Fieldwork Matters
Following Field Station 5 from Natchez to Jackson, Mississippi
Under the surface of western traditions of academic research lurks a troubling complicity with histories of exploitation. Attempts at breaking with the colonial ties of this mode of knowing often plead for alternative narratives to the dominant discourse, while overlooking how those who have long been telling these narratives typically lack the institutional backbone to make their case. In this reflective piece, Clémence Hallé ruminates on the extractive tendencies of knowledge production, which can only be countered through mutual reciprocity.
The actor and theater maker Duncan Evennou and I joined the Anthropocene River Journey in Natchez, Mississippi, on October 23, 2019, shortly after the beginning of Field Station 5: Place, Space, and Relations of Belongings. We reached the Grand Village of the Natchez Indians museum around noon, after a few hours’ drive from New Orleans, where we had landed the day before. A recorded dialog in the museum’s auditorium exploring the etiologies of the Anthropocene between the Mississippi River, the Natchez Trace, and the Grand Village was just ending. We quickly introduced ourselves to the crew while sharing a bowl of pasta and some nachos in the garden, then jumped back into our car to follow the “Wilderness Inquiries” van toward the Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture, from where we took a Natchez Heritage Tour of the city’s enslavement history. As forecasted on the Anthropocene Curriculum website, our journey through the Upper Delta region seemed to start by engaging with “the deep connections that exist between white supremacism and human exceptionalism, and between genocide and ecocide.”1
The “Wilderness Inquiries” van and its canoes. Photo by Clémence Hallé
While touring us through the collection of the Museum of African American History and Culture, our guide told us the story of its foundation by African American women and its museography, as well as his own use of its archives to reenact obscured narratives of enslaved people. Some of them were African princes; all of them were rendered invisible. Most of them were sold at the Forks of the Road Slave Market, where our guide brought us to share his stories in situ. On the permanent information panels scattered around the site, we could read that a slave was bought for between $800 and $1,600 “to raise more cotton to buy more negroes to raise more cotton”—a mournful formula literally intertwining human and land exploitation. Our guide carried some chains and a whip to reify the violence of the place on which we stood. He pointed out the same type of chains cemented in the ground, calling it “a small testament.” Small testament indeed, we thought, while we pursued our tour around several historical markers of the city until we reached the Watkins Street Cemetery, a Black cemetery established primarily for the “over 200 individuals that perished in the Rhythm Nightclub Fire on April 23, 1940.” We then headed to a sports bar with subdued lights, looking like an underground jazz club and as if it were inhabited by ghostly swivel chairs that might turn toward a low stage. There, as a closing act, our guide performed his “Narrative of a Natchez Slave”, a speculative reenactment of an omitted episode briefly described in a single letter that he found in between the museum’s archives.
Our guide performing at the sports bar. Photo by Clémence Hallé
As I remember the discussions that ensued, one question in particular resonated through the room: How could a group such as ours—namely undergrad students, artists, social scientists, and curators from Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, canoeing downstream the Mississippi “as a collaborative learning experiment to understand the river as a composite and storied space” that grounds the Anthropocene:2—help our guide in his excavation of alternative stories to counter “the traditional Antebellum Natchez historical tours”?3
Our guide’s answer to this question immediately drew the red line of any pluridisciplinary and collective research project such as the ones we were involved in, both together and separately: what our guide needed the most was institutional and financial support in order to pursue and promote his work on, with, and for African American histories. Segregation, he said, has continued in the South through means of economic inequalities. While the growing interest of white tourists taking his tours may help to popularize his work—an interest some postcolonial scholars theorized as “white guilt”—this alone does not have a meaningful impact on the development of the museum’s activities, if it is not accompanied by material reparation.
I see this whole scene as a mirror image of the abyssal reflections that confronted Duncan and I from the very first day of our journey. No matter how blurry our landmarks might have been, they bluntly forced us to situate ourselves in the environment in which we had landed from Paris only the night before. As we were sitting in the foggy atmosphere of the secret sports-jazz place, listening to the shattering testimonies of our host, I was submerged in questions that I have spent weeks trying to unpack. I will spare you the “Who am I?” existential type—glaringly evident here—and go straight to the “What am I here for?” ones, which I believe carry more heuristic accuracy in this case.
