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Welcome to the On Paradise podcast series.

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I'm Paul Basu, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford

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and curator of ‘On Paradise: Between Hope and Memory’,

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an exhibition featuring the work of the artist Saad Qureshi

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at the Schwarzman Center for the Humanities in Oxford.

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‘On Paradise’ is part of ‘Utopia Now!’, a season of events

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that asks how we might live, imagine and create differently,

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and why imagining new futures matters now more than ever.

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As part of the exhibition, I spoke with Humanities

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scholars across the university who in different ways

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work on themes relating to Paradise and utopia

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in different cultural and historical contexts.

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In this episode, we hear the reflections of J.C. Niala,

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Deputy Director of the History of Science Museum... On Paradise.

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I'm J.C. Niala,

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Deputy Director and Head of Research, Teaching and Collections

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at the History of Science Museum.

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One of my big research interests

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for a long time was Paradise and Utopia,

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because I was researching urban gardening

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sites in Oxford and they were allotments, but also guerrilla

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gardening sites, and many people,

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especially on allotment sites, described them as Paradise or utopia.

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So I came up with a concept called ‘banal utopia’,

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the idea of the everyday, ordinary things that we do,

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but that take us into a different space,

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one that is extremely pleasurable and one

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that could be considered to be like a Paradise.

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So the objectives was actually... when I first started out,

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I wanted to understand the social lives of people who grow in cities

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because it is quite something to grow in a city

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as opposed to growing in rural areas.

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So I thought, okay, I'll spend 36 months

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on allotments across the city of Oxford.

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But very quickly

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I found that Oxford also has a huge guerrilla gardening scene,

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and so I spent a lot of time also in guerrilla

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gardening sites across the city.

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And then just, you know, I was growing.

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I had plots on four different sites.

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I was also carrying out experiments.

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So on one of those sites,

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I recreated an allotment in the style of the year 1918.

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So there was a historical aspect to it.

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And at the time I was doing,

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it was around the time of the Covid 19 lockdown.

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So there were really interesting parallels about the roles

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of growing, about the roles of outdoor space.

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You know, it was not long after the centenary of the First World War.

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So thinking about things like the Spanish flu.

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So in growing alongside and with many different types

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of people on many different types of sites across Oxford,

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I became interested in the themes that arose

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from the growers themselves.

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And and one of those themes was Paradise.

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One of the things I did was

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when I got to know allotmenteers well, I'd say,

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show me around your plot. That was it.

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There was I didn't say anything else.

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And immediately, for sometimes even up to three hours,

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people would describe in great detail what they were growing,

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why they were growing it, how long they had the plot,

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what it meant to them.

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Sometimes there’s family connections,

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you know,

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people growing on the plot that their father or their grandfather

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grew on.

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But what I found amazing was how often

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at some point, you know, people would say, this is my little Paradise,

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or this is a Paradise.

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I think it was David Crouch who wrote, you know,

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allotments are sort of, you know, sort of 51% drudgery, 49% joy.

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And it's true, there's a real there's a real repetitive.

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And especially in autumn and winter, it's not the most

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you wouldn't think of it being like a Paradise.

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But people said that there was something about that

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consistent and long term and seasonal engagement,

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where they felt that there was a co-creation with more than humans,

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and that was what allowed it to transcend what is, you know,

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I mean, allotment sites are scruffy,

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anarchic places, but allowed it to happen.

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There's one example actually, I'm really thinking of,

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and this was a site... I had wanted to get a plot on this site,

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and I called up the secretary because I'd seen a sign

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they were looking...

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They were actually looking for people

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to take up plots. It’s a site that floods a lot.

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And and I called her up and she said, can you come now?

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And I said, great.

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So I went to have a look

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and she was showing me around the site, and it was October,

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and it was one of those, like we have now where, you know, the weather

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had been a bit different that year.

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And she took me to her particular plot

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and she lifted some leaves, and behind them was a tomato.

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And it was a perfectly, you know, very ready to be picked tomato.

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And in that moment and thinking about many months later,

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all of the time that Paradise was invoked, there is that

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sense of what seems ordinary, you know, some leaves...

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It's a sort of slightly soggy October afternoon,

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but you look just underneath it

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and there's something quite magical happening.

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There were different temporalities.

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So there's the creating a Paradise in the sense of the seasonal,

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you know,

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the moving from winter into spring and all of the work that you do.

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But then even in the winter,

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there were some people who really loved the preparatory work.

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And for them that was a kind of Paradise, especially people

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who had jobs where they sat down for a long time.

