Tag: Heritage

Climate Emergency and Spiritual Ecology

erasmussen93Leave a comment

“On this side, where our world stands now, we each live our separate lives, isolated within our individual, anxious self. On the other side, we feel the patterns of interrelationship that support and nourish us, and can commune together as a single living community; we feel the mystery and magic of a world full of sacred meaning and purpose. It is only when we stand on this other shore that we can hope to heal our world, to help it to become free of this nightmare of materialism that is destroying its fragile and magical beauty. Only then can we return to our ancient heritage as guardians of the Earth” (Vaughn-Lee 2013: iii).

Sorry for the long hiatus, my passion for anthropology dwindled a bit during these long COVID months. I think we’ve all lost parts of ourselves during this time, no? I am now in the period of remembering who I am and re-imagining my future.

Of course, COVID isn’t far from the mind when thinking about the future, nor is climate change – now officially recognized as a climate emergency. I have just begun the essay anthology Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, written in 2013 but more poignant now than ever. I read it with a sadness and a fear in my heart; what will our future look like? How will generations to come view the earth, both literally, with their eyes, and figuratively, with their hearts? 

Where do you stand with your relationship to the earth? What steps are you taking to mend the fissures between you and nature? This past year–despite COVID–has been great for me in regaining a relationship with my childhood landscapes. I moved back in with my parents and have been exploring the woods, field, and lake on their land. I have learned the names of many plants, found which ones are edible, and I have found another passion that has taken up much of my time this past year: natural dye. In many ways, I feel like coming back to Minnesota and being forced to stay in place was good for me.

My thirst for travel and experience didn’t go away, however, and I recently traveled to the island of Tahiti to meet with some friends from my fieldwork days. I spent a month and a half there not as an anthropologist but merely another tourist (albeit a tourist that stayed with a local family and not in hotels). I brought some yarn and t-shirts along with me and asked Tatie Tahia, the matriarch of the household, which plants could be used for dye. It was refreshing to connect once again to another culture’s traditions and remember how much I love hearing stories about the past and how we can bring these stories into the future. Listening to and working with the past will be vital in the process of imagining a sustainable nature-oriented future.

References:

Vaughn-Lee, Llewellyn. 2013. Introduction. In Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth (pp. i-iv). Point Reyes, CA: The Golden Sufi Center.

Heritage Management in the Marquesas Islands

erasmussen93Leave a comment

“The UNESCO WHL is intended to help identify, protect, and preserve certain heritage for the benefit of all humanity (UNESCO 2018). Yet, both in reality and in the future imagined by Marquesans, this includes a commoditization of heritage that prioritizes material preservation over attention to ancestral meanings or respect…. Despite intentions to respect local culture and meaning, the recognition of world heritage thus becomes an exercise of power and, ultimately, governance by the state and the global market” (Donaldson 2019, 117).

Working with the Ancestors is a beautiful depiction of the way different groups interact with heritage in the Marquesas Islands, a place close to my heart. Emily Donaldson’s book describes heritage in the Marquesas and the problems Marquesans face in the twenty-first century. One of the issues at the forefront of heritage studies is the way in which UNESCO and other preservationist organizations follow standardized rules of heritage listing and management, which leads to at best an ignoring of local values and at worst a complete dispossession. Donaldson writes, “The UNESCO project has relied primarily on an authorized understanding of heritage fed by nonlocal funding, political influence, and the globally dominant heritage discourse. As with similar cases in nature conservation, the result is an ongoing negotiation between the elite, often global ‘eco-discourses’ of powerful outsiders and local, emplaced knowledge of the land (Campbell 2005, 311). In the process, imposed political, economic, and intellectual influences are driving indigenous peoples to question their own superior knowledge of their surroundings in favor of foreign ‘expert’ opinions” (Donaldson 2019, 127).

As Donaldson points out, the silencing of local and indigenous voices is a problem in both heritage and conservation management. People working in these fields should find ways to uplift indigenous values, instead of subsuming them in the name of global visions (a great book on the clash of indigenous groups and conservation visions is Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the Global Dreamtimes of Environmentalism by Tracey Heatherington). This book would be a great read for anybody going into the field of heritage management. “A true commitment to the future of Marquesan culture and the land instead requires an acknowledgement of islanders’ rich social and spiritual relationships with the bush, and the recasting of Marquesan understandings of respect, ownership, and time as a potential asset, not a hindrance, to the preservation of ‘heritage’” (Donaldson 2019, 143).

References:

Campbell, Ben. 2005. “Changing Protection Policies and Ethnographies of Environmental Engagement.” Conservation and Society 3 (2): 280-322.
Donaldson, E. 2019. Working with the Ancestors: Mana and Place in the Marquesas Islands. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
Heatherington, T. 2010. Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the Global Dreamtimes of Environmentalism. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
UNESCO 2018. “World Heritage.” http://whc.unesco.org/en/about.

Threats to the Yanomami

erasmussen93Leave a comment

“We strongly urge an intervention on behalf of the Yanomami by persuading the governments of Brazil and Venezuela, through sanctions or other means, to cease their incendiary anti-indigenous language, and effectively respond to this blatant case of genocide, ethnocide, and ecocide. The Yanomami are an essential part of the world’s diverse heritage. They help tell the story of all the peoples of the Amazon. To permit the diminishment or destruction of this invaluable community would be a terrible mistake.”

This quote appears as the final paragraph in a letter written by the American Anthropological Association to address the ongoing issue of mining in Yanomami territory, in the Amazon. Goldminers, ever encroaching illegally onto Amazonian land, spread disease and pollute rivers. These problems have seen an increase since the election of President Bolsonaro, who fails to act and has made some anti-indigenous comments. The rest of AAA’s letter can be read here, and some good articles to read on the topic are this Guardian article and this Mongabay article. This is happening today, this is happening now.

Hard-time foods of Japan’s popular classes

erasmussen93Leave a comment

“I remember quite clearly, he continued with no change of expression, how I used to go into the mountains with my classmates after the war to collect locusts, which we would bring back to school and boil with shoyu. We also ate boiled silkworm larvae in those days, he said, and stopped only when the silk industry declined in the 1960s and the supply of insects dried up. It was hard-times food, but it was good food. It was part of our cuisine, but you would never know that now. It was the culture of the popular classes, he said, a culture rarely recorded and always forgotten” (Raffles 2010, p. 354).

From Hugh Raffles’ Insectopedia. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in human-animal interactions (and more academically multispecies ethnography, although Insectopedia is not an ethnography) and the nature-culture divide. A great place to get some starting ideas about the ways our lives are entangled with the insects and other animals around us.

The last sentence is the reason I chose this quote, and the note I have written in the margin of this book reads “what other pieces of cultural memory and heritage around the world are left to be forgotten?” Just something to think about.

Final note – gotta love going outside and finding some insects! It’s amazing the multitude of these animals, from bees to dirt mites and all other critters. Makes me think back to an undergraduate biology study I performed on collembola (although not technically an insect, I believe, check out this blog post on these cute microscopic creatures).

A preying mantis hangs out in a garden in Minamata, Japan (photo taken September 2016)

References

Raffles, H. 2010. Insectopedia. New York, NY: Vintage Books.