Beth from Ethnologica, a research consultancy firm with a focus on community-based ethnography, recently came into The Resource Exchange to find reclaimed materials to use in their storytelling and art workshop River Beasts and Besties. The event, held at The Barn at Bartram’s Garden, was made possible by an Ecotopian Toolkit award from the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities for Ethnologica’s project entitled Monsters of the Deep, Myths for the Future.
Ethnologica created this public workshop to:
…explore local fears of and hopes for urban waterways as part of their ongoing work researching community conceptions of health and wellbeing. Fear of touching, wading in, or boating on river water has resulted from decades of Philadelphians experiencing local rivers as contaminated, and the physical and psychic dumping ground for the ills of urban life—including human and animal bodies. Through storytelling, drawing and myth creation, our workshop will engage our monster imaginings of the river by creating stories and visualizations of what we most fear about immersion in urban waterways. We will also ask: what newly created benign spirits are available to usher our imaginations into new relationships with local rivers? What new mythological mascots might help us re-imagine and work to protect our watershed?
In the workshop, participants of all ages learned about river myths and creatures, and created their own river monsters using reclaimed art and craft materials like paint, pom-poms, glue, pipe cleaners, and beads!
Ethnologica is made up of a group of anthropologists who “collaborate with public and private organizations to collect data, answer questions and innovate programs. Through participatory and arts-based methods, we invite voices and stories into research and evaluation processes that may not otherwise be heard. Whether working with kids canoeing on the rivers of Philadelphia, healthcare providers in health clinics in Cambodia, human rights activists in Belize, or urban gardeners telling their stories on film, we prioritize the voices of our collaborators, knowing that they are the experts on their lives.”
To learn more about them and what they offer to local and worldwide communities, visit their website www.ethnologica.org.
