ANTHMETHGRP4-2425-CARL-HENDERSON

[Last modified: December, 5 2024 06:37 PM]

Why do people choose to do environmental anthropology?

Humans from all over the world come to UCL to study EA against a backdrop of environments transformed, planetary life support systems undermined, and cultures rapidly changing. What do new members of this community, trained in a tradition of self awareness and self critique, think of the course, their role as anthropologists and their future careers? What do their motivations to study tell us about the course? What can we learn from any discrepancies between their expectations and the content they discover?

What has changed methodologically:

Realizing that interviewing each member of my class would be very time intensive for my interlocutors, and, while less ideal, questionnaire would be way more realistic.

Also realizing that my classmates all have completely different international backgrounds, and a question about their childhood might help provide that context for other answers.

Number of questions reduced drastically:

• What drew you to study Environmental Anthropology?
• Tell me about your earliest memories of being aware of a ‘natural environment’, whatever that means to you?
• The course has a strong emphasis on justice, with capitalism/neoliberalism as the arch villain of the 20^th/21^st What do you feel your own relationship is with this villain? Was it different in your past (if so, how?), and do you think it will be different in your future (if so, how?).
• What sort of expectations did you have before you took the course, and how has the course differed from them?

Realizing there was a process of changing acculturation with the students, that capturing different points in this process might draw out different responses, and that no one point made any more sense than another to capture, I realized I needed an experimental method that tracked change. I feel an EA themed Dungeons and Dragons role playing campaign would be perfect for this and would generate an exceptionally rich ethnography.

[Last modified: December, 2 2024 10:45 AM]

6. Indigenous identities and disempowerment

How will research be represented? Will indigenous experiences of violence be balanced with authentic indigenous representation? What is the migrant group representative of within larger groups? Why are no other groups in this power struggle being interviewed?

Can transparency about the research be adequately communicated given multiple language barriers etc.

Participants are vulnerable due to history of human rights abuses. Constructing life histories of violence and displacement may be a trigger for emotional distress. Their exposure to police violence means they may be (likely unfairly) implicated in illegality. Activists may break unfair laws in protest. If participants have been questioned repeatedly by authorities, researchers questioning may correspond to this pattern, raising questions of free and informed consent. There is a question of whether benefits of this research outweigh risks. All these factors make the research high risk. Project would have to be assessed by UCL REC: apply at earliest possible opportunity.

Risk assessment: there is substantial physical risk both for researcher and participants. Indigenous migrants have been exposed to gang and police violence: researcher collecting data on violence may in turn expose both themselves and their interlocuters to violent reprisals. Impact of eventual published research may do the same.

Data protection risk: life histories generate lots of data that would be difficult to anonymise. Migrant indigenous groups are often small and will have very distinctive identifiers.

[Last modified: November, 24 2024 11:24 AM]

I attempted to honour the spirit of this exercise by turning my rational brain off completely and putting my senses in charge of the whole show, following them out into London. As I stepped through the door, I felt that recently added note of shrillness to the cold winter air, the questing reach of a wan sun weakly connecting with my vitamin D, and the visually stern geometry of London’s brutalist architecture. I did not, however, feel the hostility I normally felt, the one that seems to justify my rational mind being on high alert. My senses are clearly more optimistic than my rational mind. Why do we even need a rational mind? I also noticed that Londoners do not behave as though they feel the cold. Perhaps they filter it out?

I realized I wasn’t at all sure the last time I’d done an exercise like this. It put me in mind of the headspace of day long wildflower surveys, the strange phenomenology of heterotopias, and of childhood memories sneaking into my mum’s room and systematically trying all the perfumes. There was trepidation and uncertainty in the unfamiliarity of the experience, as well as lots of other sensations I cannot name, but in a very pure way the greater part felt utterly glorious.

With rationality turned off, mistakes were easy to make. To the senses a card shop superficially seems like an interesting environment, full of shiny colours. But everything in the shop was wrapped in plastic, creating a barrier to touch and a sensorily repulsive glabrous sheen to the entire space. Coupled with tinny instore speakers and pass-agg shop keeper asking whether there was anything I needed, my senses definitely did not want to stay there.

