Transcript

[00:00] [Sounds from Gitxaała territory]

Charles Menzies (CM) [00:10]: Gitxaała, a North Coast Canadian First Nation, is a people rooted in the past in a way that prioritizes planning for the future. Gitxaała history tells of times in our past when we forgot ourselves—we broke our relations with other beings and treated them with cruelty. Our histories tell how we were then met with calamity. Tidal waves, floods, landslides, and famine was our reward. In the aftermath, our ancestors who survived rekindled our proper relations with other beings and returned to knowing who we are.

This idea of knowing who we are is particularly important in today’s world, where people treat each other with acts of inhumanity and carelessness and callousness. It is as though the entire globe has been deracinated and disconnected from its sense of place and belonging.

Sharon Jacobs (SJ) [01:02]: That was Charles Menzies, professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, speaking via video recording to the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, or AAA, in New Orleans in November 2025. Menzies is also director of the Ethnographic Film Unit at UBC, which generously provided the audio from Gitxaała territory that opened this episode, and which you’ll hear throughout it. At the AAA’s, Menzies shared Gitxaała stories of disaster and retribution, which you’ll hear scattered throughout this episode, among other presentations. 

Alejandro Echeverria (AE) [01:36]: This episode of AnthroPod is the third in a miniseries sharing highlights from talks organized by the Society for Cultural Anthropology at the AAA. The presentations we’ll share with you today deal with the disastrous world we live in, a world where capitalist interests and geopolitical conflict threaten traditional forms of agriculture and land custodianship, where enduring violence and conflict have joined forces with anthropogenic climate change to drive communities to ruin. But we’ll also share presentations about people who are imagining and developing livable futures, learning from lessons from their past and rekindling their relations, as the Gitxaała Nation has done throughout its history. 

SJ [02:17]: I’m Sharon Jacobs.

AE [02:19]: And I’m Alejandro Echeverria.

SJ [02:21]: And you’re listening to AnthroPod’s coverage of the AAAs. Stay tuned. 

[02:25] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

AE [02:38]: The panel that Menzies presented on was called “The Future is a Foreign Country,” and it asked how people imagine, understand, and build future lands from the vantage point of present collapse. Many of the presenters we’ll hear from today were fellow “Foreign Country” panelists, including Susanna Hoffman, chair of the Risk and Disaster Commission of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnographic Studies. Hoffman shared insights for anthropology that come from her thirty-two years of experience in disaster study.

Susanna Hoffman (SH) [03:08]: Clearly, as we speak, there are a host of dire occurrences happening all over the world. Unheralded climate events, storms, more storms, storms that don’t leave, atmospheric rivers, crazy heat and ballooning heat domes, floods, fires, rain, no rain, crop failures. Along with the climate-related impacts, we also have a lingering and resurging global epidemic with the threat of more, profound social upheavals involving massive population displacement, food systems in jeopardy, and concomitant famine, and all this taking place on the backs of, for many, a global economic slowdown punctuated by inflation, and not surprisingly, yet louder calls to address the harm of colonial legacies. 

We in anthropology have always dealt with groups and entire societies. This crisis we are in, however, leads us to the necessity of adding the phenomena of human sequestration to our purview. As happened in the pandemic, we now have the isolation of people in triple ways: disaster occurrence, disaster preventative, and disaster repercussions. Without a doubt, the isolation of persons away from their social collective affects every aspect of human life that we have considered before in our field: kinship, religion, economics, politics. And isolation is occurring more and more, certainly also with urbanization, coastalization, and westernization. It impacts not just persons, but whole societies and cultures. Its disruptions are temporal, spatial, cognitive, sensorial. At the same time, however, it has given rise to new forms of culture and connection. 

AE [04:54]: Isolation, as well as other changes to the world, such as the increase in forced migration globally, have profound implications for how we do anthropology. Hoffman stressed how we have to see ourselves as both researcher and subject, our work a project of self-reflection as well as social analysis. She also touted the value of deduction over induction, or in her words, 

SH [05:17]: … the interpretation of meanings and happenings, and proposing of conclusions and solutions, rather than just collecting data and reporting on one particular case study or numbers. I believe we should take more leaps of understanding, from both the particulars of our location and our work, and reach again for more overarching determinations. Along that line, with the growing acceleration of calamity, geological, atmospheric, and all human-caused disasters, it is clear we must merge our work with other approaches and knowledges from other fields, particularly ecological, economic, and physical sciences, and certainly the social sciences. 

AE [05:59]: Hoffman ended with her talk with an ode to the value of universals.

SH [06:03]: Yes, there is cultural relativity. Yes, each culture is different. And yes, every disaster is different, even across the breadth of a population affected. But all that is still pinned to the underlying universal concept that all people have culture, even if the cultures differ. Certainly, different case studies are crucial. But the point has all long been the comparison of the different studies and to find commonalities among them.

In conclusion, I argue, let’s get back to that—the bigger overarching validities. Not just what happens in one fire, but all fires. Not one flood, but all floods. Not just one culture and society, but all of them. Not just one future, but all of our futures.

AE [06:47]: From universals to the universe, Courtney Desiree Morris used the concept of black holes as a portal into a historical Black community about three hours’ drive from the AAA conference location in New Orleans. Morris is an artist and assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She brought audiences face-to-face with Southwest Louisiana’s petroleum industry in a reflection on her photographic project, Solastalgia. What does it mean, Morris asked us, to photograph a black hole? Or, essentially, to see the unseeable?

