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- Convenors:
-
Michelle Pentecost
(King's College London)
Thomas Cousins (University of Oxford)
Jamie Lorimer (University of Oxford)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Medical
- Location:
- Magdalen Daubeny
- Start time:
- 18 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
How do animals, cities, and health shape each other in urban contexts of the global South? This panel brings together ethnographies of animal life, urban human livelihoods, and the governance of health in order to examine how trans-species interactions shape livelihoods and health.
Long Abstract:
How do animals, cities, and health shape each other in urban contexts of the global South? This panel brings together ethnographies of animal life, urban human livelihoods, and the governance of health in order to examine how trans-species interactions shape livelihoods and health. What entanglements are overlooked in normative approaches in global health and One Health? What might examinations of more-than-human intimacies reveal about urban ecologies, informal economies, and lively infrastructures? Working from the intersections of situated urban political ecology, medical anthropology and science studies,
this panel will explore relationships between forms of life and practices of meaning in Southern urban contexts. We seek to think through the singularities, exchanges, and normativities that emerge from careful attention to lives, materials, and forms that come together across city life. We are interested in the ways in which animals are understood to contribute both materials and labour to the life of the city, to the shaping of urban metabolisms, and to the distribution of rights to the city in new and unexpected ways. We seek papers interested in exploring novel approaches between anthropology, geography and health that develop new methods and concepts for the study of animal life, urban ecologies and more-than-human labour in Southern cities.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on more-than-human encounters and their implications for articulating the urban in the Global South. Drawing upon etho-geographical research, the paper front-stages the ways in which they have bearings upon everyday life, the ecologies of urban health and governance.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on more-than-human encounters and their implications for articulating the urban in the Global South. Drawing upon etho-geographical research (Barua & Sinha, 2017) on macaques and people in New Delhi, the paper front-stages three modalities of such encounters and ways in which they have bearings upon everyday life, the ecologies of health and governance (Jadhav et al., 2015). The first pertains to cultural practice: the role of religion and empathy in rendering the urban as a space for primates to flourish.The second entails urban ethology: how macaques perceive encounters with people and adapt to the complex city, with and against the grain of design. The third indexes contestations: how frictions between people and macaques are products of both corporeal encounters and external actions by the state, with implications for the wellbeing of both. A short conclusion discusses the wider import of this work for rethinking political ecologies of health and urbanization.
Barua M and Sinha A. 2017. Animating the urban: an ethological and geographical conversation.Social & Cultural Geography,DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2017.1409908
Jadhav S, Jain S, Kannuri N, Bayetti C and Barua M. 2015. Ecologies of suffering: mental health in India.Economic & Political Weekly,50,12-15
Paper short abstract:
An ethnography of the Muslim festival of sacrifice in Mumbai as a moment of worship, labor, commerce and play: I argue that the association of animal slaughter with disgust and cruelty entails an ethical judgement where an act of violence is imbued with an affect of horror.
Paper long abstract:
In India, Hindu nationalist discourse associates the slaughter practices of Muslims as an imaginative repertoire for the evocation of disgust. The link between the violence of slaughter and the experience of disgust is crucial for the production of the Muslim as cruel other. However, I argue that the association between a violent act, material substance and the experience of disgust is not straightforward. Through an ethnography of the practice of bull slaughter at the Deonar abbatoir during the Muslim festival of sacrifice in Mumbai (Qurbani), this paper offers insights into the variety of emotional dispositions in a slaughterhouse. I draw attention to the ordinariness of the sacrifice event as a moment of worship, labor, commerce and play. Furthermore, I draw attention to a discursive tradition of slaughter (zabihah) in Mumbai that recognizes the violence of the act, without the moral judgment of cruelty nor the evocation of disgust. I argue that the association of slaughter with disgust entails an ethical judgement wherein an act of violence is imbued with an affect of repulsion and horror. Crucial to understanding this ethics of disgust is a consideration of how the discourse of non-violence produces on abstract ethical claim that necessarily castes a disdainful eye on supposedly violent others. This paper suggests that the de-linking of violence, cruelty and disgust is crucial for a nuanced theorization of multispecies interaction and slaughter.
Paper short abstract:
In the context of a global health technology involving bioengineered mosquitos, this paper considers how unforeseen events shed light on the ways in which multispecies relations are entangled within the complex fabric of the city of Medellín, and how local and global dynamics of governance emerge.
Paper long abstract:
The World Mosquito Program is currently releasing bioengineered mosquitos across the city of Medellín, Colombia, as a potential new global health technology to combat diseases like Zika, dengue, and chikungunya. The city is cast as an urban living laboratory, through which scientists, human inhabitants, and mosquitos are producing and experiencing new forms of entanglement and cohabitation.
The life of these modified mosquitos and that of their human counterparts are intricately bound to one another. When at one point during my research the bioengineered mosquitos started to die, this co-dependency both for life (of the mosquitos) and livelihoods (of the project workers) was thrown into light. Blame and hypotheses surrounding these deaths reveal how the complex social, political, and ecological fabric of the city forms far more than just a backdrop for these multispecies interactions.
This paper will explore these entanglements in order to consider the ways in which local insect-human cohabitation is choreographed by urban dynamics. Based on 11 months of fieldwork, this paper examines the relations between humans and mosquitos in a complex urban setting, asking how, in the context of an unforeseen event such as the death of bioengineered mosquitos, questions of local and global governance emerge.
