Re-imagining Land – Living on Abandoned Land: Environment and Depopulation on the Azores

This video features a conversation from the EDC’s 2024–2025 itinerary for “Reimagining Land,” a thematic exploration of land not merely as surface area, but as a living, interconnected entity shaped by water, air, and the ecosystems it supports. Land is marked by historical divisions, borders, and injustices, yet it also holds powerful possibilities for reimagining relationships beyond those boundaries.

In this video, we are honored to welcome Dr. Tim Burger, who speaks to these themes and more. Dr. Burger is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. He earned his doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 2024 and has published widely on topics including human-animal relations, historicity, and economic systems. His work appears in journals such as Social Analysis, American Ethnologist, and Sociologus, and he has coedited collections on ethnographic methods, feminist critiques of capitalism, and the role of literature in ethnographic imagination.

Residents of the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago in the North Atlantic, grapple with rapid demographic decline which has halved the population of several islands. My talk suggests that people understand their crisis primarily as an environmental one. With thick brushwood enclosing upon their formerly tidy and productive fields, they live out their consciousness of abandonment by engaging with agrarian land that is known to lie in ruins. Land, then, is the central frame mediating abandonment. More specifically, I trace a set of relations, ideas and actions associated with land that is said to be already ‘lost’. Lost land or terra perdida, the local shorthand for everything that is going wrong with farming, denotes fields that have become overgrown and thus at once unproductive and aesthetically unpleasing. Yet lost land is also the site where islanders can take a concrete effect on abandonment’s manifestation. As they encounter depopulation as a disorienting loss of familiarity with their environment and historical positionality, not forsaking land but keeping it under strenuous cultivation becomes an imperative informing conviviality, economy, and historicity.

We invite you to view the full conversation.