Land Violence and the Indigenous Female Body: Mapping the Guarani and Kaiowá experience

By Anaclara Giurfa de Brito and Tarsila Iglecio.

With contributions Amelia Yates, Anna Magrì, and Sara Cano Diaz.

Edited by Jaqueline Aranduhá.

Leia este artigo em português em: https://uclcaos.files.wordpress.com/2022/05/violencia-territorial-e-o-corpo-indigena-feminino-2.pdf

The First March of Indigenous Women took place in Brasília in 2019. The march gathered approximately 2,500 women from 130 different Indigenous communities to demand the protection of their fundamental rights. The “Outcome Document” produced by the marchers stated:

“We are embedded in the land, since this is where we look for our ancestors and what we use to nourish our life. For these reasons, we don’t see our territory as a good to be sold, exchanged, or exploited. Our land is our own life, our body, our spirit”.

Across the world, Indigenous women have centred their resistance against violence by connecting land and gender-based violence. For Indigenous communities, the land is a core living aspect of culture. Indigeneity and womanhood embrace reciprocal relationships between territory, spirit, human and other beings (Kermoal and Altamirano-Jimenez 2016: 9). The struggle for equal access to the land is then not only a struggle for Indigenous sovereignty but also a struggle for the valuation of women’s bodies and reproductive work. The expropriation of territories involves simultaneously the transformation of women’s experiential meanings and life-forms into commodities. Going beyond notions of “property”, indigenous cosmovision of land embodies cycles, practices, and ancestral knowledge (Arvin et al. 2013: 21). Environmental changes can then endanger the community’s cosmology and survival.

The expression “cuerpo-territorio” (“body-territory”) emerges from Latin-American feminist, Indigenous, and afro-descendant movements and expresses historical violence perpetrated against feminized and/or racialized body-spaces. The Latin American communitarian feminists (feminismos comunitarios) have coined the concept of “cuerpo-territorio” by joining the fight for their traditional territories to the defense and protection of their bodies (Cabnal, 2015; CMCTF, 2017). The explicit union between the body and the territory introduces us to a particular way to move in the world – deeply rooted in an understanding of personhood, undistinguished from the land. “Cuerpo-Territorio’’ reveals a common and regional history of colonial and patriarchal relations of power where feminised bodies and territories are spaces for conquest and exploitation. The body is then a territory-place to conquer, with experiences, emotions, and sensations, while simultaneously becoming a space and tool of denunciation. In this way, land and bodies render oppression and humiliation visible through pain and memory. Their transformative relationship moves from spaces of conflict to resistance (Cabnal 2010; Cruz Hernández 2016; Segato 2016; Carrillo Rodríguez 2020).

Although “Cuerpo-Territorio” emerges in a Latin American context, its origins trace back to European cosmology, drawing dichotomies between culture/nature, male/female, and civilization/wilderness (Cronon 1996; Ulloa 2016). As nature previously contained places with little to no population, the European notion of wilderness expressed a fearful understanding of the natural environment, associated with the inability to control and exploit spaces. Likewise, womanhood was historically interrelated to nature which allowed European societies to present both as ‘territories of subjugation’. When these notions were brought into the colonies, the confrontation with the ‘other’ left colonisers with a vision of ‘chaos’, ‘uncontrollability’, and ‘uncivilisation’. New territories seemed to present a challenge for their domestication and exploitation explicitly leading to the legitimization of the use of violence towards new bodies and territories (Cronon 1996). In Latin America, this logic was institutionalised through the construction of nation-states, which legally and structurally allowed processes of dispossession and exploitation. Non-white and feminized bodies have been marginalized alongside undomesticated territories, targeted as spaces of conflict and violence. Their survival has thus proven the interrelationship to be strong and resilient, drawing a historical line of fight and resistance.

In Mato Grosso do Sul, Central-West of Brazil, the Great Assembly of Guarani and Kaiowá women – Kuñangue Aty Guasu – have undertaken the leadership of the community’s fight. Despite being the region with the highest incidence of violence, Mato Grosso do Sul is characterised as being one of the state’s “blind spots” for the lack of public policies and studies addressed towards gender-based violence. Additionally, the alarming violence Indigenous communities face every day is ignored and institutionally neglected (if not justified) leaving no political space for demands and equity. As a response to this, the Guarani and Kaiowá women decided to register and communicate themselves the violence the community is facing in their region. In 2019, Kuñangue Aty Guasu started collecting individual reports on violence through on-site visitations which led to the creation of a valuable database. This allowed them to write “Corpos Silenciados, Vozes Presentes” (“Silenced Bodies, Present Voices”), an insightful understanding of violence, bodies, and territories. In this work, they introduce us to the Guarani and Kaiowá cosmology and highlight the absence of the word “violence” in their native languages (Kuñangue Aty Guasu 2020). Despite this, violence seems to contagiously enter their communities, poison their lands, intoxicate their youth, reduce their territories, appropriate and silence their bodies.

