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- Convenors:
-
Sophie Chao
(University of Sydney)
Anne Galloway (Victoria University, Wellington)
Laura McLauchlan (University of New South Wales)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Friday 26 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
This panel explores current and emergent approaches to understanding and reconfiguring multispecies relations. We seek ethnographic, theoretical, multi-modal, and/or interdisciplinary papers that articulate expansive, capacious, and relational approaches to the more-than-human world.
Long Abstract:
Every day seems to bring more stories of multispecies suffering and planetary unraveling. Responses to the fires that ravaged Australia in the Black Summer of 2019-20 made it clear that the 'natural world', and not only humans, can suffer injustices. To our collective detriment, Indigenous understandings of human-environment relations remain systematically excluded. In the face of these contemporary realities, how well are the existing rules, norms and institutional processes that structure our responses to injustice faring? What can be learnt from Indigenous worlds and worldviews, and how can they be better recognised and restored? How might our responsibility for/with other lives shift in relational perspective(s)? What opportunities and challenges emerge when we apply culturally specific (human) concepts like 'justice' to other forms of life? In the face of violence and calls for reckoning, where do 'good relations' already exist, and persist? How do forgiveness, kindness, and love continue to operate in everyday life? What mending practices are being undertaken, and at which scales? We seek ethnographically grounded contributions inspired by situated locales and ecologies, as well as interdisciplinary and theoretical papers. Multi-modal presentations (e.g. film, poetry, and visual art) are also strongly welcome.
Read more about the panel participants here: https://sophiechao.wixsite.com/aas2021
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 26 November, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Mongolia is one of the few places in the world still practicing a mobile form of pastoralism. Seasonal mobility is an important part of Mongolia’s cultural heritage, allowing for biodiversity in both wild and domestic species, and is a key means of co-existing with multiple species of herd animal.
Paper long abstract:
Mongolia is home to one of the largest, continuous and intact grassland ecosystems left on the planet, in large part through herding families’ ongoing unique management of their multispecies herds in this landscape. The grasslands contain a rich diversity of plant species, supporting large ungulates, including wild horse, ass and camel, and therefore apex predators, such as wolves, bears and snow leopard. Over thousands of years the nomadic pastoral way of life successfully co-existed within a rich and diverse grassland ecosystem. This paper proposes that a key means of retaining this ongoing pastoral existence and the accompanying biodiverse domestic and wild animal populations, particularly relates to a mobile way of life, while living with multiple species, including horses, camels, cattle, sheep and goats. A focus on mobility is also a feature of newer pastoral farming methods, such as regenerative or holistic practices, or rotational grazing patterns, in contrast to the more sedentary, intensive farming methods with individual species. The focus here is on the mobility of both humans and more-than-humans as a means of retaining both socio-cultural and biological diversity. Minimal fencing and containment means that both domestic and wild mammals can co-exist as part of an interconnected ecology. The presentation will include multispecies ethnography integrated with a photo essay as part of a multimodal methodological approach to mobile pastoralism in Mongolia.
Paper short abstract:
Across diverse landscapes in Western Australia, interspecies relationships between cattle and humans are foundational to settler-colonial and emergent forms of belonging. We explore contemporary manifestations of these interrelations, including how they play out in land justice and conservation.
Paper long abstract:
Of Australia’s early settlers, Mayes (2018, 5) points to the central role of livestock and agricultural production in “establishing moral and ontological proprietorship” and a sense of home on unceded and unfamiliar land. Today, there are as many cattle as people in Australia, and cows continue to play a key role in the legitimisation of settler nationalism and belonging, albeit in emergent, and often contradictory ways. Drawing on ethnography from the Kimberley to the Great Southern, we examine how social and ecological relations in Western Australia’s diverse landscapes are mediated through and by cattle. We argue that cattle and conceptualisations of them continue to connect and divide Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, including in struggles over land justice. Cattle are also at the heart of conservation debates, through claims of their potential to destroy or, conversely, regenerate land. We describe how in their relational framing with humans, the treatment of cattle spans commodification to love and connection within farmers’ variable value systems, and we seek to understand how settler-descended and more recently arrived non-Indigenous Australians make sense of their place in the contemporary nation via these interspecies relationships.
