CEH member Paul Merchant has published new research on the Pacific Ocean in Chilean cinema in the Bulletin of Latin American Research.
”Collecting What the Sea Gives Back’: Postcolonial Ecologies of the Ocean in Contemporary Chilean Film’ addresses the entanglements between ecology and postcolonial politics in the films of Tiziana Panizza and Patricio Guzmán.
The abstract, from BLAR, is:
This article proposes a new mode of understanding the entanglement of ecological and postcolonial questions in contemporary Chilean filmmaking, through the lens of directorial subjectivity. Both Tierra sola (Solitary Land, Tiziana Panizza, 2017), and El botón de nácar (The Pearl Button, Patricio Guzmán, 2015) contest hegemonic structures of belonging by constructing an alternative ‘oceanic archive’. Yet where Guzmán’s metaphorical meditations on indigenous connections to the ocean risk collapsing into romanticism and replicating colonial visuality, Panizza’s reflexive conception of filmmaking as a situated and embodied practice facilitates a subtler understanding of cinema’s political engagement in this sphere.
Dr Paul Merchant is lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century Latin American film and visual culture, with particular emphasis on the countries of the Southern Cone and, more recently, Peru and Bolivia. He has recently completed his first book, Remaking Home: Domestic Spaces in Argentine and Chilean Film, 2005-2015.
Header image credit: Tierra sola (Solitary Land, Tiziana Panizza, 2017)
My PhD focusses on the mossland landscapes of early modern Lancashire; in particular on the mossland Complex around Chat Moss, to the west of Manchester. I’m supervised by Prof. Sasha Handley of the University of Manchester, Dr John Morgan of the University of Bristol, and Mike Longden of the Lancashire Wildlife Trust.
Cadishead Moss. Photo: Aneurin Merrill-Glover
A mossland, or moss, is the name given to a peat bog in the north of England, so named for the distinctive Sphagum genus of mosses which populate the mossland surface. These landscapes underwent transformative change through drainage and ‘improvement’ at the end of the eighteenth century. Approximately two percent of the lowland raised peat bogs of historic Lancashire survive in a salvageable condition. This was devastating for the plant and animal life which inhabited the mosslands, the Lancashire Wildlife Trust are dedicated to rehabilitating the mosslands and their wildlife. The most recent example of this was the Manchester Argus (large heath) butterfly, locally extinct for one hundred and fifty years, which was reintroduced in May of 2020. Such tales of ecological calamity are common sights in the histories of English wetlands. The significantly larger East Anglian Fens and Somerset Levels underwent comparable transformations; and have engendered significantly more scholarly attention. This study thus provides timely regional reservations to narratives of national environmental change. Although the mosslands have been characterised as ‘wasteland’, my thesis is demonstrating that they were productive landscapes for those that lived on them. For instance, the peat which makes up the substance of a bog has been used for millenia as a source of fuel.
The unique wetland landscape fostered unique management practices in the communities which lived on them. A manor court was a local court which resolved small-scale agricultural disputes, and their records are central to my understanding of the historical mossland. Like much of the ‘wasteland’ in early modern England, the mosslands were held in common by the locals. This meant that though they were nominally owned by the Lord of the Manor, the locals retained certain use rights. These rights included the digging of peat, and the pasturing of animals on the mosses, and were regulated by the manor courts. The courts also appointed specialised officers to ensure that the mossland landscape was being properly maintained, known as ‘moss reeves’. The large amount of standing water on the mosslands acted as a spur to cooperative action, and much of the moss reeves’ time was spent ensuring that peat diggings were filled back in, and drainage ditches were maintained. The majority of literature on historical commons has been preoccupied with their role in gating access to a resource, or determining the level of that access. This finding thus demonstrates the power of adding an environmental dimension to historical inquiry.
Lancashire Archives, Lancashire County Council, DDTr/Box 91 Barton-upon-Irwell Court Book, 15 January 1718
These manorial court records make up the main body of my source base for this doctorate, and they provide a useful insight into the lowest level of legal dispute resolution in early modern England. Occasionally, they even offer slightly amusing narratives of flagrant illegality. A William Cheetham found himself before a Worsley court in 1688 for unlicensed construction of a shippon [cattle shed] on an area of common land. This was a crime in and of itself, however a family member, Richard Cheetham was also presented in front of that court. Richard’s crime was ‘pulinge downe a shippon & Selling the wood onto William Cheetham & haveing noe License or Leave soe to doe’. This family scheme to steal an entire shed would be appalling were it not so deliciously ambitious. Protecting the integrity of common land from unauthorised encroachments was a key component of the court’s role, and symptomatic of its role in ensuring that the collective interest was prioritised over the individual.
