Speaker: Dr Victoria Ramenzoni, Rutgers University, USA
Date : Thursday, 23 January 2020
Time : 2.00pm
Venue : AS8 #06-46, Singapore 119260
ABSTRACT
In the maritime world, there is a large corpus of myths and legends about sea creatures, incredible and wondrous feats, and impossible places. In this article I present an account of the mythological world of the Endenese, a group of fierceless seafarers and pirates that scourged the Eastern Indonesia Seas for over four centuries. By discussing the myth of Kota Djogo, an island that disappeared at sea in immemorial times, I reconstruct their explanations for luck and uncertainty in a world that is plagued by volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and typhoons. I build on the study of this narrative to show how symbolic accounts of environmental events can provide important clues into the understanding of how resources are used and the risks associated with their extraction. I rely on ethnographic interviews and surveys about environmental change and disasters, to reaffirm the importance of symbolism and local narratives in tailoring human-environmental interactions. I contest that explanations that ignore these factors cannot fully produce successful resource use tenure practices. To support these conclusions, I discuss how this narrative is structured to regulate behavior, the role of historical and anecdotal information, and the significance of local beliefs within Islamic traditions.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Rutgers Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS) faculty member Dr. Victoria Ramenzoni, is an environmental anthropologist who specializes in studying how coastal communities adapt to climate change in the geographical areas of South East Asia, Latin America and the U.S. Her scholarship is focused in understanding the multiple ways in which humans interact with their environment, from cultural ecology to behavioral studies. She got her undergraduate degree from Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a doctoral degree in environmental Anthropology from The University of Georgia in the US (2014). The title of her dissertation was “Effects of Socio-Environmental Variability and Uncertainty in Decisions about Fishing Effort of a small-scale Tuna Fishery in Ende, Eastern Indonesia. She is currently an assistant professor in Marine Policy and Social Sciences at the department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, US
DISCUSSANT
Serina Rahman is a Visiting Fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore, where her research includes sustainable development, rural politics, political ecology and more recently, women & radicalisation. She currently also teaches environmental politics at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. When not at her day jobs, the rest of her life is taken up by Kelab Alami, a community organisation that she co-founded in 2008 to help the people of Mukim Tg Kupang, Johor, participate in and benefit from urbanisation and development. Trained as a conservation scientist, her practice is in community empowerment and marine human-habitat interactions.
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