Territorial legacies and criminalised indigenous technologies



Maano Ramutsindela presents



A response to the presentation by Maano Ramutsindela and Clapperton Mavhunga. Understandings of “nature” are probably the most ideological and perhaps romantic in the making and utilising of nature parks in Africa. The “naturalness” that wildlife parks in Africa seem to suggest was dismantled with the presentations delivered at the lecture, “People and Parks”. Maano Ramutsindela introduced the political motivations behind demarcating parks in Africa and Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga shared his research on the knowledge resources of the people living adjacent to the Makuleke Park (the northern part of the Kruger National Park).

Maano’s historical reading of conservation parks in Southern Africa suggested that establishing wildlife parks was part of the colonial making of Africa. In the “scramble” for power over nature, wildlife was seen as private property to be acclaimed and controlled from extensive hunting practices. Conservation in Africa also mirrored the colonial political climate: the 1933 London Convention, which permanently determined the boundaries of nature parks and the ideological imprint of conservation in Africa, was reminiscent of the 1884 Berlin Conference. The project of extending colonial power through wildlife parks displaced local people and criminalised traditional hunting practices. The fences, gates, rangers and guns that identified and protected the boundaries of wildlife parks, policed a separation between humans and nature. This separation captured the territorial mapping of parks in Africa, and produced a legacy that continues to determine the borders of nature parks today. My own research on an urban park in Cape Town studies this legacy and finds it not in the form of physical fences, but in borders of the mind: boundaries inscribed by the historical fabrication of a metropolitan nature and contemporary conservation practices.

With Africa’s struggle for independence, conservationists (especially the ICUN) responded to the new political climate that “endangered” the future of nature parks. During this period, outside funding for conservation increased and the Arusha Conference in 1961 was about selling the “conservationist idea” to the new African leaders to create postcolonial parks (“a special re-territorialisation project of the South”). The political and conservation convergence in shaping the future of nature parks in Southern Africa is a trajectory most explicitly illustrated by the foundation of Transfrontier Conservation Areas (or “Peace Parks”) in the 1990’s by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and South African Billionaire Anton Rupert. Amongst other meetings with aspiring African leaders, Rupert and the Prince met with Nelson Mandela who declared Peace Parks as shaping the image of Africa as one of “peace and solidarity”. This mapping of nature parks on the African continent – irrespective of local worlds or national boundaries – continues with the current drive to establish a new Peace Park between Zimbabwe, South Africa and Botswana. Peace Parks intends to promote “tourism flows” between nations and to re-establish ecological integrity by allowing animals to have multiple nationalities. This African wilderness image irons over local understandings of nature and the landscape, politics, poverty, ecological disasters and social conflicts to create an unhindered idyllic natural space for tourists and wildlife funding. The critical question remains what this colonial wildlife legacy means to the locals in their everyday lives. What are the historical utilisations of proclaimed parks, and what does uncovering these knowledge resources mean for postcolonial conservation.

On this point, Clapperton’s presentation shared with us reports from the Makuleke region that detailed the “ways of knowing” around the forest and bush, to consider “technology” outside of the Western scientific canon. To me, he suggested that the local technologies by which the animal is trekked, and the registry of fruits and plants eaten for sickness and health, are indigenous sciences, not recognised in their own right. The forest was a “reservoir for all illnesses, including hunger” (Mavhunga). Boys were skilled in making poison, the dog was neither friend nor enemy, but a trained technology and partner in the hunting process, trekking and finding animals were skills that preceded and proceeded bulleting the target. These knowledge resources and technologies were criminalised by the poaching/illegal harvesting discourse mobilised by conservationists; rendering traditional hunters into poachers.

Yet, the danger in “recovering” these local sights of knowledge lies in failing to recognise its “elastic” and adaptable nature, and perpetuating the “native in nature” stereotype. The biography of things – like the gun – narrates a movement from the global into the local, where it was actively sought after and appropriated, as Makuleke was appropriated by it. To sustain the gun’s utility, ironsmiths made bullets from bat droppings and networks of travelling gunpowder emerged. The weapon also morphed into the cultural context of its locality: technology was part of religion, faith and the process of becoming a man.
What brought the two presentations together were questions of power and knowledge in the space of conservation. Maano presented the political figures behind the territorial mapping of nature parks in Southern Africa, while Clapperton presented the local knowledge resources criminalised or denied by these power demarcations. The result was a mapping from above that mimicked older colonial habits and a mapping from below that traced local technologies. The discrepancy remains within the gap between the power involved in the former mapmaking process and the criminalisation involved in the latter.