Paper short abstract:
We give an account of the course of, and state response to, the 2017 avian influenza outbreak in Cape Town, South Africa, considering how ideas of enforcement, containment, compensation, and value are mediated across forms of life and death.
Paper long abstract:
In mid 2017, a highly-pathogenic avian influenza (H5N8) outbreak swept across southern Africa, devastating the poultry industry in the Western Cape and affecting supplies and prices of eggs and meat in the province. State services struggled to contain the outbreak, and by the end of 2017 more than three million birds had died or had been culled nationally. In this paper, we present a thick ethnographic account of the state response to the outbreak, tracing the course of the outbreak and the technologies deployed by veterinarians, health officials, politicians, and ordinary citizens, in order to consider how ideas about enforcement, containment, compensation, and value are mediated and translated across forms of life and death.
We focus on a set of relations made visible by the outbreak, between medium-sized commercial farmers and an informal market for live layer hens at the end of their productive lives. In the translation of industrial laying poultry into imileqwa (tough, wiry, tasty, rural chickens at the heart of urban consumption of protein) by means of "a cull-buyer market" lies a complex economy of containment and compensation. The case illustrates how the biopolitics of avian influenza in this postcolonial urban setting elicits ambivalent concerns about security and readiness, the value of life and the place of animals in the city. Following unstable lines of transmission, infection, and consumption, we argue that informal economies and local institutional arrangements are important factors that shape local technologies of biosecurity and preparedness.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses rival conceptions and approaches to rodent control in Cape Town.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses policy contestation in Cape Town over a program to help households in Khayelitsha (a low-income suburb) deal with rodent infestation in a 'poison free' manner. Workers, managed by the local government department of Environmental Health (EH), set cage traps for rats inside people's homes. This project was halted after the South African National Council for Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (NSPCA) objected because the rats were subsequently drowned. We show that rival understandings of the morality of rodent control shaped the policy contestation. EH officials held that drowning rats was preferable to poisoning them because poison was dangerous to children, domestic animals and wildlife. They adopted a broader, and more ecological, notion of welfare that extended beyond the NSPCA's focus on whether the rat was killed in a cruel and legal manner. There was some common ground in that both 'sides' believed that drowning was cruel. For EH, it was the least worst option and officials continued to seek alternative, poison-free and more humane methods of disposing of rats (though these proved impractical). We draw on a social survey in Khayelitsha to show that EH's approach had significant local support. Most agreed that workers should be allowed to trap and drown rats and those who said they were concerned about rat poison killing other animals like cats and owls were more likely to do so. Those who believed that drowning was painful for the rat were less likely to agree with cage-trapping and drowning.
Paper short abstract:
This paper stems from a scoping study that was conducted in Cape Town, South Africa on how rats are managed in different parts of the city, how rats are perceived and what effects rats have on human health.
Paper long abstract:
Humans and rats have lived alongside one another for many years and will most likely continue to in the future. When it comes to understanding the dynamics of human and rat relations in Global South urban spaces, very little is known about the intimate ways humans negotiate everyday living alongside rats - whether it be in the sense of health, managing rat infestations or how rats are perceived. This paper stems from a scoping study that was conducted throughout different areas in Cape Town, South Africa which focused on understanding the extent of rat infestations in different parts of the city, how rat infestations are managed by both the private and public sector, how rats are socially and culturally perceived among various communities and lastly what effects rats have on human health. Taking Cape Town's colonial and apartheid history into account, this paper draws links between the past and present when it comes to rat infestations and its links to social injustices. The politics around rat infestation management in the city is discussed alongside the social, economic and environmental elements at play to shine light on the political ecology. Focusing on the entanglements of social and cultural life that humans have with rats in Cape Town, the paper then explores how these entanglements shape what happens to the rat. Effectively, the paper lays out a path for future research that is needed in Cape Town to inform understandings around the complex everyday life that humans and rats share.
Paper short abstract:
Caring for children in precarious urban contexts requires rats be 'exterminated.'This paper explores the complex human-animal interface, with ethnographic data drawn from the city if Cape Town where schools of thought around animal cruelty clash.
Paper long abstract:
This paper draws attention to the hidden perils of agricultural pesticides, which have been repurposed in urban South African townships by street sellers to kill rats and other unwanted urban 'pests'. We consider, in particular, the causal relationships between child poisoning episodes and the household use of these illegal street pesticides, which are used to protect children from the harmful consequences of rodent bites. This domestic instantiation of care is complexly bound up with the etiology of childhood poisonings. We follow competing models of care in the work of primary care givers, street sellers, poison specialists, and animal rights activists invested in saving rats from painful deaths. In tracing these uneven trajectories of care, especially in the light of state negligence, we highlight the layers of social injustice and economic inequality that contribute to child poisoning episodes in the absence of structural care. We raise questions related to the intersection of the city, human-animal relations, and the spike in childhood poisonings and demonstrate the entangled worlds of sanitation, waste removal, insecure housing, and the proliferation of rodents and other 'pests' in urban landscapes of the Western Cape. While immediate public health interventions for eliminating rats and household pests in non-toxic ways is critical, long-term approaches to care, namely social justice, will require environmental and human rights activism to address racist processes of dehumanization and forms of structural violence that underpin both human and animal suffering.