral territories. This volume presents case studies from Eastern Africa, based on long-term field research, that vividly illustrate the struggles and strategies of those who face dispossession and also discredit ideological false modernist tropes like ‘backwardness’ and ‘primitiveness’.

3. Loss and Wonder at the World’s End

by Laura A. Ogden

Published by: Duke University Press

https://www.dukeupress.edu/loss-and-wonder-at-the-worlds-end

In Loss and Wonder at the World’s End, Laura A. Ogden brings together animals, people, and things—from beavers, stolen photographs, lichen, American explorers, and birdsong—to catalog the ways environmental change and colonial history are entangled in the Fuegian Archipelago of southernmost Chile and Argentina. Repeated algal blooms have closed fisheries in the archipelago. Glaciers are in retreat. Extractive industries such as commercial forestry, natural gas production, and salmon farming along with the introduction of nonnative species are rapidly transforming assemblages of life. Ogden archives forms of loss—including territory, language, sovereignty, and life itself—as well as forms of wonder, or moments when life continues to flourish even in the ruins of these devastations. Her account draws on long-term ethnographic research with settler and Indigenous communities; archival photographs; explorer journals; and experiments in natural history and performance studies. Loss and Wonder at the World’s End frames environmental change as imperialism’s shadow, a darkness cast over the earth in the wake of other losses.

Rangeland, forests and riverine landscapes of pastoral communities in Eastern Africa are increasingly under threat. Abetted by states who think that outsiders can better use the lands than the people who have lived there for centuries, outside commercial interests have displaced indigenous dwellers from pastoral territories. This volume presents case studies from Eastern Africa, based on long-term field research, that vividly illustrate the struggles and strategies of those who face dispossession and also discredit ideological false modernist tropes like ‘backwardness’ and ‘primitiveness’.

4.  Plantation Life

Corporate Occupation in Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone

by Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi

Published by: Duke University Press

https://www.dukeupress.edu/plantation-life

In Plantation Life Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi examine the structure and governance of Indonesia’s contemporary oil palm plantations in Indonesia, which supply 50 percent of the world’s palm oil. They attend to the exploitative nature of plantation life, wherein villagers’ well-being is sacrificed in the name of economic development. While plantations are often plagued by ruined ecologies, injury among workers, and a devastating loss of livelihoods for former landholders, small-scale independent farmers produce palm oil more efficiently and with far less damage to life and land. Li and Semedi theorize “corporate occupation” to underscore how massive forms of capitalist production and control over the palm oil industry replicate colonial-style relations that undermine citizenship. In so doing, they question the assumption that corporations are necessary for rural development, contending that the dominance of plantations stems from a political system that privileges corporations.

5. Making Livable Worlds

Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice

Hilda Lloréns

Published by: University of Washington Press

When Hurricanes Irma and María made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, their destructive force further devastated an archipelago already pommeled by economic austerity, political upheaval, and environmental calamities. To navigate these ongoing multiple crises, Afro–Puerto Rican women have drawn from their cultural knowledge to engage in daily improvisations that enable their communities to survive and thrive. Their life-affirming practices, developed and passed down through generations, offer powerful modes of resistance to gendered and racialized exploitation, ecological ruination, and deepening capitalist extraction. Through solidarity, reciprocity, and an ethics of care, these women create restorative alternatives to dispossession to produce good, meaningful lives for their communities. Making Livable Worlds weaves together autobiography, ethnography, interviews, memories, and fieldwork to recast narratives that continuously erase Black Puerto Rican women as agents of social change. In doing so, Lloréns serves as an “ethnographer of home” as she brings to life the powerful histories and testimonies of a marginalized, disavowed community that has been treated as disposable.

6. Saving Animals

Multispecies Ecologies of Rescue and Care

by Elan Abrell

Published by: University of Minnesota Press

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/saving-animals

In the past three decades, animal rights advocates have established everything from elephant sanctuaries in Africa to shelters that rehabilitate animals used in medical testing, to homes for farmed animals, abandoned pets, and entertainment animals that have outlived their “usefulness.” Saving Animals is the first major ethnography to focus on the ethical issues animating the establishment of such places, where animals who have been mistreated or destined for slaughter are allowed to live out their lives simply being animals.   

Based on fieldwork at animal rescue facilities across the United States, Elan Abrell asks what “saving,” “caring for,” and “sanctuary” actually mean. He considers sanctuaries as laboratories where caregivers conceive and implement new models of caring for and relating to animals. He explores the ethical decision making around sanctuary efforts to unmake property-based human–animal relations by creating spaces in which humans interact with animals as autonomous subjects. Saving Animals illustrates how caregivers and animals respond by cocreating new human–animal ecologies adapted to the material and social conditions of the Anthropocene.

Bridging anthropology with animal studies and political philosophy, Saving Animals asks us to imagine less harmful modes of existence in a troubled world where both animals and humans seek sanctuary.

7. Banana Cultures

Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States

by John Soluri

Published by: University of Texas Press

https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/soluri-banana-cultures

Bananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, “banana republics,” and Banana Republic clothing stores—everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this lively, interdisciplinary study, John Soluri integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the United States.

Beginning in the 1870s, when bananas first appeared in the U.S. marketplace, Soluri examines the tensions between the small-scale growers, who dominated the trade in the early years, and the shippers. He then shows how rising demand led to changes in production that resulted in the formation of major agribusinesses, spawned international migrations, and transformed great swaths of the Honduran environment into monocultures susceptible to plant disease epidemics that in turn changed Central American livelihoods. Soluri also looks at labor practices and workers’ lives, changing gender roles on the banana plantations, the effects of pesticides on the Honduran environment and people, and the mass marketing of bananas to consumers in the United States. His multifaceted account of a century of banana production and consumption adds an important chapter to the history of Honduras, as well as to the larger history of globalization and its effects on rural peoples, local economies, and biodiversity.

8.  Unwritten Rule

State-Making through Land Reform in Cambodia

by Alice Beban

Published by: Cornell University Press

In 2012, Cambodia—an epicenter of violent land grabbing—announced a bold new initiative to develop land redistribution efforts inside agribusiness concessions. Alice Beban’s Unwritten Rule focuses on this land reform to understand the larger nature of democracy in Cambodia.

Beban contends that the national land-titling program, the so-called leopard skin land reform, was first and foremost a political campaign orchestrated by the world’s longest-serving prime minister, Hun Sen. The reform aimed to secure the loyalty of rural voters, produce “modern” farmers, and wrest control over land distribution from local officials. Through ambiguous legal directives and unwritten rules guiding the allocation of land, the government fostered uncertainty and fear within local communities. Unwritten Rule gives pause both to celebratory claims that land reform will enable land tenure security, and to critical claims that land reform will enmesh rural people more tightly in state bureaucracies and create a fiscally legible landscape. Instead, Beban argues that the extension of formal property rights strengthened the very patronage-based politics that Western development agencies hope to subvert.