Janie Swanepoel

Insects and Incisions



Clapperton Mavhunga presents

 For me Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga’s talk, ‘How did African sciences and technologies shape colonial science and technology of nature?’ re-inserted critical considerations of the ‘past’, of the historical imagination and the power of historical specificity in our engagements with questions on the ‘Futures of Nature’ and nonhuman agencies. Way overdue in discussions about ‘nature’ within postcolonial settings is the need to move past uncomplicated and simple framings of epistemological differences along categories such as ‘the West’, ‘African’ or ‘Indigenous’ and to begin to theorize from a more situated epistemological position.  If one takes seriously the agency of nonhumans as co-constituents of the historicity and materiality of the everyday and thus as agents in how people come to know and be – what are the implications of this in thinking about the colonial encounter in terms of ontology?

Clapperton’s talk explored this to some extent by looking at the material and social realities in which so-called “Western” science and technology took form. In doing so, he brought our attention to those ‘entangled knowledges’ and the manner in which practices of knowledge production are always embodied, emplaced and situated within very specific ‘geometries of power’ and ‘cultural topographies’. To illustrate this Clapperton took a somewhat unconventional approach - reading the colonial encounter and archive in southern Africa through tracing the ways in which the ‘Tsetse Fly’ came to be constituted or known and the multiple techniques that emerged in response to its existence, forms of mobility and power. By focusing on the history of the Tsetse Fly, Clapperton’s talk subverted more dominant historical narratives that read colonialism as the brutal and subtle imposition of Western ways of knowing on indigenous ways of knowing and the subsequent creative appropriation of or resistances to those Western science and technology by Africans. Instead Clapperton showed that much of colonial science and technology in this territory emerged from and were produced by appropriating already existing African sciences and technologies and subsuming them into a ‘Western’ episteme.

Clapperton’s talk eloquently and somewhat ironically showed how a tiny insect – the Tsetse Fly - was deeply implicated in the co-production of the history of mobilities and thus colonialism,  and the patterns of migration and settlement in the then Rhodesia. By focusing on tracing the mobilities of this particular agent – the Tsetse Fly – within the context an imperial project of re-territorialization, Clapperton showed how certain ontological categories or framings of “nature” and the ‘Other’ came to be - ways of knowing that which is imposing, strange, threatening, or untameable. Within this historical moment an specific ‘ontology of pesthood’ emerged premised on a certain way of knowing, perceiving and representing and engaging ‘Others’ – both human and nonhuman –who exhibits certain characteristic mobilities or who come into or settle in a territory or space to which one has made a certain claim to.

There is much in stake in postcolonial Africa when one writes and performs history from a ‘register more accommodating of agency’ – as Clapperton phrased it – not just human but also nonhuman agency. In considering nonhuman agencies as key actants in the shaping and making of the colonial encounter and the frontier, a more heterogeneous narrative might emerge. In such narratives representations of colonial power can be subverted by or be intimately related to the agency of nonhumans – such as the Tsetse Fly. Thus, these narratives can begin to destabilize our imaginings of the distribution of power and agency in the making of material and social realities. Such narratives may also be able to resonate more with the kind of “popular epistemologies” Nyamnyoh (2001) or ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway) that inform everyday lives of people in different African contexts. Many African scholars such as Francis Nyamnyoh (writing on Cameroom) and Achille Mbembe (in his talk on equatorial Africa), as well as writers such as Ben Okri –have showed that the kind of epistemologies that inform the everyday of many people within different African ‘lifeworlds’ do not rely on a priori boundaries between the invisible and the visible, the animate and inanimate, between subject and object, and between so-called culture and nature. Rather there exists a “deep interconnection between different levels of the real” (Mbembe) – a real which is always emergent and populated by a multiplicity of beings – both human and nonhuman – whose agencies are situated within vernacular framings of power.

For Clapperton, more heterogeneous narratives can also enable a move away from over-determined stories of victimization, which erases the ingenuity and resistances of colonized peoples and enables an opening up of the multitude of ways in which the colonial encounter - as a dialectical process – led to different forms of entanglements and appropriation. And rather than feeding into imperial and colonial representations of Africans as being held ‘captive’ by and being bounded to ‘nature’; Clapperton rather facilitated a representation of pre-colonial Africa as a space of innovation and design and liberation struggles as sites that brought together different ways of knowing in creative, eclectic, unpredictable but also very violent ways.

