Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9712467
J. Baker
This article describes moments of plant-induced enchantment during community-based environmental monitoring and ethnographic research in Treaty No. 8 sakâwiyiniwak territories. These multispecies ethnographic encounters while collaborating with Elders and friends from Fort McKay First Nation and Bigstone Cree Nation describe how sakâwiyiniwak ecological care is rooted in kinship. Moments of enchantment, or intense moments of noticing and “plant-thinking,” inspire new appreciation of the boreal forest and the many familiar plants that grow within it, illuminating the magic of muskeg tea, frog’s pants, and aspen. Written in the style of lively ethnography, this article focuses on plants of sakâwiyiniwak ceremonial, nutritional, and medicinal use. These plants are often overlooked or are described as nuisance weeds, despite being indigenous plants, by settlers whose decisions and natural resource extraction activities have a direct effect on the survival and well-being of these plants and larger ecosystems. Enchantment brings attention to the deep-seated settler biases against certain types of plants that are common or abundant or, more specifically, not of current commercial value.
本文描述了在第8号条约sak wiyiniwak领土的社区环境监测和民族志研究中植物诱导的魅力时刻。在与来自Fort McKay First Nation和Bigstone Cree Nation的长老和朋友合作时，这些多物种的民族志相遇描述了sak wiyiniwak生态护理是如何根植于亲属关系的。迷人的时刻，或者是强烈的注意和“植物思考”的时刻，激发了对北方森林和许多生长在其中的熟悉植物的新欣赏，照亮了麝香茶、青蛙裤和白杨的魔力。这篇文章以生动的民族志风格写作，重点介绍了sak wiyiniwak植物的仪式、营养和药用用途。尽管这些植物是本地植物，但定居者的决定和自然资源开采活动对这些植物和更大的生态系统的生存和福祉有直接影响，因此这些植物经常被忽视或被描述为讨厌的杂草。《魔法》让人们注意到定居者对某些常见或丰富的植物的根深蒂固的偏见，或者更具体地说，不具有当前的商业价值。
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Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9712489
Piergiorgio di Giminiani
Drawing on the experiences of caring in agriculture and forestry among Mapuche landholders of Chile, this article advances a definition of care as an act of relating intervening mutual articulations of vitality. Caring for nonhumans entails a reflexive awareness of the ontological and ethical limits of human care, limits made visible by the nonhumans’ potentials to respond to our actions and affect us. Reflections on the limits of care foster an attentiveness to the conditions responsible for nonhumans’ ability of enchantment, a term that in Bennett’s proposal concerns an awareness on the singularness and surprising character of life. First, this article characterizes care as a human intentional action targeting dependent nonhumans, such as crops. Second, it illustrates the recalcitrance of some nonhumans to human care, as in the case of forests in Indigenous southern Chile. Third, it shows how care emerges from ethical aspirations and concerns, such as those at the core of Mapuche engagements with cultural reclamation and conservation.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9712500
A. Pandian
Migration is a bedrock reality of earthly life. This truth invites us to imagine the span of the Americas beginning not with borders and walls but instead with movement beyond them. What might our continents and countries begin to look and feel like if we acknowledged the necessity of these crossings, the kinship and well-being that movement sustains? The essay explores these questions through a series of meditations on the monarch butterfly, a creature that has become in recent years the symbol of a more expansive vision of North American belonging. Anand Pandian describes affinities for the butterfly articulated and expressed by artists, migrant rights activists, butterfly enthusiasts, and migrants themselves, in the United States and in Mexico. In the company of migrants, both human and lepidopteran, Pandian explores an alternative vision of collective life beyond national walls and borders. With the lifeways of the monarch butterfly, the most crucial lesson has to do with the relationships that propel movement across borders, the ties that draw together those within and those without. A society of rigid walls and borders may seek to repudiate their reality, or their necessity. And yet these relationships remain at work in our world of pervasive motion and migration, binding our fates together with living beings and distant places far beyond the span of the lines we draw.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9712390
L. Nichols
The figure of the “native informant,” as outlined by Spivak, confers a legitimacy of “inside” information for the colonial subject that, ultimately, is generalized to the point of confirming the colonist’s view of the world, challenging nothing and, instead, providing authenticity to existing beliefs. Since Indigenous groups are often associated with primordial nature in the hemispherically American context, there is a long tradition of settler colonial societies appropriating the figure of the Native to claim authentic land rights or establish an identity distinct from Europe. This article argues that, in its modern iteration, appropriation of the native informant within the natural context serves anxieties concerning potentially illegitimate land stewardship for settler colonial societies. Focusing on the native informant figure in Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Overstory, the article explicates how, in the age of climate change, patterns around settler land theft are repeated and repurposed for the settler episteme in which, instead of reconsidering who has the rights to land stewardship, the settler seeks to transfer Indigenous knowledge to themselves, authenticating the settler society’s continued right to the colonized land. While Powers makes significant contributions to reconsidering the European model of an anthropocentric relation to nature, the article argues that The Overstory does this through repeating such settler colonial traditions as associating Indigenous peoples solely with the past and depicting the American landscape in a way that relies on the legal mythology of terra nullius.