A bog is an anathema to our classificatory order ‘predicated on a […] distinction between land and sea’
My PhD is the fruit of a partnership between the University of Manchester and the modern-day custodians of the mosslands, the Lancashire Wildlife Trust. As the modern-day custodians of the mosslands, the Lancashire Wildlife Trust want to use the historical dimension to engage local communities with the importance and fragility of the mossland landscape. The LWT face vandalism on many of their sites, for instance through destruction of fencing, illegal off-roading, illicit agriculture, and arson. Putting these issues into historical context may help to ameliorate these strained relationships. Further, in order to reintroduce a species to the mosslands, the LWT are often required to provide evidence that the species inhabited the landscape historically. An environmental history of the mossland landscape is uniquely positioned to assist with this. The partnership also gives me unique opportunities to go out and work on the mosses myself. This gave me access to the extensive knowledge and experience of the LWT staff and volunteers, which has been invaluable in developing my understandings of the historical mossland. Finally, first-hand experience of the mosses has also helped me to develop my understanding of the unintuitive mechanics of a wetland. A bog is an anathema to our classificatory order ‘predicated on a […] distinction between land and sea’, in Rod Giblett’s irresistible phrase.[i] Being out on the mosses helped me to begin to subvert this dichotomy, which is a key step in imagining any wetland, historical or otherwise.
[i] Rod Giblett, Postmodern wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 4.
In Contesting Hydropower in the Brazilian Amazon, Ed Atkins focuses on how local, national, and international civil society groups have resisted the Belo Monte and São Luiz do Tapajós hydroelectric projects in Brazil. In doing so, Atkins explores how contemporary opposition to hydropower projects demonstrate a form of ‘contested sustainability’ that highlights the need for sustainable energy transitions to take more into account than merely greenhouse gas emissions.
The assertion that society must look to successfully transition away from fossil fuels and towards sustainable energy sources often appears assured in contemporary environmental governance. However, what is less certain is who decides which forms of energy are deemed ‘sustainable.’ Contesting Hydropower in the Brazilian Amazon explores one process in which the sustainability of a ‘green’ energy source is contested. It focuses on how civil society actors have both challenged and reconfigured dominant pro-dam assertions that present the hydropower schemes studied as renewable energy projects that contribute to sustainable development agendas. The volume also examines in detail how anti-dam actors act to render visible the political interests behind a project, whilst at the same time linking the resistance movement to wider questions of contemporary environmental politics.
This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable development, sustainable energy transitions, environmental justice, environmental governance, and development studies.
Chapter 6: “A country that cannot live with difference”
Chapter 7: Refusing to Celebrate Victory
Chapter 8: Final Remarks
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
Dr Ed Atkins is a Lecturer in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. You can find his published work here, and follow him on twitter @edatkins_
EcoGothic gardens in the long nineteenth century provides fresh approaches to contemporary ecocritical and environmental debates, providing new, compelling insights into material relationships between vegetal and human beings. Through twelve exciting essays, the collection demonstrates how unseen but vital relationships among plants and their life systems can reflect and inform human behaviours and actions. In these entertaining essays, human and vegetal agency is interpreted through ecocritical and ecoGothic investigation of uncanny manifestations in gardens – hauntings, psychic encounters, monstrous hybrids, fairies and ghosts – with plants, greenhouses, granges, mansions, lakes, lawns, flowerbeds and trees as agents and sites of uncanny developments. The collection represents the forefront of ecoGothic critical debate and will be welcomed by specialists in environmental humanities at every level, as a timely, innovative inclusion in ecoGothic studies.
