The Florida Everglades: An Entangled Landscape: A talk by Laura Ogden January 28, 2010

In this talk, Laura Ogden discusses her research with alligator hunters in the Florida Everglades. In particular, she uses her fieldwork to think about how the Everglades is the product of human and nonhuman relations. For Everglades hunters, the landscape is alive with histories of people dead and living, with morality tales of local justice and girls gone bad, and with uncanny phenomenon, such as fantastically large snakes. These encounters shaped the mobility, or immobility, of local landscape practices. Yet it is not only humans that are in motion here. The land itself is in constant motion, as are the creatures, nutrients, charged particles, vegetal matter, and the like, that are humans’ fellow travelers. We might understand these spatial relations as a sort of “contact zone,” where bodies, geographies, biota and mythologies become entangled. The contact zone is marked by a furious exchange of messages, tactile encounters, territorializing acts and countermoves, all taking place among and between the natural and human worlds. This talk is an experiment in mapping this entanglement.

Laura Ogden is a professor of Anthropology at Florida International University. Some of her recent work includes The Bill Ashley Jungles: Landscape Ethnography and the Politics of Nature in the Florida Everglades (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), "The Everglades Ecosystem and the Politics of Nature" (American Anthropologist, 2008), and "Public Participation in Environmental Decision-Making: A Case Study in the Florida Everglades" (Cahiers d’ Economie et Sociologie Rurales, 2006).

Prof. Ogden's visit is hosted by the Environment, Culture, and Sustainability Group of Quadrant, a joint initiative of the University of Minnesota Press and the Institute for Advanced Study. Quadrant is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/thursdayscals10.php