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Call for Papers: American Anthropological Association Meetings

Denver, CO, USA November 18-22nd 2015

Organizers: Dr Sophie Haines (University of Oxford) and Dr Piergiorgio Di
Giminiani (Universidad Catolica de Chile)

Translating natures: relations, (in)determinancies and the work of
translation in natural resource use

This panel explores the notion of translation as a framework to understand
the productive tensions and transformations that natural resource use
entails among different social actors. Processes of translation across
different materialities and human groups in natural resource use can be
problematic and productive, involving relationships and objects that are at
once material and imaginative, instrumental and meaningful. In a departure
from perspectives that see translation as unilateral, and from those
focused on the incommensurability of 'local' and 'scientific' knowledge,
this volume examines the potential of natural resource use and its
frictions for challenging existing assumptions and ultimately generating
different worlds. Through the reconfiguration of relations among
individuals and groups, humans and non-humans, natural resource use emerges
as a process of ontogenesis, leading to changes that are not simply
discursive or cultural, but also material and embodied.  Natural resource
is here understood in its dual connotation as an object constructed by
humans and thus passively subject to change, a point echoed by rational
planning models, and a subject responding to human action in unexpected
forms and actively involved in fostering processes of social change.
Translation refers to transformation of and among human and non-human
elements of society (people, materials, communities) as much as
modifications concerning key terms, such as energy, community, nature,
ethnicity, and marginality, inherent to different social contexts brought
together in often conflictive terms under natural resource use. We thus
take translation as an alteration from a set of codes to another, but also
as a process of transformation - as its etymology (“to carry across” or “to
move from one place to another“) implies. In doing so, we reconsider
influential anthropological contributions to the debate on translation in
the context of natural resource use and transformative socio-ecological
processes (Asad 1986; Blaser 2010; Ingold 1993; Latour 1993 and 2005;
Palsson 1993; Turner 2011; Viveiros de Castro 2004; West 2005). We seek to
bring together analyses that consider explicit and implicit translations in
relations among different human groups concerning the use of natural
resources, such as land, water, soil, wind, minerals, plants and animals.
Such relations range from collaborative management to disputes over
resource access and control. We encourage reflections on natural resource
use as a process both material and moral, political and poetical, effective
and affective; and ethnographic insights into the experience of natural
resource management and conflicts in everyday life, as well as in moments
of sudden change or disruption.

Please email abstracts of 250 words to the organizers Piergiorgio Di
Giminiani ([log in to unmask]) and Sophie Haines ([log in to unmask])
by Monday the 6th of April. Selected participants will be notified by
Friday 10th April.

-- 
Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, PhD
Programa de Antropología
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Av. Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Macul (Campus San Joaquin)
Tel. (0056-2) 3544648
[log in to unmask]
antropologia.uc.cl
<http://antropologia.uc.cl/Academicos/piergiorgio-di-giminiani.html>

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