ANTH2060 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Political Ecology, Environmental Anthropology, Participant Observation
ANTH2060 Lecture Eight: Subsurface Environments I
Mythologies of the Underground
• Environmental anthropology historically focusses on the surface, a literal analysis on the face of the earth
• The underground focusses on a range of things, including fracking, resource contests, aquifers
• The underground has a link to mythology and literature
e.g., Odysseus' symbolic death and descent into the underworld, learning from the shades of his past.
Orpheus' descent in the underworld to save his dead wife. Sybil and Aeneas; Aeneas wishes to see his
deceased father seeking answers (Virgil, 70-19 B.C.). Dante's journey through hell and the journey of
overcoming fear, and the recognition of the rejection of sin. Tolkien's Mines of Moria in The Fellowship
of the Ring.
The underground is a powerful theme in literary works, religious texts, vidual art and so on Its material
qualities allow it to figure widely and fundamentally in human understandings of the world. Relatively
little work has gone into cross-cultural comparative studies of the underground
• The underground is hidden from the public, criminal, secretive, amoral, and sinful. A place of
punishment and sinful.
• The underground thus also figures as a metaphor is psychoanalytic terms: the site of the unconscious,
desires, instinct, irrationality and monstrous demons, related to liminality, but also to psychological
oppression, anxiety and deceit
• A site of redemption and hope, of dreams and ambitions
• Dichotomies of above and below; lunar and seasonal cycles of light and darkness/winter/summer; death
and regeneration
• Underground also involves politics: as resistance, subversive, utopian, and antiestablishment. The
underground of a site of moral good, altruism, reflection, hope and endurance
• Political ecology o subterranean struggles. Who owns the subsoil? Control of the subsoil has been a
vehicle for the accrual of immense power both domestically and internationally. This power is most
obviously embodied in those corporations that dominate mineral and energy companies, but just as
importantly affects, and is constitutive of, many domains of transnational and national and everyday
political economic and social life
Indigenous Papua New Guineans
• (Ballard 1994) Oil seeps were engaged as critical nodes within Huli sacred geography, which in the oil
itself represented a substance crucial to the survival of the Huli universe. The 'roots' (seeps) are the knots
of the earth. They described it as a vine or roots that runs beneath the earth, composed of an intertwined
snake and cane, both bound around a fluid core of latent flame
• The area of the seeps must be maintained to continue of the well-being of the universe
• There is a sociocultural regenerative dimension of the underground and the role of ritual tapping into this
potential, involving the politics of religion
• "earth magic" bound together different regions and groups of people
• The earth is imagines in corporeal terms. Its interior, where the spirits of the dead are, is 'earth bone' and
its exterior, where the living dwell, is 'earth skin'
• 'white people' were considered magical with a great wealth of knowledge, immortal even, for they
discovered the gold the snake in the earth was withholding
• Note: Visual technology and mythology; ritual leaders, geologists and the role od esoteric knowledge
Australian Aboriginals
• Rainbow serpent myths are common among indigenous Australian. Often relating to deep waterholes,
rain and rain-making climate, the seasons, the practice of magic, initiation rites, creative and destructive
agency, and the importance of adequate ritual knowledge
• There is this ancestral force inside of under the ground
•
• 'sickness dreaming' or 'sickness country' as dubbed for the indigenous, at coronation hill: the uranium
deposits at Kakadu NP in the NT, signifying the relationship between man and environment
Mesoamerica
• Rocks are affiliated with bones, and the inside of the earth is associated with ancestors and intestines
Mountains and volcanoes are considered geographical counterparts to pulse areas
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Document Summary
Orpheus" descent in the underworld to save his dead wife. Sybil and aeneas; aeneas wishes to see his deceased father seeking answers (virgil, 70-19 b. c. ). Dante"s journey through hell and the journey of overcoming fear, and the recognition of the rejection of sin. Tolkien"s mines of moria in the fellowship of the ring. The underground is a powerful theme in literary works, religious texts, vidual art and so on its material qualities allow it to figure widely and fundamentally in human understandings of the world. Relatively little work has gone into cross-cultural comparative studies of the underground: the underground is hidden from the public, criminal, secretive, amoral, and sinful. The underground of a site of moral good, altruism, reflection, hope and endurance: political ecology o subterranean struggles. Control of the subsoil has been a vehicle for the accrual of immense power both domestically and internationally.
