Negotiating ‘darkness’ and ‘light’: Meshworks of fluidity and fire in Baucau

Palmer, Lisa

doi:10.22459/pp.2018.10

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…All these substances, elements and processes are understood to bring the world into being through the continual communicative potential and need to cross socio-natural boundaries. All are powerful shape-shifters coming together (and importantly at times being held apart) to produce something new (Palmer, 2015(Palmer, , 2018Bovensiepen, 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conjuring carbon: Resource materialities in Timor-Leste

Palmer

Jackson

2023

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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In this paper, we trace the social and material effects of a carbon verification encounter in Timor-Leste. Foregrounding the relational historicity of these resource materialities, we inquire into the disorientating but potentially generative place-based effects of carbon offsetting. We unpack carbon's elusive and unruly materiality through our participation in a verification event connected to a reforestation and carbon-offsetting program that encourages individuals and organisations from Australia to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing carbon credits from subsistence farmers in Timor-Leste. We interpret this making, or conjuring, of carbon through interactions between technical experts, program managers, staff, and participants over a 4-day audit of the program and, with the benefit of subsequent interviews with farmers, examine how the opacity of the carbon credit's materiality and its measurement leads to community scepticism and demands for greater methodological clarity and oversight. At the same time, we take issue with critics of market-based conservation programs who assert that carbon offsetting leads inevitably to severe adverse impacts for local communities. Activating a generative understanding of the economic logics of ‘commodity indigenisation’ through attention to the ‘cultural biographies’ or life cycle of things, we evidence fluid movements: complex socio-natural relations and moral economies that humanise nature to reveal and potentially reconfigure the otherwise alienating effects of carbon commodities and their socio-natural technical complex.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conjuring carbon: Resource materialities in Timor-Leste

Palmer

Jackson

2023

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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“…The related assumption that non-human animals, plants or things may appear as intentional and agentive subjects (Århem 2015, 3) is an emergent not a constant quality (Sprenger 2015). 12 Yet, East Timorese animism is also characterised by multiple overlapping and at times juxtaposing conceptions of place and related modes of identification that can be found amongst and within the same communities (Palmer 2015;2018). 13 There are different political and moral consequences to the way people relate to the non-human world around them.…”

Section: Transformations Of Alterity-oriented Animismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can Oil Speak? On the Production of Ontological Difference and Ambivalence in Extractive Encounters

Bovensiepen¹

2021

Anthropological Quarterly

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Negotiating ‘darkness’ and ‘light’: Meshworks of fluidity and fire in Baucau

Cited by 2 publications

References 13 publications

Conjuring carbon: Resource materialities in Timor-Leste

Conjuring carbon: Resource materialities in Timor-Leste

Can Oil Speak? On the Production of Ontological Difference and Ambivalence in Extractive Encounters

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