Courtney Desiree Morris (CDM) [07:23]: In the U.S. historical imagination, Black and Indigenous geographies exist as something like black holes: spaces that are fundamentally unknowable and unseeable, yet whose inherent fungibility and worthlessness mark them as disposable sites where the perpetual dream of manifest destiny and endless capital expansion can unfold.

Consider the case of Mossville, a small historical freedmen’s community located in southwest Louisiana, in the heel of the boot, just north of the city of Lake Charles. Mossville is my mother’s hometown. There is some dispute about the town’s origins, but varying accounts suggest that the town was established sometime in the 1790s, potentially making it one of the oldest free Black communities in the South, although this is debated in the community depending on who you talk to.

The town expanded rapidly after the end of the Civil War and became a haven for formerly enslaved peoples, who secured land grants to begin homesteading. My great-great-grandfather, Julius Williams, and my great-great-great-grandfather, Leon Venise, owned approximately 120 acres between them, that they held onto until the 1920s, when they were tricked through some legal sleights of hand by petrochemical companies establishing facilities in the region, and they lost that land in the early 20th century.

The town continued to grow in the early 20th century as Mossville residents built churches, businesses, juke joints, small farms, and a colored school. In the 1930s, however, as southwestern Louisiana became an increasingly important site for the development of the U.S. petrochemical economy, various companies began to construct facilities around Mossville. Eventually, by the end of the century, the town was surrounded by fifteen petrochemical companies manufacturing the many products that make our carbon-based consumer lives possible.

AE [09:05]: In 2012, one of these companies, Sasol, announced an expansion that would require a full buyout of Mossville.

CDM [09:13]: I knew, visiting the community as this was happening, that the buyout would be the final nail in the coffin of a community that had been slowly dying for many years. Mossville had survived slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the terror of Jim Crow. But it would not survive the age of oil. Throughout the African diaspora, Black communities have developed complex and beautiful mourning rituals to celebrate our dead. As an anthropologist whose work has taken me to many diasporic communities, I’ve had the chance to witness these practices.

As I mourn the death of Mossville, I found myself wondering, how does one mourn the loss of a place? How are Black spaces made to die? And what does it mean that those deaths are so often unseeable to society at large?

AE [09:59]: This line of questioning led Morris to her photography series, Solastalgia. The term refers to the existential distress of losing the landscapes of your home to environmental forces outside your control. And it became an expression of Morris’s grief and rage about Mossville’s loss.

CDM [10:17]: Although in the moment I felt powerless to stop the buyout, I felt an urgent need to document what was taking place and to create my own counter-archive of the community’s Black and Indigenous social life.

And so I began photographing everything that I could. I photographed the old Mount Zion Baptist Church, where my grandfather had once been a deacon and where a bunch of my cousins got married. I photographed the plants that had engulfed the community. I photographed the historic colored school that Sasol purchased and used as an office to process Mossville residents’ buyout claims and then was subsequently demolished. I photographed the Jacob Rigmaiden Center, where we celebrated family reunions. I photographed my grandmother in the last two years of her life, as cancer tore through her body—the result of a lifetime of living in the shadow of the plants. I photographed my mother and my niece in a portrait called “Cynthianne Got Some Pretty Grandbabies.” I staged self-portraits in the Morning Star Cemetery, where all of my grandmother’s people are buried, just across the street from the new Sasol facility.

I also photographed seemingly empty sites, in order to consider how emptiness can also speak volumes. I photographed streets that had once been lined with modest homes. I photographed the foundations of homes that had been demolished, since the Sasol buyout agreement required that Mossville residents demolish their own homes before receiving their payouts from the company.

In the collection there are photographs of driveways and porch stairs that lead to nowhere, abandoned wood-framed cabins being consumed by nature, and street signs with the names of the community’s original founding families, including my grandmother’s family, the Williams family. Or for example, a grassy field, once a dense pine forest where my grandfather used to take my male cousins and uncles hunting.

Viewers may not have the kind of historical memory of Mossville that I do, but you do not need to know that history in detail in order to know intuitively that this is a haunted landscape, that these ruins are full of stories.

AE [12:09]: Her goal in the project is to get viewers to see what is generally considered unseeable, to see something disappeared. 

CDM [12:17]: The claims to space that subordinated subjects make through their quotidian cultural practices, collective knowledge, and place-making strategies constantly contest geographical domination. By paying attention to the spatial practices of Black social life, we begin to understand this process, the alterability of space, and the necessary incompleteness of all geographical projects. And we also apprehend Black people throughout the African diaspora as subjects who can tell radically different stories about place than the ones that we are accustomed to accepting as fact.

Nothing is unseeable. We simply lack the capacity or the inclination or the tools to see.

What is a black hole? A black hole is simply a cosmic ancestor, a dead star, waiting to be acknowledged, trying in the only way it can to touch the living. There’s more than one way to know the truth of a thing, and we need not wait until we can see something to intuit its presence and power on our lives. The gravitational pull of the past is strong. It is there to be known and felt, if we are prepared to see it with more than just our eyes.

AE [13:26]: Morris’s talk was part of an invited session called “Habitable Air: Urban Inequality in the Time of Climate Change.” All the panelists in this session are contributors to a forthcoming edited volume with the same name. Across different contexts, the presenters have used ethnographic and historical methods to understand how ordinary people grapple with the energy industries in their midst and manage the effects of chemical air pollution on health and society.

Kerry Ryan Chance introduced the panel with some observations from her ethnographic work in South Africa, the U.S., and Germany. Chance is a professor at Norway’s University of Bergen and Principal Investigator of The Habitable Air Project, which is funded by the Research Council of Norway and European Commission.

