Week 13: A home at the end of the world

Week 13: A home at the end of the world

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology for a better world
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building 410
November 4, 2025

Main reading: n/a

Making and maintaining a home in the world

Many of the Black coastal communities I worked with were similarly steeped in histories of autonomous worldmaking deeply rooted to local ecologies that shaped their approach to coastal restoration. Compared to frameworks of restoration predicated on land loss and natural processes, many Black community leaders in Plaquemines Parish approach questions about land and future of Plaquemines around the past—specifically through invocations of holding land across generations of kin over time. (Barra 2024, 153)

Potawatomi scholars Kyle Powers Whyte and Robin Kimmerer suggest ecological repair is a cultural practice that mends and strengthens relations between human and nonhuman kin across time. Whyte calls this as “collective continuance:” the practice of (re)establishing restorative relations between humans and the environment through ecological practices. Collective continuance refers to relations of interdependence, responsibility, and care for the social resilience of Indigenous peoples, cultures, and the environment as they shift and evolve over time. (Barra 2024, 154)

How do you interpret the idea of cultural continuity here?

Whyte and Kimmerer are making an argument for a distinctively Indigenous philosophy of nature based on the value of reciprocity (Kimmerer 2011). Why does Barra invoke that here?

Plantation and plot redux

• Plantations are planned spaces. They are the projection of one society’s values onto nature.

• Plantations, as actual systems, are necessarily incomplete; and so, plantation owners allowed for people to work plots.

• Work on a plot is not based on land or labor as a resource to be owned, managed, or quantified.

• Work in plots thus also promotes the flourishing of alternative values and creates the possibility for individual and collective autonomy.

  • Plots are, in another sense, similar to spaces of marronage, or refuge from plantations.

• The history of the world economy, whether told as a story of capitalism or colonialism, contains within it a “secretive” history, a separate, parallel world based on distinct values of communal interdependence and collective self-determination (Wynter 1971, 101).

Anthropologists think in terms of kinship

Kinship is a major theme connecting the topics in this class, and for a reason:

Kinship is an important topic for anthropology and perfect illustration of how anthropologists think.

• Each person has kin
• The people who count as one’s kin differ from group to group
  • Kinship is often based on biological facts, but it is not the same as biological facts, because that would mean kinship is the same everywhere.

Kinship is both universal to everyone and particular to a specific community. It sits directly on the border between nature and culture.

Kinship is, furthermore, an expression of the fundamental fact of society. It is universal but it is not natural or biological, so it is a universal feature of society itself.

Kinship is the context for any other social forces or historical trends we want to understand.

Kinship is always present

Kinship is in many ways the secretive history of any one society.

It is distinct from other social forces that are the source of important social and historical changes, but it is never displaced by these forces.

• Many societies have a sexist bias in a double sense:
  • Women’s roles in kinship systems are often crucial to what they provide people, but mostly not valued as highly as male-identified roles, and
  • Because these aspects of kinship are associated with women, the material and social significance of kinship is ignored in a male point of view.

Two views of continuity

Continuity sounds like stagnation if you assume that change, its opposite, is more important.

• Bourgeois culture is a culture based on private ownership of capital and market competition. It assumes
  • that greater individual freedom from tradition is good, and
  • any social change that frees individuals is good.
• Plaquemines Parish communities are based on different ideas.
  • They want to pass on land and resources to future generations.
  • They want to cultivate shared resources, rather than maximize individual gains.

Incompleteness is fundamental to being human

Kinship as a topic points to another major theme: No person is an island.

Bourgeois culture assumes that, details and circumstances aside, everyone is basically like Robinson Crusoe, alone on a deserted island surrounded by possessions (Marx [1843] 1978, 222).

• You may agree with Marx, and reject a universal concept of the human based on the bourgeois individual, but you may still want to know what everyone has in common

Incompleteness … is the way of the world, a universal; we are all incomplete, no incompleteness is exactly the same as for another person, but each incompleteness offers an opportunity for interesting encounters and creative outcomes. So, you prop me up with your height, I help you with my shortness. I am in pain, you offer me a shoulder to lean on, with the understanding that one good turn deserves another. (Nyamnjoh 2023, 216)

We are all “dependent on that which is different”

In an interview, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall makes a similar argument:

I don’t want other people to be like me. I don’t know why they should be. I don’t think my experience is rich enough to embrace the existence of the rest of the world. I have to find a way of recognising that I cannot be self sufficient in myself. I am, from the moment of birth, from the moment of entry into language and culture, dependent on that which is different from me.

We are dependent on the other - to feed us, to recognise who we are, to speak a language. Our common humanity … is the process of reciprocity with that which is not us, which is other than us, which is different. (Hall 2007, 155)

Methods of comparison

Any real-world example might have various features, some shared with others and some that are unique to the case.

For any feature you want to explain, consider the specifics of the case—the who, what, where, and when.

PDF version of the above diagram

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