Table of contents
Introduction: Phantoms, fantasy and uncanny flowers – Sue Edney
1. Deadly gardens: The ‘Gothic green’ in Goethe and Eichendorff – Heather I. Sullivan 2. ‘Diabolic clouds over everything’: An ecoGothic reading of John Ruskin’s garden at Brantwood – Caroline Ikin 3. The Gothic orchard of the Victorian imagination – Joanna Crosby 4. Gothic Eden: Gardens, religious tradition and ecoGothic exegesis in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Lost Valley’ and ‘The Transfer’ – Christopher M. Scott 5. ‘That which roars further out’: Gardens and wilderness in ‘The Man who Went too Far’ by E. F. Benson and ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ by Algernon Blackwood – Ruth Heholt 6. Darwin’s plants and Darwin’s gardens: Sex, sensation and natural selection – Jonathan Smith 7. ‘Tentacular thinking’ and the ‘abcanny’ in Hawthorne’s Gothic gardens of masculine egotism – Shelley Saguaro 8. Green is the new black: Plant monsters as ecoGothic tropes; vampires and femme fatales – Teresa Fitzpatrick 9. Death and the fairy: Hidden gardens and the haunting of childhood – Francesca Bihet 10. Presence and absence in Tennyson’s gardens of grief: ‘Mariana’, Maud and Somersby – Sue Edney 11. Blackwater Park and the haunting of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White – Adrian Tait
Afterword: Z Vesper, the Wilderness Garden, Powis Castle – Paul Evans
Austin Read, a PhD candidate in human geography at the University of Bristol, introduces his project on ontology, decoloniality and salmon.
Salmon anatomical plate drawing. Source: University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections (Sp Coll RQ 271)
If you carried out a survey of what people think is the most important thing that we can do to stem the tide of ecological ruin sweeping the planet, challenging Euro-Modern ontologies of nature (beliefs and ideas about reality, or ‘nature’s nature’) probably wouldn’t emerge as a number one priority on the list. In a time of crisis, where time literally feels like it’s running out and the apocalypse is already here for some people, carrying out this kind of philosophical reflection might feel like ineffective political strategy. Yet a challenging of our assumptions about ontology is precisely what a growing chorus of theorists and activists are calling for. For my PhD project, I want to examine how heeding these calls might allow us to better understand the nature of the ecological crisis we are facing.
Specifically, my project is building upon decolonial scholarship and activism that emphasises the role that the politics of ontology has played in bringing about intertwined social and environmental injustices. Within the history of Western philosophy, the study of ontology has mostly consisted of making assessments of the reality of the world. Decolonial theorists such as Arturo Escobar, Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser have challenged these dominant philosophies of ontology by destabilising the very idea that we live in a singular world or universe. Instead, these thinkers have argued we live in a world of many worlds they call the pluriverse, in which there exists multipleradically different ontologies. Decolonial theorists have documented the political currents of power that exist between pluriversal worlds, diagnosing Euro-Modern ontologies as predicated upon a dominance of culture over nature and therefore ecologically ruinous, as well as violent and colonising, supressing any ontology that does not align with its firmly held principles of rationality and individualism. In this sense, for proponents of the pluriverse, environmental justice begins with a dismantling of the systems of power through which Euro-Modern ontologies have violently dominated others.
Decolonial activism and scholarship has emerged primarily from Latin American and Indigenous geographies, and as such most of the literature examines thought coming from these worlds. However, I am intrigued by Escobar’s (2020) suggestion that it is possible to bring about decolonial and ‘nondominant’ Wests – that another Europe is possible. To think about how insurrectional decolonial ontologies of nature might arise from within Europe, I’m turning to a perhaps surprising companion: the salmon.
A salmon farm near Bergen, Norway. Marius Ltu/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Salmon are playing a complex role in the theatre of contemporary Anthropocene politics. An enchanting creature that travels thousands of miles using ancestral memory as its guide home, salmon ways of life are becoming increasingly threatened as rivers and oceans are warped by the toxic infrastructure of modernity. Activists, scientists, Indigenous communities, fishers and nature-lovers have all documented the alarming rate at which wild salmon and other water-dwelling creatures are being threatened with extinction. As salmon are simultaneously caught by trawlers, domesticated in industrial salmon farms, bred in hatchery pens to boost depleted wild stock and subject to increasingly stringent conservation laws, they sink deeper and deeper within the folds of Euro-Modern logics.
However, as well as being indicators of the logics of modernity, salmon are also sources of hope. Fisheries have been highlighted as some of the most hopeful sites for fostering nondominant ontologies of nature within Europe. Salmon have swum in European rivers and oceans for millennia, meaning there are deep historical cultures of angling and caring for salmon that we might turn to as examples in the struggle to bring about fair and just ecological relations. Elsewhere, efforts to articulate alternative communal economic arrangements and relocalize food have found fisheries to be potent and generative sites of experimentation (see, for example Elinor Ostrom’s influential work on the commons).