By tracing the ways in which human and nonhuman mobilities and processes of re-territorialisation and settlement in the colonies gave rise to particular ways of being and knowing; Clapperton was able to show how so-called ‘Western’ epistemological practices have been shaped by multiple configurations of ‘natures/culture’ as they were continuously made and unmade within the context of southern Africa during the colonial regime. Thus, ‘Western’ science and technology, despite its own universalizing and neutral claims are just as contingent upon specific spatial-temporal relationalities as any other form of knowing. Such historical incisions into the powerful exterior of ‘Western’ knowledge are an unsure project, but one that will at least lead to some leakages and experimental flows and has implications for current theorizing about what it means to know within the postcolony.

Elsemi Olwage

Meeting the Next Generation of Scholars

The 2012 JWTC session witnessed the participation of many young South African and international scholars. The Blog has spoken to some of these. We will run their profiles in the next few weeks. Today, we speak to Janie Swanepoel from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Stellenbosch.

 

You attended your first session of the JWTC. How did you hear about the JWTC and what are the reasons that led you to apply to the 2012 Session?

My supervisor Professor Steven Robins advised me to apply for the Workshop. Since my research concerns “nature”, the theme also made the Workshop more attractive.

What are the events in this year's program that you enjoyed the most and why?

The theme “Futures of Nature” led us to consider the agency of non-humans. We occupied our minds with trees, the tsetse fly, oceans, and the gun to consider other ways of thinking about the (apocalyptic?) world we live in. In this spirit of taking seriously the material, the organisers exposed us to the place-ness of Johannesburg: we visited the mines from which the city was built, discarded urban places (uitvalgrond) and the remaking of spaces in the inner city through art. I really appreciated the way in which this workshop not only presented an excellent collection of lectures, but also gave us a visceral, material and cultural introduction to the place Johannesburg. I also wondered on the influence of this material experience of the city on our conversations and debates around epistemologies of the south – or thinking from the south. 

Can you tell us about the interactions between South African participants and the other participants who came from abroad?

Discussing my locally based project with international participants gave me the opportunity to refresh my perspective. I also learned a lot from the late night debates that took place on 7th Street Melville where conversations continued in a lively fashion from the day’s art exhibitions and lectures. The workshop provided a platform from which I could position my own thinking on an international level.

What, in your view, is the importance of 'theory' for young researchers?

As a young social scientist, it is a daunting task to make sense of the messiness that emerges from research, and theory helps with this task. But the JWTC is about rethinking theory and its place in the South. The relationship between methodology and theory was a recurrent theme in the discussions of the workshop. In the “Anthropocene” (Chakrabarty) the “project of critique as based on the premise of human exceptionalism” (Achille Mbembe) demands us to consider alternative agencies and ways of knowing and writing in the making of theory. Critiques of the apocalyptic alerted us to its ability to obscure the now and the lectures on transnational geopolitics illustrated the political nature of natures. These discussions seem to suggest that the future of critique lies in finding methodologies that challenge the current theoretical capital (mostly produced in the North). The culture of theory is as part of human-natural history, as it is part of its future(s), and the task of the next generation of scholars lies in engaging  with this practice while concentrating on those places, spaces, thinkers and philosophies and life systems that are often overlooked by theories built on Western understandings. The latter task should not be considered without criticism (it has it own set of problems brought to our attention by Annie Leatt) or without recognition to what has already been theorised.

What are you currently working on and why?

My ethnographic work explored some of the borders that positions Table Mountain National Park (TMNP) within the city of Cape Town. This has opened a network of people and spaces that brought together an interdisciplinary (but largely historical and anthropological) reading of the contemporary conflicts that emerge from the urban/nature interface. My interest in this study began with a simple question: how can it be that this large national park can exist (largely uncontested) within a city challenged with vast inequalities and housing shortages? Reading into the historical fabric of this metropolitan nature park, my curiosity has led me to another question: what nature, and for whom? This research forms part of my MA in Social Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch.

Architectural confrontations with landscape

Belmont House with tropical planting invading doorways at garden level

JWTC interviews Joshua Comaroff, architect and critic, director of lekkerdesign, Singapore. http://www.lekkerdesign.com/

What relation, if any, do you see between architecture and the domains of nature?