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So going out, actually doing physical work,

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getting their hands on the earth, turning the soil over.

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I think sometimes we tend to think of Paradise as a place where

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everything is easy and you don't have to worry and, you know, fruit

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just falls off the tree.

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But actually,

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what I really learned in my research

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is there's something about Paradise that requires

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an active engagement, and that makes it all the more sweeter.

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Guerrilla gardening is basically growing without permission,

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so it's anything from somebody who might just throw

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a handful of wildflower seeds on a verge near where they live

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to sometimes people get, you know, especially in Oxford in particular,

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women of a certain age

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will decide to go out and reshape the streets that they live

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on, to the point

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of getting the council not to spray so that what they're growing.

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So there's varying levels of guerrilla gardening.

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Interestingly, the word Paradise or the ideas of Paradise didn't

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come up as much when it came to guerrilla gardening,

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though...

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It was...

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There was a real question around care.

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Guerrilla gardeners very often are

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trying to demonstrate their care for the city

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or their care for more than humans or plants.

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And it's often in response

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to what they see as neglect by the municipality.

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These are incredibly vital spaces,

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whether it's allotment sites or whether it's, you know, guerrilla

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garden spaces.

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Because once you can tell what a guerrilla garden space is

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and sometimes even put little signs there, you know,

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you see the city very differently

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because they they change the way people interact with the city.

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And they bring people together on many different levels.

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There's an allotment site that I walk past

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nearly every day, and I know a lot of the people on the site well,

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and there was a woman who purposely grew flowers along the fence

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to attract people.

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So that and it's true,

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you see people, you know, stopping to engage with the flowers.

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And also in Oxford, there are allotmenteers

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who do specifically only grow cut flowers,

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and they grow them just to give them away.

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So if you ever come across, in Oxford,

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somebody's wandering up to you with a bunch of flowers

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- because it does happen -

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going, these are for you.

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They're not crazy.

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They're just spreading a little bit of Paradise.

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Where I think about kind of Paradise in

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the context of heritage is actually around conviviality.

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I'm really interested in modes of conviviality, and I'm interested

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in decolonial processes being convivial,

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like Francis Nyamnjoh talks about and writes about.

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I think, hospitality,

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you know, sharing a drink, sharing a meal,

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being together, particularly in cultural spaces.

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To me, that's a mini Paradise or a mini utopic space

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that allows people to transcend where they are.

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Without meaning to get too nostalgic, 

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one of the things that I miss is, you know ,

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live music before smartphones.

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Because in one of my mother tongues,

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there's a word sigalagala, which means... well, it has two meanings.

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The straightforward meaning is ululation.

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The richer meaning of it means the feeling that you feel

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when you're all listening

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to music and feel the music at the same time together.

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And to me, that's a moment of Paradise.

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You know, you know that when everybody in the crowd is experiencing the music

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at exactly the same time, in exactly the same way,

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it almost can't be described. But there is a word for it: sigalagala.

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What seems to me to be more common across different cultural contexts

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is the idea of an other space

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that is better than this one.

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Now, the ways in which that is understood tends to be quite different.

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One of the things that I love,

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because there is there is a literature thread to my research.

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And so one of the things I love

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and I'm very fascinated by in magical realism, whether it's from

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Japanese or Latin American,

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is this understanding of the world leaking

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and this very thin veil between here and there and these possibilities.

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So I think in some ways they are not necessarily a Paradise, but

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it's an analogy of these, you know, these spatial places.

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And I feel with with the great Abrahamic faiths,

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those tend to be very... described in a very particular way.

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It's either lost or accessed or attained,

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whereas I think there's many other cultural references

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where it's understood that the, you know, it's a very thin veil

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between here and there, and there's possibilities and moments when

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one seeps into the other.

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Maybe if

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I approach this question of, of Paradise in an other place

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from a slightly different angle and think about

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what is in that place or that space.

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When I think about in many different African cultures

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where ancestors are

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beings or spirits that people live with and are very present,

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I think it allows for an other place

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that is not necessarily as distant.

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I think that especially in the way that Paradise

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gets maybe more commonly understood nowadays, there is a distance,

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you know, it's a place that you might have to die to be able to access,

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whereas there's other cultures that that

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there's not necessarily that same amount of distance.

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And I also feel

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and it might be a slightly controversial view, if we go back to

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Thomas More's

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you know, Utopia, and there's book one and there's book two

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and it's book two

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that gets talked about the most, because that's where, you know,

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Utopia is envisioned.

