Department of social anthropology seminar with Laura Rival

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to a seminar with Laura Rival from the University of Oxford. She will present the following paper:

"Encountering nature through fieldwork experiments: Indigenous knowledge, local creativity and modes of reasoning"

Abstract
In this paper, I outline the positive and negative outcomes of the 'ontological turn' in anthropology by focusing on the ontological critique of ‘indigenous knowledge,’ which targets anthropological analyses of ethnoclassifications, particularly those of the natural environment, as these exemplify most vividly the epistemological and ontological tensions at work in all the ‘ethnosciences.’ I discuss these tensions in the light of various examples taken from my fieldwork among the Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador and the Makushi of Southern Guyana. I present three ethnographic moments that present different types of encounters between autochthonous forms of ecological reasoning and various Western scientific approaches. I end by engaging Claude Lévi-Strauss' ideas about our changing world, scientific knowledge and the 'science of the concrete.'

Bionote
Laura Rival is University Lecturer at Oxford University, where she teaches various courses relating to the Anthropology of Nature, Society and Development. Her research interests include Amerindian conceptualizations of nature and society; historical and political ecology; indigenous peoples, development, environmental and conservation policies in Latin America. She has written several books and numerous papers on these topics, including Trekking through History. The Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador (Columbia University Press, 2002), Amazonian Historical Ecologies (JRAI, 2006), and Ecuador’s Yasuní-ITT Initiative (Ecological Economics, 2010). She has edited Beyond the Visible and the Material: The Amerindianization of Society in the Work of Peter Rivière (Oxford University Press, 2001), The Social Life of Trees. Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism (Berg, 1998), and Governing the Provision of Ecosystem Services (Springer, 2012). She is also preparing a book on new theoretical developments in Amazonianist anthropology, and one on agroecology movements in Latin America.

All interested are welcome!

Best regards
BSAS Comittee