Ryan Schram
ANTH 6916: The social in justice
October 9, 2024

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/6916/2024/10

Many of the Black coastal communities I worked with were similarly steeped in histories of autonomous worldmaking deeply rooted to local ecologies that shaped their approach to coastal restoration. Compared to frameworks of restoration predicated on land loss and natural processes, many Black community leaders in Plaquemines Parish approach questions about land and future of Plaquemines around the past—specifically through invocations of holding land across generations of kin over time. My visits with Ms. Irvine in the small town of Ironton, which neighbors the proposed Mid-Barataria River Sediment Diversion project, regularly reinforced this point to me. (Barra 2023, 153)

See Mauss ([1925] 1990), pages 10–11.

Barra, Monica Patrice. 2024. “Restoration Otherwise: Towards Alternative Coastal Ecologies.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 42 (1): 147–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758221146179.

Mauss, Marcel. (1925) 1990. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. https://archive.org/details/giftformreasonfo0000maus/page/10/mode/2up.