[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 20th/21st 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.