December 2007: 'Performing Natures at World's Ends'. A Workshop for Researchers and Research Students
'Performing Natures at World's Ends' is envisaged as a series of workshops focussed on various ways people 'do nature'. Our general aim is to establish a comparative framework using Australia and Norway as our case sites. We study landscape practices, nature narrative, and other other ways of performing nature eg art installations. We are interested in contemporary environmental policy, history of nature, and the role of nature in nation building in Norway and Australia. Our methodological framework seeks to recognise new enactments of nature in this globalising era, and to understand how old enactments are being regenerated.
Workshop #1:
Department of Social Anthropology (SAI), University of Oslo
August 29th-31st 2007
The first workshop in the collaborative research endeavour on cultures and politics of nature in Norway and Australia was held in August 2007. The workshop was hosted by the Department of Social Anthropology (SAI), University of Oslo, and bringing together researchers from Australia, Norway and the UK. There is detailed information about this workshop here.
Workshop #2:
School of Philosophy, and Office of Environmental Programmes, University of Melbourne
November 26th-27th 2007
The second workshop in the Performing Natures at the Worlds’ Ends series coincided with a visit to Melbourne by Professor Marianne Lien Department of Social Anthropology (SAI), University of Oslo, one of the initiators of this workshop project. This visit is associated with her continuing ethnographic fieldwork in Tasmania. We took this opportunity to further discussion of our emerging comparative analytic framework, involving researchers from Univ of Melbourne, University of Tasmania, and University of Queensland who are working in this general area.
Schedule of presentations
| Monday 26th November 2007 | |||
| 12.30-2.00 | Lunch and hellos | ||
| 2.00-2.30 | Formal proceedings begin | Helen Verran, Marianne Lien, Lee Godden | Introductions |
| 2.30-3.10 | Presentation | Monica Minegal | Dancing Nature: performing nature as a research technique in PNG |
| 3.15-3.55 | Presentation | Kumi Kato | Performing nature through sound: women divers of Japan |
| 4.00-4.40 | Presentation | Marianne Lien | Becoming Indigenous: reflections on Cross-cultural Comparison |
| 4.40-5.20 | Presentation | Adrian Franklin | A Typology of Natures |
| 5.20-6.00 | Presentation | Klara Hansen | Authentic? - Naturally. Indigeneity and the performance of nature and culture in Norway and Australia |
| 6.00-6.40 | Presentation | David Trigger | Place, nature, culture: reflections on assembling research materials. |
| 6.30 --> | Dinner (self funded) | Please advise for booking purposes | Markov Place, 350-352 Drummond Street, Carlton |
| Tuesday 27th November, 2007 | |||
| 9.00-9.40 | Presentation | Stephanie Lavau | Droughts and flooding rain |
| 9.45-10.30 | presentation | Lee Godden | Law's Demand for Performance: Telling stories of the practice of native title |
| 10.35-11.15 | Presentation | Aiden Davison and Marianne Lien | Science, experience and nature: comparative musings about nature-talk in Oslo, Melbourne, Hobart and Perth |
| 11.20-12.00 | Presentation | Christian Clark | Constituting Common Streams |
| 12.05-12.45 | Presentation | Helen Verran | Sustainable Rivers: A Story about Buying and Selling |
| 12.50-1.50 | Concluding discussion | The 'performative analytic? A comparative socio-cultural framework? Interdisciplinarity? Multiple natures? Indigenous interests and claims? | |
| 2.00--> | Lunch provided | All | Systems Gardens |
Attendees
| Marienne LIEN | Anthropology, Univ of Oslo |
| Aiden DAVISON | Geography, UniTas |
| Helen VERRAN | Hist&Phil Sci, UofM |
| Lee GODDEN | OEP/Law, UofM |
| Adrian FRANKLIN | Anthropology, UniTas |
| Stephanie LAVAU | Hist&Phil Sci, UofM |
| Christian CLARK | Hist&Phil Sci, UofM |
| Monica MINEGAL | Anthropology, UofM |
| Klara HANSEN | Anthropology, ANU and UofM |
| Tanya KING | Anthropology, Deakin |
| Dianne MULCAHY | Education, UofM |
| Vicki MacKNIGHT | Hist & Phil Sci U of M |
| David TRIGGER | Anthropology, Univ of Q'ld |
| Marcia LANGTON | |
| Kumi KATO | Languages & Comparative Cultural Studies, Uni Qld |
| Gillian VESTY | Hist&Phil Sci, & Accountancy UofM |
| Peter Dwyer | Anthropology, Uof M |
Helen Verran's focus thoughts for Workshop #2: Performing Natures at the World's Ends. Melbourne, 26-27/11/ 07.