9. How to Make a Wetland

Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey

by Caterina Scaramelli

Published by: Stanford University Press

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=32174

How to Make A Wetland tells the story of two Turkish coastal areas, both shaped by ecological change and political uncertainty. On the Black Sea coast and the shores of the Aegean, farmers, scientists, fishermen, and families grapple with livelihoods in transition, as their environment is bound up in national and international conservation projects. Bridges and drainage canals, apartment buildings and highways—as well as the birds, water buffalo, and various animals of the regions—all inform a moral ecology in the making.

Drawing on six years of fieldwork in wetlands and deltas, Caterina Scaramelli offers an anthropological understanding of sweeping environmental and infrastructural change, and the moral claims made on livability and materiality in Turkey, and beyond. Beginning from a moral ecological position, she takes into account the notion that politics is not simply projected onto animals, plants, soil, water, sediments, rocks, and other non-human beings and materials. Rather, people make politics through them. With this book, she highlights the aspirations, moral relations, and care practices in constant play in contestations and alliances over environmental change.

10. Atmospheric Noise

The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles

by Marina Peterson

Published by: Duke University Press Books

https://www.dukeupress.edu/atmospheric-noise

In Atmospheric Noise, Marina Peterson traces entanglements of environmental noise, atmosphere, sense, and matter that cohere in and through encounters with airport noise since the 1960s. Exploring spaces shaped by noise around Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), she shows how noise is a way of attuning toward the atmospheric: through noise we learn to listen to the sky and imagine the permeability of bodies and matter, sensing and conceiving that which is diffuse, indefinite, vague, and unformed. In her account, the “atmospheric” encompasses the physicality of the ephemeral, dynamic assemblages of matter as well as a logic of indeterminacy. It is audible as well as visible, heard as much as breathed. Peterson develops a theory of “indefinite urbanism” to refer to marginalized spaces of the city where concrete meets sky, windows resonate with the whine of departing planes, and endangered butterflies live under flight paths. Offering a conceptualization of sound as immanent and non-objectified, she demonstrates ways in which noise is central to how we know, feel, and think atmospherically.

11. Herring and People of the North Pacific

Sustaining a Keystone Species

by Thomas F. Thornton and Madonna L. Moss

Published by: University of Washington Press

Herring are vital to the productivity and health of marine systems, and socio-ecologically Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) is one of the most important fish species in the Northern Hemisphere. Human dependence on herring has evolved for millennia through interactions with key spawning areas—but humans have also significantly impacted the species’ distribution and abundance.

Combining ethnological, historical, archaeological, and political perspectives with comparative reference to other North Pacific cultures, Herring and People of the North Pacific traces fishery development in Southeast Alaska from precontact Indigenous relationships with herring to postcontact focus on herring products. Revealing new findings about current herring stocks as well as the fish’s significance to the conservation of intraspecies biodiversity, the book explores the role of traditional local knowledge, in combination with archeological, historical, and biological data, in both understanding marine ecology and restoring herring to their former abundance.

Edited Volumes

12. DELTA LIFE

Exploring Dynamic Environments where Rivers Meet the Sea

Krause, F. & Harris, M. (eds)

https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/KrauseDelta

Proposing a series of innovative steps towards better understanding human lives at the interstices of water and land, this volume includes eight ethnographies from deltas around the world. The book presents ‘delta life’ with intimate descriptions of the predicaments, imaginations and activities of delta inhabitants. Conceptually, the collection develops ‘delta life’ as a metaphor for approaching continual and intersecting sociocultural, economic and material transformations more widely. The book revolves around questions of hydrosociality, volatility, rhythms and scale. It thereby yields insights into people’s lives that conventional, hydrological approaches to deltas cannot provide.

13. Performing Environmentalisms

Expressive Culture and Ecological Change

Edited by John Holmes McDowell, Katherine Borland, Rebecca Dirksen and Sue Tuohy

Published by: University of Illinois Press

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=85zfn3yf9780252044038

Performing Environmentalisms examines the existential challenge of the twenty-first century: improving the prospects for maintaining life on our planet. The contributors focus on the strategic use of traditional artistic expression–storytelling and songs, crafted objects, and ceremonies and rituals–performed during the social turmoil provoked by environmental degradation and ecological collapse. Highlighting alternative visions of what it means to be human, the authors place performance at the center of people’s responses to the crises. Such expression reinforces the agency of human beings as they work, independently and together, to address ecological dilemmas. The essays add these people’s critical perspectives–gained through intimate struggle with life-altering force–to the global dialogue surrounding humanity’s response to climate change, threats to biocultural diversity, and environmental catastrophe. Interdisciplinary in approach and wide-ranging in scope, Performing Environmentalisms is an engaging look at the merger of cultural expression and environmental action on the front lines of today’s global emergency

14. The Anthroposcene of Weather and Climate

Ethnographic Contributions to the Climate Change Debate

Edited by Paul Sillitoe

(Berghahn)

https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/SillitoeAnthroposcene

While it is widely acknowledged that climate change is among the greatest global challenges of our times, it has local implications too.  This volume forefronts these local issues, giving anthropology a voice in this great debate, which is otherwise dominated by natural scientists and policy makers.  It shows what an ethnographic focus can offer in furthering our understanding of the lived realities of climate debates. Contributors from communities around the world discuss local knowledge of, and responses to, environmental changes that need to feature in scientifically framed policies regarding mitigation and adaptation measures if they are to be effective.

RAI 2021 Conference Panel report – Hope, ruination and the politics of remaking landscapes

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Panel held at the Royal Anthropological Institute’s “Anthropology and Conservation” online conference, October 29th, 2021.

We organised a panel at this international conference to explore links between the RAI’s theme “Anthropology and Conservation” and our 2021 workshop on “Hope, Ruination and Environmentalism”. The panel discussed contributions from five presenters from around the world. Our starting point was that increasing environmental degradation has become a key concern for anthropologists and scholars in related disciplines. Yet, they look to conservation with mixed feelings. On the one hand, they have documented the problems for people inhabiting the ruins of past and present economic dreams and ecological indifference. On the other hand, they have noticed the ubiquitous tensions between different people’s hopes for more sustainable futures, amongst which are various models of conservation. Taking contested landscapes as its starting point and material anchor, our panel explored stories of environmental destruction, but also attended to the related hopes for ecological transitions and justice. 

The first paper, “Hope, Ruination and Precarious Place-Making in the Asian Anthropocene”, was presented by Ishtiaque Ahmed Levin, a doctoral candidate at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS), School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University in India. Ishtiaque delivered a poignant critique of the Eurocentrism and white supremacy overtones in mainstream Anthropocene discourse, and proposed to rethink the Anthropocene through alternative tropes. He suggested, for example, a version of the Gandhian concept “swaraj” that emphasises self-rule and self-transformation as a possible way forward and developed this concept further by drawing attention to the precarious place-making practices of a Dalit fishing community in Bangladesh. 