The Making Violence Visible Map
https://en.kunangue.com/mapainterativo

These 120 pages have then become the seeds to create an interactive map which would digitally amplify Guarani’s and Kaiowá’s voices at an international level. The creation of this map is the result of Kuñangue Aty Guasu’s work and resistance – supported by the ‘’Instituto de Arte e Cultura – IDAC” and the UCL Multimedia Anthropology Lab. The project was named “Making Violence Visible: Mapping Violence against Guarani and Kaiowá Women” and it initiated a multifaceted process of translation. The challenge was to ‘translate’ bodies and territories into digital voices of resistance. By adopting a “karai” (“non-Indigenous”) way to denounce violence, GK women showed how their fight needed to ‘bend’ and follow ‘dominant’ pathways in order to be heard and seen. Despite the pain and difficulty to quantify different accounts of violence, they identified and categorised 21 forms of violence. Several categories didn’t match with legal or internationally recognized violence, such as the “Brazilian state and the violence against our bodies” which intertwines genocide, epistemicide and ecocide. The map is a political tool, with audiovisual content that allows the viewer to feel and understand the emotional weight these territories carry, alongside the collective struggle and memory of GK women. Kuñangue Aty Guasu’s interactive map is thus the embodiment of survival, strength, and memory. It is constantly fed by new reports and incidents of violence, aiming to help its community to stand up against social injustice whilst also building a strong international network of solidarity and resistance.

Indigenous women are the most heavily impacted by colonial-patriarchal processes of land dispossession. The end goal has been the erasure of indigenous peoples and the possession of their territories; this is why women and their reproductive networks have been targeted (VLVB Report and Toolkit, 2016). Feminicidal violence is structured around the destruction of reproductive paths and ecosystems since it goes against the communities’ movements and practices on the grounds of ancestral land-based connections (Card 2003: 63). These ongoing assaults against Indigenous lands, bodies, and communal “webs of life” have made Indigenous women the protagonists of struggles against environmental degradation. In Mato Grosso do Sul, the collusion of power between the Brazilian state, local farmers, and transnational corporations is putting land defenders at extreme risk of violence. It is vital that the voices and experiences of GK women, and Indigenous women globally, continue to be heard and amplified, while their struggles against environmental degradation and climate collapse are strengthened.

Bibliography

Arvin, Maile, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill. 2013. “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy.” Feminist Formations 25 (1): 8–34. https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2013.0006.

Cabnal, Lorena. 2010. Feminismos diversos: el feminismo comunitario. ACSUR – Las Segovias.

Card, Claudia. 2003. “Genocide and Social Death.” Hypatia, 18(1): 63-79.

Carrillo Rodríguez, Eliana Carolina. 2020. “Cuerpos-Agua : Defensa y Cuidado Del Territorio a Través de La Experiencia de Las Mujeres de La Escuela Campesina de Chapacual, Nariño.” Undergraduate thesis. https://repository.javeriana.edu.co/handle/10554/49785.

Cronon, William. 1996. “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Environmental History 1 (1): 7. https://doi.org/10.2307/3985059.

Cruz Hernández, Delmy Tania. 2016. “Una Mirada Muy Otra a Los Territorios-Cuerpos Femeninos.” Solar: Revista de Filosofía Iberoamericana, June.

Kermoal, Nathalie, and Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez, eds. 2016. Living on the Land: Indigenous Women’s Understanding of Place. Athabasca University Press. https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771990417.01.

Kuñangue Aty Guasu. 2020. “Corpos Silenciados, Vozes Presentes: A Violência No Olhar Das Mulheres Kaiowá e Guarani,” November.

Segato, Rita. 2016. La Guerra Contra Las Mujeres. Traficantes de Sueños.

Ulloa, Astrid. 2016. “Feminismos Territoriales En América Latina: Defensas de La Vida Frente a Los Extractivismos.” Nómadas 45 (October).

