Ancestral futures for a changing planet with Prof Inanna Hamati-Ataya

Humans are the only ones within their lineage to have become a global species capable of sustaining itself in habitats very different to the ones it was evolutionarily disposed to inhabit. Our successful adaptations to radical climatic fluctuations during the Pleistocene and Holocene Epochs tell the extraordinary story of how culture, technology, and social organisation have rewritten the script of our natural evolution. An important part of this story of successful ecological adaptation can be told through the history of agriculture—once hailed as the mark of human ‘civilisation’, now blamed for our existential ‘decline’. This talk addresses the temporalities of agricultural knowledge-transfer since the ’Neolithic Transition’ (or ‘Revolution’) and how ongoing climatic transformations disrupt the historical patterns of adaptation and circulation that have enabled us to successfully preserve and deploy sustainable food-producing knowledges over millennia of sedentary life and continuous global migrations. I will use the case of ’terroir’ based knowledges to illustrate how these disruptions manifest, within ‘Old World’ Europe, at a local and regional level of climatic degradation, and how the current cultural, political, and legal attitudes aimed at the protection of terroir or traditional agriculture against cultural and economic competition from ’New World’ countries actually undermine societies’ capacity to preserve these knowledges that constitute a common heritage of humankind and a source of sustainable solutions to local environmental degradation and community decay.

Accessibility

An access guide to Birkbeck Room B34 can be found on AccessAble.

About the speakers

Inanna Hamati-Ataya is Professor of Global International Relations at the University of Groningen, Research Affiliate at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge, Founding Director of the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies (gloknos), and co-Founder of the Cambridge Sustainability Initiative social enterprise.

Inanna's research lies at the intersections of deep history, global politics, and the anthropology of knowledge, science, and technology, with a special interest in how major transformations in knowledge-systems have shaped societal and natural orders throughout human history. Her IGP Soundbite talk draws on her recently completed ERC-funded research project The Global as Artefact (2017-2023), which examined the evolution and political impact of agricultural knowledge-systems in deep time, and her ERC/UKRI-funded proof-of-concept project A New Noah’s Ark (2022-2023), which developed an anthropological-legal framework to address the impact of climate change on traditional farming communities, through the preservation of ancestral agricultural knowledges between old and emerging Mediterranean regions of Europe.

About this event series

Dreams, Desires and Aspirations: Imaginative Landscapes of Prosperity

At UCL Institute for Global Prosperity we are working towards a new model of prosperity for the 21st century, reworking the way we conceive and run our economies, our societies, and our relationship with the planet. Our social and collective imaginaries, dreams, and aspirations are at the core of that mission, not only in understanding how people strive towards ideas of prosperity, but in unearthing how and why different ideas are constructed as they are. This term, we are inviting scholars, novelists, politicians, artists, and film-makers to help us excavate some of the imaginary forces that brought ‘prosperity’ to where it is today, and where it might be taken tomorrow.

Soundbites are a platform for professionals and entrepreneurs who are leading in their field. Speakers are innovators and inspiring actors working in new and traditional sectors, outside of academia. The Soundbite gives the audience an insight into how their organisation contributes to sustainable and inclusive prosperity.

For more events in this series visit the series page ►