Kerry Ryan Chance (KRC) [14:15]: “Close the window. The air smells and tastes of blood,” a woman named Zama told me, describing her neighborhood in a water-scarce energy hub outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. The smell of blood, she assured me, is not exceptional, not a chemical leak or a disaster, but—like the red dust that gets into her eyes and clothing—a familiar element of day-to-day life.

I joined Zama and her neighbors on June 4th, 2018, in a sparse, immaculate living room with a curtained window that faces an industrial site, smoke rising. The site and workers’ housing, which eventually grew into a township, was constructed in the 1950s under apartheid. Neighbors explained that the metallic tang of the air is partially due to sulfur dioxide, SO2, an invisible pollutant with a pungent, burnt matchstick odor—a scent, incidentally, also associated with fiery street protests of the 1980s. Along with invoking its chemical compounds and sensory affect, Zama’s words gesture toward the material and symbolic weight of the air in this area, thick as it is with histories, violences, and social possibilities. Blood also captures the viscous nature of the petrochemicals produced here, which goes into the most taken-for-granted household items, from laundry detergent to lipstick to children’s pens. 

AE [15:36]: The petrochemical industry is deeply embedded in life here, and families and communities are intimately imbricated in it, even as they recognize the harm it causes them, Chance explained. 

The 2015 Paris Agreement, as well as national court rulings in South Africa, have decried unequally distributed industrial pollution and affirmed the right to non-toxic air. But accords and policy have had limited effect on the ground. What’s more,

KRC [16:03]: … scientific and governmental framings cannot fully capture other dimensions of air’s force. In a church located in a petrochemical zone, a congregant sacralized polluted air in worship, invoking its presence through the refrain, “I can feel it in the atmosphere, the spirit of the Lord is here.”

In southern Africa, the Isizulu word umoya means breath, spirit, air, wind, and are part of the humoral and cosmological systems that refers to the spiritual breath that persists until death and connects the living ancestors to the ancestral realm. These perspectives converge and suggest that the “blood air” Zama described is not an individual property, but a collective substance that circulates through and between bodies, which binds people together into local ecologies.

Zama’s window functions as a threshold between habitable and uninhabitable air, mediating between that which enables and constricts “the universal right to breathe.” The question of habitability extends beyond biological survival to the capacity to dwell, to inhabit, and to make life in that space. These states are not fixed or opposing poles, but exist in a constant dynamic relation, shifting by contingent degrees in passing moments, for Zama as for us all. 

AE [17:20]: In introducing the rest of the panelists, some of whom we have heard from in the previous parts of this miniseries, Chance, in her role as editor, also spoke on the Habitable Air volume as a whole. She highlighted overarching themes of community response, imagining futures, and corporate state sovereignty. Habitable Air will be available in December through Berghahn Books; you’ll find a full reference for the volume on our show notes page.

Chance defined a key concept that emerges from the volume in tracing the intertwined landscapes of habitable air, that of “sacrificial habitation.”

KRC [17:57]: It is where the expectations and projections at different time scales are grounded in environmental racism. Yet it is also where people continue to dwell, continue to think about a future that redresses the past. Sacrificial habitation takes place in so-called “sacrifice zones,” where geographies have been impacted over and over again with different layered forms of industrial violence. There’s a tension between historicity, the course of separate events, and the feeling that history is simply repeating itself. So when finding a footing for change feels untenable—and it’s incredibly difficult, it’s even dangerous to re-envision security, to wonder about history and to posit post-industrial or post-carceral futures—at the same time, habitation emphasizes that despite this, there are localized forms of memory and memorialization rendered, for instance, through kinship or aesthetic expression, as well as the use of localized capacities to harness resources.

Sacrificial habitation is not about romanticizing struggles over air, for air, with air, but acknowledging the labor contained in these ambivalent forms of sustained dwelling. In these sites, it’s not that there are clear lines between habitability and uninhabitability, but a mapped modularity of what is redeemable and containable.

As smoke rose and dust blew around in Zama’s house, her window framed the banality of pollution and the complex ways ordinary people make air breathable and life viable for themselves and their families and communities. Thank you.

[19:33] [Sounds from Gitxaała territory] So like if you wanted a spring salmon or a crab, just go get it. What we need to eat, not a whole bunch. 

CM [19:48]: Drawing from the work of Tsimshian ethnographer William Beynon, anthropologist Jay Miller in 1997 describes the results of people not respecting the gifts of their nonhuman relations. In his account of the story of Temlaxham, an ancient Tsimshian community of origin, we learn of how the people are punished for forgetting themselves, for disrespecting their own animal relatives:

Everyone did as he or she pleased. Great chiefs would give feasts and kill many slaves. They wasted food. The people had become wicked. One day some children went across the Skeena to play by themselves. One of them went for a drink at a small stream. There he saw many trout. He called to the others and they began to fish for trout, even though they already had plenty of food. They abused the trout. When they caught a fish, they would put urine in its mouth and return it to the water to watch it writhe and die. They laughed and mocked the fish in its agony. The trout had come to spawn that fine spring day, but they died instead. Soon a black fog began and a strong wind blew. Then it began to rain torrents. The trout stream began to rise. The children drowned.

SJ [20:54]: In this story, shared by Charles Menzies, the land itself responds when people treat their nonhuman relations with abuse. How people construct connections to land, and the role land itself plays in shaping those connections, was also a question for Kristin Skrabut, assistant professor of urban and environmental policy and anthropology at Tufts University, in a talk called, “Mi papa pachacutana: Urban Unsettlement, New Natives, and Growing Futures in the Meantime.”

