Hello and welcome to the June newsletter of morethanhumanworlds! This month, I'm sharing a new article on growing plants and people in West Papua published in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, an interview on multispecies ethnography and plantation lifeworlds featured on the Max Planck Institute's kunst.log, and a recorded guest lecture on the changing meanings of hunger and satiety in West Papua, hosted by the University of Wisconsin's Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Some exciting conferences and online talks are coming up this month! I'll be in conversation with scholars at roundtables on "Environmental Humanities in Oceania and the Pacific" and on "Just Multispecies Food Entanglements" at the 2021 Native American and Indigenous Studies Annual conference and the 2021 Joint Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Food and Society, Agriculture, Food & Human Values Society, Canadian Association for Food Studies, and Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition. I'll also be hosting two talks with social anthropologists Alyssa Paredes and Kristina Lyons as part of ARC-funded The Promise of Multispecies Justice project. In this month's Morethanhuman Matters interview, I speak with Natasha Fijn, an ethnographic researcher and observational filmmaker based at the Australian National University’s Mongolia Institute. Natasha’s ongoing interest is in cross-cultural perceptions and attitudes towards other animals, as well as the use of the visual, particularly observational filmmaking, as an integral part of her research. If you'd like to share resources, news, or anything else related to morethanhumanworlds, please send them to me for inclusion in the July newsletter. Enjoy and thank you for subscribing to morethanhumanworlds! |
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NEW OUTPUTS Read an article on growing plants and people in West Papua, published in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. In this article, I explore how processes of monocrop capitalist production undermine processes of multispecies social reproduction across human and vegetal realms in rural West Papua. Read an interview on multispecies ethnography and plantation lifeworlds featured on the Max Planck Institute's kunst.log. In this interview, I share some thoughts on distributed personhood, Indigenous knowledges, and multispecies cosmology among Marind peoples of West Papua. |
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Listen to a guest lecture on the changing meanings of hunger and satiety in West Papua, hosted by the University of Wisconsin's Center for Southeast Asian Studies. In this talk, I explore how mass deforestation and agribusiness expansion are giving rise to new kinds of "hunger" among Marind, that communicate the material and symbolic force of capitalist modernity on more-than-human relations of eating and being eaten. To read an article version of this talk in Medical Anthropology, click here. |
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UPCOMING EVENTS Join us for a roundtable on "Just Multispecies Food Entanglements" at the 2021 Joint Annual Conference of The Association for the Study of Food and Society, Agriculture, Food & Human Values Society, Canadian Association for Food Studies, and Society for the Anthropology of Food & Nutrition. In conversation with Zoe Todd, Peter Andree, Sarah Elton, and Myriam Durocher. Join us for a roundtable on "Environmental Humanities in Oceania and the Pacific Islands" at the 2021 Native American and Indigenous Studies Annual conference. In conversation with Craig Santoz Perez, Rebecca Hogue, Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, Olivia Quintanilla, Michael Lujan Bevacqua, and Brandy Nālani McDougall. I'll also be hosting two online talks with anthropologists Alyssa Paredes (University of Michigan) and Kristina Lyons (University of Pennsylvania) as part of The Promise of Multispecies Justice project. Alyssa Paredes will explore how justice can become an exclusionary project when operating within the limited legal frameworks and delimiting capitalist logics afforded by plantation agriculture. (check out a fresh-off-the press article by Alyssa in the "For the Reading List" section below!) Kristina Lyons will explore the “excesses” and aspirational horizons of progressive visions in general, and of rights of nature paradigms in nascent climate jurisprudence in particular. To register for upcoming Promise of Multispecies Justice talks, visit www.multispeciesjustice.space. |
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"I wanted to think about the social engagement between species differently, where the human community is still reliant upon animals for survival and where herd animals still live a free-ranging existence and are not bound by the same human-imposed life constraints." Natasha Fijn |
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MORETHANHUMAN MATTERS This week, morethanhuman matters interviews Natasha Fijn, an ethnographic researcher and observational filmmaker based at the Australian National University’s Mongolia Institute. Natasha’s ongoing interest is in cross-cultural perceptions and attitudes towards other animals, as well as the use of the visual, particularly observational filmmaking, as an integral part of her research. | | |
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FOR THE READING LIST Paredes, Alyssa. 2021. “Experimental Science for the ‘Bananapocalypse’: Counter Politics in the Plantationocene.” Ethnos. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2021.1919172. On how renewed scientific sensibilities can offers ways to expand local strategies for transformative political praxis in the face of political constraints in the plantation sector. |
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Hermanns, Rachel. 2020. “Spirits Out of Place: Relational Landscapes and Environmental Change in East Kalimantan, Indonesia.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26 (4): 766–85. On how spiritual and ritual relations with nonhumans in Kalimantan's plantation landscapes reflect historical and ongoing experiences of life and sociality in the forest and human domains. |
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