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- Convenor:
-
Knut G Nustad
(University of Oslo)
Send message to Convenor
- Formats:
- Workshops
- Location:
- V303
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 11 July, -, -, Thursday 12 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Paris
Short Abstract:
The panel explores the many initiatives attempting to manage environments (such as protecting biodiversity, stopping deforestation and limiting carbon emission), and how current political and economical changes redefine nature(s), reshape flows of resources and redistribute access and ownership.
Long Abstract:
In Tristes Tropique Lévi-Strauss painted a vivid picture of how phenomena seemed to attract anthropologists when they were about to disappear, causing nostalgia, uncertainty and disquiet. Is the growing anthropological interest in the environment a sign that we are increasingly becoming aware of the fact that we are loosing sight of, and control over, our environments?
Environmental degradation and climate change are on the top of the political agenda worldwide. A series of global initiatives have been launched to protect biodiversity, stop deforestation and limit carbon emissions. These political initiatives are both causes for and effects of concurrent forms of governance, which redefines land and marine resources in ways that can be delimited and packaged, valued in monetary terms and sold as "carbon sinks", or as tourist attractions by labels such as "UNESCO World Heritage Sites", "unspoiled", "virgin", "last frontiers" and so on.
Global initiatives such as REDD use similar conceptualizations of nature in order to price stored carbon in rainforests and use this as the foundation for new forms of environmental accountancy governing large monetary transactions from the global north to the global south.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 11 July, 2012, -Jose A. Cortes-Vazquez (University of A Coruña)
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at the re-definition of natural resources in the Protected Areas of Southern Spain, related to the promotion of nature tourism, and reflects on the role that certain socioeconomic interests play in the design of environmental conservation policies.
Paper long abstract:
The re-definition of many rural areas in Europe, following changes introduced by the Common Agricultural Policy over the last few decades, has given rise to a shift in the way local resources are managed. These regions are no longer meant to depend on highly subsidised farming practices, but on numerous other activities, such as tourism, in order to diversify and boost the local economy. This process has exerted a strong influence in the design of environmental policies within Protected Areas in so-called 'Peripheral Europe', where new resource management plans aim to achieve both environmental conservation and sustainable development through the promotion of nature tourism.
In relation to this phenomenon, this paper focuses on the adjustment in the definition of 'environment' that has paralleled it, as natural resources become attractive and accessible products for touristic consumption. My aim is to reflect on the socioeconomic interests that underlie new environmental readings in the Protected Areas of Southern Spain, which legitimise the introduction of conservation measures through the strategic use of certain concepts such as wilderness, nature and tradition. I analyse the particular case of the Cabo de Gata-Nijar Natural Park, and examine the role that certain criteria, for example, tourists' motivations and expectations, play in the Park's land-use zoning plan. In doing so, I pay special attention to how this plan defines local resources so that old farming fields become 'natural' areas for tourists' contemplative use; a process that has prompted significant changes in the way humans have historically managed them.
Bertram TURNER (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Paper short abstract:
The paper addresses the intertwining and coproduction of normative and technological strands in politics of natural resource extraction. It looks at the integration of argan oil which is produced in a biosphere in Morocco and is the most expensive nutritional oil worldwide today in the world market.
Paper long abstract:
The paper addresses the intertwining and coproduction of normative and technological strands in politics of natural resource extraction. It is explored how the integration of a forestal resource in the global economy by means of normative and technological appropriation is associated with the delegation of responsibility for its conservation and the sustainability of extraction management to local use rights holders. In the process, so is argued, such entanglements are induced to transform a local product into an exploitable global commodity as a niche product.
The case study looks at the emergence of argan oil at the world market. Argan oil is the most expensive nutritional oil worldwide today and also used in pharmaceutical and cosmetic industry. It is produced out of the fruits of the argan tree which is endemic to southwest Morocco forming a unique forestal ecosystem. Nowadays argan is endowed with a normative framework that includes its legal protection as a global good in form of a UNESCO biosphere reserve; a legal concept that allows the production of the premium product required by the world market and the legal labels of a fair traded organic product with certifications and protected geographical indication (PGI). Such framework positions argan oil in an economy of solidarity and equity which also appeals to the consumer in the industrialized world. It is analyzed how specific configurations of inventories of knowledge, legal repertoires and technologies have materialized and what social consequences in terms of access and property rights they involve.
