Sylvie Poirier – författare

Entangled Territorialities offers vivid ethnographic examples of how Indigenous lands in Australia and Canada are tangled with governments, industries, and mainstream society. Most of the entangled lands to which Indigenous peoples are connected have been physically transformed and their ecological balance destroyed. Each chapter in this volume refers to specific circumstances in which Indigenous peoples have become intertwined with non-Aboriginal institutions and projects including the construction of hydroelectric dams and open mining pits. Long after the agents of resource extraction have abandoned these lands to their fate, Indigenous peoples will continue to claim ancestral ties and responsibilities that cannot be understood by agents of capitalism. The editors and contributors to this volume develop an anthropology of entanglement to further examine the larger debates about the vexed relationships between settlers and indigenous peoples over the meaning, knowledge, and management of traditionally-owned lands.

In this timely collection, the authors examine Indigenous peoples’ negotiations with different cosmologies in a globalized world. Dussart and Poirier outline a sophisticated theory of change that accounts for the complexity of Indigenous peoples’ engagement with Christianity and other cosmologies, their own colonial experiences, as well as their ongoing relationships to place and kin. The contributors offer fine-grained ethnographic studies that highlight the complex and pragmatic ways in which Indigenous peoples enact their cosmologies and articulate their identity as forms of affirmation. This collection is a major contribution to the anthropology of religion, religious studies, and Indigenous studies worldwide.Contributors: Anne-Marie Colpron, Robert R. Crépeau, Françoise Dussart, Ingrid Hall, Laurent Jérôme, Frédéric Laugrand, C. James MacKenzie, Caroline Nepton Hotte, Ksenia Pimenova, Sylvie Poirier, Kathryn Rountree, Antonella Tassinari, Petronella Vaarzon-Morel

Territories of Life highlights the multiplicity and heterogeneity of worlds and collectives, some labelled Indigenous, as they struggle to sustain their territories of life. “Territories of life” is the phrase used in this volume to speak about the shapes that these collectives or worlds adopt in the present as they endure the heavy shadow of modernization and coloniality. This label also highlights that the agencies that animate these struggles are never just human but also include entire more-than-human collectives. To portray the complexity of the relations between these collectives and the modernization front, the volume is organized around three keywords: equivocation, entanglement, and endurance. Each of the ten chapters is grounded in long-term ethnographic work from various countries, namely those colonially-known as Australia, Bolivia, Canada, Colombia, Paraguay, and Taiwan. The book offers a grounding to discuss the challenges and possibilities that exist for the continuation of territories of life that have endured, for the renewal of those that have been severely damaged, and for the creation of those that must flourish to sustain diverse modes of existence. Contributors: Penelope Anthias, Jacinta Baragud, Mario Blaser, Yamila Gutierrez Callisaya, Benoit Éthier, Sipi Flamand, Hernán Ruiz Fournier, Sarah C. Moritz, Adam Nye, Sylvie Poirier, Lorna Quiroga, Qwalqwalten (Garry John), Cristina Rojas, Scott E. Simon, Kim Spurway, Annick Thomassin, Carolina Tytelman, and Paul Wattez.