Environmental Personhood and the Management of Cultural Resources

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the past two decades, there has been a renewed interest in the concept of Environmental Personhood, which grants particular natural entities with legal personhood with the intent of reorganizing anthropocentric hierarchies and better protecting the environment. These features, including Te Awa Tupua in New Zealand and Mutesheku Shipu in Canada, have been granted and maintained legal designation. Of course, though under different names, concepts of Environmental Personhood have long been deeply integrated with many Tribal experiences of the world. Many Indigenous ontologies understand the co-constitution of living and nonliving entities—that no material entity is unhinged from material and immaterial intrusions. Just as Karen Barad notes, “Existence is not an individual affair” (2007:ix). The co-constitution of the human and nonhuman and of living and nonliving should be considered in the interpretation and management of cultural resources. This paper explores how considering archaeological things and spaces in the context of movements of Environmental Personhood pulls those landscapes from the past, through the present, and into the future.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40283.0