{"title":"Becoming Indigenous Again","authors":"L. Nichols","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9712390","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9712390","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The figure of the “native informant,” as outlined by Spivak, confers a legitimacy of “inside” information for the colonial subject that, ultimately, is generalized to the point of confirming the colonist’s view of the world, challenging nothing and, instead, providing authenticity to existing beliefs. Since Indigenous groups are often associated with primordial nature in the hemispherically American context, there is a long tradition of settler colonial societies appropriating the figure of the Native to claim authentic land rights or establish an identity distinct from Europe. This article argues that, in its modern iteration, appropriation of the native informant within the natural context serves anxieties concerning potentially illegitimate land stewardship for settler colonial societies. Focusing on the native informant figure in Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Overstory, the article explicates how, in the age of climate change, patterns around settler land theft are repeated and repurposed for the settler episteme in which, instead of reconsidering who has the rights to land stewardship, the settler seeks to transfer Indigenous knowledge to themselves, authenticating the settler society’s continued right to the colonized land. While Powers makes significant contributions to reconsidering the European model of an anthropocentric relation to nature, the article argues that The Overstory does this through repeating such settler colonial traditions as associating Indigenous peoples solely with the past and depicting the American landscape in a way that relies on the legal mythology of terra nullius.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46443229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9712478
Eduardo O. Kohn
What kind of guidance can the world Eduardo Kohn calls “forest” provide for living well on Earth in times of planetary anthropogenic ecological fragmentation? How, that is, can humans learn to ecologize their ethics? Reflecting on his ongoing ethnographic research in and around Indigenous communities of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, Kohn uses what he learned to help find a path that can orient humans in their attempts to live well in relation to the many kinds of others that make and hold them. Ecologizing ethics, this article argues, turns on understanding the living world as a “thinking forest,” one that is mind manifesting or psychedelic in nature and as such requires a mode of attention that is itself psychedelic. Ethical guidance comes from finding ways to appreciate the “shape” of the larger mind of which people are a part, and in this way, to find direction from that form as it becomes manifest to them. This article discusses, thus, the ways in which an ecologized ethics is linked to the aesthetic ground from which it emerges.
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Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9481462
Andrew McCumber, Patrick Neil Dryden
Archaeology and anthropology treat the presence of animals in mythology and folklore as axiomatically about a culture’s ideas of nature. Sociology often assumes modernity no longer has such myths, but animal imagery abounds. In this article, the authors argue that our relationships with animals and nature are not primarily rational or scientific but formed through these images and the mythologies that come with them. The authors call these images “modern bestiaries” in reference to the medieval proto-encyclopedias that cataloged animals for moral instruction. Modern bestiaries (including alphabet books, sports teams, and car names, among others) generate a holistic worldview that marries a deep love of animals and “nature” to a fundamentally anti-ecological cosmology. The authors examine a particular modern bestiary—the menagerie of gummi animals in the candy aisle. Eating a gummi bear is never merely gastronomic but also an act of mimesis, sympathetic magic, and storytelling in which cultural relationships to animals are formed.
