How to build an environment: Negotiating possible futures through infrastructures and cultural re-enactment

Beschreibung

In the summer of 2020, popular protest in the Kazakh capital Nur-Sultan organised around the preservation of a lake/water reservoir that was to give way to real estate construction advertised as a ‘park construction’ by authorities. As former wetlands are drained for the growing city while climate change brings increasingly dryer and hotter summers, fears of water scarcity grow. Instead of a typical rally, protest incorporated traditional dress and music as symbols of alternative visions of human-environment relations. At the same time, Nur-Sultan continues to attract the rural unemployed but there is an acute shortage of affordable housing and municipal water provision effectively ends at the outskirts where people are demanding better infrastructure and services. Human interactions with the environment in Central Asia are very often shaped by recourse to historical orders, yet different ones. Large-scale extraction and urban construction sites, epitomes of the Soviet era modernisation model, are increasingly questioned and resisted by reference to ‘autochthonous culture’ that allegedly provided better care of the non-human world. By drawing on fieldwork in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, this paper asks how existing or missing infrastructures as well as the narratives around them work towards the generation or disintegration of possible futures, and how strands of discourse and practice that refer to different pasts connect to ideas of liveable futures. It explores perceptions of a modernity that manifests itself in built infrastructure, survival strategies of economically vulnerable populations, and cultural reference to environmental protection that are often pitted against each other in the context of recurrent violent state response to social and environmental protests.

Zeitraum	28 Sept. 2022
Ereignistitel	Vienna Anthropology Days 2020 (VANDA)
Veranstaltungstyp	Konferenz
Ort	Vienna, ÖsterreichAuf Karte anzeigen
Bekanntheitsgrad	International