Evocative Ethnographies of Florida’s Silver River
Channel: Anthropology of Consciousness
Date: 09/09/2021

Water: a reflection, a surface, a substance, and a movement. A boundary that eludes, precludes and shapes form and life itself. A vessel that shapes its surroundings and where vessels float, feed, and folly. This live panel shares multimedia poetic experiments in conducting an ethnography with a river, specifically with the Silver River in North Central Florida where Asian monkeys, mastodons, Black Seminoles, self-identified rednecks in motorboats, Northern conservationists in kayaks, tourists in glass bottom boats, Tarzan movies, fungi, Paradise Park (the Blacks-only beach during segregation), manatees and alligators (from prehistoric times), migratory birds, algae, and conceptions of humaNature relationships collide as fragmented facets of the Silver River's identity.

Meryl Shriver-Rice’s masters of Environment, Culture, and Media program’s course called Nature, the Anthropocene and Visual Anthropology (University of Miami) is the milieu for this artistic-scholastic engagement with representations of lifeworlds, culturally specific experiences, and the policies that shape and are shaped by these meshworks. Students are guided by Amanda Concha-Holmes’ pioneering work with Evocative Ethnography to integrate videos, texts, soundscapes, images, graphics, sensorial experiences, and poetry to interpret some of the layers of cultural and ecological history through a decolonial, feminist theoretical and methodological lens that examines the Silver River’s entangled
prehistorical, historical, and contemporary entanglements of environmental concepts, conservation policies, diverse peoples, animals and plants, climate changes, multispecies perspectives, and the meaning for being, belonging and becoming in Florida, and the world.

This 90-minute panel will feature multimedia presentations accompanied by the artivists who made them for a discussion on decolonization, embodied transformation, healing, and learning with nonhumans. Presentations will examine multispecies ways of seeing and sensing, questions of belonging in emergent ecosystems, "invasive” species, habitat conservation, and ideological underpinnings of environmental policies, along with notions of change and deep time to negotiate the representations of some of the layers of identity formation that are fragmented, hybrid and emergent. These stories and the evocative ways they are represented are critical for excavating and interpreting consciousness from a deep historical and multispecies framework that highlight the contributions of the under-represented.