Abstracts are arranged below by panel following the sequence given in the conference schedule.

Religion & Representation

Allegra Lovejoy Wiprud, F&ES + Divinity
Personhood of Trees in Hindu Practice and Philosophy

Who are trees for Hindus? This paper explores concepts of personhood of trees in Hindu traditions. While the personhood of rivers – and even their divinity – is fairly well understood in Hinduism, little literature exists on the personhood of trees. Similarly, much of the literature on animism focuses on the animate (creatures that move), yet far less has been explored about animism beyond the animate. This paper explores the personhood of trees in Hindu traditions based on the work of David Haberman and others. Animist literature from other socioreligious contexts is also utilized to help form conceptual bridges where original research is lacking in Hinduism.

Annalea Rose Thiessen, Divinity
Iconic-Seeing: Shifting the Human Relation to the Earth

In this paper, I will work constructively with the logic of the (Christian) icon, as presented by scholars Norman Wirzba and Bruce Foltz, in order to think through a reorientation of the human relation to the earth. My starting point, upon which I will briefly expound, is the common theological distinction between idol and icon. In basic terms, the idol is that of which one decides or determines the meaning, whereas the icon is a localized site of the divine, a divinely saturated experience which has the effect of shifting the human’s focus and self-understanding. As Norman Wirzba puts it, the icon “overwhelms us and calls into question the expectations through which we [at first] approached it. In [this]…a new form of subjectivity begins to take shape.” Using the structure of the icon, Bruce Foltz presents the notion of the earth as iconic, as indwelt by the divine. The structure of iconic-seeing (of the divine in things) emphasizes the place of the human being as radically open to being affected and transformed insofar as the icon informs and grants to the human being a shifted sense of self (or transfigured way of being). It is this transfigured relation to the earth – this phenomenon of being affected – that I will highlight in this paper. Conceptually, then, rather than the earth as (determined) idol, the idea of iconic-seeing provides a way of being which opens the human to being affected anew by its relation to the iconic earth.

Elena Adasheva-Klein, Anthropology
Humans Are Not Welcome? Blizzards, Adventures, and Death on Wrangel Island

European, American, and Russian explorers together with the native peoples of Chukotka and Alaska have ‘discovered” and attempted to inhabit Wrangel Island located in the Arctic Ocean for centuries, but it has resisted. The latest Soviet-American dispute around the island reaffirmed the Russian claims over its territory in 1926. Today, Wrangel Island holds a status of State Nature Reserve, established in 1976 and inscribed on the UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2004, for the purpose of conserving its unique natural systems and surrounding waters. Known for its exceptionally high biodiversity, the island is a home for the world’s largest population of Pacific walrus and the ancestral polar bear dens. It also serves as the major feeding ground for the grey whale and the northernmost nesting area for over hundred migratory bird species. For humans, Wrangel Island has remained a mysterious, desirable but dangerous, territory due to its harsh climate conditions and inaccessibility. Despite many failed voluntary and forced attempts to colonize this obstinate land, Wrangel Island has continued to inspire for conquest. In my research, I aim to explore the island as simultaneously attracting and resisting human presence through its portrayal in multilingual literary pieces, including expedition travelogues, studies of indigenous legends, biographical accounts, fiction, and poetry.

Ted Hamilton, Comparative Literature
Communicating Vessels: Mario Vargas Llosa and the Cultural Difference of Nature

This paper examines the way in which political rhetoric and literary imagination shapes understandings of extractive conflicts in the Peruvian Amazon and the social and ecological relations supporting competing visions of human-natural encounter. Beginning with a reading of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel The Green House and the author’s extensive writings on the book’s construction, the paper explores the possibility that specific novelistic techniques might be able to bridge the racialized “epistemic rift” between “society” (creole, modern) and “nature” (indigenous, mythic). Tracing Vargas Llosa’s movement away from a leftist critique of the Peruvian state’s imperialist policies in the Amazon toward a reactionary defense of extractivism and Western chauvinism, the paper reads this literary history — which includes critiques by indigenous writer and activist Hugo Blanco and the elaboration of a “counter-canon” including José Maria Arguedas — alongside the rise of indigenous and environmental social movements in Peru.