Kristin Skrabut (KS) [21:25]: As Lina and I washed dishes behind the comedor popular, a kind of grassroots communal kitchen and dining hall common in Lima’s impoverished peripheries, an Andean grandmother marveled at the back garden. “Esta tierra es más abonada, this land is so fertilized, you all should plant potatoes.”

She told the story of how she had found a small shriveled potato outside a local school and planted it behind her house. “And from this tiny potato, almost forty other potatoes grew! Small, beautiful. I gifted them to various people and they said, ‘Oh, how pretty, where is this potato from?’ And I told them, ‘This potato is from mi tierra, from Pachacutec.’ ” Lina and I laughed at the turn of phrase, de mi tierra, “from my earth,” which Peruvians typically use to depict rural and Indigenous homelands. The phrase conveys autochthony, naturalness, and deep-rooted connections to land and past. It was thus incongruous with Pachacutec, a progressive housing settlement situated on a section of desert coast in the northwestern periphery of metropolitan Lima-Callao. As the seat of a state-sponsored urban housing project, there was nothing particularly rural or native about Pachacutec. And as a desert, it was not a place where any plants, let alone food crops, were expected to grow.

SJ [22:42]: Skrabut described Lima, Peru as a, quote, “desert megacity, dusty and sprawling.” Over time, the state has planned some small settlements at its peripheries with infrastructural development available for those who know how to advocate for it. Pachacutec is one of these planned settlements. The story Skrabut is telling here isn’t just about growth versus stagnation or rural versus urban, but rather… 

KS [23:09]: … to look instead at what happens in the meantime of development, scrutinizing the relations, subjectivities, and the very soils and substrates produced as people wrestle towards visions of a dignified future.

SJ [23:22]: During Skrabut’s research in Pachacutec, many people, especially poorer residents, as well as community-run projects, lacked regular access to water and sewage due to the state’s delays and slow pace of infrastructural development. Skrabut described residents’ creative ways of using and disposing of water in one communal kitchen.

KS [23:44]: All food that enters the kitchen is washed and rewashed. And, like food, this water is never wasted, but reused and redistributed according to its fitness: as a base for soup, to rinse ingredients, wash dishes, or nourish gardens. There are practical reasons for this: Water is costly, and communal kitchens have little money. And, because these locales were rarely connected to sewer systems, there was no easy way to dispose of it. Gardens provided a solution. Water used to wash potatoes is especially prized for its capacity to nourish and was given to plants that kitchen staff particularly wanted to support. Cloudy water that was used to rinse vegetables, grains, pulses, and dishes was also used in this way. 

Elisa, a sixty-five-year-old grandmother from Arequipa, complained as we hunted for a place to dump the water we used to wash pots. “If we only had sewerage, we could work in peace.” Together, we spread this twice-used water around a backyard enclosure, where we also washed dishes, stored recycling, burned trash, and grew a few plants. But the enclosure was small, and the garden was young, so the gray water formed greening pools where flies would both feed and breed.

However, Elisa had also planted a few pacay trees in front of the communal kitchen, another still-brown, municipal “green area.” A neighbor, Ana, [had] gifted Elisa a few sprouted pacay seeds. Ana’s sister had brought the fruit from her natal home in Ayacucho. After eating the cottony pulp, Ana put the seeds in a small plastic bag at the bottom of her sales cart and forgot about them. A week later, she discovered the seeds had sprouted.

Proudly, she explained that because these pacay came from Ayacucho, they were of superior quality. “Those seeds are native, natural,” she explained.

As we dug small holes for the seeds and poured in gray water, Ana assured me it was impossible to overwater these plants. She said that sometimes the water took a while to absorb because the ground had been compacted and leveled, perhaps mixed with other dirt in preparation for construction projects that never materialized. But it would soak up the water eventually. She said, “Pachacutec is pure sand. It consumes everything.”

SJ [25:54]: From urban gardening in Peru, we’ll move to Basque farming communities. Researcher Meredith Welch-Devine, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Georgia, is undertaking an interdisciplinary project that’s working to understand and support traditional small-scale agropastoralism, a mode of living that is on the decline worldwide due to climate change, state policy, and rural-urban migration.

Meredith Welch-Devine (MWD) [26:20]: So our work is set in the smallest of the seven Basque provinces. It’s Xiberoa in Basque, or Soule in French. Farms here are small. This is the northern Basque country—so, the part that sits in France. Farms average about forty hectares, so they’re substantially smaller than the average farm in France. And one-third of the farmers here practice transhumance, which is the seasonal movement of the animal herds from the valley-bottom villages up to the high mountain commons.

So the commons are of course an economic resource, but they are so, so much more. Through the institutions of collective management, the commons provide a space for the exchange of expertise, creation and maintenance of ties to animal raisers in other villages, and strengthening cultural identity. The commons have also been really important here for long-term resilience, both of individual farms and for the region’s agricultural system.

SJ [27:16]: Cultural identity in this region is closely tied with agriculture. But more and more people are leaving farming, Welch-Devine said. 

MWD [27:25]: But there is good cause for hope here. New farmer installations in Xiberoa are among the highest in all of Europe. And there’s a strong commitment here to Basque culture, to language, and [to] traditional agricultural practices. And this is not a place where people are just passively accepting whatever future may come. Rather, they are working actively and collectively to move toward a future that keeps cultural heritage and tradition alive, while also modernizing animal raising to improve quality of life and to attract new entrants to the profession. 

SJ [27:59]: As part of her research, Welch-Devine spoke with farmers about what they want. She found that quality of life was a big factor.

