Perspectives on Climate Change: Modernity and Ontology in Amazonia
| Dates: | 5 March 2014 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 19:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Adults, Alumni, Current University students, General public |
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| Speaker: | Dr Evan Killick |
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Abstract
Drawing on research with both indigenous people and academic and policy workers this paper examines understandings of forest conservation and climate change mitigation strategies in contemporary Amazonia. In so doing it notes how these latest issues parallel older processes of economic and political independence and dependency. The paper begins by considering both indigenous conceptions of and physical interactions with the environment. Through this focus the paper interrogates local ontologies and what they may or may not suggest about notions of forest conservation. The paper then goes on with a similar analysis of contemporary, non-indigenous notions of climate change and climate-change mitigation policies, examining both their practical outcomes as well as their ontological underpinnings. It notes how the rainforest and its people are reified as saviors of modernity’s ills but only within a particular economic and legal framework in which carbon can be understood as the region’s latest extractive commodity, the value of which is determined outside the region. Through this broadly parallel analysis of emic and etic approaches to the Amazonian environment the paper seeks to consider the opportunities and limitations of the latest technical solutions being offered while also considering the ethical issues surrounding the fact that climate change is itself an outcome of the broader processes of modernity.
Speaker
Dr Evan Killick
Role: Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and International Development,
Organisation: University of Sussex
Biography: Evan Killick has a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has previously held teaching and research posts at Brunel University and The London School of Economics.
Travel and Contact Information
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4.4
Roscoe Building
Manchester