For me thinking about 'Performing Natures at World's Ends' forms itself into questions about four rather separate issues. I detail these below as a framework which might support a generative conversation at this workshop. This framework is not intended to be prescriptive or exhaustive.
First there's the performativity move to be considered. Scholars see this move in various ways and have differing expectations about what sorts of leverage it gives, often differences here do not follow disciplinary lines, although sometimes they do. Second there are the issues associated with 'natures'—that is claiming nature as multiplicity. (Of course this originates in the performativity move, but I think it's useful to separate it out as a separate issue.) Third, related in complex ways to both of the above are questions of recognising interests of the indigenous peoples in performing natures. And fourth there's the comparative framing implied in 'world's ends'.
• A continuum of positions around the so-called performative move: Some think of the performative move around nature as recognising that in many 21st century contexts nature is staged—examples here might involve housing development sites or national tourism campaigns. For others performing nature is self-conscious engagement with nature—both collective and individual. Bush-walking, or having emus and kangaroos as national symbols. We might think of these versions of the performative move as cultural re-framing. But the performative move is being embraced in administrative contexts too. In Australia, Native Title is recognised as having a performative basis separating it off from other forms of land title, and some think that this recognition of the performative could or should flow on to environmental law. In history and philosophy of science the performative move is considered a matter of metaphysics, implying a shift from epistemic concerns to a involvement with ontology. Perhaps the best known example of science studies' performative moves is actor-network theory.
• A continuum of natures? While having natures as performed consigns us to a confusing domain of multiple natures variously interlinked and distinct, in today's politics of nature we can perhaps identify a continuum of natures that grows out of a shared colonised/colonising past. I gloss these as Romanticist natures and productivist natures—going back at least to the early 19th century; ecological natures—emergent in many places in the late 1960s-and 1970s; and sustainability natures—coming into being in the past two decades. Of course all these are co-constituting in many, many ways. These natures are probably only tenuously linked with various indigenous notions that we might usefully label as natures—'Country' or 'Kantri' for Aboriginal Australian English speakers for example.
• Articulating indigenous interests: There is a continuum of positions here too. Difference and multiplicity become central when we embrace the notion of natures as enacted, but just how and why that difference is managed and valued varies. Profound difference between say scientific and indigenous framings sometimes needs to be negotiated; there are many ways this might be achieved.
• 'World's Ends' as a continuum of comparative framings: Nature/natures are often central in the still (or newly) vibrant nationalisms of the 21st century; it/they lie at the core of perhaps the most ambitious globalising project in the world's history—the Millenium Project. Sustainability spreading on the coat tails of the virulent expansion of the ideology of neo-liberal economics emerges differently in different places. The 'world's ends' comparative framework also relates to the 'Why Norway and Australia question?' The natures of Norway and Australia seem to 'naturally' call for a comparative stance. Articulating that intuition is part of our project: tracing origins and effects of a national sensibility of occupying peripheries; ironically examining why and how we sense ourselves as distinguished by our (capital 'N') Nature rather than our (capital 'K') Culture.
Visit the University of Oslo's 'Performing Nature at World's Ends' website here.