Kinship: How to live in a more-than-human world

Our earliest roads were elephant paths. Even today, in Africa's most impenetrable undergrowth, it is the trails maintained by elephants that enable human mobility. Hacking back the overgrowth of time and following one historical track, we find ourselves deep in more-than-human history. In this lecture, Professor Swart explores what a doomed experiment on elephants taught us about animal cultures (and quite a bit about our own). Professor Swart examines our past misunderstandings and successes with animals and considers the implications for our shared survival.

History, as Professor Swart will demonstrate, can play a crucial role in addressing global biodiversity crises revealing the shifting dynamics of conservation dilemmas, fusing ecological, political, social, and economic data into explanatory narratives of change over time. It can explore successful initiatives but also expose the failures precipitated by unintended blowback from failed efforts. The long roots of (human) coping strategies may be learned from cultures with long memories of traditional ecological knowledge. However, Professor Swart suggests something much bolder: that we should look at changing cultures of the animals themselves. Professor Swart suggests how these cultures might be reconstructed and how they could contribute to harmonious coexistence.

Professor Swart explores the deep connections between people and animals, troubling the persistent and dangerous idea that human-wildlife relationships are ancillary to ‘pristine’ or nonhuman interfaces in how we envision ‘Nature’ more broadly. Professor Swart will show how historicising elephants and human-wildlife relations helps to avoid romanticising them. Ultimately, Professor Swart argues that animals have history, and these histories are vital to their futures.

About the Speaker:

Internationally renowned environmental historian of southern Africa, Professor Sandra Swart is Chair of History at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and vice president of the European Society for Environmental History. Her latest book is The Lion's Historian: Africa's Animal Past.

About the Robin-Griffiths Environmental History Lecture:

The Australian National University's Centre for Environmental History is pleased to announce the Robin-Griffiths Environmental History Lecture. This Lecture honours the Centre's founders, Emeritus Professors Libby Robin and Tom Griffiths, who have so generously fostered the field of environmental history and cultivated a community of scholars. We hope this annual event will go a small way to recognising their enormous contribution to the field and to share new research in environmental history.