Duncan and I had been invited for a residency in the Southeastern United States, supported by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in Atlanta, Georgia. During this residency, we decided to follow the participants of the Anthropocene River Journey from their last field station to the Anthropocene River Campus at New Orleans. Duncan is an actor and a theater maker, specialized in the use of research material on stage to explore presentations of the contemporary condition that break away from classical theater standards. I work on the emergence of the Anthropocene hypothesis in the worlds of the arts and the humanities at the Ecole normale supérieure’s Sciences, Arts, Creation and Research laboratory. Both of us were trained in ecological thought and political art, and deeply inspired by Donna Haraway when she wrote: “It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems.”4
As I was trying to study, as part of my PhD thesis, the many stories that have been told about the Anthropocene, I stopped on the HKW’s Anthropocene Project . It was the very first pluridisciplinary research platform concerned with the geological hypothesis, and many of the actors and agents I had been looking at were involved. With environmental history, I have learned that even thoughts have environments, and I found a way to situate mine through the Anthropocene Project’s curatorial narratives. The documentation of the project also became common ground for Duncan and I. We looked at the discourses of the inaugural meeting of the Anthropocene Working Group,5
which was given a stage at a performative and cultural institution rather than at one or another geological society, as one might have expected. After this meeting, Duncan and I wrote a play called Matters, a polyphonic assemblage in which Duncan transforms the historical, scientific, and political voices of the working group members evaluating the hypothesis into a one-man show, bringing to light the frictions of thinking that occur when sciences get up on stage. It is the very ambiguous relationship of Matters with reenactment and science fiction that brings me back to the overwhelming reflections that struck Duncan and I in the subdued atmosphere of the room where we were watching our guide’s performance.
When writing Matters, both Duncan and I realized we had to stick to the Anthropocene’s dominant scientific and political narrative in order to be coherent with the discourses of the Anthropocene Working Group’s inaugural meeting. Including what we clumsily named “alternative stories to the main Anthropocene narrative” would have given them the status of mere commentaries next to the dominant one. Yet, in my view, ecological thought starts by exploring both the dominant and the alternative in a symmetrical manner. Thus Matters became an introduction to the geological hypothesis, rather than an experimentation with the plurality of other possible worlds and temporalities that humanist, artistic, and critical accounts of the conceptual version of the notion imply. To accomplish the latter, we needed more experience and encounters. The Mississippi. An Anthropocene River journey, by aiming “to make the Mississippi River basin legible as a zone of ecological, historical, and social interaction between humans and the environment using novel forms of exchange, research, collaboration, and pedagogy,”6 seemed like an inspiring opportunity for just that. The project situates the hypothesis in a specific territory, localized in the heart of Western modernity, bridging the gap between such a global concept as the Anthropocene and intimate experience. For Duncan and I, it also raised the problem of how to present the dynamics that occur between the actors and agents of such a territory in a theater. So we started to look at the material produced by the Anthropocene River learning experiment as our field of inquiry, while our group was in the process of trying to “understand the river as a composite and storied space”7—producing a sort of double-layered research and creation project, a stratigraphic and multidisciplinary study of one another, to understand the territorial relationships of ones to the others.
But what the encounter with our Natchez guide made me experience intimately is the sensitivity of this object-subject relationship. His work cannot be adequately reduced to an example of either “an alternative story to the dominant Anthropocene narrative” or “a composite and storied space.” If I believe his reenactments are strongly connected to the ones Duncan and I wrote for Matters in terms of methodology—in both cases, we are reenacting cultural institutions’ archives in order to imagine alternative scenarios to our past, present, and future condition—then every other aspect of our respective performances are marked by immense inequalities. The historic, economic, racial, and institutional factors that structure our individual speculative reenactments are deeply unequal. For one, they are marked by continuous exploitation and segregation. For another, European privilege is found in each of the abovementioned dimensions. Since environmental exploitation and extraction are intimately intertwined with the history of slavery and colonization, how can we avoid reproducing the same extractivist dynamics that brought us into the same room? In other words: Could I potentially be extracting my fellows from the Anthropocene River project, who are themselves extracting our Natchez host, whom I am extracting by extracting my fellows from the Anthropocene River project, exploiting each other all the way down—and so in total contradiction with the very reasons that gathered us together that day? I had to dig into this overwhelming question, which obliged me to situate myself as an ecological intellectual. I felt it was flirting with the core of the research and creation process I’ve engaged in over the past few years. I want to share here a short and nascent state of my inquiry through Field Station 5 with that problematic in mind.
