Plant Lives - Haripriya Ranganon on Recombinant Landscapes and Biogeographical Knowledges
You are warmly invited to the next session of WiSER’s online seminar series
Plant Lives Critical Plant Humanities - Conversations from the Global South
Haripriya Rangan will speak on
Recombinant Landscapes and Biogeographical Knowledges
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This paper will reflect on how indigenous knowledge is presented in the dominant ways of talking about landscape and vegetation change. The term ‘recombinant’ in this context refers to new plant and animal associations which have evolved due to direct, inadvertent, or indirect human moulding and manipulation of landscapes (Meurk, 2010). When indigenous ways of knowing and talking about landscapes is translated into the dominant language of science, policy, or politics, two things happen. First, these are abstracted as ‘timeless knowledge’ or knowledge from the past, which either serves as a minor acknowledgement or point of departure for the knowledge produced by the dominant culture. Second, the descriptions of ‘indigenous knowledge’ in the dominant language obscures the fundamental relations between language and knowledge production about landscapes. Consequently, there is little interest among policy makers and environmental managers in knowing how ‘indigenous knowledge’ about recombinant landscapes shaped by the dominant culture and language is being translated and understood by indigenous groups in their own terms. The paper will focus on the recombinant landscapes of the Kimberley region of northwest Australia which have been produced through enormous biophysical and economic transformation over the past six decades. It will centre on how changes in landscape vegetation, particularly in relation to plants officially categorised as environmental weeds, have been interpreted by indigenous elders of the Miriwoong community and government agencies in eastern Kimberley. It will highlight the different ways in which these two groups draw together narratives of history and agency to signify the biogeographies of these plants in their landscape.
Meurk, C.D. (2010) Recombinant ecology of urban areas: Characterisation, context, and creativity, in Douglas, I., Goode, D., & Houck, M. (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Urban Ecology, pp. 198-220.
Haripriya (Priya) Rangan (https://haripriyarangan.net/) began her academic life as a student of architecture and wandered through a number of disciplines, from urban and regional planning to her ongoing preoccupation with biocultural geography, political ecology and the environmental histories of the Indian Ocean World. She has been part of several interdisciplinary research collaborations over the past three decades centred on the historical and political ecological contexts of transfers of tree species between India, South Africa, and northern Australia, and long-term climate and agroecological change in littoral and small island complexes in the northeast and western Indian Ocean. She is co-founder of Reseed Indico (https://www.reseedindico.org/), a not-for-profit organisation that partners with rural communities in the Indian Ocean region to promote climate resilience, social equity and sustainable entrepreneurship.
Priya is currently Principal Fellow at the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Melbourne and Principal Consultant at the Australia India Institute for policy research on education cooperation between the two countries.
Monday, 7th April 2025
4-5pm (Johannesburg time)
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Plant Lives is a seminar series convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall.
It follows two previously successful series, Heated Conversations and Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres, convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall
In these calamitous times, are plants a distraction from pressing problems, or a new way to approach them? Is the burgeoning field of the plant humanities just another fad with little bearing on the global South? Can we imagine a seedy and weedy politics in which plants are less metaphors for human logics and more themselves? Can we shift from an abstract concern with plant life to consider material plant lives? And if so, with what consequences?
This seminar series explores the global plant humanities and the conversations that plant worlds enable. We envisage a postcolonial plantarium* which encompasses plantations, pre-colonial pharmacopoeias, philosophy, phytopoetics (both visual and textual) and much more. Our starting point is 'ruderal', a term which describes a plant that grows in disturbed grounds. A plant humanities for the global South takes shapes at the intersection of enforced human and plant migrations and works in the wake of disturbance and damage.
Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at Wits University; Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WiSER, Wits.
*Thanks to Marianna Szczygielska and Olga Cielemęcka for this term