For my PhD project, I am proposing that we let salmon, the injustice they materialise and the hope they symbolise, act as a guide. Following salmon in the UK and across Europe, both as they emerge in present material entanglements and in historic flows, leads us to a dizzying array of political ecologies of extraction and conservation in which we find unfolding conflicts over use, meaning and access to salmon. It’s my suggestion that a detailed study of these political ecologies and the different queer and historic ontologies emerging within them could serve, in its own small way, as a crystallising political narrative for bringing about environmental and social justice. As Environmental Humanities scholars have shown, bringing about environmental justice will not just be about new technoscientific technologies or acts passed in parliament: it will be, in part, about what kinds of stories we tell. I say let us listen to the stories of the salmon: stories of ancestral struggle in the face of the ever-encroaching logics of modernity, stories of resistance in the face of power and domination, so that we might have a better understanding of the problem we must ourselves struggle against.
Eline D. Tabak, PhD researcher in English (Bristol) and Environmental Humanities (BSU), introduces her SWW DTP-funded project.
‘According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.’ You might recognise these words as the opening from the animated film Bee Movie (2007). The film is as known for its memes as its compulsive heteronormativity. If you are unaware: not only are there many happy nuclear bee families, the star of the film, Barry, is a male worker bee. On top of that, the human woman with whom Barry takes on the honey industry and fights for equal bee rights appears to develop some warm feelings for him. Needless to say, Bee Movie is fun but not a cinematographic masterpiece.
A still from Bee Movie (2007), directed by Simon J. Smith and Steven Hickner
Jokes aside, the 2007 film is a good indicator of an influx of documentaries, memoirs, novels, and poetry collections starring the Western or European honeybee. Perhaps I’m being too critical here. This influx does excite me in a way, as it shows that insect life and decline has become part of a broader conversation. But, with this awareness of insect decline in our cultural imagination comes a sting in the tale. In this case, the sting is an almost obsessive focus on the European honeybee in an age of overall insect decline and what Elizabeth Kolbert (2014) popularised as the sixth extinction. There are thousands of known species of bees all over the world—not to mention other bugs—and yet a select group of people continue to talk, write, film, draw and campaign for the European honeybee. (Are you familiar with the concept of bee-washing?)
In response to these stories, I started thinking about the following: why is there so much creative work on the honeybee? Insects make up the most biodiverse and largest class of described (and estimated) species in the animal kingdom. And while many of these—not all—are indeed facing decline or even extinction, the European honeybee is not one of them.
What started out as a general interest, quickly evolved—metamorphosed!—into my doctoral project on insect decline. Inspired by Ursula Heise’s (2016) work on the cultural side of extinction, I started asking the following: what kind of narratives do people create when talking about insect decline, and how do they tie in with other and older insect stories, our broader cultural memory? Is there an explanation to be found for this honeybee hyperfocus when it comes to narratives of insect decline? Thinking about these questions, I kept returning to Donna Haraway, who wrote that ‘it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with … It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.’ (12) Haraway’s keen (if not overcited) observation also applies to the case of insect decline. When looking at creative storytelling—of which there is a lot—we’re not just considering entertainment or aesthetics. Even with something as seemingly banal as Bee Movie, it does matter what stories we tell to tell the story of insect decline. So why do people contribute to this, for lack of a better word, honeybee extravaganza?
An assortment of contemporary honeybee stories
My project become more than a chance to get deep into the problem with honeybees and other charismatic microfauna. Thinking about tiny critters (instead of charismatic megafauna) created the opportunity to engage with and tease out some of the broader questions in the fields of critical animal and extinction studies. Between all the reading and writing and talking and plotting out of the work that needs to be done, theories and ideas and random shower thoughts keep falling into place, and I have a red thread or two running through the different chapters of my thesis. Watch this space.
For now, I do want to say that one of the more rewarding elements of my research so far has been the deep dive into care ethics. My understanding of the concept has both expanded and gained new focus, and my deep dive into care and conservation has opened my eyes to the possibility of care as a violent practice (Salazar Parreñas 2018). One of my current challenges is to see how care, understood as ‘a vital affective state, an ethical obligation and a practical labour’ (Puig de la Bellacasa), is reflected in the poetics of insect decline. What does a poetics of care look like when we let ourselves become subject to, as Haraway (2008) phrased it, the ‘unsettling obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the end of the day than at the beginning’ (36). What happens when we allow ourselves to pay careful attention to the other-than-human life around us and start to care?