The second paper was presented by Davide Cacchioni, doctoral candidate at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Marseille, France, and titled “Hemp as a remediation for a polluted territory? Hopes and struggles in the Susa valley”. Davide began reporting on a protest movement against a high-speed railway project that was to cross the Susa Valley in Northern Italy, and explained how these protests focused a mix of concerns in the region, from pollution to migration, economy and politics. He traced how the growing of hemp emerged as a source of hope in the area ruined by pollution and neglect, but suggested that this hope was largely frustrated: while hemp cultivation was deemed to be a potent remediation of polluted soils, its market as a commodity lay mostly in the “organic” bracket, for instance for clothing, which favoured hemp from unpolluted sources.

Beth Cloughton, doctoral candidate at the University of Glasgow in Scotland held the third presentation, which was titled “’Las Vegas is all lit up…what’s my energy saving lightbulb gonna dae?’ The ethics of consumption at Baltic Street Adventure Playground.” In her paper, Beth criticised the consumerist focus of much of climate action based on her fieldwork with a food bank in a deprived Glasgow neighbourhood. The common, middle-class narrative and ethics of frugality and environmentalism showed little traction in a context of food poverty and multiple deprivation, which was not, as Beth emphasised, thereby devoid of ethical reflections on climate change, wastage and other environmental matters.

Elias Plata Espino presented the fourth paper, titled “Forests of Refuge and Development. The Historical Development of Forests in the Sierra Tarahumara of Mexico.” Elias is a doctoral candidate at the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA. His paper discussed the Sierra Tarahumana forests as an agentive force with different affordances for conflicting politics in Mexico. On the one hand, they were a key resource for export-oriented development, epitomised by neoliberal arrangements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). At the same time, however, they continue to be a stronghold for Indigenous activism, resistance and alternative development.   

The final paper, “Hope does not come from the skies: the politics of cloudseeding in the United Arab Emirates”, was presented by our network’s co-convener Alexandra Cotofana, who works as Assistant Professor at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. Alexandra discussed the technocratic dreams and practices of rain-making in a dry region, and their association with conspiracy theories that link cloudseeding to state control. As governance extends vertically from the territory to the skies, industrial rain-making can emerge as colonialism’s “wet dream” of superior control of ever more spheres of life turned into resources. Hopes for green, sustainable futures are thereby wedded with a military-industrial tradition that aims at engineering vital processes to fit consumer demand. 

TEACHING ENVIRONMENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY WORKSHOP – AN ONLINE WORKSHOP ON GOALS, ETHICS AND RESOURCES. 20 APRIL – PROGRAMME AND ZOOM LINKS

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In a time of profound anthropogenic environmental change and severe ecological crises, environmental anthropology is a key subject in helping us understand our shared world and futures. As scholars, practitioners and students, we want to hone our learning and teaching on these crucial themes and anchor them at the core of the anthropological endeavour. This online workshop aims to inspire learning through and with environmental anthropology, by gathering teaching resources and reflecting on ethics and teaching practices.

The workshop is divided into two short sessions. In each session, the first half will be dedicated to watching short pre-recorded presentations, introducing particular resources for teaching environmental anthropology. We will then have an open discussion, sharing further ideas and resources to help meet our teaching or learning goals, as well as some of the ethical and philosophical aspects of such endeavours.

SESSION 1 (9-11am CET)

ZOOM LINK: https://zoom.us/j/94398521848 

Participants and Themes:

Anna S. Antonova — ‘Reinventing Oktoberfest’: Imagining alternative environmental Futures in the interdisciplinary environmental Humanities Classroom

Maria Ayala — Walking backwards into the Future. Teachings from Māori People


Mengyi Zhang — Why it was Difficult for me to study Anthropology and how I overcame these Difficulties


Tim Ingold — Manifesto for an Outdoor Anthropology 

Martín Fonck — Environmental Autobiography

Sandro Simon — Navigating Multi-Sensory Re-Assemblages

SESSION 2 (4-6pm CET)

ZOOM LINK: https://zoom.us/j/93189996646 

Participants and Themes:

Eunice Blavascunas — Decolonizing Classroom Expectations: Pre-colonial Ingenuity and evolutionary Debates

Jodie Asselin — Unpacking the Notion of Complexity through student-led Case Studies


Nicole Katin — Mock-Museum Exhibits Exploring present-day human-environment Relations across Cultures

Jared Schultz — From Pedagogical Discourse to Modeling Humans in Trophic Cascades

Diane Russel — Practitioner Roles in Teaching Environmental Anthropology

Angela Storey — Exploring Urban Environments through Participant Observation

Liliana Duica Amaya — War ecology in the Colombian Amazon: Warscapes as an insightful methodology

Montse Pijoan — How can knowledge be gained despite losing our relationship with our environment? Is there something missing in science or modern ways of learning?

If you would like to attend the workshop, please write to Jana Pfeiffer to register, at this address:jana.pfeiffer@student.uni-tuebingen.de. We will send you the programme and zoom links prior to the workshop.

The workshop is organized by Jeanne Féaux de la Croix (University of Tübingen) and Alessandro Rippa (Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society) and is the first initiative of the Teaching Environmental Anthropology Working Group that was recently founded through the EASA Environmental Anthropology Network.

Environmental Anthropology – Teaching Workshop 20 APRIL 2021

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Teaching Environmental Anthropology in Fearful and Inspiring Times

An Online Workshop on Goals, Ethics and Resources

Convenors: Jeanne Féaux de la Croix, Alessandro Rippa

21 April 2021, 10am-3pm (CET)

In a time of profound anthropogenic environmental change and severe ecological crises, environmental anthropology is a key subject in helping us understand our shared world and futures. As scholars, practitioners and students, we want to hone our learning and teaching on these crucial themes and anchor them at the core of the anthropological endeavour.

The “Teaching Environmental Anthropology Working Group” was recently founded through the EASA Environmental Anthropology Network. Its aim is to foster conversations around key dimensions of teaching environmental anthropology. We are particularly interested in the ethical and pedagogical aspects of teaching an often-overwhelming subject, and in the interdisciplinary impetus of environmental issues. How can we encourage scholars, practitioners and students to engage with the subject beyond academia? How can we ensure that critically discussing the environmental challenges we face is not only anxiety-inducing, but also generative of tangible change and healing? 

This short online workshop aims to inspire learning through environmental anthropology. We therefore explicitly welcome not only academics but also students and other kinds of practitioners in the arts of environmental teaching. In addition to reflecting on goals and teaching practices, we will gather and comment on available teaching resources such as syllabi, literature, objects, practices and films. We envision each participant briefly introducing their ‘problematic’ and sharing a favourite resource that helped meet their teaching or learning goals. We are particularly interested in examples that speak to the following issues, but also definitely welcome suggestions well beyond these concerns:

●     The “ethics” of teaching environmental issues that may spell the end of the world as we know it and can generate significant anxieties.

