Weedy Life: Coloniality, Decoloniality, and Tropicality

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.22.1.2023.3985

Keywords:

coloniality, decoloniality, weeds, more-than-human-lives, tropicality

Abstract

Respect for any form of life entails nurturing all the potentialities proper to it, including those that might be unproductive from the human point of view. Are there lessons to be learnt about decolonisation of the tropics from a focus on ‘weeds’? The contributors to this photo-essay collectively consider here the lessons that can be learnt about the relationship between colonisation and decolonisation through a visual focus on life forms that have been defined as weeds and, consequently, subject to a contradictory politics of care, removal, and control – of germinating, blooming, and cutting. The essay demonstrates the continuing colonial tensions between aesthetic and practical evaluations of many plants and other lifeforms regarded as ‘invasive’ or ‘out of place’. It suggests a decolonial overcoming of oppositions. By celebrating alliances of endemics and ‘weeds’ regeneratively living together in patterns of complex diversity, we seek to transcend policies of differentiation, exclusion and even eradication rooted in colonial ontology.

Author Biographies

Rosita Henry, James Cook University, Australia

Rosita Henry is a Professor in anthropology in the College of Arts, Society and Education at James Cook University. She reflexively positions herself as a weedy product of colonialism, whose forebears were both colonisers and decolonisers. Rosita attempts to work against coloniality by researching colonial, anti-colonial and decolonial relations between people and places across tropical Australia and the Pacific as expressed in cultural festivals, the politics of belonging and emplacement, cultural heritage, material culture, land tenure frictions, and state bureaucratic effects. Rosita is author of the book Performing Place, Practicing Memory: Indigenous Australians, Hippies and the State (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2012) and A True Child of Papua New Guinea: Memoir of a Life in Two Worlds (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Press, 2019).

Helen Ramoutsaki, James Cook University, Australia

Helen Ramoutsaki is a PhD page and performing poet-natural historian, practice-embedded researcher and educator of English-Welsh-Irish birth heritage. My experiences living, working and birthing in England and on Crete, and my more than twenty years as a settler on Kuku Yalanji Kubirriwarra bubu in the Wet Tropics of Far North Queensland, have revealed to me the complexities of relative privilege, the tensions of differential regard and the value of being responsive to others. I am grateful to those who, not in an academic context, have trusted me with glimpses into story/place/language/culture that are not mine to pass on but that have enriched my deepening immersion in places and communities. My fascination with natural history and my love of wordcraft motivate my practice as a poet, natural historian and photojournalistic photographer compiling transdisciplinary creative natural histories. I also collaborate with my grandmother alter-ego, MC Nannarchy, who writes and performs ludically-serious raps concerning attitudes and ethics within the more-than-human world, with a focus on ethical tropical sustainability and the work of the multispecies gardening collective in our backyard habitat patch.

Debbi Long, The Wollotuka Institute, University of Newcastle, Australia 

Debbi Long is a CIS-gendered woman of acknowledged convict and immigrant Anglo-Celtic heritage, and unacknowledged First Nations heritage. She was born on Wiradjeri country, raised on Yuin Country, and after more than four decades of living in other parts of Australia and overseas, has returned to Yuin country to live in a four-generation family compound. Her research as a medical anthropologist, hospital ethnographer and health systems analyst has included clinical governance and health management, multidisciplinary clinical team communication, and development health and the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). Her current life/research interests, framed by the permaculture ethics of “Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share”, incorporate health in areas such as permaculture and food security, sustainable housing techniques, and i/Indigenous knowledges, with an overarching focus on resource equity and decolonisation.  She has a PhD in Anthropology.

Greg Acciaioli, The University of Western Australia

Greg Acciaioli is currently a senior honorary research fellow at The University of Western Australia, where he lectured in Anthropology for 29 years. Born of European migrant stock in California, he became a migrant himself to Australia as a postgraduate student at the Australian National University. Although his engagement with Indonesia began with his PhD research in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, marrying a woman from that research site, the plain surrounding Lake Lindu, has led to long stints of non-research-oriented residence there and thus being declared a member of the local community. His concern with the dilemmas of inland fisheries in Indonesia has stemmed from this hybrid personal and academic experience of life at Lindu. He has worked with the Alliance of Archipelagic Indigenous peoples (Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara or AMAN) to promote co-management of national parks in Indonesia and has also worked on the issue of accommodating stateless Bajau Laut in marine parks in Sabah, Malaysia.

Simon Foale, James Cook University, Australia

Simon Foale is an Associate Professor teaching anthropology in the College of Arts, Society and Education at James Cook University, Australia. Simon’s research interests range between political ecology, the anthropology of development and the history and philosophy of science. His primary geographic focus is coastal Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and the Western Pacific. His disciplinary and geographic interests are in large part a consequence of having been born in pre-independence Solomon Islands (to white Australian parents). That first-hand experience and knowledge of the deeply exploitative character of the colonial state, combined with a post-graduate education in anthropology, makes the ongoing struggle against capitalist extractivism and race-based discrimination all the more serious for him. Simon is also an active unionist.

Celmara Pocock, University of Southern Queensland, Australia

Celmara Pocock is Director of the Centre for Heritage+Culture, and a Professor of anthropology teaching heritage studies at the University of Southern Queensland. Her decolonial and anti-colonial positionality is shaped by her experiences of migration and queerness, and a longterm commitment to working with and for Australian First Nations. This manifests in research that focuses on social and community approaches to understanding the environment, including, aesthetics and senses of place; storytelling and emotion; and the intersections between heritage and tourism. Human relationships with the environment are core to her work, and her monograph Visitor Encounters with the Great Barrier Reef: Aesthetics, Heritage, and the Senses was published by Routledge in 2020. 

Kristin McBain-Rigg, James Cook University, Australia

Kristin McBain-Rigg is a non-Indigenous (white) female anthropologist who works with rural, remote and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to improve health outcomes by seeking to decolonise biomedical systems and the ways we educate health practitioners throughout Northern Queensland.  She is employed as a Senior Lecturer in the College of Public Health, Medical and Veterinary Sciences at James Cook University. She has a PhD in Anthropology.

Michael Wood, James Cook University, Australia

Michael Wood is a white anthropologist and adjunct with the College of Arts, Society and Education at James Cook University. He grew up in British, Australian and American colonies and has since worked, for a long time, with Kamula speakers in Papua New Guinea mainly on their complex engagement with industrial logging. More recently he has become interested in understanding how the Kamula have been subject to colonizing violence from their neighbours and how this violence has generated new forms of power that now influence the lives of the Kamula. He has a PhD in Anthropology.

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Published

2023-07-03

How to Cite

Henry, R., Ramoutsaki, H., Long, D., Acciaioli, G., Foale, S., Pocock, C., McBain-Rigg, K., & Wood, M. (2023). Weedy Life: Coloniality, Decoloniality, and Tropicality. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 22(1), 236–269. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.22.1.2023.3985

Issue

Vol. 22 No. 1 (2023): Decolonizing the Tropics: Part One

Section

Material Culture and De/Cultured Nature

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