Eeva Berglund (Aalto University)
Paper short abstract:
A recognition of the social and cultural dimensions of environmental damage has already shifted vocabularies and problem definitions. The paper examines the trope of design, popular among urban environmentalists in Helsinki, as a flexible and vague but potentially productive tool to conceptualize this shift and perhaps to inform environmental anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
Many initiatives for addressing ecological degradation have an urban bias, are narrowly expert-based and unequal in their demands and impacts, yet remain legitimated through appeal to the common good. Anthropology has helped draw attention to the politics implicit in such agendas and argued for more constructivist conceptions of knowledge. Meanwhile contradictions between globally recognized threats and locally consequential actions continue to create practical and political problems. But important shifts in environmental thought are taking place. These include significant reappraisals of the social and cultural dimensions of environmental damage and of the idea of technology.
This paper focuses on environmentalist thought in Helsinki where it is a significant domain of cultural creativity. Specifically it looks at the promises and pitfalls of "design" as a popular international trope for parsing together domains that earlier environmentalist thinking kept separate.
The paper shows how environmentalism never properly acknowledged the fictions that separated "nature" as rurality from "culture" as city. Now green thought is entangled with the urban vibe of the post-industrial city and green values inform its governance. But, the paper notes, although alternative thinking proliferates, it can be difficult to distinguish market-oriented green-washing from more meaningful efforts to address threats. Nevertheless, across networks of doers and thinkers, under the flexible banner of design, it seems it is possible to imagine the end of economic growth and to see technology in the environment. It is equally possible to see design in purely commercial terms.
The paper's theoretical impulse is towards a "post-constructivist", simultaneously rural and urban, environmental anthropology.
Raul Acosta Garcia (Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main)
Paper short abstract:
A model of potential deforestation of the Amazon by 2050 published in the journal Nature demonstrates the hope of a Brazilian NGO to protect the largest forest on Earth. This paper analyses the NGO’s affective appeals to scientific legitimacy, traditional heritage, and the global common good.
Paper long abstract:
What does it take for an appeal for the improved management of large-scale ecosystems to work? Governance strategies require a type of persuasion that involves all stakeholders in decision-making processes. They imply affective appeals that tap into vernacular ontologies and epistemologies. Rhetoric is influential not because of its message, but because of all that is not said. It is not the only tool used, however, as new media and other forms of engagement allow for a variety of ceremonial presentations of problems and potential solutions. All these means are used to induce stakeholders to incorporate particular views of environmental problems into their everyday actions, or their being-in-the-world. They are thus affective strategies with interconnected scales of application, from a local understanding to an idea of a global common good.
This paper examines one NGO's efforts to establish governance schemes in the Brazilian Amazon. It analyses the uses of one of its publications in the journal Nature, containing two contrasting models of potential deforestation by 2050. The maps and information included were used in all scales where the NGO works: from small farmers to international climate conferences. Such uses reflect the recent convergence between social movements, indigenous groups, NGOs, state governments, and other stakeholders in environmental campaigns. In managing a differential use of information, NGO advocates have negotiated the idea of dwelling as relational, as a collective aggregation of emotive notions of space and place. The political practice of these advocates thus mirrors its aim as a concerted form of becoming.
Kaj Arhem (Göteborg/Uppsala University) Nikolas Århem (Uppsala)
Paper short abstract:
Market-oriented economic development and forest conservation are both corner-stones of Vietnam’s current state policies. The paper examines the social consequences of these twin processes on a particular indigenous society in the uplands of central Vietnam.
Paper long abstract:
Development and forest conservation are both corner-stones of Vietnam's current state policies towards its indigenous upland peoples who tend to live in the countries remaining rich forest areas.
Current forest policies, classifying all forest land into production forest aimed at industrial forest production and various types of protected forests excluding human forest use, increasingly enclose the indigenous upland population and dramatically reduce their access to traditionally used forest land. At the same time, state-development policies push for an all-out transformation of the local sufficiency-oriented economies towards market-oriented cash-crop production and small-scale agro-forestry. An important step in this direction is the devolution of forest land to households and the conversion of swidden land into heavily subsidized small-scale rubber-plantations and other forms of industrial tree plantations.
The paper examines the social consequences of these twin processes, seemingly opposed but unfolding side by side as parts of a single "sustainable-development package", on a particular indigenous society in the uplands of central Vietnam. It argues that the state policies engender growing inequalities and a progressive erosion of social cohesion in local communities as well as, seemingly paradoxically, accelerating environmental destruction and deepening poverty.