Women’s Earth Alliance, and Native Youth Sexual Health Network. 2016. “Violence on the Land, Violence on Our Bodies. Building an Indigenous Response to Environmental Violence.” A partnership of Women’s Earth Alliance and Native Youth Sexual Health Network.

Decolonising protected areas: Sapelli in eastern Cameroon

By Simon Hoyte

In 2018, the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar remarked:

We are facing modern problems for which there are no longer modern solutions

What he’s referring to is that the worsening ecological crises, created through Western knowledge systems, cannot be solved by Western knowledge systems despite being widely considered ‘advanced’ and ‘modern’.

This involves the mindset and understandings of the world that Western science is rooted in and maintains. Another way to put it, in the words of Ajay Parasram and Lisa Tilley is that:

Colonial science alone is ill-equipped to solve colonial problems

Colonial science? Knowledge is not created or maintained in a vacuum, it is a product of particular contexts, norms, influences, and values; “The truth is that facts and frameworks reflect the worldviews and truths of their creators” as Amber Huff and Nathan Oxley phrase it. And most people in the world, before colonial invasion at least, do not share the same worldviews and truths as Westerners. Western science teaches us that these alternate systems are incorrect, for example animist societies who *know* how the world is and value it based on spiritual relations (read more here).

Nature conservation is at the forefront of colonial science. The majority of nature conservation remains centred on the creation of protected areas, built to keep ‘nature’ in and people out. In the most extreme these involve the eviction and brutalising of indigenous and local communities who are in the way of nature (such as that ongoing around Messok-Dja in Congo). In the least extreme cases protected areas may involve some level of so-called ‘sustainable use’ by local people and perhaps even co-management or indigenous protected areas. But the concept of protected areas itself is increasingly being criticised because it is inextricably dependent on a separation between people and ‘nature’, when actually the majority world (those outside of the West) see no such dividing lines at all.

Lobéké National Park in south-eastern Cameroon is a prime example.

The park was created in 1999 to protect the rich biodiversity of the region from poaching. Lines were drawn on maps and eco-guards were employed to conduct armed patrols of the forest. Unfortunately, despite claims that local Baka hunter-gatherer and Bangando communities were consulted and gained access to the park which was ‘For them a dream came true!’, in reality access has been heavily restricted resulting in cultural destruction, and the deterioration of livelihoods thereby forcing many into the illegal wildlife trade. Unsurprisingly, this has led to increased poaching and fewer and fewer animals.

Some Baka communities have been instructed to apply for permission before entering the forest by filling in paperwork, but the vast majority of people are illiterate and cannot wait to receive permission before going in search of food, the permit itself only lasting for a couple of weeks before having to renew it again. Most worryingly, serious cases of abuse and violence by eco-guards have been recorded towards Baka people surrounding the park, including beatings, torture, destruction of villages, and confiscation of food. Conservation can of course never be successful or sustainable when it is goes hand-in-hand with human rights abuses. Ironically, it is the Baka and their ancestors who have inhabited these forests for many millennia and, through their practices and knowledge, have played a part in making the forest as rich as it is today.

*Honey collecting with a bundle of smoking leaves*

In 2019, a memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed between the Baka of this region and the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife. The deal was that the Baka will be allowed access to the park in order to hunt, fish, forage and carry out cultural activities, but only if following strict restrictions on size of prey, hunting equipment and many other things.

Human rights organisations have criticised the MoU for it’s vagueness on what actual rights the Baka will have with regard to accessing the park, and that communication with communities has been so poor that they often ‘claimed to know nothing of the MoU (some not even knowing what “MoU” meant)’. The whole idea of an MoU itself as a solution in this case should be put into context when considering more fundamentally that this forest has been stolen from local people (‘green grabbing’) who need it to survive, despite the root causes of ivory trafficking, pangolin smuggling, and logging being elsewhere.

In any case, the MoU exists and the task now is to properly monitor it. In this vein, WWF, who supports the government in managing Lobéké, invited me to initiate Sapelli citizen science projects alongside the Baka of Lobéké. Whilst being initially hesitant to work in this controversial and problematic context, I decided that this was an opportunity to initiate change, whereby the voices and values of the Baka could be taken seriously.

Maximising the bottom-up design of the project and the sharing of knowledge between Baka communities, I asked Mangombe, a friend from my primary fieldwork village, if he’d like to join me in the new WWF work. He hastily agreed, excited about meeting many new Baka families in a different region and learning medicines of the forest that are new to him.

We set off on the 5-day journey from Bemba village on the edge of the Ngoyla-Mintom forests to the Lobéké forests of the East.

