Paper short abstract:

How do death and the decisions that make it possible impact knowledge and politics within and across species? This paper describes a series of paradoxes: Deer that instrumentalize peers’ death by hunters, biologists who exhort hunters to kill, and hunters who refuse to kill at all

Paper long abstract:

How do death and the decisions that make it possible impact knowledge and politics within and across species? This paper examines quandaries of verification and evidence in the knowledge claims of multispecies ethnography and the anthropology of violence by considering how killing, its avoidance, and its encouragement produce as well as partition knowledge and discernment. Central to the argument is a concern with conservation bureaucrats, hunters, and even white-tail deer who draw on and manage nonhuman deaths. Based on three years of ethnography with hunters, bureaucrats, and deer, it describes how killing makes visible a series of apparent paradoxes: Deer that recognize and instrumentalize peers’ deaths by hunters, biologists who exhort hunters to kill to “safeguard” environments, and hunters who kill selectively or refuse to kill at all. This paper thus explores how death may permit actors normally kept separate to reproduce and make visible often-obscured fundaments of nature/culture orders, including on the part of deer. It interrogates how an ethnographer might know what a deer knows about its death, suggesting a rapprochement between human and nonhumans’ ability to cognize killing for particular ends. Such recognition of how violence circulates is not a form of absolution or relativism, but a suggestion that claims to absolution configure how humans recognize and assign sentience and responsibility in multispecies worlds. Hence a material engagement with killing made “useful” by both deer and humans alters the grounds and methods for evidence for recognizing human and nonhuman subjectivity as approached by ethnographers and ecologists