A bagel shop over the road seemed like an infinitely preferable proposition. As I crossed the road in sense mode, I detected 2 distinct smells along the way that were completely unidentifiable to me: neither pleasant or unpleasant, impossible to relate to any other smell, like laboratory smells. I realized I would have ordinarily filtered such loose sensory ends out of my awareness.

At the time, I related nothing of what I was sensing to design decisions in the bagel shop, but in retrospect it was masterfully curated. My senses were drawn to bags of bagels and the sweet treat counter at the front of the shop, so by the time I was at the back where the menu was, I was totally invested in the experience. Also in retrospect, I am not sure that huffing the bags of bagels is socially acceptable. Right… so *that’s* why we need a rational mind….

The dense bread held the fat raisins and salty butter in an overall experience that was just perfect. For reasons that don’t make complete sense to me, my companion and I organically got to talking about childhood memories. Perhaps that sensory dominant state was closer to the state of mind we spend our childhood in.

It was very obvious that other people I encountered during this exercise had a lot less time and patience than I, and were almost in another river of time. Given that everyone else is submerged so completely in rational mind, it feels like sensory mind is a very specific tool to use in ethnographies, and cannot be the only tool. I feel like the way I approached this exercise, and perhaps this entry, are therefore quite indulgent. Nether the less, I really had the best time.

[Last modified: November, 18 2024 10:53 AM]

The commute from the Isle of Wight to UCL takes 4 hours. It covers 4 types of transport in the following sequence: car to ferry town, park in free space on outskirts of town and bicycle to ferry terminal, ferry to Portsmouth, train from Portsmouth to Waterloo, bicycle from Waterloo to UCL. A large part of it is conducted on bodily autopilot, which can be a surreal sensation. I can feel how, though my mind has not yet woken up, my body is completely capable of adapting to cars and bicycles and the challenges of public transport. Sometimes I reflect and think how frustrated late trains and ferries would make my mind, if it were present, but that my body is not concerned.

I awake at 5.30 and make up a boxed lunch, dinner and flask of tea whilst also preparing breakfast. Because I am preparing all three simultaneously and am very hungry, I always overestimate the portions of lunch and dinner I allocate. No matter how hard I have tried to adjust my judgement, I always seem to take slightly too much. I end my hot shower with a period of ice cold, vital for jumpstarting a degree of presence and alertness to the rest of the day. The smooth running of the remaining autopilot program is noticeably affected if autopilot ‘forgets’ this crucial cold water step to my routine.

I have experimented with the timings and sequence of the commute to balance reliability and length of commute. For instance, I once tried taking a bus from Waterloo to UCL. But I have noticed that after an early start, the bicycle ride/physical exercise just before a lecture massively enhances learning. I see my peers in class flagging or leaning on coffee, and I am grateful that the distance forces me to work.

From Thursday to Friday I stay overnight in a London hostel to ensure I can make the 10am Methods lecture start. The complexity of the autopilot goes up by an order of magnitude on these days, as there are myriad odds and ends essential for a successful journey: overnight stuff, boxing up 2 lunches and 2 dinners, change of clothes, a locker combination lock for the hostel, a bicycle lock, laptop and notebooks, tickets for transport, headphones so I can sleep despite hostel snoring etc etc. I do not actually ‘remember’ these things: key to a successful trip is the integration of all these items into my ‘body map’. My body instinctively knows at any one time whether my headphones are in my back right pocket, my keys in my back left, my phone in my left, my wallet in my right. And it has extended that map to incorporate my backpack, and feels physically unsettled if one of the items is not in its correct place. This body map autopilot is of course most obvious when it fails. I have so far lost a beanie and the little pouch I stored my headphones in. Both items were lost when the ‘restoring the body map’ process of putting everything in its correct place was rushed by late train changes, and a stressed mind overrode the autopilot.