Contrary to the way conservation projects normally work, minimal planning and design was done before visiting communities in order to promote local leadership. The Sapelli technology was not initially mentioned in village meetings at all – doing so may lead to communities joining the project simply because they want to use a smartphone. Instead, we sat down and asked communities about their forest – what concerns they have, what their current situation is like, how the forest has changed, how intact their traditions are, what their relationships are like with ministry eco-guards, WWF, non-Baka communities.

These conversations revealed all sorts of interesting insights: problems with accessing the forest due to abusive eco-guards and absurd requirements to apply for written permission; conflict with safari reserves who keep the Baka out by employing heavily-armed personnel (who shoot first and ask questions later); anger over logging companies who are cutting down the forest, for which the Baka see no benefits, and includes important medicinal and fruiting trees; wildlife traffickers that arrive, coercing some local people to help, and smuggle animals and trophies away by tipping off officials; concerns by elders that Baka ecological knowledge and cultural heritage is vanishing and failing to be passed on to the next generation, amongst many other things. Two villages told us of concerted efforts by government guards to destroy Baka culture by threatening communities to stop calling the ancient and most powerful spirit of the forest – ‘Ejengi‘. This was shocking to for us to hear because of the fundamental role Ejengiplays in male initiation, teaching boys how to walk in the forest, identify medicines, hunt animals, and other knowledge to survive, and also his role in mediating conflicts and at other times of distress (watch this for more). “We need to have Ejengi in our village” the women told me.

Sapelli projects emerged from these concerns, and with constant dialogue with the communities (if you’re not familiar with Sapelli, see here). Sapelli was not presented as a solution to all the problems, but more so as a tool which could help with addressing specific problems which we identified together: increasing access to the forest by mapping important resources (fruit trees, honey, wild yam, fishing and hunting sites, and medicinal trees; a requirement for access within the MoU), reporting wildlife poaching, documenting instances of violence and abuse, and recording where animals eat and damage crops (human-wildlife conflict).

At a meeting on the MoU there was a change of tune in regard to Ejengi. WWF and the ministry decided that the Baka should be allowed to hunt elephants in order to practice the Ejengiceremony, but restricted to a maximum of one per year for several villages grouped together. In order for this to work, they said, it would have to be carefully monitored; but how do you carefully monitor a forest spirit? Sapelli, the Baka decided, could play a part in this by alerting authorities as to when Ejengi has arrived and whether the hunting of an elephant may be necessary.

One of the best parts of a bottom-up approach is the tendency to produce unexpected outcomes – the mapping of Ejengi, but also the youths in one village who proposed that Sapelli could help them map potential sites for football pitches (though later changed their minds).

It all hinges on the process of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC): being honest with communities about the possible advantages and risks of the projects, and ensuring that proper understanding is behind their decision to accept or deny the projects. Having these conversations relies upon trust, and, having worked with the Baka in Cameroon since 2016, I’ve learnt how this can be achieved. Speaking the Baka language is the most impactful, and I’ve learnt it through living in Mangombe’s village: hard work but opens up so much. The WWF staff accompanying me included two Baka employees, meaning that for many meetings and also amongst ourselves we would be speaking in Baka. Staying overnight in each community where we would share food, hear stories and histories, and get to know people more genuinely was invaluable.

*The village built us mongulus to sleep in overnight*

The Sapelli software is made up of icons in order to include those who cannot read and write (such as the Baka), and I’ve found that if these icons are designed by each community themselves, not only does the software make much more sense, but community members feel a sense of ownership over the technology. This process of locally-led ‘co-design’ is an important part of trying to decolonise research.

Training in how to use the smartphones was done with a self-selected team within each community over two or three sessions in the forest, during which questions were encouraged and the FPIC process continued. Communities decide for themselves how they will manage the phone – who will keep and charge it and how they will share it -, where exactly their data will go and who will have access to it, and for what purpose. It’s all well and good to involve indigenous peoples in participative, innovative projects, but if they do not have the opportunity to decide on who has access to their data and for what reason, are these really so different from top-down, colonial methodologies?

*Icons from one Sapelli project depicting poaching, human-wildlife conflict, abuse, and fishing (left), eco-guard violence (middle), and Ejengi (right)*

The primary use of Sapelli in all five villages centres on helping to regain access to the forest, both the national park, and its periphery – a forest taken from them, but in which their ancestors thrived and their identities and spiritual world still depend. But this project too requires strong collaboration with outsiders (WWF, the ministry, ExCiteS) in order for the data to change things, and it’s us outsiders who remain in the position to actually take actions or not.