Assorted Coleoptera in the University of Texas Insect Collection
Another thread is that of the different (temporal and spatial) scales of extinction and the limits of our empathy for other-than-human animals. As Ursula Heise (2016) and Dolly Jørgensen (2019) so effectively argue in their monographs on the topic, extinctions come to matter once they reflect upon our own (human) pasts, presents, and futures and we can emotionally engage with them. And like these different pasts, presents, and futures, extinction isn’t singular. It is easy—and to a certain extent even useful—to put it all under the label of the sixth extinction. Still, I am increasingly convinced that such labels obscure the differences and intricacies people need to be aware of in the face of the sixth extinction—or rather, extinctions.
There are local extinctions, global extinctions, extinctions completely missed or forgotten (by human eyes), even desired extinctions. Communities respond to and engage with different species and local and global extinctions in different ways. Especially when something tricky like shifting baseline syndrome ensures that some communities aren’t aware of local extinctions or declines in the first place, while passionate campaigns for charismatic megafauna put certain species on the global agenda and in the public eye. I’m not saying this is always a bad thing (I’m just as passionate about the survival of the Malayan and Sumatran tiger as the next person).
I am, however, saying that it is worth researching how attention and care are directed and, ideally, can be redirected in times of need. And insects—in all their creeping and crawling diversity, with important ecosystem functions such as pollination, prey, and waste disposal—have turned out to be an excellent group to consider these questions.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016.
—. When Species Meet. U of Minneapolis P, 2008.
Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinctions: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. U of Chicago P, 2016.
Jørgensen, Dolly. Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging. MIT Press, 2019.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Bloomsbury, 2014.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Salazar Parreñas, Juno. Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Duke UP, 2018
The Literary and Visual Landscapes group hosted a talk by Dr Eveline de Smalen on 28 October 2020. Eveline kindly agreed to allow the talk, ‘Nowhere, Somewhere, Elsewhere, Here: Nature Conservation and Cultural Representations of the Dutch Wadden Sea’, to be recorded.
Nowhere, Somewhere, Elsewhere, Here: Nature Conservation and Cultural Representations of the Dutch Wadden Sea by Dr. Eveline de Smalen
Abstract: The Wadden Sea, an intertidal UNESCO world heritage site, stretches from the north coast of the Netherlands to Esbjerg in Denmark. As an ecologically and culturally important site, it has been presented in fiction and poetry on many occasions and in many ways. This paper discusses the engagement with place in contemporary Dutch Wadden Sea literature and focusses on how literary texts present the Wadden Sea as connected or disconnected from other places and how they engage with local ecologies and communities. A close reading of these texts shows that many display a lack of concern for entanglements and local particularities in ecology and community. This cultural imagination of place is not without its implications in the real world. For example, it is echoed in problems with nature conservation that have been identified by several scholars in the humanities and social sciences. They argue that there are communication problems between conservationists and communities, because the former disregard the particularities, customs and desires of the latter. This paper shows how reading literature can diagnose the extent of this problem, which is not limited to particular groups or regions, but is reflected in the cultures of the Wadden Sea countries at large. While literature can help diagnose this problem, it can also be a tool to remedy it. By providing insights into the lived realities of local communities and the relations between human and non-human beings, literary texts can improve understandings of local cultures. This way of engaging with literature against the background of very urgent and specific problems poses fundamental questions about the position of literature in the world today that is neither politically detached nor wholly instrumental. Analyses of place in literature can be productively linked with real-world environmental problems, but these connections should always urge us to consider carefully how we conceive the place of literature in a world of environmental crisis.
Bio: Dr Eveline de Smalen is a literary scholar who works on literatures of coastal and riverine landscapes, with a particular interest in the transformative capacities of the imagination and the interactions between the realm of the imagination and that of policy and politics. She studied English and comparative literature at Utrecht University and completed her PhD in Environmental Humanities at the Rachel Carson Center in 2019. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Corridor Talk: Conservation Humanities and the Future of Europe’s National Parks” (DFG-AHRC, 2020-2022/3) and visiting fellow at Integrated Research on Energy, Environment and Society (IREES) at the University of Groningen. For this project, she works on the cultural imagination of the Wadden Sea.
