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- Convenors:
-
Adam Runacres
(University College London (UCL))
Timothy Cooper (University of Cambridge)
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- Stream:
- Utopias and Temporalities
- Location:
- Elizabeth Fry 01.02
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 3 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel will attempt to broker a dialogue across different sections of anthropology concerned with the idea of conservation (of material culture and of nature) as an agent of continuity and rupture, with regard to state intervention and resistance to it.
Long Abstract:
Through dialogue between ethnographic studies of material culture, heritage, wildlife, and conservation, this panel explores the parallels and dissonances among anthropological sub-disciplines' understandings of conservation. In each case, conservation emerges from a desire for fidelity; a concern with preserving, returning to, or imitating an - ultimately constructed - ideal, whether it be a certain idea of nature and wildness, or of origins and completeness. Often both the poison and the cure for problems of asserting order over objects of conservation is wildness itself and its instability; the feral, unruly, often non-human collaborators that atrophy objects but regenerate landscapes. When the pursuit of fidelity falls under the control and intervention of the state, conservation becomes a domain in which censorship, intervention, and authority unfold.
However, top-down notions of continuity can become practices of ongoing rupture for local actors, who may negotiate or subvert these processes through the appropriation and circulation of resources. Such acts re-define both the space of conservation and what is reproduced and conserved. This panel calls for a discussion between scholars across material culture, social anthropology, political ecology and wildlife conservation in order to interrogate conservation as a discursive space of ethnographic enquiry. We ask: How is conservation as a social form and category of knowledge crystallised and reproduced? In what ways does the state intervene on such spheres of reproduction through censorship or authority? What role do non-state actors play in resisting that censorship, intervention, and authority by attempting to (re)gain control over material or natural resources?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 3 September, 2019, -Adam Runacres (University College London (UCL))
Paper short abstract:
Relocated tigers and villagers around Panna Tiger Reserve challenge discourses of disturbance and wildness through their ferality, their refusal of imposed categories of wild nature and tame villager, exposing the tensions of government intervention in human and tiger life in conservation areas.
Paper long abstract:
Through the case of Panna Tiger Reserve, this paper will compare government intervention in the lives of two groups intimately imbricated in Indian conservation: tigers and villagers living in and around tiger reserves. As the name might suggest, tiger reserves, when notified by the government, are intended for tigers, set-up to flourish free of "human disturbance". However, all tiger reserves have a history of human habitation. As a result, state Forest Departments have pursued programmes of village relocation, through which people can be compensated to make space for the tiger reserve and its tigers. In Panna Tiger Reserve, following the local extinction of the tiger population in 2009, the Forest Department implemented a successful reintroduction project, in which tigers from neighbouring reserves were translocated to Panna. The reintroduction project accelerated the already-well-under-way village relocation programmes in Panna. However, in recent years many communities have halted their relocations partway through and now refuse to leave until the Department compensation improves. Locals and tourist visitors alike question the 'wildness' of the relocated tigers, some of which are radio-collared and whose lives have been the site of intense human intervention. These relocated tigers and (not yet) relocated villagers challenge discourses of disturbance and wildness through their ferality, their refusal to cooperate into government-imposed categories of 'wild nature' and 'tame villager', and they expose the tensions, contradictions, limits and problematic outcomes of government intervention in human and tiger life in these contested conservation landscapes.
Rebeca Suarez Ferreira (Durham University )
Paper short abstract:
This paper will unfold moveable cultural heritage conservation knowledge in situ. Ethnographic enquiry of a project which began with acceptance in lieu of inheritance tax of a large collection of historic fans reveals how conservators negotiate the care of museum collections.