MWD [28:07]: So farmers in Xiberoa want the things that many of us take for granted: weekends, the ability to take vacations. They watched their parents work long hours and they do not want the lives that they saw their parents living. Young farmers in particular want opportunities to be with their friends, both to spend time with other animal raisers—that’s critically important, because they want to be with people who understand their challenges and understand their day-to-day lives—but they also want opportunities to engage with things that have nothing at all to do with farming. They want to go to the museum, they want to play sports, they want to see live music.

Farmers in Xiberoa also emphasize the importance of social and emotional wellbeing. And a key component of that is recognition from society of their multifaceted roles. So, farmers in Xiberoa want fair compensation for the work that they do. In our participatory workshops focused on ideal futures, animal raisers repeatedly mentioned just remuneration for their labor and for their product as something that’s important to them. Furthermore, they are keenly aware of the fact that their farms are important threads in the fabric of the region.

So the farm continuity is not important only for familial heritage, but for the heritage of the whole region. Not only are they producing food, their grazing animals also provide landscapes that are highly valued for biodiversity and for recreation. They ensure transmission of ecological knowledge and traditional practice across generations. And they’re stewards of cultural heritage. So they ensure the reproduction not only of the farm, but also of the region and of Basque pastoral culture writ large. Often though, they feel marginalized, penalized, and looked down upon.

SJ [29:57]: In building the futures they want to see, farmers engage in small-scale solidarity and mutual aid to support each other, improve their lives, and also attract new farmers by showing how fulfilling and rewarding it can be. But policymakers ought to play a role here too, Welch-Devine said, and should pay attention to farmer working conditions, quality of life, and community. 

[30:19] [Sounds from Gitxaała territory] That’s edible.

Gorkem Aydemir-Kundakci (GAK) [30:31]: “We haven’t left our land for decades despite everything, you know. But now I think it wants us to leave,” said Irma, a young Georgian woman in her early 30s, in our first meeting since the COVID-19 pandemic in Georgia. 

SJ [30:45]: That’s Gorkem Aydemir-Kundakci, a postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven in Belgium, in her talk, “Contested Lands of Nutella: Cultivating Hazelnuts Under Conflict and Climate Change in the de facto Georgian-Abkhazian Borderland.”

Aydemir-Kundakci’s interlocutor, Irma, was displaced from the Gali region of Abkhazia as a child following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing war between Georgia and its breakaway region, Abkhazia. But her family retained access to their homes and lands across the border. 

GAK [31:16]: For over three decades, Irma and her family have sustained mobile lives across this contested divide, lives vitally dependent on the fertile soil of Gali and Abkhazia, yet also reliant on the public services, relative normality, and socioeconomic networks available on the Georgian side. Their everyday survival has depended on navigating a militarized, unpredictable border.

In this presentation today, I examine how relations between people and land are being transformed in the Georgian-Abkhazian borderland, where decades of conflict, ecological crisis, and economic uncertainty converge.

SJ [31:54]: Her discussion started not with large-scale war and repression, but with the unassuming stink bug.

GAK [32:01]: When I came up against scores of parosana, [which] is the local term for these bugs, on a window frame in the spring of 2017, I didn’t yet know that they would soon become such a pressing concern for the people of western Georgia. Stink bugs were indeed everywhere, having the ability to reproduce in vast numbers. Inside human-made structures, they invaded wall cracks, wardrobes, and even pockets of the clothes during winter, and then in the spring ventured out into the orchards and fields to suck out the juices of nuts, corns, and fruits. As they evolved from nauseating but harmless bugs into highly invasive and destructive agricultural pests over several months, people got reacquainted with the insect as an alien invader. Having destroyed around eighty percent of the annual hazelnut harvest in a couple of months, the stink bug infestation in western Georgia, including Abkhazia, severely devastated the already precarious livelihoods of the displaced community in the borderland. 

Tkhili hazelnut, or Corylus avellana, is native to Georgia and the Eastern Black Sea region, one of the oldest cultivated crops in human history and deeply rooted in local ecologies and livelihoods. Its place in western Georgia, however, has never been straightforward.

SJ [33:28]: Aydemir-Kundakci explained how, during Soviet times, land engineering transformed the region and tea plantations came to dominate. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the tea industry collapsed too, leading to unattended tea bushes and huge job loss. Local people then turned to what they knew: hazelnuts. 

GAK [33:50]: Childhood memories of my informants are shaped by the hardships of the ’90s, felt even more deeply by the displaced families facing additional loss and scarcity. In this recollection, hazelnut money, tkhilis pooli, covers school fees and winter clothes each fall, offering the only steady income to sustain a yearlong cycle of debt. 

Global players are also deeply entangled in Georgia’s hazelnut economy. As one of the world’s top five producers, Georgia has drawn growing interest from international corporations, most notably Ferrero, the maker of Nutella. Nearly eighty percent of its supply comes from a narrow strip of land along the Black Sea, including Turkey and Georgia.

SJ [34:36]: In western Georgia, Ferrero has bought Soviet-era tea plantations to convert into commercial hazelnut orchards and reshape traditional farming practices. Hazelnut production in western Georgia is big, so when the 2017 stink bug infestation devastated the industry, it was met with a devastating response.

GAK [34:56]: In the months that followed, streets and fields across western Georgia and Gali were engulfed in thick white fog as pesticides were sprayed indiscriminately. It was so extreme. Many of my informants were hospitalized due to the unregulated use of these chemicals and the absence of protective equipment. Children were kept home from school as the toxic fog seeped into every corner of daily life, and as one of my informants put it, this aggressive unrestrained use of pesticide killed the soil. Coupled with floods, erratic rains and unexpected frosts, the once-legendary fertility of the land has been severely affected.