 

Art & Landscape

 Freya Schwachenwald, History of Art
Ecology, Slavery and Ice Cream. Haunting and Knowing in Fürst Hermann von Pückler-Muskau’s archive

Today, Fürst Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785-1871) is either known as a landscape planner, as an eccentric bon vivant, or as an ice cream flavor. Contemporary discourses represent him as an early example of German worldliness, juxtaposing him with Alexander von Humboldt and J. W. Goethe. These representations blur complex asymmetric power relations required to construct him as a historical subject. His subjectivity emerges through processes of classificatory and ontological knowledge production on the world, nature, art, humans and objects. While German colonial history is often considered as a short episode from the 1880s to 1920, this paper sets out to unlearn these assumptions: the aim is not to rewrite German colonial history, but to investigate in which way colonialism as a fragmentation of the world naturalizes hierarchical knowledge systems through abstraction, aestheticization and subject-creation. Firstly, this paper investigates the dominant narratives in Pückler’s “Hints on Landscape Gardening” (1834) and his gardens in Muskau and Branitz as constructions of the ‘world’ as ideal nature. Secondly, it critically examines the relations of humans, objects and possessions within Pückler’s ecological thought. Here, the focus lies on silenced narratives and the entanglements of his understandings of nature and slavery, with a particular focus on Machbuba, a young slave whom he bought while traveling through Egypt. Finally, the paper analyzes the contradictory historiography on Pückler, from the propagation of ice cream recipes during the German Empire, to national-socialist ideas on German landscape, to contemporary representations of Pückler as a cosmopolitan creator of UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Jack Hanly, Architecture
Peter Fend, Ocean Earth, and the Artist-Technician

This paper situates the conceptual artist Peter Fend (b. 1950) at the intersection of energy, ecological systems theory, and information management through an examination of three types of work over a four decade career. Fend and his “corporation for artists” Ocean Earth seek to enact a total reorganization of the built world and its systems of production through environmental monitoring, biofuel production, and urban megastructures. Situating himself as both aggrieved outsider and technocratic optimist, Fend presents the artist’s vision as a model of governance.

Anna Thurston, F&ES + Divinity and Institute of Sacred Music
Mountains as Markers: British Aesthetic Engagement with 19th Century Himalayan Landscapes

As 19th century England expanded its borders, so too did it witness an expansion of artistic development. In this project of colonization, artists resultantly functioned as visual gatekeepers for newly possessed lands. While sketches and paintings tend to depict agricultural plantations and the success of maritime exploits, this presentation considers mountains as unique sites of evolving colonial—and therefore aesthetic—anxieties.

Three case studies highlight the levels of artistic engagement with this mountainous region: Robert Burford’s Panorama of the Himalayan Mountains (1847), the Himalayan travel journals of Joseph Dalton Hooker (1854), and Edward Lear’s oil painting, Kanchenjunga from Darjeeling (1879), all housed in the Yale Center for British Art. More than dramatic sites for interaction with new landscapes, these mountains mark sites of British exigency to corral foreign geography into aesthetic frameworks that are not only understood, but easily controlled.

In addition to tracing a narrative of mountain-based anxieties in British visual repertoire, this presentation responds to the 1985 regional analysis of the Himalayas commissioned by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). While many attribute its diminishing natural resources to a lack of scientific consensus, the authors of the study admit: “[t]he difficulty is that the change is not necessarily photogenic,” and “a less ugly solution is needed.” Therefore, this visual retrospective situates environmental concerns within a new framework of inherited aesthetic uncertainties, and proposes that problems lie not in uncertain scientific narrative, but in the failure to streamline visual, qualitative interpretation.

Andrew Vielkind, History of Art + Film & Media Studies
Demystified Terrains: The Moonscape as Environmental ‘Non-Site’

The first moon landing in July 1969 was regarded as a transcendental moment in human history, but many members of the avant-garde art community received it with antipathy. In particular, they critiqued the discomforting emptiness of the endeavor instilled by the banal, antiseptic images of the live television transmission and the demoralization felt when astronauts compared the unfamiliar moonscape with the geological features of the American high desert. Artists lamented that the moon, previously occupying a mysterious and untouched realm of the imagination, had now been colonized.

My research draws parallels between lunar exploration and the earthworks created by land artist Robert Smithson during the late 1960s. I analyze the Apollo 11 mission’s photographic documentation and sample collection as being evocative of Smithson’s theory of “non-site” wherein he abstracted physical locations by transporting and reinstalling their constituent environmental components, such as rocks, soil, and topographical maps as mixed-media assemblages into the gallery setting. The exploration of the moon, like Smithson’s non-sites, suggests a semiotic attempt to impart some semblance of meaning or wholeness upon a sparsely understood space. In other words, artists such as Smithson himself, bemoaned that the moon landing did not provide any new insight into humanity’s relationship with the cosmos, but rather amounted to a kind of anthropomorphic projection where existing knowledge filled the empty, lifeless void of the moonscape in an attempt to make the whole experience seem more comprehensible.