Paper long abstract:
Moveable cultural heritage conservation knowledge is crystallised and reproduced through a non-linear trajectory towards professionalisation. Attainment requires the body, self, experience and may include apprenticeship, graduate level training, volunteering, preventive and interventive practice, as well as exhibition and display. The museum embraces and rejects conservation expertise based on allocated, systematic agendas of status on the global site categorised as the heritage sector. Within the UK, Her Majesty's Government plays an important role in object acquisition, veneration, and regulation. Ethnographic enquiry alongside conservators, curators, enthusiasts, specialists, technicians, and collectors on a seemingly procedural project began with an obligation created by acceptance in lieu (AiL) of inheritance tax of a large collection of historic fans. As the project progressed, the intricacies of conservation requirements were negotiated in order to fulfil this British tax law, this museum's own policies, and adequate care for the collection. Those who performed the work struggled with their individual preference for practice and found resistance in the hidden, social forms often at reach to conservation practitioners within the UK heritage sector. This paper will introduce the multifaceted and complex nature of conservation knowledge as it follows the fan project from in lieu of inheritance tax to conservation justification to completed, recognized display.
Valentina Torelli (BTU Cottbus, Germany)
Paper short abstract:
The paper looks at World Heritage Sites as landscapes of ethnographic endeavor and investigates the dissonances between global and locale scale in heritage production processes.
Paper long abstract:
In time of late modernity, according to Harrison, the nation-state is slowly losing its control on and connection with heritage conservation and new forms of heritage authority, as non-governmental organizations, are on the rise (Harrison R., 2013).
I will explore how the "worldheritageization" phenomenon, the increasing inscription of landscapes, towns and other heritage objects in the UNESCO World Heritage List creates the potential of conflicts between global and local narratives, which can be defined as "heritage dissonances".
In landscape and heritage studies research, local or global scales are often considered as given, as inert containers of the research, or natural levels of a governance system, but heritage scales are never neutral: they are often formatting power behaviors between social actors (Lähdesmäki T., Zhu Y. and Thomas S., 2019).
Among actors of different scales there is always a conflict around the questions: Whose heritage? Which heritage values from the past should be conserved in the present and brought to the future?
In this research scales dissonances are revealed through the implementation of the technical standards prescribed by UNESCO Advisory Bodies such as ICOMOS.
The paper explores how ICOMOS experts in the World Heritage Landscape of the Palladian Villas in northern Italy use the global scale to foster cultural elitism, narrative of classes and social exclusion and how local actors create a "dissonance" by producing alternative heritage through materiality, representation and experience.
Christopher Ward (University of Nottingham)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will investigate the role of heritage as a form of legitimacy within the management of "wild" deer. This legitimacy appears to be conceived in parallel by multiple competing actors, upon a logic of a predetermined and symbiotic balance which is realised in the right to kill the deer.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will explore the conceptions that are used to inform the conservation efforts of deer-managers, and particularly the emerging competitions and challenges to traditional practices.
For the last millennia, deer have been maintained in the "parks" and forests of Great Britain. Through the medieval sovereign granting the right to deny the free movement of deer in the form of the deer-park, vast hierarchical structures were formed across the British landscape. In successfully maintaining a "natural balance" within these parks, the continuity of the deer would also allow the continuity of the heritage of the family that held it. The modern deer-manager has inherited these responsibilities, and the deer are understood as a form of "living heritage", a pre-existing ideal that relies on the manager removing unsuitable factors within the herd, and external to it. Yet in identifying and removing threats and predation, it would seem that the remaining humans would become entrusted with recreating the effects of the predation that they removed. And this conception of man as predator has become a site of legal and illegal contests to deer-manager's legitimacy.
Furthermore, in recent years, new methods were developed to establish deer farms, which has caused many to regard the practices of wild deer management as irresponsible and their methodologies as wantonly outdated. With deer farms now springing up around Europe, how does the treatment of deer as property have for not only legislation and practices, but also for accepted views of domestication, wildness and interspecies interactions?
Timothy Cooper (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore what is gained by the possibility of simulating the old, particularly in the absence of sympathetic conservation practices, and ask if "new heritage" can be taken seriously as religious or political claims-making expressed in the ability to build again.