[Last modified: November, 4 2024 10:25 AM]

My interest in Environmental Anthropology students as a group means my project is inevitably political, as Environmental Anthropology as a subject is politically very normative. It regards Neoliberalism as the defining force in modern western culture and the global arch villain of 20^th/21^st century history. By focusing my interest on student’s lived, past experience, or ideological relationship with environmental topics, I am likely to generate political discussions. And my orientation is especially interested in any contradictions that arise from the course material’s focus on the destructive influence of capitalism/international organisations, and the student’s relationship with capitalism/their future career ambitions in international organisations. It is also curious about student’s feelings about antipolitics machines, and speaking for the global south. It is not strictly mandatory, however, that EA students engage with the normative orientation of the course, so I want to design my questions to be so open that such ideas are driven by my interlocuters and not by my assumptions.

In terms of my own positionality, as a resident of the UK, I have lived with and benefitted from the systems EA describe as destructive, only experiencing the destruction as a tourist or in books, with the systems themselves less than enthusiastic about revealing their full extent. Understanding and documenting a lived experience of that destruction will therefore take an act of translation. I must also be mindful that international students will have varying degrees of proximity to both neoliberalism’s benefits and victims. There are also issues of translation when it comes to baggy terms like ‘the environment’ or ‘nature’: my interlocutor and I might be talking about subtly different things whilst using the same words, and I think it might be important to clarify how they define these terms during the interview.

I have conducted several interviews already and it is apparent that students have very strong views about the politics of the environment, but also very strong views about entering the world as anthropologists trained in the western tradition, or working within the belly of the beast. Many have sought careers advice and come away disillusioned. There is a heaviness in most student’s reflections, and I have not yet heard any hope. The implications for this are that modernity does not have clear pathways, beyond academia, for expressing and accommodating its own critique and transformation. EA could be the radical highpoint for many of us, with few ways to then translate our politics into real change.

I am still interested in innovating an experimental method to compliment my interview methods, with a view to perhaps circumventing some of these issues. I have identified table top role playing games (TTRPG) as a potential candidate for this. These games allow the researcher to build a complex parallel world full of actors and situations, and to study players perspectives and attitudes within, all in a relaxed engaging setup. An EA flavoured fantasy world could very expressively explore EA themes that students might not otherwise have divulged, free from the too familiar oppressiveness of capitalisms hegemony or our impending real world ecological collapse.

[Last modified: October, 28 2024 11:08 AM]

The leaves of this artificially curated assemblage of trees and shrubs all senesce at different rates, some even within themselves, one third of a tree block colour green, the middle yellow, the other side red. Parakeets hide within them and squabble. A crow lazily paces on the grass and fallen leaves, occasionally turning one over, perhaps looking for food? Suddenly cries out 3 times, and another on a distance building calls back. The leaf crow takes flight and joins the building crow. Crows mate for life. A young man is taking a photograph of a squirrel using his smartphone. An international student for whom the squirrel is a novel encounter? A Londoner trying to connect with nature?

I am drawn into the scene and gradually the park becomes the main character. Different organisms interact with the park in different ways. Most organisms are non native to UK and to each other, a distinction that only an ecologist would make, but in a cosmopolitan mega city seems totally appropriate. The only tree that may have an ancestral claim is an enormous beech, Fagus silvatica.

3 children speaking German gather around their mothers phone. The eldest has her own and flips attention between hers and her mothers. The youngest watch videos of a relative laughing ecstatically, possibly grandmother?

Sustained, lively conversations with arm gestures at one of the café tables. Less lively, deep listening is taking place at the second table. No conversation and phone use at the third. I have to make a conscious effort not to eavesdrop, to ‘blur my ears’ and instead focus on the tone. The conversations are heavy, topics imported into the park from peoples lives. When I was here before, more of the park users were ‘present’, engaged in activities related to the park itself, like sunbathing. My task forces me to be hyper-present, but today I feel like the only one.

Besides the café tables and the German-speaking family, there are few other interactions. Everyone else is solitary. An exception are couples walking through the park to get somewhere. Three couples pass through as I sit. There are striking patterns. The first is that each partners sense of fashion is linked. The second is that for the whole duration of their walk through the park, conversation is  dominated by one partner only, whilst the other looks bored, almost held hostage.

The German speaking children have moved away from the phone and are playing elaborate high five sequences. They have enormous energy, and the park gives them the space to be wild.

