 Welcome everybody to our next session on our final day here for our 39th annual conference for the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness, see change life worlds and ecological upheaval. This is our 39th annual conference but our first fully virtual conference and it's been quite a time together so far and I anticipate that continuing now this has been our most accessible, or most diverse, and our conference with the smallest ecological footprint in the history of our organization so we thank you all for being here for participating in for help and helping to create and sustain this really unique and interactive and interdisciplinary container. My name is Andy Gervage I'm the president of the organization and I want to greet you and welcome you as I have every session with a land acknowledgement I'm speaking to you today. This is a place that is now called Portland Oregon, but it rests on the traditional village sites of tribes such as the Multnomah, the Catholic myth, the Clackamas, the Chinook, the Tuala in Kalapua, Malala, and many other tribes and bands. As the original caretakers of this land we want to begin our session by acknowledging their presence, their dignity, their continued struggle for respect, restoration and reparations. We would be here if they weren't here first and we wouldn't be here speaking to you today the way we are, if they weren't displaced from this land is the goal of this organization to do our part to help rectify that. Many of the sessions, including this one today will in their own way, help speak to those issues. I want to talk a little bit about functionality. We are in a zoom webinar again and so only our speaker, who I'll introduce in a moment, will will have her camera on. And she's going to be reading from her text, and I'll introduce Stephanie and her text in a minute, and we're going to have q amp a kind of dispersed throughout there'll be two or three sections throughout the reading, where we'll open up a time for answers and so the best way to pose a question is to put it in the q amp a box if you roll your cursor over the bottom of your screen. Your zoom screen you'll see towards the right hand side a thing that says q amp a and if you open that you'll be able to enter a question there, and that keeps it in a queue in order and we will be able to then deliver those to Stephanie at the time. Another way to pose the question is into the chat box and please do turn your chat box on now because we will be sharing information with you throughout the presentation in the chat box information about this session about upcoming sessions about other aspects of conference functionality and use the chat box as a way to respond. If you don't have a question per se but you think of something and you want to say something in response to the reading or communicate with us. There's a place that isn't a formal question and the chat box is a perfect place for that, because so much different information is going to be coming through the chat. It might not be the best place for questions because we sometimes lose them because there'll be so much information coming there but if you're more comfortable using the chat. Put your question there and we'll try to grab it and make sure that we get it to Stephanie at those correct times. Okay, and then we will get going here quickly is that we have a transcription button there's a button right next to the Q&A that says live transcript and this is Zoom's AI transcription and so if you find having the transcription on having the captioning button if that helps you interact with the session and understand and interact with the content better and find that meaningful and useful. Please do turn that on. It's not exact. It's an AI captioning mechanism and so sometimes it can actually get some of the words wrong. Some folks find that distracting and so by all means go ahead and turn that off or leave it off. If you if you find that distracting. Okay, and so now without further ado over to our speaker. Stephanie Kane is a professor in the development in the Department of International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She's going to speak to us and redo us from a text that she's been working on called an engineer tableau for the spheres of unintentional agencies, what a wonderful title. And I'm excited to hand things over to Stephanie right now Stephanie welcome. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you Andy, I am happy to be here I've been enjoying the conference very much and I appreciate folks for being here you're kind of I have no idea who's out there it's just. Andy and myself so I guess that will make it into an. Oh, now Andy's gone. Okay. Um, I am in Bloomington Indiana. I'm doing. I'm writing about a place in Winnipeg in Canada Winnipeg Manitoba. I've been working on this book for a few years it's almost ready to go. I have some selections from the book to read from for you and the working title of the whole book is theories of wind and wave and ethnography of flood control. The engineer tableau is the title of the segment. I actually have three segments. One is the first one is an, and a tiny introductory story that is me trying to speak in the voice of rivers. The second one introduces folks to the concept of spheres of unintentional