This relationship is complex, historically contingent, and--at least in the past hundred and fifty years--a space of anxious renegotiation. In our essay on Insurgent Natures, Shing and I have suggested that the vegetal has always presented a kind of useful threat to the hygienic self-image of architecture, to its rectitudes and its conceit of being "autonomous" with respect to the world. In fact, a kind of scandalous back-alley conversation has been taking place, in buildings where the natural has provided a kind of liberating, corporealizing spirit. We see this in works linking Giulio Romano to Bernard Maybeck, to Schindler and Wright. It is thus very amusing to us that "green" architecture is now sold as something new, an invention that might be attributed to the likes of Norman Foster and Ken Yeang.

In some of the most interesting architectures--and even in some of the most modern--we have seen how natures serve to open up the boundaries of architectural possibilities. This was certainly the case, for example, in the masques of Stuart England. We trace the same line of thought to the Palazzo del Te, to the Miami hotels of Morris Lapidus, to the Trevi Fountain or the grotto at the Playboy Mansion (which follows a very similar cultural logic).

Since Modernism, the conceit of architecture is that it is drawing ever closer to the domains of the natural. Or at least, that a certain transparency--both "literal and phenomenal," as Colin Rowe put it--allows the outside to approach the quotidian of modern life. However machine-like its image, the modern building always seems to draw on the natural as mirror or necessary foil. This is why, perhaps, so many of the most iconic avant-garde buildings have been figured in a field or clearing (The Villa Savoye, the Farnsworth House, etc) and not in an urban context. This "drawing near" seems ambivalent to us, at once making nature visible and keeping it at bay. This is particularly relevant in an age where the "markets of nature" seem to propose, ingenuously or otherwise, that architecture begin to naturalize itself.

To what extent have 'markets of nature' transformed the fields of architecture and design in a place such as Singapore?

These markets of nature have transformed the production of architecture in Singapore, certainly. What is interesting is how uninterestingly they have done so. During a very brief period, the codification of "sustainable" design has led to an ossification of exciting potentials in the relationship between architecture and the natural. Facile "solutions" have transformed the contemporary building from a wildly destructive, anti-natural force to a mildly destructive, anti-natural force.

What is yet more distressing, for us, is that public expectations of "green" architecture have been even less imaginative, more fearlessly literal than even those of technocrats and developers. It is enough, in most cases, that a building look green--never mind the fact that some of the most environmentally advanced buildings are not festooned with vines to prove their good intentions. The expense of money and of energy to grow trees and shrubs precisely where they do not thrive--blown to pieces on roof decks and "sky gardens," for example--shows very clearly the performative nature required by the market of new solutions. The resulting "integration" of landscape and building is, in every sense, superficial: plants are added around the building's surfaces, where they are most conspicuous. And in many cases, this is enough.

While some improvement is better than none, this remains disappointing for those who saw in the rise of the environmental challenge an impetus to new accommodations between buildings and landscape. This would include ways in which, for example, energy-efficiency might force forms and functions to reinvent themselves. In the case of greenery, it might allow a less comfortable, less distanced role of natural elements within the building, in which softscape would be allowed to re-occupy the very centre of the architectural object.

That is, the spectre of an ecological crisis might have served to force a kind of anxious reconciliation between natures and architectures, one more productive of new objects and ideas.

Is the idea of 'natural architecture' an entirely crazy idea?

House design with earth mounds at center, spliting house into four

The idea of natural architecture is crazy, yes. But it is currently a very popular form of madness, a kind of mass hysteria among designers. It is quite common, for example, to hear about buildings that claim to be "bio-mimetic," or "self-replicating," whatever this might mean.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, these architectures of the "natural" have tended to rely heavily upon digital means of production--scripts, codes, three-dimensional modeling and visualization technologies. So-called "parametric design", in which software generates proto-natural assemblages of units, is only possible in light of recent breakthroughs in processing and design applications. In this way, the free-form character of the organic seems to recognize itself in the euphoric visions of the internet age. The resulting buildings seem to embody a certain neo-liberal social vision: a market of parts; quasi-independent; related without congealing into something so dull as society. Some of these architectures are startlingly complex, alarming, or beautiful. But they are rarely meaningful. At the end of the day, their "point" is a rejection of architecture. They are the latest in a long series of architectural "naturalisms" that gleefully reject authorship or intention.