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And this idea of a no place or an impossible place.

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But book one took place in a real garden.

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It was very much described in a real garden.

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And by having the two books together in conversation,

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I argue that More was was leaning more

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to the ideas of this thin veil and a world,

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or a place or somewhere else, that you can slip into

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and out of that is not so far away.

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I think that

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that allows us to speak to...

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You know,

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for want of a better description,

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the ideas around heaven and hell and the two sides.

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And what is one person's Paradise

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somebody else might experience as a hell.

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You know, if we think about the Garden of Eden and this idea of this,

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you know,

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this generous, lush garden where there was nothing to worry about,

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but would the more than humans have experienced that as a Paradise?

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There's always two sides to it.

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So I think in that coming back to More in that colonial context,

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yes, for those who arrive there and make of it what they will,

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it might have been a Paradise,

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but not necessarily for those who met there

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and what their receiving end of that experience.

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I think, for me, music

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is a really immediate

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way to access Paradise in the moment.

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I play music myself.

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I love listening to music, I love listening to music

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with other people,

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and I think this is when you have glimmerings or moments,

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but I also feel, you know, it's making me think of

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Octavia Butler and this idea

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that, you know,

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there's nothing new under the sun, but there are other suns.

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So I think for me personally, it comes back to the sense of distance.

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I don't think of these things as being particularly far away.

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I think, you know, dystopia on one side,

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utopia on the other, Paradise on one side, Hell on the other.

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And it's just really how how close or how far apart

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those two are.

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I think the idea of everything

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just being wonderful all the time,

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there's a there's a lack of a reality in it.

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So I guess this is where I'm

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maybe this is why I enjoy allotmenteers so much, because there is

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that... you need that grit to get that beautiful thing.

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There's something really satisfying, I guess, about that process

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of of creation and working towards something.

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And then there it happens.

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And then knowing as well that it'll happen.

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You know, flowers bloom, you have a harvest,

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but then post-harvest the cycle starts again.

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But it's also very reassuring because, you know, the cycle will

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start again.

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It's super

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important to be thinking about utopia, to be working

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towards it, to be imagining other ways of being.

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You know, without imagining it, it doesn't make it's not a possibility.

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So there's some of us

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who have to spend time doing this work and holding on

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to these possibilities.

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Paradise feels more grounded.

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It sounds strange to say that about,

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you know, potentially an imagined space.

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But people can very quickly describe a lush garden space

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or the animals that might be in it, or the people

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that they might be engaging with,

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whereas Utopia seems to be more ephemeral,

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much more difficult to get hold of in a way.

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Maybe it comes from that original Greek meaning of of no place

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or an impossible place, but that was also playful.

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It was also playfully intended as well.

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I think that

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science thinks of itself as a utopic discipline.

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I think that science imagines better worlds.

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Most scientists will state,

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especially a lot of the scientists we work with in the museum.

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They're always talking about a better world, these ideal spaces.

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For a lot of people in the public,

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it’s compelling because it's seen as utopic.

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If we come back to the Covid lockdowns,

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it was the scientists

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were trying to create a world in which

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a very specific disease no longer existed,

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and that people would not suffer for it.

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You know, it was they were they were trying to create a utopic world.

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But on the flip side of that, the dystopia within science,

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unfortunately, when it's talked about

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and understandably when it's talked about,

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gets very emotive very quickly.

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So sometimes it can be very hard to hear

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the important truths contained within it.

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I'll give you an example around vaccines, so we understand

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entirely the challenges when you have,

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you know,

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people spreading conspiracy theories and so on around vaccines.

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But what isn't discussed in people who are, say,

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vaccine hesitant, not anti-vaccines, are communities around the world

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and even in this country

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who have been experimented on scientifically without their consent.

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And this is a dystopia within science.

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You know,

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these are things that are in the public domain,

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whether it's radioactive chipatis

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that were given in certain communities and,

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and looked at to see what the effects would be,

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whether it's a syphilis...

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Tuskegee Study in the US, where African American men

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were denied treatment so they could see the full effects of syphilis.

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So there's all of these kind of dystopian moments within science

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where the end was seen as a justification of some pretty horrific means

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that because of this unbelievable benefits science have brought us

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don't often get discussed in a way that is calm.

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In order to understand

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how these these things

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we should learn from them in these things shouldn't happen again.

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Thank you for listening to this episode of the On Paradise podcast series.

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Please explore other episodes by searching for On Paradise

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at podcasts.ox.ac.uk.

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Goodbye.