consequences. The story enters into the realm of multi species ethnography. Before I start I'd like to thank all of our ancestors and the indigenous people who preceded them here on our lands. Okay. The story, if I, the ethnographer could write like a river of ventriloquist of moving aquatic form. I would send this communique to the human animals. I would flow to gather the rain into currents and pools to explore earth and shapes to lift boulders and crash broken limbs to absorb water molecules into my river body to defy gravity to swell and push outside the root holding confines of my defining channels to become a lake or wetland to seeping and teaming with fish and bird nourishing life. Like you human animals. I have my cycles and I, and enjoy my secret deliances and dalliance is as I rush ebb disperse and share my soulful bounty. Thank you. Your presence on this planet is new. Your geological time spaces, whole low scenic and extent. Amir 10,000 years give or take yet your cities your dense and crusted colectivities embedded in my prairie terrain, right up to my banks, fixing my flows with concrete and steel damning and diverting my exuberance and spring. Yet now, after executing all this compulsion for control, you shy from the anger of elemental forces stirred by your lack of respect. You are apprehensive about the abstract conception of engineered balance that favors monumental systems over the ecology of beings too complex to fit within the spheres of your intentional logic and concern. This anthropogenic anthropocentric anthropocenic creation of yours. These cities that love to make my floodplains their home but hate to get wet. You cannot expect to live as long as I, who you call the assembly. I, who have outlived the Laurentian ice sheet, although the ice sheet didn't melt into a freshwater inland sea, which shorten my path and turn me into a tributary of the Red River. I'm here remnant of the ice age, though still an impressive urban actor. That's way bigger than I read and I relate to your collective humanable forms as densely mobile and truck acting beings. With buildings, bridges, and a potential for the sacred. But you must realize that we cannot distinguish among you in your terms as individuals, families, communities, First Nations, Métis, settlers, immigrants, or any of the cultural identities that organize your 21st century every day lives. You have been listening, though, to your geoscientists to whom I do sometimes pay uncharacteristic attention. You may be realizing your collective geological agency, your urbanizing forces to be as powerful as the lumbering and scraping glaciers who last resurfaced the continent and shorten my path. Why not stretch your imaginations and your technologies to find better ways to get along with us, the assembly and the red and with each other. Does anybody want to ask anything about that, or should I continue into the main part of the text. Can I get some feedback. Okay, I'll keep going. So, um, we are watching on a different larger screen. Okay. Chapter one, geoculture in Manitoba. I, I use this term geoculture. I made up this term as far as I know, to talk about the cultural dimension of human geological agency, and how we experienced the earth. And I also within that focus on geoscientists and engineers as actually engaging in cultural practice. So they think they're just all about technical stuff and science, but it is a cultural practice and they're, they are the way the ones the experts kind of shape the relationship of cities and, and many of us to the planet. Okay. So, here's the introduction. Flood events put everyday lives of inhabitants of river cities like Winnipeg Manitoba intention with waters impulsive, implacable elemental force. In extreme disorder, or in balance, cities and rivers share states of being, they are beings intention. When rivers rise up out of their familiar channels to become freshwater seas, submerging landscapes of human habitation, then receding from neighborhoods left for lawn, they enact river hood. And again, cities reshape themselves around flood prone rivers. They enact human co activity impulses of rivers and human collectives cities, combine as they carry on being and becoming persisting and distinctive yet entwined embodied form. In this sense, water bodies and collective human bodies share in the planets geophysical dynamics, which must also be geocultural dynamics as they move and persevere together cities and rivers enact a common impulse to sustain their distinct yet flexible forms. In the process, human intentions meet unpredictable events. I name the dimension of matter and meaning within which cities and rivers enact common impulses, and within which events unfold unpredictably, the spheres of unintended agencies. Flood control then can be defined as an intentional collective act to keep the city dry. In other words, flood control is the collective human effort to invent and sustain an altered state of being shared with rivers. Knowledge from expert fields of geoscience engineering and law, together with inhabitant experience provide ethnographic material for telling flood control stories. These convey a geocultural imaginary with human and more than human actors who decipher democratize and re-enchant technical expertise for a new kind of appreciation. For