●     Interdisciplinary resources, and ways of bridging the gap between anthropology, environmental sciences and activism.

●     Non-English resources, particularly indigenous scholarship on environmental change that might challenge some of our dominant assumptions.

●     Perspectives from students or activists who want or have taken courses on environmental anthropology.

We intend to share some of the outputs of the workshop, particularly in the form of short commentaries by participants, on the EASA network website. We hope the website will grow into a lively arena for resources, recommendations and connections for developing a pedagogy of environmental anthropology in many styles. Confirmed speakers include Anna Antonova (Rachel Carson Center), Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen), and Ursula Münster (University of Oslo).

Participants are asked to pre-record:

●     a brief (1 minute) introduction of yourself, your work and interest in environmental anthropology.

●     a brief (3-4 minute) presentation of a particular resource that you find useful when teaching/learning a related topic. This could well be a favourite reading, but also a practice, a field-trip, object lesson or audio-visual material. 

Following presentations, we will take time for a common discussion around some of the themes that are certain to emerge and further ideas for the working group and website. The event is limited to 20 participants on a first come first serve basis, with additional listening slots. If there are more requests, we will work towards a second event. We will include breaks and off-screen time as part of the workshop’s programme.

If you are interested, please register by sending an email to Jeanne Féaux de la Croix (jeanne.feaux@uni-tuebingen.de) or Alessandro Rippa (alessandro.rippa@rcc.lmu.de) with a brief abstract (max 200 words) detailing your presentation idea and resource, as well as a short bio (max 150 words). The deadline for registration is January 22, 2021.

Full Panel Description – Air/Gas

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Air, the atmospheric, and beings in a gaseous state are topics that are most easy to overlook in the ways we think about the environment. As a state of matter, air/gas is part of our most intimate, internal nature, but it is also an interface that connects us with other beings at many scales, from the breath and exaltations we share with others in daily lives and routines, to the atmosphere that connects us on a global level.

Besides not having a conventionally-accepted shape or volume, air/gas, and the beings that inhabit this state of matter, have the peculiarity of not always being visible. Smoke-like forms, vapors, plume, flames, or iridescent molecules can make air/gas become visible to us. However, most of the time they go unnoticed, allowing us to think without them. Scientific imaginings become crucial in engaging with air/gas beyond the human sensorium. This opens up a heated space of asymmetric knowledge-making, disquiet and even contestation.

In this panel, we will raise questions about human interactions with things that come in a gaseous state, from the most nurturing to the most toxic. How does air/gas mediate relations both among humans and of humans with other beings? How can ethnography productively engage with such an invisible and ubiquitous state? What are the most notorious ecological materializations, personal embodiments, and social instantiations of living in, through, and from air/gas? Through the various contributions of panelists, we explore narratives and logics of gaseous control, infrastructure, and change.

Some examples of possible interventions are:

-Scientific vs. non scientific engagements with air/gas properties.

-Air/gas as a human-altered interface of life . 

-Air/gas as a pollutant that requires management at medical, infrastructural and ecological scales.

-Sociotechnical challenges for balancing atmospheric air/gas chemistry.

-Air/gas as a commodity and a tool of financialization of nature (e.g. carbon credits).

-Air/gas as an ecopolitical arena.

-Air/gas as a weapon.

-Health issues related to sharing air/gas in human and more-than-human contexts.

Please send your 200-word abstract and a short 50-word bio to the emails

 EnviroAnt.Network@gmail.com  and Easaholbnetwork@gmail.com by 15 May 2023.

Full Panel Description – Water/Liquid

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Water provides a compelling challenge for the humanities and social sciences, with its liquid state resisting the solid certainties of earthbound thinking, and the inhospitability of aquatic environments for those evolved to live on land. However, increasing overabundance and scarcity of water in a changing climate poses an imperative to grapple with the diversity of ways in which humans and other beings inhabit watery worlds, and how we may do so in the future. These changing conditions, while posing threats to some beings, species, or activities, can also foster or encourage other possibilities and let us imagine different ways to relate to water environments. We are interested in contributions exploring emerging waterscapes from the point of view of climate change, conservation, maritime infrastructures, marine livelihoods, and more. 

Thinking beyond just water, the panel invites reflections on the role that other liquids might play in interspecies and human-environment relationships. Body fluids may form a key point of contact between species in medicine (human and veterinary), laboratories, everyday care practices, and food production. Liquid chemical waste is likewise a key means of communication between industrial worlds and their neighbours. This panel welcomes theoretical and ethnographic reflections on these and any other issues relating to liquid as a state of matter and its role in human-environment interaction.

Please send your 200-word abstract and a short 50-word bio to the emails

 EnviroAnt.Network@gmail.com  and Easaholbnetwork@gmail.com by 15 May 2023.

Full panel description – Earth/Solid

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On many levels, environmental anthropology is “earth-bound”. Informed by fieldwork and grounded in theory, the discipline has long been concerned with the ways that humans modify, use, and inhabit our environments in concert with other beings. Far from a mere backdrop on which humans project culture, the earth itself might be seen as an active participant in shaping human biocultural relations. While earth recalls the qualities of solidity and immobility, landscapes are also fluid, emerging over time as a product of complex socioecological assemblages. At the same time, earth can also conceal – obscuring everything from the multispecies communities below the soil to the (pre)historic landscapes of ages past.

This first panel broadly explores the dynamic interrelationships between humans and the land, and considers anthropology’s contributions to our understanding of terrestrial spaces. Contributions might explore a range of earthly themes, from human-related landscape change, ecosystem management, natural resource usage, or habitat destruction. This panel particularly hopes to feature reflections on these themes grounded in an exploration of multispecies agency and biocultural hope.

Please send your 200-word abstract and a short 50-word bio to the emails

 EnviroAnt.Network@gmail.com  and Easaholbnetwork@gmail.com by 15 May 2023.

2021 hybrid EnviroAnt Workshop in Tallinn illustrates force of environmental research and engagement

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The second workshop of the EASA Environment and Anthropology (EnviroAnt) Network, titled “Environmental Anthropology 2021: Hope, Ruination and Environmentalism” took place in Tallinn, Estonia, on 14-15 October 2021 in a hybrid format. It successfully considered the themes of environment, post-socialism, ruination, and hope and brought together the disciplines of anthropology, performative arts, and activism. Here is the full event report, along with links to the published workshop presentations from our Network Youtube channel, which you can subscribe to HERE.

