Module IV essay: Nature for First Nations

Default due date: Nov 01, 2024 at 11:59 p.m.

Word count: 1000

In lectures, we have discussed the pernicious stereotype that Indigenous peoples are “closer to nature” than other societies and that Indigenous societies always regard nature as sacred (Wasserman 1994, 98; see also Graham 2020; Brosius 2016). At the same time, we have considered the ideas of scholars who argue that some Indigenous societies do have a unique orientation toward their own natural environments. These scholars also argue that the capitalist economies of settler societies interfere with Indigenous ways of relating to and understanding their environments, and that settler societies should learn from Indigenous relationships to nature in order to solve the ecological crises that settler capitalism has created.

What is your view?

In this paper, make an argument for a claim about the ways of understanding and relating to nature that you see in one self-described Indigenous society. Identify what kind of relationship to nature you see in ethnographic facts about this society and its members’ lives and thinking, and state a claim about what this aspect of their worldview tells you about their community as a whole.

This assignment is more open than previous assignments. You have more scope to formulate a claim in your own terms. The topic of this essay—the different kinds of relationships that different cultures have with nature and the environment—pertains to Module IV but also touches on several bigger ideas that run through this whole class. This essay assignment asks you to formulate a claim about one ethnographic case but it is also an opportunity to apply ideas from the whole semester to one case.

However this assignment does not ask you to find ethnographic descriptions of Indigenous societies on your own, or to analyze several cases, or make a universal claim about all people in all Inidgenous societies. Like the previous assignments, you should choose one case study as an evidentiary basis for your essay. A good essay will base its argument on a deep reading of one case rather than a survey of several cases.

For this assignment, choose one of these sources as your case study:

Blaser, Mario. 2016. “Is Another Cosmopolitics Possible?” Cultural Anthropology 31 (4): 545–70. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.4.05.

Brightman, Robert. 1993. “You Got to Keep It Holy.” In Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships, 1–36. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

Gugganig, Mascha. 2017. “The Ethics of Patenting and Genetically Engineering the Relative Hāloa.” Ethnos 82 (1): 44–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2015.1028564.

Young, Diana. 2023. “Water as Country on the Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, South Australia.” Oceania 93 (3): 246–58. https://doi.org/10.1002/ocea.5376.

(Ryan will be adding to this list over the semester. If you have another similar ethnographic case study—either a monograph or a journal article—which you think would be appropriate, feel free to suggest it, and discuss the possibility of using it as a basis for your paper with your tutor.)

References

Brosius, J. Peter. 2016. “Endangered Forests, Endangered People: Environmentalist Representations of Indigenous Knowledge.” In The Environment in Anthropology: A Reader in Ecology, Culture, and Sustainable Living, edited by Nora Haenn, Richard R. Wilk, and Allison Harnish, 2nd ed., 254–73. A Reader in Ecology, Culture, and Sustainable Living. New York: NYU Press. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/stable/j.ctt180410k.34.

Graham, Laura R. 2020. “From ‘Ugh’ to Babble (or Babel): Linguistic Primitivism, Sound-Blindness, and the Cinematic Representation of Native Amazonians.” Current Anthropology 61 (6): 732–62. https://doi.org/10.1086/712489.

Wasserman, Renata R. Mautner. 1994. “Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Discourse of the Exotic.” In Exotic Nations: Literature and Cultural Identity in the United States and Brazil, 1830-1930, 69–100. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt207g5v4.6.