the fact is, while technical flood control knowledge and its spatial logics seem straightforward and practical, intentions and effects can be out of sync for elemental reasons not always clearly recognized. Throughout this book, the sphere of unintentional agencies works like a touchstone, a reminder to appreciate the impressive capabilities of flood control alongside a critical analysis of its assumptions, limits and sacrifices. And to the sphere of unintended agencies where cities and rivers coexist in tension, but only humans act intentionally provides an opening for attempting to tell socio-techno nature stories of water bodies as if they were as alive as you and I. To begin, I briefly sketch entryways into the geocultural imaginary. Oh shoot, I forgot to share my screen. This is a reservoir made out of the portage diversion by this dam. And it's in the province of Manitoba about 80 kilometers west of Winnipeg. So I'll just move to this. This slide shows you what happened in the Ice Age and I'm skipping over my scene where I talk about the Ice Age, but I wanted to put it here just to get you oriented towards the timeframes, the space times of this work. So this is at the end of the Ice Age when Laurentian sheet, which had been covering most of North America, melted all the rivers melted and came together in this low spot, which became like Agassiz, this gigantic lake. It was hanged in by the ice of the glaciers out of which it melted until four giant outbursts. It broke through the ice, and this one to the Mackenzie River, this one out to the Hudson Bay in the Atlantic, this one out to the mid-Atlantic and this one out to the Gulf of Mexico. And those established the river systems that we live with today and also hypothetically, according to this geoscientific model, the currents on the planet were formed at that point because all this fresh water burst out into the salt water with gigantic impetus. So that's the scale that I want us to start imagining ourselves as human actors, but I also want to start imagining us in relation to these beings that we cannot see. And this is a picture of a random diatom that I got off the internet, and they are microscopic. They can best be seen with electron microscopes. So this is the scales that go beyond our interactional scales, but yet we are acting within. Okay, so this is where we are now the engineer tableau. Oh, let's see. On the 27th of August 2014. This is not quite your normal ethnographic scene. Roughly following the Asiniboine River upstream. I drive west out of Winnipeg across the prairie along Trans Canada Highway one, which is also Portage Avenue to the Portage Diversion. And that's the structure here. This is the spillway of the Portage Diversion, and it's under the reservoir that was in that first picture. In continuous steady motion, water rushes through the giant concrete walls of the reservoir spillway and fall into the churning riverbed below a pelican squadron floats in a little side swirl of water between base and bank. Plunge bills plunge down and up into the air throat patches full of deranged fish just downstream a man fishes with a rod where line needs surface, a barely perceptible circle on the grassy hill adjacent a woman with small children play on a blanket. A stranger ethnographer stands apart her camera silently shooting the engineer tableau. I see now as I write, and as I speak pelicans, man, family, my fellow spillway visitors teach me an early lesson, monumental infrastructures of concrete and steel unintentionally offer sustenance and connection in ways that exceed engineers intentions. The work for creating an excellent fishing spot is surely not an intentional effect of this multimillion dollar node in Manitoba's flood control system inside the fieldwork scene, but outside the city. What about river hood as in pulsive entity, and about the calm, pulsive discipline of river plus control structure, although I do not have yet have these terms in mind. The work for this site visit a cognitive map of the whole system mentally supplements my ground view. The dam spillway structure in the tableau is part of a larger assemblage called the portage diversion, a key infrastructural node in the provincial system. The portage diversion shunt flood waters north to Lake Manitoba, and away from Winnipeg to the east, stuck in this relationship via Cinnabon lives a hemden existence divided and diminished all year long, even when not flooding. Like the rivers impulses have power to they continue to organize and motivate the spatial distribution of pelicans people fish and to determine the control structures, citing design and operational routines. The infrastructural question comes to mind. How are riverine impulses entangled with smaller mobile animal and plant bodies within the scene. The river buoys up the floating pelicans parting its surface and splashing around them when they dive into the water between base and bank currents carry fish downstream to meet the hook of a man. Cook a man not to the end of a line together river unintentionally and man intentionally meet trick fish into biting out of range of touch, family will presumably cook and eat caught fish absorbing river water into their collective stream. For her part after contemplating the anthropogenic ground dam set to allow river flow through the spillway earthen banks sculpted to fit around control structure mode grass. The photographer carries the river away as digital imprints later to choose one view among others to share with with readers and listeners, though due to financial constraints, the well this is referring to the book, the photos black and white, rendering erases the sunlit rivers muddy color and here we are afforded that by zoom. Thank you. But there is so much more going on in this habitat of myriad living beings. Among the unseen consider diatoms, opalescent, single cell creatures invisible to the naked eye but accessible if a limnologist or botanist collects preserves and prepares water samples for microscopic evaluation. Diatoms are ubiquitous in freshwater systems, although their species diversity is so specific, they can be used in forensic identification of locations where criminal suspects deliver corpses to the deep. The diatoms must have been there in the water, and must also have been affected by river plus control structure. Imagine them diatoms floating in the reservoirs calm layers near the top, collectively using their glass wall bodies to turn sunlight into fish food until oh no, some straight too close to the spillway and tumble really nearly into the churning river channel where laid down by sediment their work is interrupted until eventually currents carry them into Lake Manitoba, where quieter waters allow them to return to their biological, but also magical purpose. So this piece is about balance and level ideal and measure and balance is really important in so many ways toward discussion and healing and the anthropology of consciousness more generally, and also in science and so in this piece I'm trying to kind of sort out the different ways that that concept is used and exploited, actually. Oh, let me share my screen again. So this is like Manitoba three or four years after a flood you can see that the willow trees, or the cottonwoods I forget are still drowned, and that these big sandbags are still sitting in the water waiting for the next flood. So here in here is my drawing but based on an engineer is drawing the chief engineer of the systems about how wind pushes the water up over the banks of lakes, and that depends on the lake level. So, on calm days, lake waters feel quietly fill their beds, rising to unite shoreline inhabitants near and far on calm days, their singular levels may inspire a sense of balance of contemplation. Lake bodies offer a shared orientation and cultural coherence for those who gather beside them. When abstracted from the landscape, lake levels may also become a unit of measure, one that partakes of this sensory ideal, even as it serves as a practical reference of baseline comparator for stormy days. For experts, lake level indicates how much water a lake might hold, a data point collected among others to use in the quest to find system balance. Water stewards set up gauges to track rising and falling levels, the numbers stream digitally, reflecting off lake surfaces up into satellites that beam them back down into office computer models. For engineers, lake level is the calculated balance between inflow and outflow, rainfall and evaporation. In the laws that support engineering, lake level provides a boundary and index range, a language for negotiating balance, and thus a technology through which the moving aquatic elements of the lake stream space can be governed. Okay, I'm going to cut away from all the technical stuff that follows and just read one more tiny paragraph and then come to talk to you. During this analysis, I find myself pivoting between lake balance and lake level as framing concepts. The balance frame captures this sense of things, lakes are always in flux and always in search of balance. The search for balance, a basic feature of the coup stream geophysical nature manifests and practically orient a poetic ideal of balance at the heart, not just the flood control but social and environmental justice and indigenous tradition more broadly. The level frame captures another, the leveling action that lakes perform moves into legal engineering and popular floodways in curiously specific ways. The management calculation and speculation following a flood revolve around the management and mismanagement and justification of physical lake levels. And in short, the province pushes all the flood waters into Lake Manitoba flooding people out there and in the north and Lake St. Martin, sacrificing the people who live and the creatures who live around the lake for the people in the city. This is all determined in the language of balance and level. Okay, I'm going to stop there. Stephanie this has been wonderful and it's been everything we could have hoped for and more from you and there's a comment in the chat from Mia Gover and I just want to shout out to me and Mia is our brand new social media manager and has been doing an absolute wonderful helping to promote the conference and all of your wonderful work on social media and so thank you for your great work, Mia, and thank you for being here and me SS to you, Stephanie. Such beautiful poetic images thank you for sharing these works with us your photos are beautiful but your writing alone is so evocative and so we were talking beforehand Stephanie about we sit in