Thank you for your interest in our panel, Beyond Overstories—please see working abstract below. If you would like to join us as a panelist, please fill in this form by April 20th, 11:59 pm EST. We will notify you of the outcome of your submission by April 24th.
If you have any questions or concerns at this point, do not hesitate to get in touch with (any one of) the organizers (emails attached below).
Working Panel Abstract
Beyond Overstories: An Anthropology of Forests
Forests have long served as sites for ethnographic fieldwork and as central motifs through which anthropologists grappled with the aesthetic, political, and economic dimensions of contemporary environmental politics (Levi-Strauss 1955; Tsing 2005; Kohn 2013; Matthews 2018). Forests are not only situated ecological entities, but also sites of contrasting temporal articulation, shifting semiotic dispositions, and emerging technological and financial experimentation. They are mirrors against which racialized fantasies of order and optimization have been enduringly projected, as well as terrains through which gendered conceptions of civilizational conquest are enacted and contested. As recent scholarship highlighted, from the lifeworlds of Indigenous communities to the violence of extraction frontiers, and from the transnational expansion of commodity supply chains to the restoration of ‘primeval’ landscapes, the ways we think about and act upon forests echo broader histories of cultural difference, colonial dispossession, and future-oriented speculation (Hendriks 2021; Ruíz-Serna 2023; Romero Dianderas 2024; Greenleaf 2024). Forests thus exceed their apparent spatial boundaries. They are analytical entry points into wider configurations of power, knowledge, and value that extend far beyond forested terrains themselves.
Drawing on this expansive understanding of forests, this panel invites contributions that move beyond ‘overstories’—a reference to canopy layers that also gesture (over-)representation. Through historically and ethnographically grounded approaches, we position forests as conceptual lenses for interrogating larger political, ethical, and environmental questions in contemporary anthropological conversations. We seek papers that explore how forests are imagined, felt, cared for, optimized, inhabited, extracted, and contested across different contexts, and how these processes illuminate broader dynamics of socio-ecological experimentation where the tensions immanent to the notion of the forest become relevant to anthropological theorization. By bringing together scholars grappling with these questions from different angles, we seek to advance an anthropology of forests that moves beyond treating forests as bounded ecological or cultural domains, instead approaching them as generative sites whose material and relational specificities demand new vocabularies for rethinking value, temporality, knowledge, identity, and scale.
Organizers:
