Abstract
Using a genealogical analysis, this thesis explores the entangled histories and encounters generated through foraging practices in Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand. Stories of contemporary foragers are used as a lens through which we can problematize and re-evaluate performances of property and their associations to colonial histories of dispossession. This genealogy reveals heterogeneous and multispecies narratives of survival within a precarious world.
The history and continued colonization of New Zealand formulate the foundation of this genealogy. The impacts of Māori land accumulation and its particular effects on mahinga kai (food gathering places) characterize the ways in which the contemporary landscape is navigated and experienced. Tracing these affective histories demonstrates how settlement impacts how bodies feel and are oriented within the material settler state. Contained are stories of appropriation and disconnection but also contestations and resilience. The ways in which foraging relationships are (re)created suggest that there are alternative ways of understanding the ways in which we live and relate to the world.
Foraging relationships with weedy species open up opportunities to question how certain bodies become ‘othered’ and how these classifications are a biopolitical mechanism of the settler state. Despite their alienation, weeds thrive in marginal spaces within the urban landscape, engaging foragers into moments of negotiation between property boundaries. Such spaces are characterized as ‘wastelands’, as their weedy proliferations do not contribute as productive properties. These marginal wastelands provide a ubiquitous but latent landscape whereby foragers can conduct their practice in ‘plain sight’. The quotidian ways in which foraging is enacted help to demonstrate the relative power in the mundane to expand our imaginings of potential futures.