Dear Rosalyn,

Thanks for your talk. In response to your question about similar ideas being explored in India, I would like to share the work of a friend and amazing naturalist, Godwin Vasanth Bosco, who worked for nine years in the Shola regions of the Nilgiris in South India and in 2019 came out with a book called "Voice of a Sentient Highland". There is a startling correspondence between what you were talking about and what he talks about -  Vasanth has come to it through his own relationship with the mountains (and shola) he knows best.

Technical reasons also prevented me from asking the couple of questions I wanted, so I take this opportunity to do so -
I was most intrigued by the idea that - and I hope I got it right - climate change will not prove to be as disastrous for the small, organic farmer as for industrial agro-business. Have I got it right, and if yes, could you say more about that?
Also, I am sceptical of reading too much into ritual as a means of signifying (or inculcating) respect/love. Here in India symbol and actuality are kept remorselessly apart. Mainstream Hinduism still - indeed, increasingly - pays attention to the rituals that worship snakes, trees, forests, lakes, spring, harvest, etc.etc., even as, as a society, we systematically lop away at forests, dynamite sacred mountains and rivers, etc.etc. Thoughts?

Incidentally, I studied mainstream Euro-American culture for my dissertation in Anthropology many years ago in order to study the eye/I through which so much of the rest of the world is perceived -  The divorce between nature/culture, self/society, thought/emotion, body/mind seems to lie at the very heart of this way of perception. Unfortunately however, these dichotomies are now well represented in thinking - scholarly and otherwise - all over the world (Protestantism appears to be just one of the many religions that sit well with our current economic system!).

Looking forward to continued discussion -

best,
sonali  


On Wed, 3 Feb 2021 at 00:54, Bold, Rosalyn <r.bold@ucl.ac.uk> wrote:

Thanks very much everyone, I enjoyed today.
I may have given the wrong email address! You can contact me here at r.bold@ucl.ac.uk. I am eager to develop collaborations with colleagues studying the relevance of these ideas in india- feel free to get in touch!

Best wishes

Rosalyn

Dr. Rosalyn Bold

Honorary Research Fellow

Department of Social Anthropology
University College London.

From: GTA-PeDAGoG <gta-pedagog-bounces@lists.ourproject.org> on behalf of singhvan@rcn.com <singhvan@rcn.com>
Sent: 02 February 2021 17:22
To: PeDAGoG: Post-Development Academic-Activist Global Group <gta-pedagog@lists.ourproject.org>; vikalp-sangam-list <vikalp-sangam-list@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [PeDAGoG] Recording of TACC TALK: Indigenous, non-western understandings of Climate Change by Dr. Rosalyn Bold
 
Dear All, 

For those who missed today's talk by anthropologist Dr. Rosalyn Bold in the series from Teachers Against the Climate Crisis (TACC), or those who want to revisit what was a really interesting session, here is the link to the youtube video. 

Indigenous and non-western understandings of climate change: Latin American challenges to colonial and extractivist discourses
Dr. Rosalyn Bold, University College, London.
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