these rooms and you know these these language out and want to make something that resonates with people and according to me to hear your work is absolutely resonant and so wanted to share that. Thank you Mia, thank you Mia for your for your thoughts and for your work. David Miller had he froze up he wasn't he wasn't goofing on us he his computer froze up and we're trying to move over and so he put his question into the chat and this is actually interesting because this came up. And the question you asked if I believe correct, Stephanie in our water panel the other night and David asks if you were to rename Lake Agassiz what would it be called and this is exactly what you were talking about the other day so maybe speak to that a little bit and the the conundrum, as you pointed I believe in the controversy around that and even some of the answers the other day that people gave on how we can go about this conversation and why that's so important the naming of something like a lake like this. I felt I really struck a wrong note at the end of that panel that was so beautifully talking about how we should build relationships with indigenous people and I do think that should definitely be at the core of any process of renaming. A lot of the smaller legs like Agassiz is gigantic right it took up the whole heart the whole interior of North America from Canada and the United States. And so, there's a lot of people a lot of history but like Agassiz happened before humans were there was ice and then melted. What I like about the project of renaming like Agassiz beyond getting rid of the racist Agassiz from everybody's consciousness is, is that it forces us to think as geological actors, and to kind of go beyond our existence on the planet to think about how we want to name something like that so I think I'll just leave it there for now. Yeah, and I'll just add I don't think you struck a wrong note at all that one of the great things about these conversations and bringing people in from different fields and different backgrounds and different lanes and approaches to this and having that water with some native activists and you know those of us who aren't from native communities in dialogue. We have to sort of find each other and find ways to communicate and I thought your questions were provocative and interesting and and challenged us in this very of, you know, one of the panelists said something about like naming and renaming is great but if we are only making symbolic changes only. That's not enough, we have to be changing the way we interact with these spaces and the way we power the original inhabitants but I find your comment to be part and parcel with that entire process and one of the panelists brought up listening to the water itself to maybe tell you what it would like to be named and although it's a very esoteric answer I found it to be quite compelling. So, a question from Mark Shiboyan, speaking on the next panel and also one of our board members. Mark says your beautiful poetic prose, see there again Stephanie reminds Mark reminds him of the work of anthropologist and naturalist Lauren Isley. Has he been an influence at all on your work in writing. No, haven't read it. I guess I should. Yeah, I will. I'll look it up. Interesting maybe Mark you can drop a few links into the chat for for folks, especially over the works you're thinking of. That would be wonderful. Thank you. Other questions and comments folks please let us know Stephanie I have one for you. I have a conversation about water, having consciousness or being consciousness and having agency and I think we even talked in the panel the other night about in New Zealand and other places I'm starting to sort of name these bodies of water as as being individuals and so the conversations are made about damning them and using them that the, the, the wellness of the body of water itself is actually taking into consideration it has a seat as at the table and can speak for itself, so to speak, in conversations about how to work with that and I'm really interested in taking that to then your discussion of flood control because it seems that that's a very human centric idea and when we look at water and how it hits a water table. Water has a way it wants to move through spaces, and sometimes that doesn't line up with the way humans need to inhabit those spaces and so then we have to start thinking about things like flood control so how can we, from an anthropological standpoint, you know, still think about the way we have to inhabit spaces and work with water and work with the destructive capacities of it without, without caging it without without taking water and making it behave in ways that it doesn't want to, without moving it in ways and in places where it doesn't want to be. Does that make sense. And it's of course our fundamental problem with, with both the destruction of rivers and climate change and all of that. This is where for me we have to look to the process of decolonization and environmental justice and water justice together, because how this flood control system has evolved in Canada in Manitoba and I think Canada more generally and probably the world is that, in the end of the 19th century they used engineering for flood control as, as, as a weapon. So they used it to protect and develop the