(Un)seeing like a conservationist: Pluriversal politics of translating nature-culture

Keywords: Conservation, Indigeneity, Indigenous knowledge, Ontology, Nature, Dolpo, Nepal, Himalaya
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 3

Abstract

This paper critically examines what happens when particular enactments of nature-culture dichotomy by Nepali state actors through its conservation projects intermingle and clash with Dolpopa (people of Dolpo, northwest Nepal) ways of knowing and being. Drawing on ethnographic field research and my own training in both Dolpopa and “Western” epistemologies, I first analyze a particular “modern” practice (Latour 1993) that I call “seeing like a conservationist”; that is, the ways in which the park staff and conservationists represent Dolpo and translate them into concrete interventions. “Nature”, in these practices, emerges as a selection of things out there that are anything but humans. I then draw from Dolpopa frameworks to construct a situated critique of mainstream conservation and present multiple ways of knowing, narrating, and becoming-with nature. “Nature”, within Dolpopa frameworks, are less about things than they are about the interdependent relations in which humans, more-than-human beings, and the inanimate earth are enmeshed into and through which they become who they are. I also trace and reflect upon moments of translation across partially connected worlds (Strathern 2004), the “pluriverse”, to highlight knowledge-power dynamics involved in ontological politics and to make a methodological case for centering the pluriversal politics of translation that many Indigenous scholars inadvertently engage in our travels between scientific and traditional ways of knowing. This paper puts the “ontological turn” in conversation with critical Indigenous studies and challenges the tendency of the former to erase Indigenous thoughts and thinkers (Todd 2016; Sundberg 2014).