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Speaker: Paul Burow

In this weekly Anthropology speaker series, Burow will discuss his research in the Great Basin. 

Abstract: 

Landscapes are undergoing material transformation due to climate change, land-use practices, and ongoing impacts of colonialism, in turn reshaping how people relate to land, substantiate their place on it, and make claims to territory. This is creating new socioecological configurations of people, land, and place I call ecologies of belonging. In this talk, I detail the cultural and political dynamics that shape the construction and maintenance of the boundaries of belonging and non-belonging on Great Basin landscapes through a series of interconnected concepts that show how Nüümü (Northern Paiute) people, federal land managers, and livestock ranchers navigate environmental changes and understand their changing relationship to the land through the work of constructing place and belonging for themselves and others.

Based on thirty-six months of field-based ethnographic and historical research in California and Nevada, I elucidate these processes through two ethnographic case studies explaining major sociocultural dynamics of rapidly shifting landscapes: (1) Nüümü moral ecology reflected in conflicting modes of landscape valuation and moral claims-making that play out in stewardship encounters over the proper maintenance of relationships between people, plants, and animals; and (2) sage grouse conservation as a project of cultivated belonging that makes species into icons of the landscape in need of saving through the cultural work of developing people’s attachment to endangered species and their sense of where they belong on the land. This work highlights the political contestation that surrounds claims to dispossessed land by Nüümü people and the vision of local communities for livable, hospitable landscapes that support diverse forms of life and belonging in the Anthropocene.