The network presentations included three keynote lectures and 32 Pecha Kucha presentations. The hybrid format of the event appealed to both in-person and virtual attendees. 36 delegates registered for in-person attendance and 132 for virtual participation. Eight presenters (including three keynote speakers) were either already in Tallinn or were able to travel and present in person while the other 27 speakers logged in virtually and shared information on their research projects. During the discussion sessions we included questions and comments from the room as well as directly from virtual attendees and the chat. It was an excellent way to start moving beyond the restrictions of the pandemic and cater for both, people who could travel and those who chose not to. We believe this may be a common requirement going forwards and were pleased to be able to test this format, further aided using hybrid conference technology lent to us by University of Tartu.

Panel One: Contesting the relations of landscape, art, and environment

The first panel focused on contesting the relations of landscape, art, and environment. The panel addressed how to find and define the advantages of artistic and curatorial practices for addressing the Anthropocene, how to develop collaboration with environmental and life scientists, activists, communities and what does curatorial and artistic activism mean in the context of the Anthropocene and environmental degradation/ruination.

Dr. Rasa Smite and Dr. Raitis Smits from the RIXC, the Center for Art and Science in Latvia, presented the keynote for this panel. Their presentation on sensing environments. artistic practices and methodologies revealing eco-systematic relations introduced the artistic practices of RIXC, exploring various environments, real and virtual, sonic, and visible, as well as invisible – from pioneering internet radio experiments, pushing the boundaries of an “acoustic cyberspace” and artistic investigations in electromagnetic spectrum. It also considered more recent ‘techno-ecological’ art projects exploring the landscapes using sensing technologies, data sonification and visualizations to reveal the invisible activity in nature ecosystems, such as bacteria activity happening in the swamp ecosystems or volatile emissions of the pine trees in the forest and atmosphere. They concluded, “we argue that focusing our attention on “terrestrial co-existence” (Latour) and combining both ‘constructivist’ and ‘experiential’ approaches may help us to find less hazardous routes into the future and to create interactive relations with ‘more than human’ environments.”

The Pecha Kucha presentations for Panel 1 started with Sandro Simon, PhD student in the DELTA Junior Research Group at the Anthropology Department of the University of Cologne, Germany. He reflected on the audiovisual installation Bidonmondes (2020) and how it sensuously explores some of the products and residues of the Plantationocene (Haraway 2016) and the reuses and remodifications by those who live with and within them in the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal. He noted, “Bidonmondes centers around palm oil plastic canisters. These canisters take part in and inherit a range of processes of extraction and dispossession in different world regions.” 

This was followed by a presentation by dr. Carlo Cubero, Department of Social & Cultural Anthropology at the School of Humanities of Tallinn University. His presentation described the latest findings of an ongoing anthropological film-making project about Lahemaa National Park. Carlo described, “Thinking with a camera contextualises the participant observation experience on cinematic terms and highlights the aesthetic, sensorial, and tonal experiences of fieldwork, over the discursive, structural, and conceptual.” This presentation made the case for the application of film-making methodologies that go beyond the illustrative, the evidential, and data gathering, and propose ways in which film-making methodologies can offer positive contributions to the politics of landscape. To view Carlo’s presentation, please click this LINK.

Jeanne Féaux de la Croix, of the Junior Research group on Environment and Society in Central Asia at the University of Tübingen in Germany discussed the highs and lows of a virtual exhibition on the ‘Social Life’ of the Naryn and Syr Darya rivers in Central Asia. Feeding a partly flourishing, but largely disappearing Aral Sea, these contested rivers connect a wide variety of agricultural, industrial, and post-industrial communities along their 3000-kilometre trajectory. The presentation explored the conditions, possibilities, and limits of art-based and virtual spaces of communicating between Central Asian River communities, river arts and sciences. To view Jeanne’s presentation, please click this LINK.

John Grzinich, sound/video artist, educator and Head of New Media of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Estonian Academy of Arts shared some examples from his creative work that illustrate how listening practices that ground us in time and space also re-establish forms of meaning that challenge the anthropocentric by alluding to the sentience of non-human otherness. “For years I have sought to create experiences that convey perceptions of the world beyond the hegemony of our visually dominant sensory regimes. I have done this using sound as an artistic medium and by engaging myself in various listening based practices”, John said. 

Laura Kuusk, Assistant Professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts shared her interest in the patterns created by human and other-than-human behaviour. She noted, “My presentation is about continuing the route as an artist in the ongoing situation of environmental disaster. As a visual artist I am working with the ideas of the environment that is created by the juxtaposition of biological and technological matter.”

Kitija Balcare, PhD student in environmental humanities at the University of Latvia considered how the pandemic raised awareness of environmental issues through theatre imaginatory and newly approached stages. “Many questions and some subjective answers look on the process of performative arts during the year of pandemic 2020 in Latvia. I am digging deeper for eco-narratives and exploring site-specific theatre choices where site becomes not only scenography, but also co-author of the performance itself,” Kitija commented. To view Kitija’s presentation, please click this LINK.

Alessandro Rippa of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the LMU Munich and Carolin Maertens, doctoral candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the LMU Munich spoke about hunting, conservation, and multi-species entanglements in the Italian Alps. Their presentation mapped out an ongoing visual project focusing on hunting in a peripheral and impoverished mountain valley in Italy’s Trentino Province. Their presentation was based on long-term ethnography among the valley’s small – and shrinking – community of hunters, and employed camera traps, eco-acoustic recorders, as well as more traditional visual anthropology methods. They addressed the nexus of conservation efforts, memory, and multi-species entanglements that lie at the core of hunting practices in this region. To view Alessandro and Carolin’s presentation, please click this LINK.

Marie Lusson and Christelle Gramaglia from the French Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment Sciences (INRAE), spoke about repairing the rivers of the Anthropocene and offered a story of a socio-visual experiment to move from technical action to care. They said, “Urbanisation and industrialisation have altered the hydromorphological and ecological functioning of many rivers. Different practices and knowledge of the river can then clash, sometimes compromising the implementation of projects. Thanks to a method that mixes ethnographic and filmic investigation, it could be possible to take advantage of the controversies to imagine a new regime of cosmopolitical knowledge of the rivers to be repaired, at the interface of the technical, the sensitive and care.” To view Marie and Christelle’s presentation, please click this LINK.

Eeva Berglund, Adjunct professor of environmental policy, Department of Design at Aalto University completed the first Pecha Kucha panel by discussing the social in environmental imaginings from the point of view of a teacher. Eeva stated, “I find optimism in helping introduce social and political thought to mostly design and business students of a Finnish Masters programme. Promoting sustainability in a very unsustainable environment, it fosters awareness of the inseparability of technical and cultural arrangements. My teaching builds on anthropology, with a particular emphasis on landscapes and livelihoods, as well as the situatedness of all knowledge. My sense is that this enriches both students’ academic work and activism.”