Ursula Münster (Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, University of Oslo)
Paper short abstract:
This paper ethnographically engages with technologies and practices of governing wildlife in a region of Kerala, India, renowned for its severe human-wildlife conflicts. It explores how human-elephant relations are co-produced in the process of managing nature and humans at the forest frontier.
Paper long abstract:
In times of rapid species extinction, ensuring the survival of the world's remaining mega-fauna is the source of much anxiety for contemporary conservationists. In India, charismatic mammals such as the tiger and the elephant have special conservation priority. The Indian Forest Department, conservation organizations, urban wildlife activists, celebrities and private companies work together in saving the nation's iconic animals. However, conservation is a contested issue in India, whose population has reached 1,2 billion. This paper ethnographically engages with wildlife conservation in a densely populated region of Kerala, South India, which is renowned for its severe human-wildlife conflicts. By exploring technologies and practices of governing people and wildlife in the region, the aim is to understand how these disharmonious human-animal interrelationships between have been co-produced over time. The paper argues that a critical political ecology of conservation needs to go beyond its present human-centered focus and take non-humans and interspecies relationships into account.
Richard Irvine (University of St Andrews)
Paper short abstract:
Explores the politics surrounding drainage and enclosure of a wetland, and the continuing debates surrounding the future use of this ‘temporary land’ as a contested resource
Paper long abstract:
This paper will explore a particular British landscape (the East Anglian Fenlands) from an ethnographic and historical perspective. The Fens are a place where the Protestant Work Ethic has been inscribed on the landscape; labour cuts drainage ditches to bleed the peat, and creates productive land where once there was only feckless and lazy swamp. Or, to listen to the story another way: labour attempts to impose man's will on God's dominion, with disastrous consequences for humans and for other species. It remains a contested environment, represented variously as a natural flood barrier, a carbon sink, a key element in Britain's food security, and a tourist attraction. I aim to explore how wetland is enclosed as a resource, and in particular I want to explore the contested politics that surround the kind of resource that it becomes. How has the Fenland been 'mastered', and given peat shrinkage, climate change, and post-glacial rebound, how secure is this mastery?
Jan Cherlet (Ghent University)
Paper short abstract:
The article describes, first, the rise of 'Integrated Water Resources Management' (IWRM) to hegemonic discourse in the sphere of international organizations, and second, the deployment of IWRM in Mali through international development aid. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is used as descriptive tool.
Paper long abstract:
The unequal distribution of water quantity and quality in space and time burdens the livelihoods of over a billion people on this planet, most of them living in the poorest countries. 'Integrated Water Resources Management' (IWRM) is a normative policy discourse that holds the promise of a holistic management of this unfair distribution. In the early nineties the discourse appeared in the sphere of the United Nations organizations and in two decades time the discourse has gained an apparently hegemonic status in the network of water development actors worldwide.
A multi-sited ethnography traced the flow of the IWRM discourse through the network of development actors and observed its actual deployment in Mali. Both the governmental and non-governmental pathway of deployment were accounted for.
The author harnesses Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) to describe how actors enroll each other into an alliance to make the discourse work. Non-human actors -e.g. the typical aid financing mechanism, a couple of UN reports, or the Niger river- have proven to be important anchorage points for the alliance. The once very strong alliance, however, seems to be disintegrating and actors are compelled to renegotiate IWRM by drawing in climate change.
Harald Beyer Broch (University of Oslo)
Paper short abstract:
Comercial fishing for Greenland Halibut in Norwegian waters is regulated by strict quotas devided between two but short yearly fishing seasons. This regulation is intended to secure a sustainable harvest of this fish species. The management system has however, both intended and unintended consequenses that are highlighted and analyzed. It is argued that a klondike attitude comes alive at the fishing grounds.
Paper long abstract:
Inspired by Tsing's application of the consept "frontier behavior" (2005) this paper presents an empirical picture of interaction at a marine klondike. The location is at the continental slope off the coast of Troms, Norther Norway. In order to secure a sustainable resource harvest most fish stocks in Norwegian waters are "protected" by quota regulations to prevent serious overfishing. The focus is on the Greenland halibut fishery. In order to securesustaiability this fishery has been restricted by small vessel quotas. The fishing has also been limited to two short yearly periods. One period is in the spring, the other during early fall. This management strategy cause both anticipated and unforseen consequenses both for the fish and the fishermen. The outcome of this kind of regulation is presented and analyzed as seen from the fishing vessles and the fishermen's point of view. Both communication and actions among the fishermen and interaction between fish and men are highlighted and analyzed.
Anna L. Tsing: "Friction. An Etnography of Global Connection". Princeton University Press, 2005.