city and took that water and, and diverted it and took all river systems and, and move them and directed that that wrongness of all that water into First Nation and other indigenous communities. And so we have to unpack that and, and, and rewind that and have a process that's not really that different from I think the naming process and maybe that could deepen the naming process by thinking about the engineering. So many examples of people that are doing it correctly I brought up what folks in New Zealand are trying to do I know that the Dutch have a long history of working with water in a way that tries to work with it. In their civilization either other folks who are doing it correctly but are weaponizing the, the manipulation of water but are actually trying to work with it I know that in my study of ancient civilizations. The Sumerians and others as soon as you start to you know to divert the tigers and Euphrates, you know for agriculture as soon as you start to to up and the natural way water wants to move too much for human ends you can get a great burst of activity. But then these unintended consequences like you mentioned, and then a collapse. And so do you know of anyone in places and communities that are doing this correctly. Well, there are all kinds of projects going on. And I started this whole thing when I was in Amsterdam and I went to Hamburg and those two cities have some really great stuff going on but I think on the whole it's, we're really facing this for the first time and I think what what I'm realizing is two things one is that the, all our cities are built with 19th century engineering and that is bad engineering and it's old it's falling apart it's not conceptualized for even our current and certainly not for climate change. And I have to say about the laws that are my last book where rivers meet the sea is about activists who are fighting their governments to implement their own laws so it's one thing to name something and that goes back to the other question name something it's one thing to write a beautiful law about it. And it's another to actually implement and enforce the kinds of laws that would protect our rivers from being diverted from being polluted. And I haven't seen any real progress on that front and I would love to hear about it if that exists. So there are these kind of small scale. Attempts and we're certainly at a moment where we know we it has to happen. Someone in the panel the other day said when we're working with people we're working with water and I think the other the opposite issue when we're working with water we're working with people and with ancestors both human and non human. Where can folks get the book. How can folks get access to the book. It's it's I had got a revise and resubmit. And I I'm putting finishing touches on it so I don't have a contract yet so it's going to be another year or so. Can follow your work or the stuff you're up to otherwise. I guess my last book where rivers meet the sea the political ecology of water speaks to a lot of the issues that we spoke to at this panel as well and what I'm dealing with here. This is kind of I took the three major infrastructures that underlies cities and structures so potable water drainage and sewage and compared cities and port cities in Latin America and thought a lot of these things about the agency of water in that book so I guess I would refer people back to that and to just stay in touch with me. I just dropped the link for that book into the chat so folks can check that out. For those who don't know, we some folks might not know this if you go to your chat box and go over on the very bottom right, you'll see little three dots there and you can click on those three dots and actually download the entire chat, including all the links and folks, both Tina, and marks you're going we're able to drop in some links and some references to Isley as well so I think that is fantastic. Anthony, thank you so much for being here and sharing with us this has been any of your concerns about not fitting perfectly into our programming or unfounded you a fit right in here you have any time you want to share your work with us. We comments from the audience I think reaffirmed that we found the work to be captivating to be poetic to be engaging to be from the heart and just very very moving and very enlightening so thank you so much. Anthony, I really appreciate it. It's wonderful to be here and all of you out there. We are going to leave here in a second folks but then we have another session beginning at 1pm Eastern time and with the time change I know we're all still reeling to try to figure out what exactly that means. But coming up. Excuse me. 2pm Eastern, my mistake to see again I'm already making the mistake 2pm Eastern 11 Pacific so in 15 minutes, we will be entering into a panel discussion in body to colleges engaging the world through self. Please do try to make it back for that panel Margaret Brady Cassandra White Mark Shagoy and Susan Grimaldi will be there and so it's going to be fantastic. And a great continuation on this conversation and the, the energy that Gertrion got us started with today as well. So thank you all so much for being here we thank you again, Stephanie for a wonderful reading, and we will see you folks shortly on the other side.