As I was sharing my thoughts with my friend and colleague in knowledge production analysis Jamie Allen while on a bus ride to a levee near New Orleans during the “Unbound Engineering” seminar a couple weeks later, he advised me to have a look at what he accurately called “extractive epistemologies.” I started by opening up Macarena Gómez-Barris’s Extractive Zone, tracing “the political, aesthetic, and performative practices that emerge in opposition to the ruinous effects of extractive capital,” the objective of which is “to decolonize the Anthropocene”:
My objective is to decolonize the Anthropocene by cataloguing life otherwise, or the emergent and heterogeneous forms of living that are not about destruction or mere survival within the extractive zone, but about the creation of emergent alternatives. Unlike these doomsday approaches that play with destruction scenarios on the scale of the planetary, I study at the level of submerged life worlds within Indigenous territories, while pointing to African-descendent territories and ontologies, modes of living that, even if not often perceivable, exist alongside extractive capitalism.8
Throughout her work, she defines what she calls the “extractive view,” similar to a “colonial gaze”:
Before the colonial project could prosper, it had to render territories and peoples extractible, and it did so through a matrix of symbolic, physical, and representational violence. Therefore, the extractive view sees territories as commodities, rendering land as for the taking, while also devalorizing the hidden worlds that form the nexus of human and nonhuman multiplicity. This viewpoint, similar to the colonial gaze, facilitates the reorganization of territories, populations, and plant and animal life into extractible data and natural resources for material and immaterial accumulation.9
The extractive view and the colonial gaze rendered entire Indigenous populations invisible in order to define their territories as terra nullius and facilitate the extraction of natural resources from them. Indigenous Peoples have been represented as nonexistent and their land as unexploited wilderness for this very purpose. The day after our Natchez Heritage Tour, Duncan and I accompanied the Anthropocene River Journey students on a visit to the Emerald Mound, located on the Natchez Trace. A National Park Service sign describes the Old Natchez Trace as “a wilderness road that originated from a series of trails used by the southeastern Indian tribes.” Yet, how can a trace shaped for centuries by these tribes, building along this pathway of earthworks such as the Emerald Mound—“the crowning mound-building achievement” of the Mississippian Indigenous group several thousands years ago and still used today as a sacred site —be considered “wilderness”?
Sign for the Emerald Mound, nearby which is the Natchez Trace. Photo by Clémence Hallé
Western modernity’s divide between nature and culture has been thought in great depth in contemporary anthropology, environmental history, the arts, and philosophy. “Within Native American studies,” Gòmez-Barris points out, “[Linda] Tuhiwai Smith identifies the need for decolonizing academic research about Indigenous communities, whom she frames as the most studied population in the world,” referring specifically to her book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples.10 To Tuhiwai Smith, “from the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism.”11 Indeed, she describes her book as “identif[ying] research as a significant site of struggle between the interests and ways of knowing of the West and the interests and ways of resisting of the Other.” Tuhiwai Smith continues:
In this example, the Other has been constituted with a name, a face, a particular identity, namely indigenous peoples. While it is more typical (with the exception of feminist research) to write about research within the framing of a specific scientific or disciplinary approach, it is surely difficult to discuss research methodology and indigenous peoples together, in the same breath, without having an analysis of imperialism, without understanding the complex ways in which the pursuit of knowledge is deeply embedded in the multiple layers of imperial and colonial practices.12
She explains this inextricable link between the pursuit of knowledge and imperial and colonial practice by highlighting the ideal embodied by researchers when they perceive themselves as the natural representatives of an oppressed community or of a greater good for mankind because of the mere fact that they’ve dedicated an academic career to this community or good. Yet, for Tuhiwai Smith, Indigenous Peoples have alternative stories to tell about this very ideal itself, causally linking scientific research to mankind’s benefit:
Indigenous peoples across the world have other stories to tell which not only question the assumed nature of those ideals and the practices they generated, but also serve to tell an alternative story: the history of Western research through the eyes of the colonized. […] From some indigenous perspectives the gathering of information by scientists was as random, ad hoc and damaging as that undertaken by amateurs. There was no difference, from these perspectives, between “real” or scientific research and any other visits by inquisitive and acquisitive strangers.13
Remember our Natchez guide’s answer to how undergraduate students, artists, social scientists, and curators could help him to excavate alternative stories? It was with material support. He does not need theater makers or even postcolonial theorists to translate his reenactments into contemporary art or academic idioms. He can—and already does—tell his stories about, with, and for African Americans, as well as to the greater public, alone. What he does need, though, is to be offered symmetrical institutional and financial opportunities as our group received in order to pursue and disseminate his work at the same scale. He needs public funds for collection building and the conservation of the Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture’s archives, he needs time and space to rehearse, he needs cultural sites to invite him and his colleagues to perform their pieces. To consider him in a nonextractive way is to work with him, not to process his story as mere data.