Artists Excursion

The theme of the workshop was aimed to both address through the lens of art and activism  how hope and ruination combine with environmentalism, but it was also expected to chime with the location of the event, a post-socialist country that has decisively moved away from what is experienced as a ruined past. This was accentuated by the specific place where the event took place, a small location of the event, the edge of a uniquely complex peninsula in the outskirts of Tallinn, comprising of partly abandoned Soviet era industrial sites and a refuse heap turned into a view point to admire the surroundings; a water purification and human waste composting plant; a nature protection site – but also a potential seen in this area for a new gentrified sleeping district. This location enabled us to invite to the event the students from the Estonian Academy of Art who had been working in the area before, but now could hone their performative arts projects as a response to the presentations of the workshop. This offered the participants an opportunity to learn to collaborate across disciplines. During the excursion with the students, the participants were treated to performances and exhibitions, and short live clips for those attending from afar. The students described the location as Tallinn’s last fragment of not-sufficiently-capitalised and thus fiercely contested land, and “a place where imagination takes different trajectories, where conflicting dreams collide, often leaving nightmares in their wake.” The performances included some rather close encounters with the hopeful processes of breakdown – from feces to soil – as well as searches for well camouflaged art, encounters with rebellious birds and leaves introducing brief poetic quotes.

The day was concluded at a local vegan restaurant Vegan Oasis.

Panel Two: Ruined pasts, ruined futures?

The second panel and the final day of the event started with the keynote presentation by Annika Lems, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. She spoke about precarious politics of placemaking: why the historicity of environmental future imaginaries matters. Annika commented, “I explore everyday placemaking practices people in an Austrian mountain community engage in as a response to the exploitative and destructive nature of global capitalism.” She zoomed in on grassroot projects aimed at food sovereignty, demonstrating the important social role environmental future imaginaries can take as a means of creating a sense of belonging and solidarity in ‘forgotten’, rural places that are marked by unemployment, defunding and out-migration. As Annika clarified, “This politics of place does not just act against extractive capitalism. Based on historically ingrained notions of otherness, it has the side-effect of reproducing reactionary and exclusionary ideas of belonging to place.” 

The Pecha Kucha presentations commenced with Nikolaos Olma, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, Germany. He considered de-industrialisation and toxicity in a former mining town in Kyrgyzstan. “Mailuu-Suu is a former mining town in southern Kyrgyzstan which produced a partially refined form of uranium ore that fuelled the Soviet nuclear programme. But the Soviet Union’s dissolution led to the town’s rapid de-industrialisation and economic depression, leaving behind poverty, unemployment, and massive outmigration, as well as industrial ruins and empty residential buildings. The slow pace of remediation and the Kyrgyz state’s limited politico-economic involvement in the process make locals pessimistic about the town’s future.” To view Nikolaos’ presentation, please click this LINK.

Dragan Djunda, a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of the Central European University, spoke about hope at the ruins of energy transition in rural Serbia. “The dispossessive energy transition in the Western Balkans appears in the various forms of ruination and hope. On the one hand, ruination is an ecological consequence of thousands of small hydropower plants that recently mushroomed on the region’s pristine rivers, endangering the survival of both species and communities. On the other hand, it is a socio-material decay characteristic of post-socialist villages, which operates as an enabling condition for extractive investments,” commented Dragan. 

Michaela Haug, Assistant Professor at the University of Cologne, offered a Pecha Kucha presentation that was in essence a story of hope and solidarity that is currently growing out of the ruined forest landscapes of Indonesia. She analysed the attempt of the network Transnational Palm Oil Labour Solidarity (TPOLS) to develop a just transition perspective for the palm oil industry by building on the collaboration between the labour, indigenous peoples and environmental justice movements. To view Michaela’s presentation, please click this LINK.

Man-kei Tam, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Anthropology of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, considered activism after Fukushima. “How can we move on, after Fukushima, from a “damage-centered” analysis that focuses narrowly on the victimhood and incapacitation of affected communities? The collaborations between farmers, citizens, and experts to digitalize agriculture and restart rice cultivation show how their activism unpacks the trajectories of violence and makes powerful claims on the future, despite the open-endedness of the fallout.” To view Man-Kei’s presentation, please click this LINK.

Joonas Plaan, lecturer in anthropology at Tallinn University and a sustainable fisheries expert for Estonian Fund for Nature spoke about nature tourism in Anthropocene landscapes. Joonas said, “Oandu visitor centre in Lahemaa National Park is a starting point for numerous hiking, study and cycling trails. The trails pass ecosystems and landscapes with various conservation values, inviting its visitors to learn and think about the human-environment interactions in the past and present. What do the trails mean for the tourists visiting the park, its managers, and developers, and what is the role of trails in landscape conservation? Overall, does nature tourism bring hope for creating future landscapes?”  To view Joonas’ presentation, please click this LINK.

The panel was concluded by dr. Markéta Zandlová of the Faculty of Humanities at the Charles University in Prague. She discussed creative worldmaking – tracing the transformative acts of human and non-human inhabitants of the landscape of Untertannowitz – Dolní Dunajovice, a village in former German South Moravia. “My focus is on activists, winegrowers, solitary trees, tumbleweed, and maps, and how they move together towards sustainability and resilience despite ruination and environmental degradation.”  To view Markéta’s presentation, please click this LINK.

Panel Three: Hope and activism across boundaries

The final panel commenced with a keynote presentation by Stine Krøijer, Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen. She spoke on activism and its futures in landscapes of broken developmental dreams. She discussed how, in the second half of the 20th Century, modernization projects and associated narratives of economic development and progress made their imprint on landscapes and altered human relations to nature. Across ideological and political standpoints such narratives informed people’s outlook to the future and even their projects of progressive political change. Yet no more than a decade after the story about reaching an “end of history” gained momentum among European politicians – a story advocating the idea that a particular politico-economic formation would constitute the endpoint of all societal development – it became accompanied and even overwritten by experiences of environmental destruction and anthropogenic climate change. Stine commented, “I take my point of departure in landscapes of broken developmental dreams with a view to examine the forms of activism that they may give rise to. I take the listeners to sites of environmental destruction in both Germany, Denmark, and Amazonia. I do so to outline human and non-human forms of vigorous action, their relation to imperial debris and renderings of time, and to discuss the roles that anthropologists might take in such projects.”

The Pecha Kucha presentations started with Larisa Kurtović, Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa and Yanna Jović, University of Ottawa, and Program Advisor for Employment and Social Development, Canada. They spoke of postindustrial natures and post-extractive futures in postwar Bosnia Herzegovina. In 2018, an activist campaign in the central Bosnian town of Vareš successfully challenged the plan of an EU-sponsored ¡Vamos! Program to test underwater mining equipment in a nearby pit-lake Nula which formed on the site of the now-defunct coal mine. The presenters said, “How might we make anthropological sense of zones of anthropogenic resource depletion that are at once potentially toxic and beautiful, and emerge as unlikely sites of affection, communal care, and environmentalist concern?” To view Larisa’s presentation, please click this LINK.