For precisely this reason, the notion of "natural architecture" is not very desirable for us. It is precisely the conceptual problems of the building, its overtly human articulations and ambiguities, that are of interest. And the confrontation with landscape--which has, in many ways, a very different set of rules and environmental and aesthetic considerations--is compelling precisely in that the latter throws architectural conventions into sort of heightened relief.

In this confrontation between architecture and nature we prefer a middle ground, which stands somewhere between the two extremes mentioned above. It is neither the superficiality of plants hung from a facade--as in, say, Jean Nouvel's Musee Quai Branly--or in the total collapse of architecture into the bio-mimetic. It would seem more interesting to play the rules of and hierarchies of the buildings against the rather different expectations of the designed landscape. This was the case with our Stain House, where the action of weathering over time became the source of a new ornamental vocabulary. Or in a recent design for a mosque, where the envelope of the prayer hall was as much a grove of trees as a building in any conventional sense. This was a kind of archi-natural ruin, but one in which the fragments were allowed meaning and dignity as human products.  

To many a critic, the futures of nature will depend on the outcomes of the on-going struggles around what constitutes the "artificial" and what distinguishes the "artificial" from its opposite...

In Singapore, we do not see a "struggle," so much as an eclipse or reordering, in ecological or biological terms, of the artificial and its opposite.

For example: it is a peculiarity of Singaporean natures that the fake often precedes the real. How does this happen? Possibly like this: an infrastructural canal is excavated to relieve the flooding of a new neighborhood. The canal serves an urban area, and the latter likely suffers the hydrological problems that attend large impervious surfaces, compacted soils, and so forth. Some time later, well-intentioned greenies will militate--with absolutely no reflection or irony--for the removal of the concrete surfaces, for the planting of ecotopic species, and for the "naturalization" of the drain's relationship to tide and ground water. The authentic drain becomes a fake river. It joins the natural environment, via a procedure that recalls Maurice Sendak.

Many of the island's other ecological aspects follow a similar logic. Artificially introduced species join the ecosystem, and begin to play roles within it (good or bad). New coastline is "reclaimed," and offers a substrate for natural systems. A myriad of experimental ecologies emerge, half accidentally--while some fail utterly, others become the basis for new natural accommodations.

Stain house, Singapore

The radically anthropogenic character of the Singaporean landscape, the monstrous legacy of its colonial (mis)management, has rendered the restitution of the "natural"--the non-artificial--virtually impossible. For a "native" ecosystem to be restored, in most cases, it would need to still exist; the contemporary Singaporean environment would have to be largely destroyed, in order to foster the fraught re-instatement of species that were extirpated in the mid-19th century. Paradoxically, the destruction of the artificial would require an almost total ecocide, in all but a few of the island's most recessive enclaves.

For this reason, the equatorial city has been proposed--for example, by Richard Corlett--as a site where new ecosystems must be imagined, curated, cultivated. As landscape designers, we have ourselves been forced to reject the distinction between the genuine and the artificial. It is not that such a distinction does not exist, nor that it is unmeaningful. It is, however, unhelpful in Asian contexts where the genuine and the artificial are so promiscuous, so inter-digitated, as to become the progenitors of new synthetic entities. Singapore is florid with a kind of third being, a hybrid condition that spans human and natural, artifice and authenticity.

Its products are "nurtural"--for the lack of a more elegant term. These rely in large part on the workings of the non-human, and, at the same time, upon their continued cultivation by people. Some very quickly achieve self-reliance. Others are "sustainable" only in that they need to be sustained, or can be sustained, by us. However, what such phenomena have in common is their intricate admixtures of biological performance and the intentionalities of design.

Whatever it may be, the future of nature has limited place for the genuine. For those of us who are sentimental lovers of nature, however, it may be a comfort that the artificial seems to be a similarly endangered species. 