An ATV arrives and empties the bins. It’s loud engine disrupts all the conversations and activity I have observed so far, even the crows, squirrels and parakeets. It is diesel, and I’m aware that a lithium model is available. Its incompatibility with the parks function has either not been considered, or the park was not valuable enough to justify the price difference. Modernity sits uneasily next to the natural setting, in the curated mix of species, in peoples phone use, in the loud ATV, and in the heavy conversation.

[Last modified: October, 20 2024 01:37 PM]

I am a new comer to the methods of anthropology, and in these few short weeks reflexivity has produced what feels like fundamental reorientations in my world view. A small example: last week I found myself locked in addictive conversation with Yilin, one of my fellow students on the Environmental Anthropology masters course, discussing positionality. He described his education in China and the ever present shadow of Britain in history lessons. I realized, as a British person, I had zero analogy for this in my life experience – awareness of another countries overwhelming influence on my own countries history and development. It goes beyond history lessons: the dominant economic system of developed nations, started in Europe and exported all over the world – capitalism – continues to influence how Yilin sees his country in a global context. If not anything else, I could see from the degree of self awareness Yilin had about these subjects that the very fact of my being British had given me the option not to focus on my own Britishness all these years, a luxury that the rest of worlds people do not have when negotiating with power. Were I to have remained blind to this, I would not have given enough attention to this context in the backstories and motivations of international students I interviewed.

In several more obvious respects, my status as a white British male means I have no way of experientially relating to people who have lived in the shadow of institutionally asymmetric power. Childhood experiences of extreme powerlessness are definitely context for many of my interests and life decisions today – I currently work with teens in care and have run ecotherapy groups in the past – but my heightened sense of injustice has been manifesting in the context of individuals. I am not nearly sensitive enough to institutional power, or injustices committed at scale.

As a student studying their EA masters, I also increasingly feel the injustice of academic tradition: of contributing to a trend of language, translation, and theory consolidation in a world where the volume of marginalised and indigenous voices has life or death consequences. While it may be unintentional on the part of academics, the same levers of power – funding, status, influence, connections, access – that drive different types of inequality the world over function heavily in academia, with unknown effects on its focus or direction.

I wonder the degree to which all this will combine in my research project. By many measures I am the least appropriate candidate to be conducting ethnographic research – basically the Man from Del Monte – and so I ought to consider radical ways of confounding my ethnographic assumptions and circumventing power dynamics, as much as I can anyway. An additional factor: by presenting my questions to fellow students – my subjects – who are themselves aware of all these issues and are doing their own research projects beset by similar issues, does a kind of ‘reflexivity squared’ effect occur, either diminishing or amplifying each issue? E.G. a white British male researcher questioning an anthropology student about their relationship with the environment could either benefit from said students awareness of positionality and therefore be more comfortable to talk to, or that same researcher might take on the appearance of the ultimate symbol of patriarchal colonial authority, making the student self conscious of their relationship with environmental anthropology at a time when they are learning and vulnerable. I believe this would be a worthwhile question to ask in interviews – what’s it like to be interviewed in an anthropology context? – as my research and interviews so far have revealed a pattern of uncertainty in students as to anthropology’s place in the world….

[Last modified: October, 13 2024 11:58 AM]

 

Emerging from the basement of the UCL cruciform building, my peers look bright and energised about their task. They ask each other in ebullient tones what each plans for their participant observation. Most respond that they are unsure, and some of the anxiety felt the evening before in our WhatsApp group lingers – some talk about the difficulties marrying the exercise with their chosen subject. I mention that my participant observation will be on EA students, and ask them if that makes them uncomfortable. They laugh, and some say yes, some say no. All agree that they do not have strong ideas for a location, and in that absence might as well go where they would be happiest – the park. Overall, the novelty, uncertainty and challenge of the tasks translates into high levels of positivity for these students- and I indulge the theory that perhaps EA students are more likely to be drawn to a green space.

There are many different types of users in the park, spread across the patches of shade and sun – children riding, a drama group conducting exercises, people passing through, people sitting. The bulk of my observation consists of observations of these users in addition to observations of my peers, themselves observing. This is in an effort to overall understand my peers experience.

