Studying Yellowstone National Park (III): Conceptual tools for Field Trip in 2024

July 5-18, 2024

Tobias HALLER

Prof. Tobias Haller, UNIBE

Prof. Ellen Hertz, UNINE

Hunter Old Elk and Gordon Ambrosino from Gardiner Museum, Cody, USA

Neth Prak, Bunong Indigenous Peoples co-researcher from Cambodia

Mayra Shiguando and José Narvaez, Indigenous Peoples co-researchers from Ecuadorian Amazon

Prof. Christian Büschges, UNIBE

Yellowstone National Park, founded in 1872 just after the U.S. Civil War, is widely held to be the oldest national park in the world. Created on land that has been continuously inhabited by Native American populations for at least 11'000 years, for the past 150 years it has been a laboratory for social, environmental, and political experimentation by an expansionary colonizing State. Virtually all of the ecological, social and ideological tensions currently agitating U.S. society find their expression in this 9000 km2 territory: the status of 'the Wild' in the U.S. imaginary, occulting the central place of industrialized agriculture and its litany of environmental harms; the nostalgic but predatory relationship that White society has imposed on its Native American citizens; the importance of tourism and national parks in U.S. GDP and the pressures for internal land-grabbing caused by a particularly unregulated form of capitalism. We will approach the study of Yellowstone as a 'total social fact'.

The module introduces the conceptual tools for the joint exploratory fieldwork in 2024 on the complex of factors that interact to determine the current form and dynamics of Yellowstone, and introduce the view of Indigenous Peoples on the thematic axes for analysis that we will be exploring during the fieldtrip.

Gardiner, USA

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