So, whilst this is a positive step, I don’t think it goes far enough. Conservation must shift towards autonomous management, whereby communities themselves receive the funding (perhaps in the form of organisations or associations), and protect landscapes as a part of a complex web of social-ecological connections. Indigenous protected areas, like those in Australia, go part of the way, but so-called ‘biocultural heritage territories‘ must be the objective of all conservationists – “Their main goal is holistic wellbeing, rather than conservation, but holistic wellbeing means the wellbeing of both people and nature, and results in conservation as the outcome of an autonomous process. This reflects Indigenous peoples’ holistic worldview that biodiversity and culture — or nature and people — are inextricably linked and cannot be separated.” This has also been termed ‘flourishing diversity‘, which stresses the necessity of learning from indigenous wisdom traditions.

Such ideas of conservation are likely to differ hugely from those in the West and the average WWF supporter. ‘Modern’ solutions must become increasingly about local, alternative, decolonised solutions, which embrace other knowledges and world-views on an equal level, which Sapelli and similar tools can certainly help with.

I’m sure these will, in most cases, seem radical. But to those who live within the majority of the world’s conservation hotspots and are on the frontline of ecological and cultural crisis, such as the Baka, these ideas are not at all new and are practiced through everyday life. They have, therefore, always been modern.

Acknowledgment to Mangombe Felix, Yvette Mongondji, and Bibi, without whom this project would not have materialised. Endlessly hard-working, intelligent, and generous
Funded by the European Research Council Horizon 2020 and WWF

Performing sustainable agriculture in the Peruvian Amazon

Faure notes from the field

Agathe Faure
MRes Social Anthropology
University College London

I conducted ethnographic fieldwork from May to July 2015 in villages of cacao farmers along the river of Alto Huayabamba, Peruvian Amazonia. Employed by an international company providing environmental services, I was to observe environmental programmes through their local implementation in the area. I quickly realised that the Alto Huayabamba had been the arena of complex dramaturgies.

First covered by cornfields, providing just enough to cover farmers’ basic necessities, the region became a red zone of coca production in the 1960s. According to the U.S. State Department (1991), 200,000 acres of coca were cultivated in the region in 1990, being 40% of the world coca crop. Under growing pressure from the United States, the Peruvian government began a series of U.S. funded coca eradication in the region (Kawell 1995: 405). Alto Huayabamba was left completely depleted, socio-economically and environmentally. National and transnational environmental organisations, orchestrated by USAID, decided to re-construct a profitable space to grow another plant, cacao[1], setting up a new production scenery, in response to global trends of neoliberalised nature. Environment was then built as what Dasgupta (2007) calls “natural capital”, i.e. a resource base for wealth to grow through the dynamics of extracting from, polluting and conserving.

During my fieldwork, I could observe the evolution of environmental conservation towards neoliberal concerns. Environmental programmes there approached conservation as being potentially achieved through the sustainable development of economic markets that are based on in situ biological diversity. These markets were seen to enable the flow of income to reach “poor people” living in biologically diverse places (see West 2006: xii). In turn, these people were to conserve the biological diversity on which the markets they now rely on are based.

Consequently, environmental programmes there created what West (ibid.) calls “conservation-as-development projects”, which assume that environmental conservation can engender economic development for rural peoples, and that what the latter need and want in terms of development is to be met by biodiversity on their lands. The script was clear: in exchange for modernisation and good cacao production, farmers had to take on the role of conservationists in order to justify the market of environmental services now recruiting them.

I first feared that farmers were taking their new parts too seriously, as, during my first weeks there, they seemed to be shaped beyond their discourses, i.e. in their own subjectivities. The analysis of everyday practice in lived experiences however revealed that farmers were actually re-enacting themselves in a place they were themselves actively producing. Fieldwork allowed me to nuance my first judgements. I now agree with Mohan (2001: 164): if inequalities of power in spaces exist, they create hybrid places that those viewed as powerless can actively contribute to produce. Intersections of spaces allow new possibilities for challenging hegemonic power relations (Gaventa 2004: 39). In Alto Huayabamba, the opening of previously closed spaces (corn and coca) has indeed actually contributed to new mobilizations and critical consciousness. Environmental programmes did provide possibilities for transformational change. Environment was then used to construct a socio-political and ecological place, seen as a place of “tranquillity”[2]. Slowly growing, cacao trees allowed farmers to benefit from a socio-economic rebirth and re-create a space of support and security. Farmers were often comparing the strength of trees, the difficulties in growing them and taking care of them through time to how strong they were feeling socially in a new environment of union and cohesion. Cacao trees were depicted as the emblem of “stability”[3]. As opposed to coca plants, growing quickly and easily everywhere, impoverishing soil, giving what people described as “quick money”, cacao trees were environmentally and socially constructive.

