Extinction Encounters:
Vanishing Forms, Human Rights, and the Ethics of Retrieval          

Karianne’s Pet by OGeorge
(November 18, 2005)

A Public Symposium Sponsored by the Center for Genocide and Human Rights
and the Department of Anthropology, New Brunswick
Rutgers University, Newark

Friday, November 7, 2008

The current “sixth mass extinction” has induced an unprecedented sense of environmental crisis and mobilized a variety of rescue technologies and policies. Yet the phenomenon of species extinction has long shaped the human imagination. Evidence suggests that fossils of extinct animals and first-hand witnessing of sole survivors may have inspired people’s religious beliefs, folklore, mythology, and taboos. In time emerged a Western discourse of extinction which mourned vanishing indigenous populations and inspired the practice of salvage ethnography. Extinction discourse today cautions us of biodiversity loss, while a politics of identity motivates aboriginal and indigenous groups to resurrect dying languages and cultural traditions.

This symposium addresses the parallel processes and collateral effects of biological and cultural extinction. Participants will present their anthropological research on the anthropogenic causes of ancient faunal extinctions; extinction discourse as a metacultural phenomenon; contemporary legends of hominoids that correspond to actual extinct species; indigenous language preservation and the politics of identity; contestations between conservationists and marginalized societies; the interconnections of myth, social marginalization, and ecological erosion; and the moral technologies of DNA banking and artificial reproduction. Taken together, the studies raise challenges to the conception of human rights in cases where cultural self-determination jeopardizes other species lives, and in cases where operations of species recovery impinge on certain human communities more than others.

Participants

Marginality and Myth
John Colarusso (McMaster University)

Tortoise Soup for the Soul: Finding a Space for Human History in a Galápagos Dynasty
Jill Constantino (Harvard University)

Can Ethnography and Ethnozoology Shed Light on Extinct Species? A Few From Flores
(Eastern Indonesia)
Gregory Forth (University of Alberta, Edmonton)

Malagasy Megafaunal Extinctions: A case study
Laurie R. Godfrey (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

Knowledge Extinction and the Politics of Identity in China
Michael Hathaway (Simon Fraser University, Burnaby)

Ecocide, Genetic Rescue and the Moral ARTs of Wildlife Conservation
Tracey Heatherington (U. Wisconsin—Milwaukee)

Last Words, Final Thoughts: Collateral Extinctions in Maliseet Language Death
Bernard C. Perley (University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee)

Global Insecurities: Ecological Asylums and Transnational Flows in the Early 21st Century
Genese Sodikoff (Rutgers-Newark)

Extinction as Metaculture
Greg Urban (University of Pennsylvania)

Organized by Genese Sodikoff
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Rutgers University, Newark
sodikoff@andromeda.rutgers.edu