Natalia Gutkowski
I am a socio-cultural anthropologist working in the agrarian environment in Israel/Palestine. My first book Struggling for Time: Environmental Governance and Agrarian Resistance in Israel/Palestine is now ready for pre-order with Stanford University Press.
Book Synopsis:
Struggling for Time examines how time is used as a mechanism of control by the Israeli state and a site of resistance among Palestinian agriculture professionals. Natalia Gutkowski unpacks power structures to show how a settler society lays moral claim on native time through agrarian environmental policies, science, technologies, landscapes, and bureaucracy. Shifting the analysis of Israel/Palestine from land and space to time, she offers new insight into the operation of power in settler colonial societies and agrarian environments and develops a new framework to understand land and resource grabs under temporal justifications.
Traveling across both policymaking arenas and Palestinian citizens’ agrarian fields, Gutkowski follows the multiple ways that state officials, agronomists, planners, environmentalists, and agriculturalists use time as a tool of collective agency. Through investigations of wetland drainage in Galilee, transformations in olive agriculture, sustainable agrarian development, and regulation of the shmita biblical commandment, the “year of release” for agricultural fields, this work highlights how Palestinian citizens’ agriculture has become a site for the state to settle time and justify its existence. As Struggling for Time demonstrates, time politics will take on ever greater urgency as societies and governments plan for an uncertain future in our era of climate change.
Book Synopsis:
Struggling for Time examines how time is used as a mechanism of control by the Israeli state and a site of resistance among Palestinian agriculture professionals. Natalia Gutkowski unpacks power structures to show how a settler society lays moral claim on native time through agrarian environmental policies, science, technologies, landscapes, and bureaucracy. Shifting the analysis of Israel/Palestine from land and space to time, she offers new insight into the operation of power in settler colonial societies and agrarian environments and develops a new framework to understand land and resource grabs under temporal justifications.
Traveling across both policymaking arenas and Palestinian citizens’ agrarian fields, Gutkowski follows the multiple ways that state officials, agronomists, planners, environmentalists, and agriculturalists use time as a tool of collective agency. Through investigations of wetland drainage in Galilee, transformations in olive agriculture, sustainable agrarian development, and regulation of the shmita biblical commandment, the “year of release” for agricultural fields, this work highlights how Palestinian citizens’ agriculture has become a site for the state to settle time and justify its existence. As Struggling for Time demonstrates, time politics will take on ever greater urgency as societies and governments plan for an uncertain future in our era of climate change.
less
InterestsView All (11)
Uploads
Papers by Natalia Gutkowski
Teaching Documents by Natalia Gutkowski
“We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”
Werner Heisenberg
We live in a global society that has committed through international agreements to protecting nature and its biodiversity, but we rarely stop to think about what defines nature; who has the power to define it, own it or access it; and how culture informs how we understand nature and live with it.
In this course, we will examine central cultural and socio-political trends and concerns regarding the interactions between nature and society. We will explore multiple ways of understanding nature in diverse societies, examine nature as a resource for exploitation, as an asset to be protected and managed, and as a natural-cultural construct – in order to understand a wide range of meanings and practices that comprise human-nature dynamics.
This course engages predominantly with socio-cultural and environmental anthropology literature and it often intersects with environmental history, social studies of science, and sociology. Classroom lectures will provide the necessary disciplinary background.
Conference Presentations by Natalia Gutkowski
“We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”
Werner Heisenberg
We live in a global society that has committed through international agreements to protecting nature and its biodiversity, but we rarely stop to think about what defines nature; who has the power to define it, own it or access it; and how culture informs how we understand nature and live with it.
In this course, we will examine central cultural and socio-political trends and concerns regarding the interactions between nature and society. We will explore multiple ways of understanding nature in diverse societies, examine nature as a resource for exploitation, as an asset to be protected and managed, and as a natural-cultural construct – in order to understand a wide range of meanings and practices that comprise human-nature dynamics.
This course engages predominantly with socio-cultural and environmental anthropology literature and it often intersects with environmental history, social studies of science, and sociology. Classroom lectures will provide the necessary disciplinary background.