Conference reflections, second part

As I started to tell, I took part of a very rewarding two-days conference called "Nature, poverty and power: assessing challenges to sustainable development" organised by the Swedish research network Devnet.

To end my reflections of this participation, I need to bring up two other key note speakers (wrote about the third before) that I had much joy to listen at. Lets start with Ms Asher. Her topic was "wither nature or culture - imaginaries of ethnic movements in Latin America". She started by talking of a conference in Lima earlier this year, which addressed how deeply connected humans are to nature. She showed pictures of offerings and small rites of honouring the nature spirits while opening the conference.

She said that we need to understand the romantic ethnicity of culture while still it is important to be critical when studying this things. Furthermore we (the audience) learned about organisations like "matamba y guasa", black woman that works with food and medical plants to ensure the subsistence and health needs of the community as well as the biodiversity growing in the area. Much of her study was conducted in Colombia. 

The lecture continued into an enriched discussion, where we among other things brought up rhetoric questions as what exactly is the significance of an ethnic group and when do we become one? As well as what happens when we start labelling ourselves into a certain folder? When is it good with categorisation and to place everything in a certain pile of information?

In the break I talked with a women that had done a lot of studies about mines in Peru and Ecuador. She told me that in Ecuador it was more acknowledged to refer to "indigenous" groups than in Peru, where people more referred to themselves as "farmers". 

Ms Asher brought up the difference in referring to "eachselves"  (my word) to "afro displecados" and "afros decendos", which directly translated means displaced Africans and descendant from Africa. The first one can be noticed in Afrodes, an association for displaced afro-Colombians.

Another important note I did from her lecture was that of subsidies, that even if a country in the world decides to subsidies some other country, it may not in the end become as much as it sounds like. The money does seldom come as papernotes and coins (or figures in the bank), but as helicopters and more material things... 

I think this is what I would like to say about this certain lecture. I found it most interesting and it was a pleasure to listen to the subject. Thank you.