Contested Ecologies

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Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge Contested Ecologies: Reimagining the Nature-culture Divide in the Global South offers an intervention in the conversations on ecology and on coloniality, and on the ways in which modern thinking, with its bifurcation of nature and culture, constitutes ‘ecology’ within a very particular politics of the cosmos. The chapters in this collection contest the framework of knowledge that has deadlocked nature and culture, tradition and modernity, scientific and indigenous and in doing so makes a case for the value of rethinking knowledge beyond the nature-culture divide.

Contents

List of figures
Abbreviations and acronyms
Foreword
Crain Soudien
Acknowledgements

1 Contested ecologies: Nature and knowledge
Lesley Green

a first intervention: Nature versus Culture
2 Notes towards a political ontology of ‘environmental’ conflicts
Mario Blaser
3 Economic development and cosmopolitical re-involvement: From necessity to sufficiency
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
4 On animism, modernity/colonialism, and the African order of knowledge: Provisional reflections
Harry Garuba

a second intervention: space, time, life
5 About ‘Mariano’s Archive’: Ecologies of stories
Marisol de la Cadena
6 The day-world hawkri and its topologies: On Palikur alternatives to the idea of space
Lesley Green
7 Cultivating krag, refreshing gees: Ecologies of wellbeing in Namaqualand
Joshua B. Cohen
8 Are petitioners makers of rain? Rains, worlds and survival in conflict-torn Buhera, Zimbabwe
Artwell Nhemachena
9 Metaphors for climate adaptation from Zimbabwe: Zephaniah Phiri Maseko and the marriage of water and soil
Christopher Mabeza

a third intervention: sciences and publics
10 Engagements between disparate knowledge traditions: Toward doing difference generatively and in good faith
Helen Verran
11 The making of Sutherlandia as medicine
Diana Gibson and Sanjay Killian
12 Conservation conversations: Improving the dialogue between fishers and fisheries science along the Benguela Coast
Tarryn-Anne Anderson, Kelsey Draper, Greg Duggan, Lesley Green, Astrid Jarre, Jennifer Rogerson, Sven Ragaller and Marieke van Zyl
13 Cape Flats Nature: Rethinking urban ecologies
Tania Katzschner
14 Spotting the leopard: Fieldwork, science and leopard behaviour
Ian Glenn
15 Contesting ecological collapse: Rapa Nui, the island at the end of the world
David Turnbull

16 Closing remarks from the conclusion of the Contested Ecologies Writing Workshop, September 2011
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

About the contributors
Index

Artwell Nhemachena is Zimbabwean researcher who holds a Sawyer Fellowship at the University of Cape Town (UCT), where he is completing his PhD.

Astrid Jarre holds the South African Research Chair in Marine Ecology and Fisheries at UCT.

Christopher Mabeza is a Sawyer Fellow at UCT where he is completing his PhD.
He is a former manager of the Mkuvisi Woodlands Park in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Crain Soudien is Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Cape Town, where he is responsible for institutional transformation

David Turnbull is a Senior Research Fellow at the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (VEIL) in the Architecture Faculty at Melbourne University. His overarching research interest is the ways in which knowledge and space are co-produced. His research encompasses a comparison of knowledge practices across knowledge traditions including western science, with a special focus on how people, practices and ideas move and are assembled in complex polities.

Diana Gibson is a South African medical anthropologist and former HOD of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro is a Brazilian anthropologist based at the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro.�

Harry Garuba is the former Director of the Centre for African Studies at UCT, and a literary scholar.

Helen Verran is an Australian philosopher of science and technology studies and a research chemist who has worked extensively on data archive strategies with Yolnngu academics and communities in Northern Australia, and with mathematics teachers in Nigeria. She is based at the University of Melbourne.

Ian Glenn is the Director of Film and Media Studies at UCT. His research interests focus on environmental media.

Joshua Cohen is a researcher on medicinal plant knowledge, and holds a Sawyer Fellowship at UCT where he is completing his PhD.

Lesley Green is an anthropologist at UCT, and while leading the Sawyer Seminar on Knowledges and Ways of Knowing, was attached to UCT�s� Africa Knowledges Project in the Programme for the Enhancement of Research Capacity.

Mario Blaser is an Argentinian anthropologist who holds the Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Studies at Memorial University, St John�s Canada.

Marisol de la Cadena is a Peruvian anthropologist and knowledge activist based at the University of California at Davis, and the co-convenor of the Natures-Cultures conference held by the Society for Cultural Anthropology in Santa F� in 2010.

Sanja Killian holds a doctorate in psychology and is the former Manager of the DST funded Sutherlandia trials at SAHSMI, UWC

Tarryn-Anne Anderson, Kelsey Draper, Greg Duggan, Jennifer Rogerson, Sven Ragaller, and Marieke Van Zyl are graduate reseachers in Anthropology attached to the Fishers Knowledge Project led by Astrid Jarre, Lesley Green and Barbara Paterson. Their work focused on contestations over knowledge in fishing economies in the Benguela ecosystem from Stilbaai to Walvis Bay.