Don't Panic

The site of the exhibition of Don’t Panic (at the Centre for Historical Reenactments), curated by Gaby Ngcobo is a elegant example of the fluidity between thinking of universalism, (the experience of climate change) and particularities and identities of the African vantage point, as well as the viewpoints of a variety of generations of artists. Ngcobo gives us an arena to view these varying images and points of view and we are left to our own minds to make sense of it. This is how art creates a space that is flexible, in which intellectuals and mainstream viewers can debate the efficacy of visual and audio strategies. There are some artists that create direct human and formal responses to the idea of nature, such as the sun, of Sean Slemons drawings on the wall and floor demarking the pathway of the sun as it moves in reaction to the human made architecture of the building and window. Slemons reminds us that we can create gestures in concert with our world without interrupting its processes. The pathway is made as a large drawing that increases its density as the day moves on. The piece is formally elegant in its transition from the wall to the floor. Donna KuKama is presenting a video with a extremely disruptive sound element, as we stands her hair is waving in the wind against the background of a rock formation. The geologic site reminds us of the ancient period of time, her dress is contemporary, and her hair waves over her face, which brings to mind her identity as well as loss of identity. Her waving hair signifies that she is a black woman, yet we do not know her as a person. So she is presenting herself as a metaphor and an icon in the natural environment. She looks cold, as the wind blows, and is steadfast in her standing position. She confronts the viewers and we are to begin to understand what she is trying to communicate to us mutely. KuKama is also performing live for us today at the Center for Historical Reenactments. She is performing as a bank teller selling certificates on gold paper, and asking for financial exchange for something that would suggest a purchase on the future. The question is also what are we purchasing? The vegetables are placed on the desk and arranged in piles suggesting piles of money or currency. The idea of food as luxury, or food as commodity is brought forward.

They suggest that currency can be as simple as food, but also that food is so urgent for human beings. Donna’s voice can only be heard by the person in line whose turn it is to engage her. Therefore the audience is peaked by its interaction with her. Her manner is calm and serious as she assumes this character with authenticity. Viewers are deprived of hearing their exchange, and therefore are required to line up themselves in order to truly know what the bank is all about. KuKama is also right on time as she uses the platform of the bank in a moment when we all are wondering particularly about the role of banks their abuses. Viewers take this skeptical energy to donna as they react in parting with their currency.

The range of works in this exhibition is wide. They deal with both the content of the issue of climate change, but they locate in an African dialogue. Some of them have humor, and all have certain formal qualities, and some react to the locale of a particular African experience. The challenge of facing the end of a world as we knew it is so absurd that we as viewers immediately look for the corners where we are familiar, or the intimate places where we can find our purpose.

The title of Don’t Panic is taken from Ruth Sacks, video. Sacks skywrote these words using an airplane into the sky. She chose the day of human rights in South Africa to write these words. She asks viewers to look up, and not panic about the ecological disaster, not panic about the lack of human rights perhaps. In this she draws a line between the conditions of human beings and the condition of the larger natural world. Sacks today serves us a lunch, which is conceived of as a repaying her climate debt of using an airplane and its fuel in the atmosphere. The lunch is lovingly prepared by a cooking artisan, who thinks of food as her work, using local cheeses, and meats, and African grilling traditions. The meal was like no other I have had in Africa, it was fresh, delicious, authentic, abundant for us viewers and eaters. The international area of food+art is current and thoughtfully conceived. We are in fellowship together as participants, and the generosity of spirit of this work is potently felt.

Gabi Ngcobo is purposefully providing a constellation of works that articulate nodes of how to think about climate as global disaster. The works confront what still exists at a time of disaster, these may or may not be examples of natural beauty, these may or may not be hints of disaster. The nodes do not illustrate the scope of the problem. The art asks questions of viewers who must then question their own vantage points and assumptions. Human beings wrestling with the indifference of nature have to have thoughts and draw intellectual and emotional conclusions. Human beings can then remind us of the biologic and geographic locations, as well as economic and racial disparities, social dilemmas, and political problems etc. The function of art is to stir this pot with potent thoughts and arguments, and spur the viewers to connect dots and create projects of remedy. One critical question perhaps is the one that asks in the saving of nature what hierarchies are being created and by whom?

Art can perhaps suggest, yet not exactly supply the action steps, but rather foment these to become urgent.

The identity or question of audience then comes forward. Who is the audience for these works? In our hearts artists hope that the scope is wide, often the audience is more rarified. Thus, the forms of our work  also migrates across spaces such as both white cubes, black cubes, or mainstream locations like public works, and particularly on line locations such as social networks, and digital video networks such as You Tube etc. The life of a written publication is also key to the works living beyond their physical confines, like the Don’t Panic catalogue for example. This circles back to the Center For Historical Reenactments and its commitment to providing a space to work on projects in the context of post Apartheid society. This flexibility of this model addresses post trauma in a sanctioned space. The existence of the first exhibition in the public gallery of Durban is another foray in engaging the fallible government entities as well.  Don’t Panic succeeds in both subject, and context, for art and the conversation it inspires.

Kim Anno

Why epistemologies of the south?

