Anthropology Colloquium Series - Andrew Mathews, UC Santa Cruz

MOVING LANDSCAPES: BIO-GEOMORPHOLOGY, WILDFIRES, AND THE POLITICS OF FORM IN ITALY

How do slowly growing trees, rapidly growing grasses, grazing animals and fires reshape landscapes? What kinds of politics respond to the sensing and grasping capacities of plants, from terrace building and landscape drainage, to tree planting in riverbeds and on coastlines? Using examples from the Central and Southern Apennine mountains of Italy, I explore the politics of plant form and ecological disturbance that reshape pastures, hillsides, drainage systems and coastlines. I argue that arguments from form move through our senses and stretch our imaginations across time and space.

Andrew Mathews is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He holds a joint Ph.D. in forestry and anthropology from Yale University. He has studied relationships between people, plants, and landscape in Mexico, Italy, and California. His interests range from ethnoecology, STS, political ecology, and environmental history, in publications on Indigenous forest management in Mexico (Instituting Nature, MIT Press, 2011), to environmental humanities, human plant relations, historical ecology, and landscape ethnography, in Italian landscapes (Trees are Shape Shifters Yale, 2022). He is now studying the relationship between fire, grazing, and the political geomorphology of landscapes in California and in Italy.

Co-sponsored by the Ethnography Studio

NOVEMBER 9TH
12-1:30 pm
Michelson Hall - MCB 102