By the early 2020s, the stink bugs had become more manageable with pesticides, but the crisis had become inseparable from the wider atmosphere of despair in post-COVID Georgia. The pandemic magnified preexisting inequalities and pushed many rural households deeper into debt. Inflation and unemployment increased, while pro-Russian political tendencies eroded faith in the government’s commitment to a European future.

For young people in particular, the horizon of possibility narrowed. Many of Irma’s peers, highly educated but super unemployed, no longer saw cultivation as a viable or meaningful future. “Even if we stay and cultivate,” she told and asked, “how can we live with that unreliable income?”

Soon enough, the hazelnut trees, like the people tending them, reached their limits. Even the oldest, most resilient groves began to dry up and die. 

SJ [36:35]: Aydemir-Kundakci explained how, in an environment of multifactored precarity, farming has come to lose its appeal. Many young people have left the region, exhausted.

GAK [36:47]: What I’m witnessing in the Georgian-Abkhazian borderland is not only protracted conflict and displacement, as often seen, but a set of intersecting crises—from stink bugs to depopulation—that transform people’s relationship to their land, a land where they hold onto for decades despite all the military and political attempts on them.

For decades, staying, continuing to cultivate, care for the soil, was an act of defiance, a way of asserting belonging despite displacement and conflict. Today, what I see is that once the most fertile lands of the Soviet Union are losing its attraction. The younger generation, shaped by the uncertainties of conflict, and economic precarity and et cetera, no longer experiences the land as a source of life or continuity. Instead, the land itself appears to be as exhausted as the displaced Georgians themselves.

This is not just one insect or one crisis. Instead, multiple layers of fatigue—ecological, social, and political—have settled deeply into the soil, the trees, and the people. 

In a sense, what I argue here is that Georgia’s conflict zone is not necessarily an exceptional space, but an intensified glimpse of a wider planetary and political condition: a world in which both people and the earth are exhausted, entangled in a shared weariness that has come to define life in the Anthropocene.

[38:11] [Sounds from Gitxaała territory]

CM [38:26]: Marc Spencer (Ganhada, from Gitxaała), in an interview with William Beynon in 1953, described a similar Gitxaała account of a flood brought about by children disrespecting salmon at a village on Banks Island, known as the Place of the Snares:

The salmon were very plentiful in all these creeks, and the people had plenty. It was then that some of the young people, now having all the salmon they required, began to abuse the salmon by catching them in loop snares, which they made from fine roots. When the salmon’s head swam into the loop, they would pull it tight and then leave the salmon hanging by the neck, half out of water. Then the eagles and other preying animals would come and devour the salmon. The older people begged the young people to stop their abuses to the salmon, but these would not heed the warnings of the older people, and soon other children in the nearby villages began doing the same thing. Their elders kept warning them, “You will cause the anger of the chiefs of the skies because you are abusing the valuable salmon.” But they would pay no attention to the warnings. 

Soon the weather began to change and the rain began to come down heavy, and soon the rivers began to rise, and gradually the waters rose. And soon the villages of the creeks became submerged, and still the waters rose. And soon the small islands became submerged, and then the people who up until then had kept moving up into the hills now got everything into their large canoes, and the high hills and mountains were now all submerged. Only here and there were there small portions of the hills to which the people were gathering to anchor their canoes. And soon these disappeared and the people that were saved began to drift apart. People knew that this was the revenge of the salmon that caused the flood retaliating after many abuses.

Eilis Lanclus (EL) [40:00]: Entire trees lie across the trail, roots pointing skyward and their trunks stripped bare. There are heaps of branches washed into odd places and stones scattered where they don’t belong.

AE [40:11]: Eilis Lanclus, postdoctoral fellow in the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences at Loughborough University in the UK, described a trail hiking excursion she undertook with two friends in July 2021, along the River Ourthe in Belgium’s woody Ardennes region, in her presentation, “Sensory Hauntings on Trails: Navigating Outdoor Recreation in Times of Climate Crisis.”

EL [40:36]: We continue to step over, duck under, and detour around these interruptions, which not only make the hike more exhausting and slower than anticipated, but they’re also a reminder that the landscape has been reshaped more drastically than anticipated since we last passed through. In some places, the trail simply disappears, swallowed by deposits of slit or by unusual high water levels.

We stop, puzzle at first, and then find a way around, climbing over the debris or detouring up the hillside and coming back down once the trail is visible again, creating new trails as we go. The longer we continue along the river, the more the valley starts to feel like a crime scene. Visually, the landscape is littered with clues of destruction. Climbing over the debris and piles of tanglewood requires strength that we no longer have. And even though a muddy walk is no stranger to us, it does add dragging weight to our legs. Parts of the route that should have been a smooth single line along the river to give our legs some rest from the other parts of the technical terrain have become a jagged, improvised route, leaving no rest at all for either our bodies or our minds. 

AE [41:42]: Two weeks prior to Lanclus’s expedition, the region had been hit with torrential rains and catastrophic flooding—the kind of storm that used to be rare, but with climate change is becoming all the more common. More than 180 people died, hundreds were injured, and the River Ourthe experienced previously unobserved peak water levels and streamflow values, Lanclus explained. 

EL [42:05]: When Emil and Bernard and I set out for this hike, we made sure that we were not encountering the most damaged areas. We did not expect, though, that we would find the trails in the state that they were.