Far from merely parroting discourses or acting as ventriloquists, farmers were actually playing their own role in order to benefit socio-economically from a new opened environment. They were using neoliberalised power relations to construct their own place of tranquillity and locality of agricultural communities.

Bibilography

Dasgupta, P. (2007) ‘Nature And The Economy’, Journal of Applied Ecology,
44 (3), pp. 475-487.

Gaventa, J. (2004) ‘Towards participatory governance: assessing the
transformative possibilities’. In S. Hickey and G. Mohan (eds) Participation: From tyranny to transformation, London: Zed Books, pp 25-41.

Kawell, J.A. (1995) ‘The Cocaine Economy’ In O. Starn, C. Degregori and R. Kirk (eds) The Peru Reader. History, Culture and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.

Mohan, G. (2001) ‘Beyond Participation: Strategies for Deeper

Empowerment’. In B. Cooke and U. Kothari (eds) Participation: The New
Tyranny? London: Zed Books, pp. 153-67.

U.S. State Department (1991) International Narcotics Control Strategy Report.

West, P. (2006) Conservation is our government now: the politics of ecology
in Papua New Guinea. Durham: Duke University Press.

Footnotes

[1] a small tropical evergreen tree, which bears cacao seeds, from which cocoa, cocoa butter and chocolate are made.

[2] “tranquilidad”

[3] “estabilidad”

Climate change and the crisis of reciprocal relations among the Q’eros (Cuzco, Peru)

Geremia Cometti
Postdoctoral Fellow
Swiss National Science Foundation at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale in Paris

The Q’eros are an indigenous group living on the oriental slope of the Cordillera Vilcanota, in the department of Cuzco, Peru. They are split into five transhumant communities spanning three ‘ecological levels’. The highest level, the puna, ranges from 3,800 to 4,600 meters in altitude. At this level the alpacas and llamas are bred. At the qheswa, the intermediary level ranging from 3,200 to 3,800 metres, the Q’eros cultivate different types of tubers. Finally, from 1,400 to 2,400 metres, there is the yunga, a wooded zone cultivated with maize. Climatic changes, especially through changes in rainfall patterns, significantly impact the agricultural productions of the Q’eros, and endanger the health and existence of their livestock. Continue reading “Climate change and the crisis of reciprocal relations among the Q’eros (Cuzco, Peru)” →

Globalizing the climate. Climatizing the world

Edouard Morena
CNRS/LADYSS

In this thematic Notes From The Field, Edouard Morena of CNRS/LADYSS describes a collaborative ethnographic project centring around the COP21 climate talks in Paris, December 2015.

Abstract

The 21^st Conference of the Parties to the Climate convention (COP21) in Paris (2015) is commonly presented as a historic last chance to set the world on a course that prevents catastrophic climate change. By bringing together negotiators, scientists, journalists and representatives of global civil society, it also constitutes a privileged vantage point – an ‘emblematic instance’ – for the study of global environmental governance ‘in the making’.

In focusing almost exclusively on the multilateral negotiations, the bulk of current research on climate governance tends to lose sight of the ‘bigger picture’ of what is at stake in climate debates. Climate negotiations address a growing number of issues, from debates about development, energy and forests, to biodiversity, equity and urban planning. In turn, climate conferences gather a wide array of actors from different backgrounds that carry distinctive understandings of the problem, its causes and possible solutions. This points to a transformation of global debates involving both a ‘globalisation of the climate question’ and a ‘climatisation of the world’. Continue reading “Globalizing the climate. Climatizing the world” →

Call for Contributions – Notes and Queries from the Field

UCL’s Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability would like to invite contributions for the Notes and Queries from the Field section of the CAOS blog.

This section of the blog offers a relatively free format, giving students and researchers currently in the field or who have recently returned the opportunity to submit fresh observations and reflections, on which they would like feedback from others. The comments section will be open for discussion and advice.

If you would like to contribute, please send completed drafts or ideas to Marc Brightman – m.brightman[at]ucl.ac.uk