Paper short abstract:

Effectively addressing the assemblage of antimicrobial resistance requires an epistemic shift that not only considers the stakeholders’ lived realities, but also leaves space for uncertainty. An ethnographic study of a poultry farm in rural India exemplifies these dynamics in a multispecies context.

Paper long abstract:

Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) is a living, mutating assemblage, consisting not only of the enzymes that trigger the actual resistances, but also of all the actors that stimulate and world it within situated ecologies. Stakeholders are enmeshed in ‘making things work’ under precarious conditions, where containment/unintended spill over, and long term/‘productive’ toxicity are not taken into consideration. Cross-scale regulatory efforts often stem from a point of epistemic fixity and disregard local complexities and everyday realities.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in rural South India, this paper assesses local(ized) knowledge practices of antibiotic use in multispecies contexts. The case study is a medium-scale poultry farm with little biosecurity, where antimicrobials are deployed as a pharmaceutical jugaad (‘quick fix’) to address issues of a non-pharmaceutical nature and to maximize productivity. Villagers inadvertently become part of the assemblage: by using the barn bedding (with deposited antibiotic metabolites) as fertilizer in the nearby fields or by drinking the groundwater from below the farm after pharmaceutical remnants have seeped into the soil – thereby potentially perpetuating and intensifying the local resistome.

This research indicates that AMR not only has to be apprehended within a multispecies and planetary framework of health and well-being that takes living and non-living ecologies into consideration – it also requires an epistemic approach, which leaves operating space for local knowledge practices to make uncertainty analytically productive. Knowledge on resistances remains ex post emergence, and thus uncertain and speculative, which makes direct interventions difficult.