While discussing these matters with Bernd Scherer, the director of HKW, I asked him about the relationship of the Mississippi. An Anthropocene River project to the institution’s curatorial history. He explained that the project is looking at a topographic case of the Anthropocene by working with people along the course of the Mississippi River to address issues directly related to the geological hypothesis but that are not necessarily framed in this context. The project links different kinds of initiatives as a way for each to mutually relate to their respective contexts and to develop and support their social and political agendas. He told me that one reason for going to the American South is that the Upper Delta region, specifically, contradicts the old cardinal categories of “the North” and “the South.” It is a way for Westerners (in this case, Westerners from Europe, so Easterners for Mississippians) to inquire both about themselves and about themselves in relation to the others. To Scherer, Louisiana, for instance, is a place where the North colonizes itself by fully exploiting its own land and people. So yes, the Anthropocene River Journey was about auto-colonization. When I shared with him my extractive epistemology problematic, he answered:
I think if you call wherever you go and are engaging with, or just looking at a certain situation, “extracting,” then maybe the concept is being overused. It depends what your attitude is, the way you are engaged on the ground. The whole project was developed in a way that engaged with people we knew for quite some time. We knew their concerns and they knew ours. It is not a project that is only taking out—it is also giving. Quite a number of initiatives were developed by people directly on the ground. We did not just take things and not give it back. Shooting a film and just showing it at home is different than showing it to the people who are involved and engaging with them.14
Cooperation Jackson’s place. Photo by Clémence Hallé
This notion of a particular attitude and reciprocity was indeed obvious during the couple days our group spent alongside the organization Cooperation Jackson after leaving Natchez. The group’s goal is to achieve “self-determination for African Americans through economic self-sufficiency” and “has worked tirelessly to secure and grow its power base within Jackson’s political, educational, and economic institutions and the creation of institutions of its own,” especially through “laying the foundation to establish a network of co-ops and initiatives, including housing, daycare, construction, freedom farms, urban farming, and a community land trust.” I’ve taken these words from the descriptions Cooperation Jackson offered during the Field Station 5 broadcast we recorded with them while sharing meals, movies, visits, and discussions about their facilities as well as our common concerns, struggles, and dreams.15
As Scherer reminded me, much of the Anthropocene River project has been completed by people living nearby the Mississippi through radio, film, and theater plays, which they have kept and continue to use in their own contexts. I turn to Tuhiwai Smith here, and her assertion that a decolonizing methodology starts with demystifying and sharing knowledge in a long-term commitment:
I use the term “sharing knowledge” deliberately, rather than the term “sharing information” because to me the responsibility of researchers and academics is not simply to share surface information (pamphlet knowledge) but to share the theories and analyses which inform the way knowledge and information are constructed and represented. By taking this approach seriously it is possible to introduce communities and people who may have had little formal schooling to a wider world, a world which includes people who think just like them, who share in their struggles and dreams and who voice their concerns in similar sorts of ways. To assume in advance that people will not be interested in, or will not understand, the deeper issues is arrogant. The challenge always is to demystify, to decolonize.16
When Tuhiwai Smith, writing from the vantage point of the colonized, says that “the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism,” it causes my abyssal feeling of extractivism in the subdued atmosphere of the Natchez sports bar to slowly become clearer. After this brief reflection, I believe that, as a highly educated European researcher, I write from the vantage point of the colonial world. And maybe it is only after acknowledging this position that I can try to decolonize my methodologies, rather than by trying to hide what is glaringly evident. Following the brief encounters that I have described here, some premises for such reparation emerge, such as building long-term networks to facilitate the production and transmission of alternative stories. Are the curatorial politics of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt part of this long-term knowledge sharing? And as an aspiring ecological researcher and writer analyzing Anthropocenic histories through experiences such as the Mississippi River Journey, am I taking enough care to prevent my work from falling into the extractive tendency of the pursuit of knowledge? To tell alternative stories to the dominant Anthropocene narrative is to start by acknowledging that these stories are already being told, and acknowledging the need of those who tell them for knowledge reparation.