This was followed by the presentation of Eunice Blavaskunas, Associate Professor at the Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. She considered outbreaks of bark beetle and nationalism in the Białowieża Forest, Poland and the way forest activists, bark beetle and the nationalist turn afford the opportunity to think through how the forest and its ecology are suffused with agency and agents of change. To view Eunice’s presentation, please click this LINK.

Maike Melles, M.A., from the Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology, spoke about hierarchies of knowledge between landowners and land workers in the Spanish Dehesa landscape. The presentation noted that overgrazing has led to impoverished soils which are less and less able to sustain animal herds throughout the year. Emblematic of these developments are the numerous fences that criss-cross the once vast dehesas. To view Maike’s presentation, please click this LINK.

This was followed by a Pecha Kucha presentation by Ruy Llera Blanes, Associate Professor and Carolina Valente Cardoso, Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Global Studies of University of Gothenburg on hope and citizenship frameworks in the face of drought, devolution, and death in Southern Angola. They said, “Southern Angola has been experiencing a cycle of extreme drought and food insecurity. Small-scale farmers and herding communities struggle against political and economic interests. We studied the material and rhetorical architecture of relief and aid mobilization, to illustrate the autonomist and collaborative modalities of personhood and citizenship entailed in these grassroots activist projects.”

Helen Vaaks, researcher at the Lahemaa National Park, spoke about endangered species, threats, and conservation through the case study of the life of freshwater pearl mussels in the hands of humans in Estonia. She utilized this case study to highlight the importance of human-environment relation for the meanings of biodiversity, the ethics of landscape manipulation and hope for conservation.

Arev Papazian, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology and social anthropology at the Central European University, considered conflicting stances toward the ecological change of Armenia’s Lake Sevan. He commented, “The ecology of Lake Sevan in Armenia has seen decades of overexploiting the lake’s waters, overfishing, pollution, and increasing water temperatures due to climate change. Today the damage brought by human activities is acknowledged and the state regulates and monitors activities affecting the lake’s ecosystem.” The presentation discussed the differing positions of environmental activists and local communities toward the ecological change of Lake Sevan. 

Jeannine-Madeleine Fischer of University of Konstanz concluded the third Pecha Kucha panel with an exploration of the South Durban local community’s proximity to polluting industries. She commented, “The local community keeps fighting for environmental justice and develops diverse strategies to make their daily sufferings provable: local activists keep records of local cancer cases, monitor air quality through bucket air control and document spills and illegal dumping to confront authorities.” The presentation illustrated how embodied knowledge is passed on through toxic tours and a range of tools to create an informed understanding and capacity to act among the community, imbuing the struggle with prospects of hope. 

The workshop successfully considered the themes of environment, post-socialism, ruination, and hope and brought together the disciplines of anthropology and performative arts to go beyond the academic sector by involving local activists. While the format of short Pecha Kucha presentations already worked well in the Inaugural Network Event in Cologne 2019, it proved particularly valuable in the hybrid environment of this event. Top posts from the seminar reached about 150 viewers. The convenors would like to thank everyone involved in making this event a successful example of engagement and sharing of research in environmental anthropology and beyond. 

Resources for Teaching Environmental Anthropology in Fearful and Inspiring Times

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In April 2021 the Teaching Environmental Anthropology Working Group of the EASA Environmental Anthropology Network convened its first (online) workshop, under the title ‘Teaching Environmental Anthropology in Fearful and Inspiring Times’.

Organised and curated by Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and Alessandro Rippa, the workshop featured the work of 14 scholars, practitioners, and students in two brief sessions focusing on teaching goals, ethics and resources.

They state: “On this page we have curated presentations introducing some favourite and unusual teaching resources. Our hope is that these short talks will continue to foster conversations around some of the key dimensions of teaching environmental anthropology, and that they will inspire scholars, students, and activists for new activities in the classroom and beyond.”

You can find the complete programme of the workshop here.

Once again, we thank all workshop participants for a stimulating day of conversations.

Mengyi Zhang

(University of Cologne, Germany)

Why it was Difficult for me to study Anthropology and how I overcame these Difficulties

  • Type of resource: Approach
  • Keywords: online learning, mass media, class communication

From a student’s perspective, Mengyi Zhan gives suggestions on how to integrate mass media content into anthropology lectures, and explains what the benefits are, based on her learning experience. The resources include some YouTube videos and the curriculum of Yale university’s anthropology introductory class.

Liliana Duica Amaya

(Universidad de los Andes, Colombia)

War ecology in the Colombian Amazon: Warscapes as an insightful methodology

  • Type of resource: Approach
  • Keywords: Warscapes, Gunpoint conservation, Amazon Landscapes

Environmental knowledge requires understanding cultural traditions especially when violence hybridized to the day-to-day life of communities. This approach will allow to understand violence through environmental anthropology.

Gunpoint conservation by guerrillas in the Colombian Amazon suggests the inextricable relation of effective governance using traditional environmental knowledge. Teaching environmental anthropology based on ethnography in conflict settings contributes to better understanding violence in protected ecosystems.

Practitioners or students analyzing violence contexts could use this as a guide to prepare, conduct and analyze ethnographic fieldwork in armed conflict settings.

Tim Ingold 

(University of Aberdeen, UK)

Manifesto for an outdoor anthropology

  • Type of resource: Approach
  • Keywords: attention, observation, outdoors
  • Literature: Tim Ingold, 2013, ‘Knowing from the inside’, in Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (Abingdon: Routledge), pp. 1-15.

Observation means attending to the world and corresponding with it. In environmental anthropology we should be teaching students how to be good observers. This means students should learn to think outdoors, through intense observational engagements with the world around them, and to bring this thinking into a resourceful critique of what they read. 

Eunice Blavascunas 

(Whitman College, Walla Walla, USA)

Decolonizing Classroom Expectations: Pre-colonial ingenuity and evolutionary debates

  • Type of resource: text
  • Keywords: evolutionary debates, domestication, decolonizing knowledge
  • Literature: Bruce Pascoe, 2014, Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident (Magabala Books)

Bruce Pascoe’s, “Dark Emu” is a short book that Eunice Blavascunas used to teach about decolonizing classrooms expectations, especially in regards to indigenous knowledge and scholarship, published outside of the academy. In this teaching example you can also explore evolutionary debates within the book, asking if agriculture and domestication is an evolutionary advance, something all humans have, or a discourse that selectively omits other ways of sourcing food and shaping landscapes.  Bruce Pascoe forcefully argues and evidences examples of aboriginal agriculture that European settlers wrote about and yet were blind to.  This is a good text for considering our own habits in the classroom and what we do when we read and discuss a text that inverts indigenous ways of knowing and the facticity of written historical accounts.

