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- Convenors:
-
Aníbal Arregui
(University of Barcelona)
Sara Asu Schroer (University of Oslo)
Bettina Stoetzer (MIT)
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- Formats:
- Panels Network affiliated
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 22 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 Wednesday 22 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper is about sheep jumping fences in the highlands of Veracruz, Mexico, and explores how these everyday transgressions shape practices of boundary-making and local attitudes about sustainable farming.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is about sheep jumping fences in the highlands of Veracruz, Mexico, and explores how these everyday transgressions shape practices of boundary-making and local attitudes about sustainable farming. In this work, I understand sheep as serial border-crossers in multiple spatial-temporal scales, from their introduction during the Spanish conquest and the new ecological relationships that emerged from this first encounter, to their daily movements from one pasture area to another, constrained by strict rotational grazing plans. I discuss the emergence of various strategies for sheep containment - including electrical fences and "green barriers" - and how these containment strategies came to stand for different understandings of sheep-environment interactions. When sheep challenge or break through physical boundaries farmers set for them, they not only establish themselves as agential beings, but also inscribe themselves against farmers' conceptions about what it means to pursue "sustainable" agricultural practices. Additionally, this research attends to how parasites, plants, soil, birds and insects relate with each other and with sheep communities in these locales, and further, how these shifting multispecies relationalities work to influence the way sheep move through and experience agricultural spaces. Drawing from ethnographic experience working with sheep herds in biodynamic farms in Veracruz, this paper takes the act of fence-hopping as a mode of resistance to planned rotational grazing patterns, and explores how this resistance works to transform ranchers' "ways of knowing" about landscape management and local ecologies.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores tracking as a method of attending to landscapes movements in the face of forces growth in the Kalahari Desert, Botswana. Tracking notices how more-than-than human movements are crucial to stories of emergent landscapes that push back against the constraining boundaries of growth.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the practice of tracking as a method of attending to the lively movements of landscapes in the face of insatiable forces and infrastructures of "self-devouring growth" (Livingston. 2019) in the Kalahari Desert, Botswana. Here, movements of growth and development - evidenced by roads, mines, veterinary fences and the stampeding expansion cattle ranches -have reduced parts of the world's longest continuous wildlife dispersal area to a mere, narrow corridor, thwarting more-than-human mobilities indigenous to the desert. Against these encroachments, this paper elaborates tracking as a way of noticing how landscapes come together through the gatherings of different actors - both human and nonhuman - and their movements despite the infrastructures and boundaries that seek to constrain them. As both emergent indices and sedimented histories of movement, tracks tell stories about how more-than-humans do landscapes and make worlds through movement, even as roads, fences, and cattle ranches cut-off and constrain those movements. Through a close examination of the phenomenology of tracking, this paper argues that tracking involves processes that exceed the usual association between human-tracker and tracked-animal relationship, and is a reflexive practice of submerging oneself into, and attending to, more-than-human world making practices that disrupt the territorializing ambitions of developmental growth. In doing so, tracking appears as part of a broader set of practices, like gathering, that attends to more-than-human mobilities in Kalahari sands, while pushing back against dominant forms of movement that make boundaries in wire, asphalt, and concrete.
Paper short abstract:
The reintroduction of brown bears in the Pyrenees brought about a collective herds policy to reduce sheep casualties. Bears' unbounded mobility has moved sheep across (un)bounded pastures. New administrative logics driven by a wildlife program awoke and confronted with old territorial boundaries
Paper long abstract:
The bear reintroduction program was launched in 1996 when the population was considered almost extinct in the Pyrenees. After eight specimens translocated from Slovenia, the allegedly unpredicted rise of bear attacks on sheep led to the implementation of a new herding policy by the Catalan government in 2010. Collective herds consisting in gathering several local sheep flocks were organized. Following a triad of prevention measures—shepherds, guarding dogs, and electrified night camps—, the public administration funded this policy. Despite of local farmers' opposition, the reintroduction program was devised as a win-win scenario claiming to restore not only biodiversity values, but also an old communal management of herds and pastures. In this paper, I propose to approach the bear program as the interplay of sovereign, disciplinary, and neoliberal environmentalities that design rather than restore new administrative logics over long-standing, although recently blurred territorial boundaries. Focusing on a specific collective herd, I argue that this wildlife program has awakened, but also remade old rights to former common pastures without acknowledging their relevance beforehand. Releasing bears and implementing collective herds, moving flocks from other villages that were not historically allowed to graze over those pastures may lead, as it has done so, to social grievances among local farmers. Bears' mobility is unbounded and may be unruly, but the ensuing territorial conflicts tied to pastures usage by livestock should not be deemed as unexpected secondary issues from a large carnivore reintroduction program. They simply are constitutive of it
Paper short abstract:
Native nature plays a key role in identity and environment discourses in Aotearao New Zealand. I show how weeds mobilities are conceptualised as a threat to an idealised urban nature in Auckland and how their elimination is deeply entangled with power processes, belonging and exclusion in the city.