Our encounters are of course nothing compared to the loss many experienced during and in the aftermath of this extreme weather event. But these encounters on the trails do stir an embodied unease in those moving along them: a recognition of landscapes as vulnerable, already altered, and continuously reshaped by the climate crisis.

So I started asking myself, how can these sensory and affective hauntings experienced on trails invite a shift from trail sports as acts of personal conquest or consumption of landscapes to practices grounded in care, attention, and ecological responsibility? This is what inspired my new project, in which I examine how the emplaced and situated experiences and knowledges of trail sport participants shape the environmental engagements in trail sports.

AE [43:01]: The significance of trail sports changes in the face of a changing climate, Lanclus says.

EL [43:07]: Trail sports are often celebrated as opportunities to escape into wilder spaces and to measure personal limits against an enduring nature. Yet the climate crisis unsettles this imagined reciprocity.

On the trails, climate change is not an abstract data set or a distant projection. It is encountered as washed-out paths, uprooted forest, erratic seasons, and the subtle but accumulative sensory disruptions that shape each step, such as the texture of mud and clay where it should not be, the absence of shade where trees once stood, and then also the creating of new trails where there should not be any trails.

So, rather than being liberated from modernity, runners find contemporary realities inscribed in the landscape itself, revealing how even the most remote experiences of bodily immersion are now mediated by rapidly shifting climates. But the embodied and in place encounters of trail sport participants do cultivate a relational ethic in which moving through landscapes entails responsibility, reciprocity, and a recognition of vulnerability, rather than the pure pursuit of individual achievement alone. 

[44:20] [Sounds from Gitxaała territory] Great fire starter too, eh? Yeah. Smells good. 

SJ [44:36]: On September 29th, 2012, an enraged mob destroyed Buddhist shrines, idols, and sacred relics in the village of Ramu, in Bangladesh. That incident and responses to it served as the springboard for a presentation by Aanmona Priyadarshini, a lecturer at Southern Methodist University.

Aanmona Priyadarshini (AP) [44:57]: The destruction of Buddhist sites in Ramu was followed by a government-led, tourism-centered reconstruction that prioritized economic appeal over the religious value, cultural traditions, and Rakhine architectural designs and materials of local Buddhist communities, which effectively erased heritage under the guise of restoration. Also, [the] government’s selective reconstruction project that favored certain religious space—which is locally known as bihar—so, that favored certain bihars over others—has deepened existing tension within the Buddhist communities.

SJ [45:44]: Priyadarshini analyzed Ramu’s reconstructed tourist-centric religious sites through the lens of infrasecular space, a term that describes geographies where various forms of belief and non-belief cohabitate and conflict with one another. In Ramu, Priyadarshini said, infrasecular sites perpetuate violence and social tension, while offering on the surface what she called a, quote, “dazzling spectacle.” Yet, subaltern space-making strategies in Ramu pushed against the production of infrasecular space.

AP [46:17]: I conceptualize subaltern spatial strategies as resistance against the ontological mixture that tries to suppress the inherent conflict and tension within the spatial synthesis. By performing subaltern spatial strategies such as collecting, selecting, sorting, preserving, and displaying certain rubble of destroyed sacred space in specific ways, such as ashes of the bihars, burnt artifacts, and broken statues of the Buddha, many monks and devotees in Ramu have built space within the infrasecular space where the positivity of the newly built space is disputed and resisted. I call this space “rubbletopia.” Rubbletopia serves as a space of resistance where one encounters ruptured realities. In unsettling the capitalist gaze of amusement, rubbletopia gives rise to the feeling of uncertainty, discomfort, and unease.

Rubbletopia speaks the unspeakable: the rise and fall of a place, trauma, wrong suffering, amidst the stories of the dazzling positivity of the infrasecular place. In some bihars, rubbletopia is distinctly demarcated by physical boundaries and detached from the newly built infrasecular building, yet remains within the same sacred ground. For instance, in Ajabangsha Bihar, a separate structure known locally as the temple was erected by a few Buddhist devotees and bihar authority, where rubble is arranged for the worship.

[48:12] Conversely, in many bihars, there are no clear spatial boundaries between rubbletopia and infrasecular space. By placing destroyed statues alongside the newly imported fancy gold ones for worship, in these bihars the monks create a deliberate juxtaposition that makes loss palpable. The new forms do not erase the old, but rather intensify awareness of what has been shattered, invoking memory, rupture, and calling forth the layer of destruction embedded in the site.

In other bihars, repositories have been created to house the material remnants of destruction and violence. These sites of rubbletopia are neither traditional space for worship nor conventional museum. They offer a space where tourists and local communities alike are invited to confront histories of loss and to reflect on how the reconstructed landscape continues to emerge from ongoing process of destruction and marginalization.

Thus, rubbletopia exists in a state of simultaneous detachment from and coexistence with infrasecular space, an ambiguous terrain that embodies both sacred and secular spatial characteristics, as well as the intertwined forces of presence and absence.

SJ [49:48]: Placemaking, it seems, is often also an exercise in temporality. For Priyadarshini, rubbletopia is a space of resistance against infrasecular space, which brings the violence, loss, and trauma of the past into the present. Jonathan Eaton, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia and director of its Disaster Resilience Research Network, explored how placemaking strategies can enact future imaginaries in the present.

Jonathan Eaton (JE) [50:15]: I’m interested in how people engage in practices of making place, drawing on their traditions, their histories, their beliefs, and their values to express relationships with the environment they live in, and with each other. But at the same time, places and our connections with them are becoming increasingly precarious, whether from climate-related hazards, like wildfires or flooding, or from the rising costs of living, as were mentioned by other presenters, or unpredictable geological risks, like earthquakes.

