Indigenous forms of ownership in the context of extractivism and the Anthropocene
Current studies on indigenous worlds show a renewed interest in the description of alternative ways of composing specific socio-natures. Such an interest entails —as we aimed to show in two previous collective publications by two members of this project—a particular focus on the ethnography of indigenous entanglements of humans and non-humans, and how they may play out in contexts of asymmetric neoliberal extractivist and developmentalist relations in the Anthropocene. This project intends to test one of the conditions present in the main answers that have been proposed to the question of how to conceptualise those indigenous worlds that interrupt the so-called “one-world world”. This condition requires that we, as ethnographers, seek to take a position of symmetric openness to the conceptual conditions we are confronted to in the field, allowing them to inflect our own conceptual tools. Therefore, such a requirement will become the main methodological feature of this project’s activities, whose pursuit will focus on discovering – and comparing – different indigenous forms and relations of ownership in South America. Converging on the ethnography of indigenous life-projects, the workshop will explore Andean (and Amerindian) “relational ontologies” contrasting them to those worlds where humans own objects as property.
Project coordinator
- Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard, Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen
Members of the network
- Anders Burman, Associate Professor in Human Ecology, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg.
- Juan Rivera, Research fellow. Centre of Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Studies (CIIS). University of Tübingen
- Frédéric Saumade, Professor of Social Anthropology, Aix-Marseille University.
