Please note this event is available via Zoom only

“What exactly is cultural burning?” During the seven years that I have been researching the revitalisation of Indigenous land and fire management practices in southeast Australia, this is the question I have been asked repeatedly by non-Indigenous people. Through a period in which cultural burning has come to a remarkable level of public attention and unprecedented (though still limited) level of government support, some are sceptical, most are enthusiastic, and very many are confused. In this seminar, I build on the arguments of a recent paper (“What Tradition Affords: Articulations of Indigeneity in Contemporary Bushfire Management,” Current Anthropology 64(1)) and the responses of several colleagues to think through this confusion about the dimensions and meanings of cultural fire management knowledge and practice. Drawing upon ongoing fieldwork, scholarship on Indigenous jurisdictions, and the STS concept of the “boundary object,” this seminar will speculate on the causes and consequences of cultural burning’s interpretive flexibility, working towards a theorisation of this flexibility as an uneven form of political power.

Timothy Neale in Senior Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Deakin University, Melbourne. He is the author of "Wild Articulations" (UHP, 2017) and Editor of the journal Science, Technology, & Human Values.

Zoom Link:
https://bit.ly/3XEVLe2
Meeting ID: 812 1179 0732
Password: 968025