Paper long abstract:
The elimination of "invasive" plants is common practice in Aotearoa New Zealand. Auckland, the biggest agglomeration of the country, is known for being one of the weediest cities in the world. Native biodiversity forms an important part of national and local identity. Numerous campaigns ask citizens to take local action for native species as "weed busters" and thus to create a defined form of urban nature. Weeds are transgressing boundaries in space and time: firstly they come from far away to strike roots and make their place in Auckland, secondly they recede a harmonised past of native abundance into the distance and thirdly they counteract an imaginary future. More often than not military vocabulary is used to describe the tension between "good" plants to be protected and "bad" plants to be combatted. The local discourse refers to native species as vulnerable and in need to be cared for. Animate mobilities form part of daily city experiences and are conceptualized as a threat to the desired urban lifeworld. How citizens relate to weeds - if they remove them, do not care about or even plant them in their gardens - works as a local scale of belonging to Auckland. Ways of dealing with nature are closely tied to urban identity. Drawing on my empirical fieldwork, I highlight in my talk how animate mobilities shape social subjects and affiliations in the city and, finally, play out as a powerful dividing line between different socioeconomic and ethnic groups.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the role of "alambrados" (wire fences) in controlling herding animals mobilities in the Brazilian-Uruguayan border. It argues that alambrados are material resonators of the oscillation between positive direct and negative indirect modes of domestication in the Pampas.
Paper long abstract:
Recent perspectives on domestication in anthropology have emphasized the importance of technical objects and other environmental elements as mediators of the relations between humans, animals and the landscapes they inhabit. Drawing on the concept of "architecture of domestication", proposed by Anderson and others (2017), as well as on the idea that one of the first operations carried out by a technical object is to define actors and a space (Akrich, 1989), this paper discusses the role of wire and wooden fences (locally known as "alambrados") in the context of ranching in the Brazilian-Uruguayan border. Moreover, the paper aims to explore the role played by the fences in the relational game that involves humans and herd animals in the Pampas, understanding these structures as material resonators of the oscillation between positive direct and negative indirect modes of controlling more-than-human mobilities in a context of intense cross-border exchanges, dating back to colonial times. The paper also discusses how recent transformations in the Pampeano environment, in particular the biological invasion of European wild boars (Sus scrofa) in both Brazil and Uruguay, have reshaped alambrados' affordances, conferring new uses and social meanings on old material structures.
Paper short abstract:
This paper tracks the global mobilities of the so-called African Swine Fever Virus. Tracing ASFV's travels, reveals the multispecies patchy relations that have formed around the trade of pigs, dead and alive, and the infrastructures of production, distribution and waste disposal connected to them.
Paper long abstract:
The so-called African Swine Fever Virus (ASFV), formerly considered to be eradicated in Europe except the Iberian Peninsula, recently made a return to the continent. Since 2007 ASFV has spread throughout Europe with serious consequences for both wild life and domestic pork industries. This paper tells the story of ASFV's recent appearance in Europe. It traces the ways in which this virus has hitched a ride on wild life, on global pork commodity chains and infrastructures. ASFV has followed the heels of colonial trajectories to East Africa, and finally travelled back to Europe - and went feral in the process. Tracking ASFV's travels, I argue, reveals the multispecies patchy relations that have formed around the formal and informal trade of pigs, dead and alive, and the infrastructures of production, distribution and waste disposal connected to them. But even more, ASFV's global mobilities open the view onto the complex ecologies that emerge in the cracks and gaps of industrial meat production, agriculture, urbanization and climate change - ecologies that incite desires to fortify national borders while interfering with capital's trajectories. These desires emerge at a time when the desire for purity and building fences too often shapes dominant political and cultural responses to displacement and ecological destruction. This paper therefore argues that creating more livable habitats for both swine and people requires alternative forms of care that do justice to the entangled landscapes - and unexpected neighbors - that make up our world today.
Paper short abstract:
Modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are being released in Rio de Janeiro to control viral diseases. Ethnographically attending to the movement of mosquitoes and humans, I examine how these releases happen through alliances and frictions, with contrasting notions of health, science, and inequality.
Paper long abstract:
At the early hours of dawn, a car drives slowly, with the window open just enough so that a global health technician can release a few hundred mosquitoes. The car follows a predefined route, but there are some areas it will not go. In certain "territories," as my interlocutors call it, it is a public health worker who must walk to do the releases, opening tubes filled with mosquitoes as he moves. In gated-communities, where entrance is barred for health workers, the solution is to drive around it, trying to throw mosquitoes across the fortification in the hopes these insects will cross the physical and class barrier these walls represent.
These are snapshots of my fieldwork accompanying a new strategy being implemented in Rio de Janeiro, which uses the Aedes aegypti mosquito in efforts to control the viruses this insect can transmit, namely Zika, dengue, and chikungunya. Brazilian researchers are part of an international Gates Foundation-funded project, which proposes to release A. aegypti infected with Wolbachia bacteria, a microbe that can inhibit the mosquito's capacity to transmit pathogens. Ethnographically attending to the movement of mosquitoes and the humans who must walk and drive through the city to release them, my work examines how these releases show the alliances and frictions between global and public health, between geographies of health and science, of violence and inequality, of precarity and austerity.