Paper long abstract:
In 2017, construction work on Pakistan's first mass transit system was briefly halted over claims that it threatened adjacent heritage sites. A satirical article joked that the chief minister of Punjab had placated international heritage bodies with the promise of building "new heritage" sites in place of those at risk of destruction. Influential stakeholders protesting the construction works relayed the story as if it were fact as it travelled between WhatsApp groups. Elsewhere, the caricatured yet believable practices associated with the possibility of "new heritage" have become increasingly common. In the UAE and China, the construction of simulated heritage areas designed for shopping and public leisure often operate alongside the destruction or ruination of actual historic sites.
Importantly, the possibility of (re-)building heritage is not only a state concern but can be a subversive expression of disagreement. In Shi'i neighbourhoods in Lahore, Iranian-imported construction kits allow users to (re-)build the mausoleums of Jannat-ul-Baqi, the graveyard in Medina demolished in 1926. When contestations over the built heritage of holy sites are materialized by mass produced commodities, the aspirational and satirical idea of "new heritage" becomes a playful way of re-producing political and religious morality through friction with the perceived other. This paper will explore what is gained by the possibility of simulating the old, particularly in the absence of sympathetic conservation practices, and ask if "new heritage" can be taken seriously as religious or political claims-making expressed in the ability not only to develop and build, but to build again.
Marie-Annick Moreau (University College London (UCL))
Paper short abstract:
On the Rufiji floodplain, fishers call on traditions of access and sharing to challenge management measures, not always to villagers' liking. This paper draws on a year's fieldwork among three lakeside communities to explore these contests, within the context of forced relocation.
Paper long abstract:
In Tanzania's Rufiji District, in years of high flood, fish migrate from the river to feed and spawn on the floodplain, with many juveniles and adults becoming trapped in ponds and lakes as waters recede. Fish numbers in any one location are thus unpredictable and beyond local control: variations in climate and upstream environments matter too. However, the state, via district fisheries officials, continues to (unevenly) enforce national legislation developed for more stable systems, and leans on village councils to do the same. Fishers, in contrast, engage with uncertainty by shifting fishing activity between waterbodies within and across years. A tradition of welcoming others to fish at local waterbodies facilitates mobility: prior to fishery modernisation and the disruption of their society by forced relocation in the 1960s, Rufiji men built large, communal fishing weirs, co-ordinating their activity across space and time. Catches were landed when food was scarce, with fish exchanged for grain. Concepts of reciprocity and survival remain integral to local understandings of the fishery and are called upon when fishers are confronted with any management measures, be these seasonal closures, gear restrictions, or limits on catch size. At the same time, many villagers yearn for the moderating influence clan elders once held, receiving instructions from pond spirits on when and where to fish. This paper draws on a year's fieldwork among three lakeside villages to explore how locals' ideas of abundance, welfare, and justice, together with the consequences of relocation, frustrate formal fisheries management and conservation measures.
Kirsty Wissing (Australian National University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers contested dynamics between the nation-state, the local experience and non-human dimensions in relation to damming the Volta River's flow in Ghana. In building a nation, how were local human-environment relations ruptured, and can things go back to nature before infrastructure?
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers contested dynamics between (representatives of) the nation-state, the local experience and non-human dimensions over and in relation to the natural flow of water in Ghana. The focus site for this nexus is the Volta River's flow as manipulated by and to the Akosombo hydro-electric dam. Constructed under President Kwame Nkrumah's leadership, this dam harnessed water's flow to power a newly independent nation-state. But at what cost? In building a nation, how were local human-environment relations ruptured, and can things go back to nature before infrastructure?
Historical human attempts to manipulate the Volta River's flow sought to control people by controlling water. However, more recent technocratic investigations explored re-instating nature through dam infrastructure by returning to pre-dam conditions of flow. Yet water, as a somewhat inherently unpredictable, even feral, material, can also undermine human assertions of control and in-turn make humans vulnerable. In water's uncooperative nature, there is space to (re)consider non-human control. As national interests impact conservation efforts to go back to nature, some, like Akwamu traditional authorities, see cultivation (of a relationship with the divine) as the ultimate conservation (of the environment). By exploring the potentials and limitations of human manipulation to conserve or to restrain water's natural flow, I seek to unpack hydro-social tensions between national and local human actors and to ponder where the ultimate (hydro-)power rests.