And so this presentation is drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Vancouver, Canada, understanding ways that people constitute place through their values and how place-based expressions of value can contribute to future disaster recovery.

SJ [51:01]: In particular, Eaton was looking at how Vancouver residents prepare for major seismic disaster—that is, earthquakes—while already facing attendant crises of climate, housing affordability, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which was at its height when Eaton was doing his research.

JE [51:18]: Thinking about earthquakes, uncertainty around the exact location, intensity, and timing of a major earthquake is something that makes a seismic disaster an important subject of modeling, prediction, and speculation. And so, because of that uncertain, future-focused nature of this research topic, I deployed a bit of a speculative anthropological framework grounded in ethnographic fieldwork that looks at futures in the everyday present.

SJ [51:43]: Eaton’s speculative ethnography of disaster included a methodology of “modeling otherwise” that emphasized imagining futures.

JE [51:52]: “Otherwise” indicates a potentiality that transgresses expectations, an alternative path that differs from common assumptions or predictions.

SJ [52:01]: But Eaton’s focus was on considering disaster otherwises in the present, before a major earthquake has happened.

JE [52:08]: So this pre-disaster focus on recovery, I found, was really productive for the interlocutors that I was working with in my research. It encouraged speculation on the kinds of post-earthquake futures that they’d like to see and how to make those futures a reality.

So, in other words, when they’re approached with the question of, “What would recovery look like to you?” rather than, “Are you personally prepared for a disaster?” people often took the shift into the future thinking realm as an opportunity to imagine otherwise.

So one instance of this was Vancouver residents participating in a workshop called Art and Earthquakes. And they were tasked with building, as a part of this workshop, a post-earthquake neighborhood using found objects: little bits of trash, plastic spoons for serving ice cream, hot glue, and tape.

And the creations that they made imagined a future that was physically different, obviously, from their present city, looks a bit dystopic, but actually the stories that they told were anything but that. The stories they told reflected a specific set of values that they wanted to see, both now and in the aftermath of disaster—values like cooperation, neighborliness, sharing, remembering, gardening, eco-consciousness—values that are idealized even today in Vancouver, but very imperfectly realized.

So in this sense, a physical exercise in modeling otherwise helped Vancouver residents see the values that they would deploy in both rebuilding their neighborhood in the future, but then also as a means of trying to improve it in the present. 

So just to wrap up this presentation, I’m highlighting how imagined futures can affect the present. And I’m asking whether the prelude to a disaster can arouse not only a sense of dread, but hopes for a future recovery that inspire reflection on personal and societal values in the present. While placemaking that depends on disaster imaginaries may never fully escape that dread of disaster, modeling otherwise for future disaster recovery can lead to proactive, rather than reactive, efforts, drawing upon the potentialities of disaster to shape society for the better. 

[54:11] [Sounds from Gitxaała territory] See, look! My mom said there are some berries that are coming back she never seen.

CM [54:23]: Our current world is one in which people have globally lost knowledge of who they are, living in a moment of individualistic self-aggrandizing. This is not to say conflict and violence is unique to late capitalist society. But it does highlight a particular moment of forgetting who we are.

One does not need to travel far from home to find evidence of societal forgetting oneself. In BC [British Columbia], as many places globally, we face a crisis of affordable housing. This intersects with a litany of social ills related to poverty, mental health, and substance abuse. In BC, Canada, and the U.S., the overwhelming approach has been one in which the humanity of our estranged family and community members is denied. Hateful xenophobic campaigns against the poor, the ill, the newcomer are becoming commonplace.

Gitxaała’s historical record, shared in part earlier, documents similar moments in our past. Forgetting basic decency, exploiting nonhuman others, abandonment of care, all led to societal collapse.

It wasn’t all disaster though. Gitxaała lived on the north coast of BC for millennia. The moments of crisis in our history were moments, not epochs. From our histories and through my own archaeological research, we know Gitxaała lived in village communities in the thousands of people, in a managed way that prioritized care and respect. Principles of harvest based on need, not greed; concepts of sharing on community basis; ideals that included all, even though they are cast from afar, all are core Gitxaała principles of living. In the long duration of social stability can be found lessons of hope for all humanity.

Societies like Gitxaała hold possibilities for the global society. Our Gitxaała past brings forward a vision of resilience and attachment to place that counters the depravity of late capitalist extractivism. I leave you here sharing a simple sketch of the possible, highlighting the conceptual potential over the pragmatic and specific possibilities. I fear that our global society stands at a precipice and failing, falling, is a needed catalyst to bring us back to knowing who we are.

[56:20] [ambient Gitxaała sounds] My mom and dad, they used to dry berries outside. I really want to do my berries this year, to dry it out in the sun, just like my mom did.

AE [56:34]: You’ve been listening to AnthroPod’s coverage of the 2025 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans. This was the last of a three-part series—check out part 1, on “Storytelling, Performance, and History,” and part 2, “Race across Borders,” wherever you get your podcasts. This miniseries has been produced and hosted by myself, Alejandro Echeverria, and my colleague, Sharon Jacobs. Thank you to Sandra Elizabeth for providing late-stage review. Thanks also to all this episode’s contributors and the Ethnographic Film Unit at UBC. You can learn more about all the presenters featured in this episode and find a transcript of the episode in our show notes at culanth.org. That’s c-u-l-a-n-t-h-dot-org. As always, thank you for listening to AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. ’Til next time.

[57:10] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]