Paper short abstract:
Through an exploration of human relationships with feral pigs in Cape York, this paper will explore how introduced species are understood by land managing groups in the region to describe and analyse the contested, overlapping and ambiguous ways that hybrid landscapes are cultivated and organised.
Paper long abstract:
Weed and feral animal control comprises much of the work that land managers in Cape York do. Different land managers target different introduced species for control in the areas for which they have responsibility, and the ways that certain species are understood as more or less problematic indicates the ways in which land managers understand and seek to order landscapes and reinforce their sense of belonging in it. In this paper, I describe and discuss the various methods used by land managers to attempt to wrangle invasive species, in order to tease out the changing cultural and social values that shape the goals and practices of the main land managing parties in the Cape. The control of various introduced species brings to the fore questions around how species are categorised as “native” or “invasive”, belonging or not belonging. Particular species disrupt the assumed correlation between nativeness and belonging and come to represent different things for different people. Through a discussion of the various positions that feral pigs occupy—as “killable” pests, food resources and pets—I will explore how Cape York emerges as a “hybrid landscape”, rife with “feral dynamics”. By examining how fauna and flora are understood and categorised by the various land managing groups in south-east Cape York, I will show how landscapes are cultivated in contested, overlapping and ambiguous ways.
Paper short abstract:
"Pig-pig" is a feral pig who was adopted by a recreational hunter. This paper examines how Pig-pig's life and place in the world is sustained within a web of multispecies relations, relations that also subvert violent, national institutions geared towards unmaking her existence.
Paper long abstract:
In Australia, feral pigs are marked as out-of-place, untouchable, and killable. Nonhumans enacted within a discourse that aims to unmake their existence through a relational vacuum, by delegitimising and severing all social and ecological ties. As Celermajer and Wallach argue, they are made "illegible". So, in rural New South Wales, 2019, during one of the worst droughts in memory, I was surprised to meet a healthy feral pig living with a family of recreational pig hunters. An adopted two-year-old sow, ambiguously called, "Pig-pig".
Hunters keeping feral pigs as pets is not uncommon, yet I still consider Pig-pig extraordinary and wonder how her life is possible in a world geared towards annihilating her kind. This paper will explore the relational knots that sustain her ongoing, if tenuous, place in this world. Pig-pig was spoken about as fostering, and being fostered within, a web of unexpected, multispecies connections and perspectives: as brood member, tolerated prey, more-than-human friend and, because of the drought, possible Christmas lunch. She is a reminder that being is always dependent on others, and that relationality is the condition by which life and indeed existence is possible.
The relationship with Pig-pig subverts the deeply violent institutions that target invasive species, and emerges from a hunter's way of living-with and killing these animals. Hunting's interspecies relations do not easily fit within what scholars might consider ethical or good. This paper also reflects on the possibilities of intimacy, respect, and porcine ways of being that recreational hunting affords.
Paper short abstract:
This paper follows lines of flight of channel-billed cuckoos as they interweave multispecies beings in Central Australia. I link Warlpiri ethnography with my observations of crows caring for cuckoos to explore alternate possibilities to the domination and exclusion of unwanted species.
Paper long abstract:
While grounded in Alice Springs and “socially distanced” from human friends during the summer of Covid-19, I was absorbed by the spectacle of channel-billed cuckoo young being raised by crow parents in my backyard. The cuckoo (Scythrops novaehollandiae), an avian “brood parasite” known as Kurrakurraja in Warlpiri, is called “stormbird” in English in reference to the monsoonal rain it brings to northern Australia at the end of the dry season. The bird is a central actor in a major public Warlpiri ceremonial cycle that emerged in the 1960s when eastern Warlpiri came into increasing contact with Mudburra, Jingilu and other Indigenous groups while working on cattle stations north of Warlpiri country in the Elliott region. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Central Australia and utilising my iPhone recordings of crows caring for cuckoo young, I link my recent observations of “making kin” (Harraway 2016) activities between crows and stormbirds to the more-than-human relations that Warlpiri enact through their songlines. Building on van Dooran’s concept of recognition (2019, 40), I ask what we can learn by attending to, and “thinking with”, stormbird relational dynamics? In exploring this question, I follow lines of flight of channel-billed cuckoos that interweave multispecies beings across varied ecological and historical situations. I consider how the birds mediate otherwise human socialities and differing “modes of relations” (Descola 2016) to explore alternate possibilities to domination and exclusion of unwanted species.