More Literary and Visual Landscapes events are coming up this term. The remaining programme for 2020 is as follows:
CEH members Ben GJ Thomas and Michael Malay have collaborated on a new podcast about the transatlantic history of eels. Loops is a podcast from Bristol-based Caraboo Projects, exploring visual arts, social histories, folklore and music.
In this episode, Ben explores entanglements of eels in Atlantic histories with guests Michael Malay, Thom van Dooren, John Wyatt Greenlee and Rebecca Thomas. Stream the podcast on the Caraboo Projects website here.
Despite its material and ecological origins, environmental history has been profoundly influenced by the cultural turn, with scholars emphasising the importance of considering the cultural contexts in which natural spaces are embedded. My PhD project seeks to blend the cultural and material approaches with a focus on the human body and its corporeal sensations. Over the next four years, I intend to explore the implications of embodied experience on the cultural demarcations of certain landscapes, and thus demonstrate the value of this material-cultural approach for examining the historical development of human-landscape relationships.
Using the urban and rural landscapes of South-West England as a case study, my project will interrogate the embodied experiences of tourists across the long nineteenth century. Extending from a central research question which asks how visitors corporeally experienced the South West in this period, I will then consider the implications of these experiences on wider national conceptions for how landscapes should and should not be engaged with in this period. Scholarship of outdoor leisure movements has often positioned the expansion of ramblers’ clubs in the 1920s as a milestone for the fostering of a new corporeal relationship with British landscapes, the point at which experience diverged from those of Victorian elite gazing upon landscapes from a distance.
South West Coast Path, Lyton. Image by Annie Spratt via unsplash
I will begin by analysing guidebooks to the South West, in order to consider the expectations and norms regarding tourists’ physical navigation through these landscapes in this period. These sources will then be combined with accounts of tourists, which will elucidate where these expectations were observed and contravened, allowing for greater comprehension of the extent to which Victorian tourists regarded landscapes to be visceral, multi-sensory spaces of engagement.
Focusing on the environments within which sensory stimuli are produced, this project proposes a new methodological framework for sensory history. Mark Smith has set an influential agenda for sensory history which asserts the importance of considering the consumption of senses, as opposed to their production. By focusing on the physical components of sounds and smells, he argues, much sensory history has attempted to discursively ‘reproduce’ the sensory stimuli of an historical moment, rather than consider their consumption as historically and culturally contingent. Therefore, it is sensory consumption that scholars should examine, in order to situate sensual experience in its historical and cultural context.
By combining sensory and environmental history, this project, however, emphasises the importance of both the production and consumption of sensory stimuli. Sensual experiences are fundamentally entangled with the environmental contexts which produce them. Drawing together the landscapes from which sounds, smells and embodied experiences manifest, and their cultural reception by the tourists that moved through them, will allow for a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of landscape engagement in this period. In so doing, I will advocate for the importance of assimilating sensory and environmental histories.
Across the project, I endeavour to engage with practice-based methodologies that are slightly unconventional for scholarship within the humanities. Inspired by the recent autoethnographic phenomenological studies of Tim Ingold and John Wylie exploring the corporeal experiences of rural walking, the resources of the DTP will support a number of trips to conduct walking as a research method. Spending time in the South West tracing the routes taken in the life-writings I am studying, will allow me to engage more deeply with the embodied experiences that these landscapes provide.
I hope that gaining experience with and finding value in such practice-based methodologies will allow for these trips to evolve into a public engagement program in my final year. Here, I intend to produce a series of curated walks across the South West, to engage the local public in the area’s mobile and sensual histories. With the success of writers such as Robert Macfarlane and Simon Armitage, I hope that drawing on the popular appeal of reflective walking will provide a valuable and unique opportunity to engage the wider community in my research.
Mention Buddhism and you’ll often get a response shaped by its recent commodification into a self-care trend. Mindfulness apps, cheerful Buddha incense holders and the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up have led many to assume that Buddhism, like deep breathing and scented candles is primarily a technique for managing stress. Do I even need to tell you that these assumptions are wide off the mark? Probably not, yet even those who are aware ‘Buddhism’ goes deeper than these stereotypes may be surprised to hear it paired in the same sentence with ‘post-humanism’ ‘decoloniality’ ‘deconstruction’ and even ‘anarchism’.