Maria Ayala

(University of Canterbury, NZ)

Walking backwards into the Future. Teachings from Māori People

  • Type of resource: fieldwork reflections
  • Keywords: indigenous knowledge, Maori wisdom, multispecies ethnography

This video contains a personal account from fieldwork on forest biosecurity. It suggests a humble, kind, and ethical approach towards the human and non-human others that you may encounter when doing environmental anthropology. It encourages outdoor learning, the use of the body as a research tool and the courage to see the world from a different perspective.

Martín Fonck

(IIAS Potsdam, Germany)

Environmental Autobiography

  • Type of resource: Exercise
  • Keywords: Environmental autobiography – Nature experiences – Exploratory exercise

During 2020 with Saskia Brill, we designed and taught the course “Environment and Knowledge: An ethnographic exploration” at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Rachel Carson Center Certificate Program. We used the teaching method, the “environmental autobiography” to discuss how the sublime experiences of nature are present in our biographies when we start talking about the environment. This exercise inspired us to pay attention to how we tell stories and frame concepts to describe the environment, exploring our own environmental stories as a way of starting this challenging conversation.

Anna Antonova 

(Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Germany)

‘Reinventing Oktoberfest’: Imagining alternative environmental Futures in the interdisciplinary environmental Humanities Classroom

This exercise invites students to draw on their diverse experiences of environment and society in reimagining a well-known global festival: Oktoberfest. Based on a background reading of Gibson-Graham and Miller’s work on the economy as ecological livelihood, students apply theoretical knowledge gained throughout the semester to imagine alternative models for a sustainable future, considering societal and environmental trade-offs discussed throughout the semester. The point of the exercise is to brainstorm idealized alternatives, thereby gaining a deeper appreciation of the problems discussed in class.

Diane Russell

Practitioner Roles in Teaching Environmental Anthropology

  • Type of resource: approach
  • Key words: remote lecture, blog, practitioner

This video demonstrates how environmental anthropology practitioners can support teaching through remote lectures, which was critical during the pandemic. The video describes how Diane Russell developed teaching materials in the form of blogs linked to key resources for these remote lectures. The blog featured in the video concerns an anthropological perspective on efforts to reduce deforestation and mitigate climate change in developing countries. 

EnviroAnt Workshop in Tallinn, Estonia – Keynote Abstracts

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Keynote 1- 14 October 2021. 9.30am CET.

Dr. Rasa Smite and Dr. Raitis Smits

Sensing Environments. Artistic Practices and Methodologies Revealing the Eco-Systematic Relations 


“Are there any medium which better than others can open our senses towards the environment?” (Bruno Latour)

Our senses have always been “mediated”, but with more recent enhancements of various ‘immersive’ technologies, our ‘sensoriums’ have intensified and become more mediated than ever before. Environmental monitoring sensors and remote sensing tools used in environmental sciences and landscape research are extending our knowledge, perception and experiences. Yet, we ask, which practices, tools, technologies may help us better to ‘sense’ the environment? What are the methodologies for creating the meaningful relations (with it)? And – what art can do? If the ‘constructivist’ approach has been used to a large extent in environmental research and other fields, ‘experiential’ capabilities such as sensual and immersive properties of the environment have been mainly used in art practices that create immersive interaction through experience, reflection and speculation.

We will introduce our artistic practices of exploring various environments, real and virtual, sonic and visible, as well as invisible – from pioneering internet radio experiments pushing the boundaries of an “acoustic cyberspace” and artistic investigations in electromagnetic spectrum, to more recent ‘techno-ecological’ art projects exploring the landscapes using sensing technologies, data sonification and visualizations to reveal the invisible activity in nature ecosystems.  such as bacteria activity happening in the swamp ecosystems or volatile emissions of the pine trees in the forest and atmosphere.

To create “Pond Battery” (2014-2015) and “Swamp Radio” (2018) artworks of “Biotricity” series, we performed artistic interventions installing “bacteria batteries”, sensors and transmitting devices in ponds, swamps and other wetlands in North Europe and North America. Environmental data were collected, sonified and visualized making visible the invisible activities in nature such as bacteria living in a pond or swamp sediments producing electricity.

Our recent artwork “Atmospheric Forest” (2021), an immersive VR environment is created using remote scanned 3D forest environment, and visualizes the data of the fragrant emissions of pine trees, revealing complex patterns of relations between climate change, forest emissions and the atmosphere.By showcasing how sensing technologies and immersive tools used in artistic practice are well suited to reveal our interdependence of living organisms on each other and their environment, we would like to discuss future strategies, tools and methodologies for establishing two (or multi) directional link with our environment. Moreover, we argue that focusing our attention on “terrestrial co-existence” (Latour) and combining both ‘constructivist’ and ‘experiential’ approaches may help us to find less hazardous routes into the future and to create interactive relations with ‘more than human’ environments.

Keynote 2 – 15 October 2021. 9.00am CET.

Annika Lems, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Halle/Saale

Precarious Politics of Placemaking: Why the Historicity of Environmental Future Imaginaries Matters 

In this presentation I will focus on the everyday placemaking practices people in an Austrian mountain community engage in as a response to the exploitative and destructive nature of global capitalism. By zooming in on grassroot projects aimed at food sovereignty, I will show the important social role environmental future imaginaries can take on as a means of creating a sense of belonging and solidarity in “forgotten”, rural places that are marked by unemployment, defunding and out-migration.

However, I will suggest that anthropological analysis needs to inquire into the agency attached to such projects, laying bare the ambiguous nature of supposedly “green” and progressive placemaking practices. By looking into the everyday engagements with history fuelling local struggles for social and environmental viability in my Austrian fieldsite, I attempt to make visible the contours of a troubling politics of place. This politics of place, I will argue, does not just act against extractive capitalism. Based on historically ingrained notions of otherness, it has the side-effect of reproducing reactionary and exclusionary ideas of belonging to place.

Keynote 3 – 15 October 2021. 1.30am CET.

Stine Krøijer, Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen

Activism and its futures in landscapes of broken developmental dreams

In the second half of the 20th Century, modernization projects and associated narratives of economic development and progress made their imprint on landscapes and altered human relations to nature. Across ideological and political standpoints such narratives informed people’s outlook to the future and even their projects of progressive political change. Yet no more than a decade after the story about reaching an “end of history” gained momentum among European politicians – a story advocating the idea that a particular politico-economic formation would constitute the end-point of all societal development – it became accompanied and even overwritten by experiences of environmental destruction and anthropogenic climate change. In this presentation, I take my point of departure in landscapes of broken developmental dreams with a view to examine the forms of activism that they may give rise to. Based on what I like to refer to as my dark trilogy – a series of articles that examine the afterlife of progress, political uses of dystopia, and changing rhythms of radical environmental activism – I take the listeners to sites of environmental destruction in both Germany, Denmark and Amazonia. I do so in order to outline human and non-human forms of vigorous action, their relation to imperial debris and renderings of time, and to discuss the roles that anthropologists might take in such projects.

For the full programme, please follow this link

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