 

Science & Society

Cheng Li, East Asian Languages and Literatures
Planting Socialist Nature: The Rhetoric of Tree-planting in Socialist China, 1949-1961

This paper attempts to cast doubt on prior scholarship regarding Maoist environmental rhetoric regarding forestry, which has tended to characterize it as destructive, militaristic, and irrationally extractive. Against this simplistic portrayal of Maoist rhetoric concerning Chinese forestry and Mao’s attitudes towards nature, this essay demonstrates that the rhetoric of forestry and environment in general during Mao’s period is scientific, rational, and even constructive regarding tree-planting. To demonstrate the rational and premeditated aspect of socialist forestry and environmental history, I first explore the speeches and writings of Liang Xi, probably the most important forester and bureaucratic forestry official in early socialist China, who advocated tree-planting as a way to tackle the problem of scarcity of trees. During the early 1950s, his firm belief that tree-planting could solve the problems of the Yellow River found himself at odds with hydrologists who also aspired to solve China’s environmental challenges. Using newspaper reports from the People’s Daily, I then examine the rhetoric of the “Greening the Motherland” campaign launched by Mao 1956. During this campaign, Mao pushed the Yellow River’s tree-planting initiative to a national scale, thanks largely to the concerted efforts at persuasion by the foresters.

Tanmoy Sharma, Anthropology
Oil India Unlimited: Corporations and collectivities on the margins of India

While remarkable power has been imputed to corporations in social-scientific analyses, not much attention has been paid to how their operations are imagined, defined, delimited and undermined by collectivities that acquire their power in dialogical opposition to the corporations. Training its lens on the agrarian communities in the upper Brahmaputra valley in the northeastern Indian state of Assam, the paper will ethnographically present a couple of “scenes of encounter” (Keane 1997) between Oil India Limited, a premier Indian energy corporation and rural citizens, and reflect on the meaning and scope of resistance in a resource frontier, shaped by a long history of extraction.

Jia Weng, Architecture
Domesticating the Clouds: Weather Modification and the Aesthetic of Scale

Previous studies on weather prediction and modification reveal that the human knowledge of weather and climate is infrastructure conditioned. Frictions between our knowledge infrastructure and the intricate movements within the atmosphere can lead to scientific uncertainties. Because of such uncertainty, the long-established connections between science and realism may fade away, which in turn can make places for irrational believes and doubts. Because of the ambiguity in how it connects past with future, weather becomes an important political instrument that states seek to control–Weather prediction produces futurology. With technologies like weather modification, states and organizations can establish real causal relations between weather events and everyday life based on imaginary scenarios, i.e., weather can be manufactured as they please. Weather modification captures the futurology generated by weather prediction and pins it on boards. The meaning of weather in its everyday practice can be manipulated through changes in its technological and discursive contexts. My paper examines two different contexts under which weather modification was shaped and discussed during the Cold War—one is meeting minutes of think-tanks such as the Rand Corporation and the other is films produced within the popular media cultures. By tracing weather modification through its media, this paper examines how the aesthetic representation of scales reshape its epochal human condition.

Antonio Ballesteros-Figueroa, F&ES/VAR
Framing imperfect worlds: An STS approach to the construction of environmental knowledge

“The production of environmental indicators could be perceived as the compilation of databases that when setting together, they allow us to observe the status of different environmental issues in a given period. However, when analysing the day-to-day creation of quantitative tools, it is possible to understand the production of indicators not to be a predetermined, by rigid methodologies, process but a set of daily performances in which mundanity plays an essential role in the creation of (un)perfect worlds.

This presentation aims to discuss a crucial component of environmental indicators: data. In the case of financial data, this is usually standardised to make comparisons and analyses available, current US dollars could be an example. However, in the case of quantitative environmental data between the moment of recollection and publication, a lag of several years will occur. This “data lag” raises several ethical issues and represents the work that research centres measuring the world conduct.

Unlike financial data, the quantification of the status of the environment is something undesirable, hence, when used as part of an environmental composite index, data lag becomes a subject of inquiry which is performed to build imaginary worlds.  These “imaginary worlds” are the result of multi-layering different issues which were measured at different times but that set together, represent the status of the world.

This presentation will focus on the ethical consequences around the creation of multi-layered worlds as a tool for environmental policy. This research is conducted using STS and environmental sociology as its main fields.