Park users
Approx 50% hold coffee cups in their hand, and 30% are using their phones. The phone users do not switch their attention from phone to park, but remain for surprisingly long periods transfixed to their phone before coming up for air. I time one, 4 minutes 46 seconds before glancing at a noise. A distinct difference between phone users and other park users is their expressions: phone users look serious, intensely concentrating, while other expressions are more dynamic or engaged with surroundings. I make a point of looking around to see if anyone looks happy. I laugh out loud when I identify the only park user with a smile – Skye Hervas Jones, an EA student, eyes closed and enjoying the sun on her face. Another sun enthusiast stands in the middle of the grass, eyes closed, face angled to the sun, no smile, almost in a trance. Something that becomes more obvious as I attune myself to people and movement is that Londoners outside the park, walking to their destination, walk noticeably faster than those walking through the park. Watching them carefully, I notice that even if their journey would be quicker through the park, more choose to go around the outside, an indication that choosing to travel through the park involves complex factors beyond speed.

EA students
The already buoyant mood amongst my peers is further heightened when they reach the park. I cannot be sure if it is myself or them that feel calmer and slower in their communication. Several of my peers become interested in the drama group. Some sit and frantically scribble. Some attempt to emulate the journey of the parks users. At various points all seek comfort in each others company. Martha agrees to turn our talk into a very short interview. It is full of rich insight into her relationship with nature, and reassures me that I have good grounding for my project (interview notes to be typed up in future blog).
Several of my peers become interested in the flora of the park, perhaps chasing context for their ideas, and latch onto my ability to identify UK species of plants and a trees. They want to know if any of the areas are unmanaged and whether weeds have crept in. They become transfixed by an obese pigeon. They note that a multispecies ethnography angle would respect the pigeon as a park user.
Overall, my peers are drawn to many non human elements of the park. I get a sense that it is hard for them to be anchored in the park through its human inhabitants alone, who themselves are present here to wildly varying degrees, from the sun enthusiast absorbed by the sun, to the phone users, absorbed in tasks entirely unrelated to park.

[Last modified: October, 7 2024 12:56 PM]

The subject of environmental anthropology is being taught at a critical time in earths history. Environments are being transformed, life support systems are being undermined, and communities are rapidly changing. Technology and urbanisation means fewer people have any kind of lived, visceral, dependent, or community connection with the natural world. Environmental anthropology has a strong tradition of reflecting on inherent contradictions, asymmetric power relations, and relativist barriers between its subjects and its research, making the identity and culture of its academics a fascinating subject of research.

Young humans from all over the world come to UCL to study EA. How do new members of this community, trained in a tradition of self awareness and self critique, see their own culture, their role as anthropologists, and their future careers? What do their stories and motivations to study tell us about EA? And what is the effect of EA on them? Has their time in this community and culture changed their self identity, and in what ways? How do they see EA situated in a broader academic landscape?

Perhaps the most uncomfortable of the questions I am interested in exploring is how the students of environmental anthropology, living in one of the most highly manufactured landscapes on earth – the megacity of London – view any biases, limitations, or issues of ethnocentricity when it comes to handling topics of environmental degradation, cultures deeply enmeshed with the environment, and differing environmental value systems. Has studying environmental anthropology changed how they see their relationship with nature or increased their connection with the natural world? Has it distanced it? How do they feel about themselves as consumers? How do view their own ability to practise environmental anthropology?

Through deep immersion, observation and listening I can build a picture of the community. Through more structured interviews I can explore patterns and themes. I can also use participatory interventions, such as presenting hypothetical EA scenarios based on real world case studies designed to explore controversies and promote open ended discussion of what students personally believe to be the most important approaches in their chosen field.

Such an ethnography, if repeated across different campuses across the world, would help build a picture of a unique academic culture. It might reveal useful pedagogical issues. Most importantly, it would reinforce a a tradition of self reflection in humans studying other humans, with all the issues that famously entails. This is probably my primary motivation in choosing this topic: it is a sincere attempt to engage, in real time, with this project of academic self awareness, not as a researcher inducing it in my peers, but as a student concerned about my own potential biases, limitations, and blind spots, attempting to increase my awareness of myself through my awareness of this community.