JWTC in conversation

“Why epistemologies of the south?” Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s challenging lecture was charged with greater provocation in the context of the JWTC conversation on nature and environment. It was even more provocative since his argument seemed to unsettle the emergent view in the workshop that knowledges alternative to hegemonic knowledge are romanticized reinventions whose time has passed since the world in which their interventions may have been productive has already been fundamentally transformed. The lecture foregrounded the epistemologies of the metaphorical global south in the context of what the speaker observed as seven threats to social justice in the forms taken by contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Some of these threats, like continued colonialismfor example, are not new or different, just paradoxical in the ways that they continues to perpetuate racism while superficially rejecting the nineteenth century science of race. Other threats to social justice identified represent a widening out of the exclusions of earlier forms of capitalism: For example, as technological advances have allowed work to be brought home and as the nature of the workplace has changed in various sectors, incursions into leisure time have been pushed further. These forms of unpaid labour have thus expanded the sphere of the most significantly unrecognized and unrecompensed labour of traditional women’s work. Most of the threats outlined identify attacks on social justice which allow the continued encroachment of a fluid and engulfing capitalism.

 One of the threats singled out by the speaker, however, namely, the destruction of nature, is a threat of a different magnitude and order since it threatens both the dominant and the dominated. This reinforces the view of Immanuel Wallerstein, among others, who suggests that the finitude of the world conceptualized as resource makes the present crisis of capitalism a crisis which capitalism’s legendary protean powers of transformation will not succeed in transcending. In fact, the environmental threat is a planetary catastrophe which could destroy not only actors in capitalist relations of power, but also animal and vegetable life. (This question addresses a different tension which seems to have arisen in the JWTC conversation. On the one hand, some points of view have taken for granted environmental finitude and potential catastrophe. On the other, the discourse of disaster has been presented as part of the problematic which needs to be challenged.)

 The speaker asserts that containing and reversing global disaster in the cause of social justice cannot emerge from the systems of knowledge which have produced transformations of the natural world on a scale hitherto unknown and unthinkable. In the context of global warming, there quite literally is no part of the planet which lies outside of human influence – there is no wilderness. The speaker maintains that since the sum of knowledges of the world exceeds a western understanding of the world, the epistemologies of the global south suggest a trajectory out of the impasse. Responses to environmental finitude for the most part engage only the knowledge of the global north whose epistemology exists on one side of an “abyssal divide”, producing a radically truncated horizon of possibility. In this way cognitive injustice reinforces social injustice.

Some questions, however, remain troubling in this approach which clearly is inspired both by a pragmatic realism and social concern. In terms of the argument presented, those on the other side of the “abyssal divide” must engage indigenous epistemologies. There is an interesting slippage in the terms used to describe the knowledge which must be gleaned. The argument shuttles between the terms “epistemological” and “cognitive” justice and also “indigenous understandings”. One gets the impression, one that possibly may be misconceived, that the framework and the terms of thinking of indigenous knowledges may, in fact, produce an instrumentalisation of epistemologies of the south, just as epistemologies of the north defined, delimited and  instrumentalised nature. If epistemology of the south refers only to indigenous “know-how”, then it may disembed knowledge from a much more profound understanding of the world which connects human, non-human, plant and cosmos. These spiritually and philosophically integrated worlds are also worlds enabled by a mythology which may not be shared by other indigenous groups. The question then arises of how different indigenous ethical understandings might encounter and engage one another.

Constituting the epistemology of the south as an epistemology of “those who have suffered injustices” as the speaker does, also tends to elide the enabling mythology of indigenous groups in favour of a mythology of a constitutive moment forged out of the engagement with capitalist modernity. In other words, this paradigm would continue to cast into abyssal darkness the epistemology which exists in excess of the epistemology of injustice constituted at the moment of capitalist encounter.

The broader framework of the argument also implies that somehow the radical left summons itself into being outside of an enabling mythology, in other words, universally, and so may be tasked with the role of managing indigenous epistemologies.

Indigenous cosmological or cosmogonic mythologies also simultaneously constitute a set of social and human – nonhuman relations conceived as obligation, the ways one ought to act and engage other people and the natural world. The epistemology of the south is always inherently an ethical understanding, not just a “know-how”. Ethics is also a term which has repeatedly been introduced in the JWTC conversation, but one which has not gone on to produce a dialogue.

Fiona Moola

English Department, University of the Western Cape