{"title":"The Bestiary in the Candy Aisle","authors":"Andrew McCumber, Patrick Neil Dryden","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9481462","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9481462","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Archaeology and anthropology treat the presence of animals in mythology and folklore as axiomatically about a culture’s ideas of nature. Sociology often assumes modernity no longer has such myths, but animal imagery abounds. In this article, the authors argue that our relationships with animals and nature are not primarily rational or scientific but formed through these images and the mythologies that come with them. The authors call these images “modern bestiaries” in reference to the medieval proto-encyclopedias that cataloged animals for moral instruction. Modern bestiaries (including alphabet books, sports teams, and car names, among others) generate a holistic worldview that marries a deep love of animals and “nature” to a fundamentally anti-ecological cosmology. The authors examine a particular modern bestiary—the menagerie of gummi animals in the candy aisle. Eating a gummi bear is never merely gastronomic but also an act of mimesis, sympathetic magic, and storytelling in which cultural relationships to animals are formed.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47875841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9481429
P. du Plessis
This article explores the skilled arts of tracking and gathering as methods for noticing and theorizing multispecies landscapes in the Kalahari Desert, Botswana. Tracking is typically used to describe a practice of following animals, usually for hunting, whereas gathering primarily refers to the collection of plant and fungal materials. The author presents a case in which these terms have been scrambled during long-term ethnographic field research. The author and his interlocutors tracked the Kalahari desert truffle, an experience that demonstrates how aspects of tracking extend to gathering, but also how the practices are attentive to the movements of landscapes more broadly. This form of tracking attends to multiple spatial and temporal movements that include nonanimals and other nonhumans. It represents a way of noticing the assemblages of more-than-human relations that make up landscapes. These convergences, first identified through tracking, are then explored through the more distributed analytic of gathering. Inspired by Ursula LeGuin’s call to describe stories of gatherers and collectives in her “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” the article argues that thinking tracking through the gathering analytic helps articulate a “carrier bag approach” for understanding landscapes through the gatherings of relations with which they emerge.
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Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9481451
Thom van Dooren
The Hawaiian Islands were once home to one of the most diverse assemblages of terrestrial snails found anywhere on earth, with more than 750 recognized species. Today, however, the majority of these species are extinct, and most of those that remain are headed swiftly in the same direction. But this is just the crisis that we know about, that we can in some way quantify. In Hawai‘i, and all over the world, a diversity of species—many of them invertebrates—are being lost while they still remain unknown to science. In fact, for every described species that blinks out, the best estimates indicate that roughly another four extinctions take place entirely unknown to us. This article focuses on the particular case of Hawai‘i’s snails and the efforts of taxonomists to catalog them as a way into this broader unknown extinction crisis. Snails have particular lessons to offer in understanding and responding to this situation. This article seeks to draw out those lessons, thinking through some of the challenges for storytelling in summoning up these unseen others and in opening up a space for ethical encounter with living and dead beings that must, in important ways, remain beyond the edges of our knowledge.
{"title":"In Search of Lost Snails","authors":"Thom van Dooren","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9481451","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9481451","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The Hawaiian Islands were once home to one of the most diverse assemblages of terrestrial snails found anywhere on earth, with more than 750 recognized species. Today, however, the majority of these species are extinct, and most of those that remain are headed swiftly in the same direction. But this is just the crisis that we know about, that we can in some way quantify. In Hawai‘i, and all over the world, a diversity of species—many of them invertebrates—are being lost while they still remain unknown to science. In fact, for every described species that blinks out, the best estimates indicate that roughly another four extinctions take place entirely unknown to us. This article focuses on the particular case of Hawai‘i’s snails and the efforts of taxonomists to catalog them as a way into this broader unknown extinction crisis. Snails have particular lessons to offer in understanding and responding to this situation. This article seeks to draw out those lessons, thinking through some of the challenges for storytelling in summoning up these unseen others and in opening up a space for ethical encounter with living and dead beings that must, in important ways, remain beyond the edges of our knowledge.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43303368","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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