Yet I’m about to embark on research linking just these streams of thought. This October I’ll be studying for the MSc Society & Space with plans to continue to PhD study through the ESRC 3+1 route in 2021. My research will ask how Buddhism can help us reconceive the politics of the more-than-human world in an age of planetary crisis. Buddhist thought has a unique contribution to make here, yet it’s frequently overlooked as a source of theory for approaching these questions (and other social science questions more generally).
A statue of Jizo (Kṣitigarbha) or the Earth-Womb boddhisattva glimpsed through a doorway at the Koya-san temple complex in Kansai region, Japan.
Just like other non-Western philosophies, perceptions of Buddhism have been framed through the colonial encounter. Whilst nineteenth century explorers to Tibet, China, India and Japan, did much to inspire fascination with ‘Oriental religions’, early translations of Buddhist texts often understood Buddhism through a Christian lens, equating the Buddha with Jesus. This, and the general imperial refusal to take other ways of thought and life seriously have ensured that Buddhism is yet to receive much serious academic attention outside of religious studies and history departments.
For this reason alone, Buddhist perspectives can and should be mobilised as a source of decolonising critique. But it’s not just valuable as a perspective from which to criticise. Contemporary Buddhisms brought to the West by Tibetan refugees and modern Japanese scholars such as D.T. Suzuki from the 1950s onwards have demonstrated the breadth, diversity and originality of Buddhist scholarship and practice. And more recently, excellent work has been carried out demonstrating historical Buddhism’s clear pertinence to contemporary philosophical and political concerns more broadly.
In fact many of most disruptive (and productive) concepts shaping contemporary humanities study today were anticipated by Buddhist thought by literally thousands of years. Put it this way – if names like Derrida, Deleuze, Whitehead, Latour, and Stengers are more familiar to social scientists today than Nagarjuna, Dogen, and Candrakirti this is not because the latter have nothing relevant to say on topics such as deconstruction, non-representational theory, subjectivity and self, embodiment, the symbolic order or the production of knowledge (although of course the way they mobilise and describe these concepts is completely different.)
Post-human concepts of relational networks and assemblages, which have so radically re-shaped geographical approaches to understanding human/environment relations, find close resonance in pratitya samutpada, or the doctrine of mutual causality, an ontology of radical relation. Pratitya samutpada sees reality as process – patterns of self-organising physical and psychological events which have no fixed structure or semiotics. This interdependence logically implies an ethic of care and kind-heartedness (towards all sentient beings), a cornerstone of Buddhist practice common to all traditions.
A moment of contemplation at the D.T. Suzuki centre in Kanazawa, Japan.
In an age of climate crisis the ethical imperative to try to relieve suffering is being interpreted increasingly to include ecological care for the more-than-human world (including heterogenous and complex ‘sentient beings’ such as watersheds, bio-regions and radioactive waste) and the resulting politics of this ‘Eco-dharma’ have many similarities to activisms inspired by deep ecology, indigenous, ecofeminist and anarchist philosophies. This global wave of ecologically-informed Buddhist practice is the starting point for my research, but I’m hoping to use it as a springboard for bringing Buddhist critique into geography more generally – applying Buddhist ideas to questions of political ecology, inter-species relationships, care-giving, and environmental governance.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to disrupt some assumptions along the way – including the idea that Zen is primarily concerned with minimalist interior design and esoteric catchphrases. For me, it offers something much more radical and ultimately subversive – a philosophical commitment to experiment with risky ideas and relentlessly question the foundations of your knowledge (as well as a strong suggestion to not take yourself too seriously, and to always be prepared for absurdity and impossibility!) I hope that these will be useful qualities for a new postgraduate researcher to bring into their academic practice and I’m sure that both Deleuze and Dogen would agree.
And of course, Buddhist psychology and meditative practice do offer highly effective methods for understanding the mind, cultivating equanimity and un-learning habitual patterns of thought. It’s exactly this refusal to sit neatly in disciplinary boxes that makes Buddhism such a fascinating area of study – a philosophy of the mind and world which is simultaneously theory and practice. Buddhism asks us to move beyond dualisms of self/world, human/non-human and thought/reality which is exactly why its perspectives are essential to understanding our entangled, inter-dependent and precarious life in the age of the Anthropocene. It offers us an injunction to both sit down (learn to change your mind through meditation) and wake up (liberate yourself through taking ethical action), demonstrating beautifully Marx’s dictum that the true purpose of philosophy is not just to interpret the world, but to change it.
