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- Convenors:
-
Aníbal Arregui
(University of Barcelona)
Sara Asu Schroer (University of Oslo)
Bettina Stoetzer (MIT)
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- Discussant:
-
Paolo Gruppuso
(University of Munich (LMU))
- Formats:
- Panels Network affiliated
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 21 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
Plants, fungi, animals and microorganisms often disregard human-made and imagined boundaries. We welcome proposals that engage with the ways in which the unruly mobilities of animate beings trouble boundaries of human world making: national borders, ecological habitats, and biological taxa.
Long Abstract:
Plants, fungi, animals and microorganisms often disregard human-made and imagined boundaries: They spread in plantations, traverse fences, cross national borders, enter new landscapes and move beyond plan. In this panel we address how animate mobilities trouble and co-create geopolitical, ecological and even taxonomic boundaries. In particular, we aim to explore how nonhuman disobedient movements challenge divisory lines that serve as typical orderings of human world making: national borders, ecological habitats, and biological taxa. How do animate mobilities not only transform interspecies relations but also remake boundaries among humans and between species?
Scholars have started to pay attention to human perception of animal movements as well as to animal's own subjective experience of spatial mobility (Hodgetts and Lorimer 2018; Schroer 2019). Taking that thread, this panel examines the ways in which 'the animate' —not only the animal—poses new challenges to ethnographic practice: first, animate world making relates to a lively movement which includes other scales, rhythms and logics of movement beyond those of animals —plant growth, virus spreading, spore travel, etc. (Myers 2019; Stoetzer 2018). Second we revisit 'animate worlds' as a dimension through which anthropologists have classically approached nonhuman agency beyond a divide between nature/culture, one of the constitutive boundaries of Western rationales (Haraway 2008; Ingold 2011; Tsing 2015). With focus on unruly nonhuman movements across boundaries, we welcome proposals that engage with the myriad ways in which animate mobilities may trouble and remake biological, ecological and social orderings.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 21 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
In connecting multi-species ethnography and the anthropology of urban prototyping, this paper elicits the movements of wild boars into the city of Barcelona as a 'protoecology' that bodies forth potential failure to prefigure new possibilities for interspecies coexistence.
Paper long abstract:
Wild boars not only abound at the periphery of Barcelona but exhibit a pioneering initiative to explore central districts as well. While conservationists try to control the relations between the city and its adjacent 'nature', these unsettling porcine movements challenge the ecologic boundaries between rural and urban landscapes, as well as the status of wild boars as a 'wild' species. This article connects the wide field of 'multispecies ethnography' and the anthropology of 'prototyping', as it applies to new theorisations and potentialities of the urban. The 'protoecological' outlook is proposed for capturing a troubling orchestration of genetic, affective, infrastructural and climatic transformations, which leads to experimenting with interspecies encounters in contemporary Barcelona. Wild boar protoecology acts here as a 'relational prototype' that bodies forth potential failure to prefigure new possibilities for interspecies coexistence.
Paper short abstract:
Mexican native maize disregards human-made and imagined boundaries: its genes flow to other plants, its animated mobility creates desired inter-species relationships and identities. GM maize, by venturing outside labs, disrupts relationships and boundaries through its unruly,unwanted mobility.
Paper long abstract:
According to traditional Mexican farmers (and to some genetic and crop scientists) native maize has a healthy habit of disregarding human-made and imagined boundaries. Maize is an out-crossing, wind-pollinating plant, whose genes flow and cross-pollinate specimens in both close and distant fields, and can even mix with teosinte, maize´s wild ancestor. Maize "naturally" travels across individual plants, species´ genomes, farmers' properties, local communities, and regional and national borders, and thus its animated mobility creates relationships not only between plants, and between plants and humans, but also between humans themselves (for instance, through seed exchange). Furthermore maize, through its freewheeling or managed movement, co-creates geopolitical, social, cultural, and ethnic identities and boundaries.
On the other hand, crop biotechnologists see transgenic maize as obedient and predictably (in)mobile, with genetically modified genes which do not venture outside the secure boundaries of laboratories or experimental fields. However, after DNA from US-grown GM maize was found in native crops (Quist and Chapela 2001), this techno-scientific discourse on the impossibility of transgene boundary crossing was challenged. The unruly flow of transgenes was considered by many farmers, scientists, activists and a large part of the wider society as a form of malefic mobility, a kind of pollution that disturbs the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, safety and danger. The unwanted mobility of genetically engineered constructs not only remakes intra and inter-species relations between plants and humans, but also reconfigures geopolitical, social and cultural boundaries and entanglements between different forms of human agency (scientific and otherwise).
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers animate mobilities' troubling of boundaries through the lens of sonic ethnography. Drawing on Salomé Voegelin's writings on "sonic possible worlds," I argue it forms a kind of "ontological poetics" opening us to other ways of perceiving how nonhumans "thing" spaces.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers animate mobilities' troubling of boundaries through the lens of sonic ethnography: the recording, editing, and presentation of anthropologically-informed works of sound-based media. Although the field overlaps with ethnomusicology, it focuses less on music than the voices of both human and other-than-human actors comprising our shared environments. Instead of writing about these voices, sonic ethnography asks what we can learn by composing with and listening to them. Drawing on my own recording practice in Japan and recent work in sound studies, visual ethnography, and ontological anthropology, particularly Salomé Voegelin's writings on "sonic possible worlds," this paper theorizes the kind of knowing this enables. Sonic ethnography, I argue, produces representations of contingent and shifting sonic relationships between actors, human and other-than-human, "thinging" spaces and places in ways that both underpin and exceed visible and discursive boundaries. This often—though not always—occurs below the level of everyday consciousness. By directing attention to it, sonic ethnography not only explores how we generate and interpret soundscapes; it is also a kind of "ontological poetics" opening us to other ways of perceiving, and thinking, the world and its actual and possible compositions.