HUH Environmental Humanities Forum, May 14 (Tuesday),
Kati Lindström, KTH Stockholm
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
we kindly invite you to the next Helsinki University Environmental Humanities Forum
May 14 (Tuesday), at 14.15-15.45
Kati Lindström
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Stockholm, Sweden
“Nature or Culture? Negotiating Outstanding Universal Value of Mt Fuji in the Japanese World Heritage Nomination”
Kielikeskus (Language Center) sh.405 (Fabianinkatu 26)
Please kindly see Abstract and short Bio of Speaker below.
Looking forward to meeting/seeing you soon!
Twitter @helsinkienvhum
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With kind wishes, Viktor Pál and Mikko Saikku
Abstract
“Nature or Culture? Negotiating Outstanding Universal Value of Mt Fuji in the Japanese World Heritage Nomination”
Mt Fuji, the visual symbol of Japan, was one of the first locations to be raised for potential world heritage nomination when Japan joined the World Heritage convention in 1992. The state starts to investigate its nomination in natural heritage category with a major public support. However, the governmental commission decides to remove Mt Fuji from the list of potential candidates after the first round of consultations. After 2005, a campaign is launched on the level of regional governments for the cultural heritage nomination of Mt Fuji. How would such a turn from nature to culture be possible? I will look at the meeting minutes of the scientific committee who prepared the Outstanding Universal Value statement of Mt Fuji, the development of the list of included sites and management structure to see how Mt Fuji was recasted from nature to culture and how the shadow of “nature" still lingers on.
Bio
Kati Lindström is a researcher in environmental humanities at KTH Royal Institute of Technology with a background in semiotics, anthropology, environmental history and geography and trained in University of Kyoto (Japan) and University of Tartu (Estonia). Prior to her present appointment, she has worked as a deputy director of the Neolithisation and Modernisation: Landscape History at East Asian inland Seas project at Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN) in Kyoto, Japan, and at the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu. Her work deals with the interplay of personal and public in the environmental perception, more precisely on how individual experiences and cultural stereotypes influence the delineation and management of natural and cultural heritage sites and the construction and communication of value. Her recent projects cover a wide range of geographical locations from Japan and Chile to Estonia and Antarctica and employ a variety of methods from oral history, anthropological field work, literary text analysis and archival work.
Kati Lindström publishes in English, Japanese and Estonian and has served as an acting editor of the foremost international semiotics journal Sign Systems Studies between 2007-2012. She is a founding and board member for the Estonian Centre for Environmental History, a board member for the European Society of Environmental History (ESEH) and the ESEH regional representative in the Baltic Countries. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Letters at Tokyo University in 2018 and held a JSPS post-doctoral fellowship at Nishi-Kyushu University in 2016. During 2015 to 2017, she served as a Visiting Associate Professor at the Mt. Fuji Centre for Mountain Research at the Shizuoka Prefectural Government, Japan.