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- Convenors:
-
Tatyjana Szafonova
(Comenius University)
Victoria Peemot (University of Helsinki)
Istvan Santha (Hungarian Research Network)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores how populist and authoritarian regimes reshape human-nonhuman relations, producing new multispecies conflicts and forms of violence. Through ethnographic cases, it examines how power, affect, and ideology polarise life in the Anthropocene.
Long Abstract
Multispecies ethnography (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010) began as an effort to engage with life forms and beings that had long existed on the margins of anthropological inquiry. Since then, it has become a central field, revealing the entangled relations between humans, nonhumans, climate, and capitalism, domains once conceptualised as separate. Today, multispecies ethnography serves not only as a tool to examine exploitation and capitalist symbiosis but also as an entry point into emerging ambiences and affective regimes that generate new forms of violence. One striking example is the rise of a right-wing populist regime in India that venerates cows while inciting violence against Muslims (Govindrajan 2021). Recognising that populist and authoritarian regimes actively regulate cross-species relations (Mathews 2014) offers a valuable lens for understanding contemporary political transformations. Such regimes mobilise anthropocentric conflicts and polarisations, as seen, for example, in the anti-bear hysteria during Fico’s electoral campaign in Slovakia, the rising cult of trophy hunting in Orbán’s Hungary, or the shifting roles of spirits in the border mountains between Russia and Mongolia amid geopolitical change. This panel invites ethnographic case studies from diverse contexts (beyond these examples) to examine how emergent authoritarian formations shape interspecies relations and produce new regimes of multispecies oppression. By situating multispecies politics within the broader dynamics of right-wing populism and autocratic rule, the panel invites a rethinking of how power, affect, and violence move through the porous relations among species, generating new entanglements, clashes, and responses.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper explores how in Tajikistan ‘jinn’ are involved in navigating everyday struggles. In recent years ‘jinn’, together with harmal plants and spiritual practitioners are entangled with the figure of the ‘witch’ creating an immoral ‘Other’ that needs to be securitized.
Paper long abstract
In contemporary Tajikistan, everyday precarity and labour outmigration radically transform intimate lives. In this context ‘jinn’ are intricately involved in navigating intimate struggles. They support the attempts of cowives in polygynous family units to secure access to resources or influence interpersonal tensions between in-laws. In recent years spiritual practitioners – often called tabibs and folbins – as well as seeking to attend their rituals has been criminalised in the name of protecting citizens from exploitation. This echoes broader global debates over ‘superstition’ and ‘modernity’, connected to struggles over ‘biomedical’ authority and ‘Islamic’ reform. ‘Jinn’ have long been involved in attempts to heal bodies, minds, and relationships, in the present they increasingly reconfigure intimacy as an intricate part of everyday conflicts.
Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Tajikistan (2025–2026), I examine how against this backdrop ‘jinn’ are involved in navigating intimate relationships. I argue that the spirits offer resources to individuals otherwise unavailable. This together with the deinstitutionalised character of spiritual practices makes it difficult for authorities to regulate. However, the association of ‘jinn’, ancestral spirits, spiritual practitioners, and their practices together with different material forms such as harmal plant with the figure of the 'witch' creates an immoral ‘Other’ onto whom moral anxieties are displaced. This gives rise to new configurations of ‘the secular’ through ‘translation tactics’ of individuals navigating how to live (with)out the help of ‘jinn’ among intimate struggles.
Paper short abstract
This paper traces Soviet introductions of pink salmon and Kamchatka crab in the Barents Sea and their ongoing effects in Sápmi, showing how invasive species mediate conflicts between Indigenous knowledge, industrial fisheries, and authoritarian governance.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the history and present of two invasive species in the Barents Sea: pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) and Kamchatka crab (Paralithodes camtschaticus). It traces a Soviet experiment in environmental engineering and explores its ongoing consequences in Sápmi. Drawing on archival sources, the paper shows that the introduction of these species was part of Soviet strategies to intensify fisheries and extend state control over Arctic ecosystems, linked to a broader project of colonizing (osvoenie) Indigenous multispecies landscapes. These interventions generated tensions between state-directed industrialization and local knowledge and practices. Today, these legacies produce overlapping conflicts. Internationally, Norway–Russia relations over fisheries and environmental policy are shaped by global markets, climate change, and the militarization of the Arctic amid Russia’s war against Ukraine. Locally, Sámi small-scale fishers face conflicts over rights, livelihoods, and knowledge systems, navigating state science, industrial fisheries, and Indigenous environmental knowledge under Norwegian regulations. Pink salmon and Kamchatka crab act as agents in a multispecies ethnography of political tensions, highlighting contradictions, generating political and technoscientific interventions, and fostering resistance. By situating these species within Soviet environmental history and contemporary Scandinavian governance, the paper shows how authoritarian and technocratic approaches shape relations among species and between social practices and knowledge systems. It contributes to understanding how authoritarian structures influence multispecies relations and how politics emerges, is experienced, and contested at the intersection of geopolitical strategy, industrial capitalism, and Indigenous resistance.
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnography in western Turkey, this paper examines how authoritarian governance reshapes human–olive relations. Ancient trees uprooted through extractivist expropriations are resold as ‘macro-bonsais’, producing new forms of multispecies violence and spectral afterlives.
Paper long abstract
Uprooted ancient olive trees have become a prized landscaping fixture in Turkey. They are renamed as ‘macro-bonsais’, grown in steel pots with their limbs pruned and maimed, their foliage carefully razed to look like trays or balls. With their evergreen foliage, statuesque form and embodied stories, they now serve the wealthy, not the peasants. The most important factor behind this change is the changing environmental protection laws and expedited expropriations for development projects or extractivist operations. As the presidential powers increasingly exceed the power of the legislature and the judiciary in Turkey, these expropriations are common, affecting not only forests but also olive groves and native oleaster bushes. A large number of those olive trees that are uprooted are then re-rooted and sold as macro-bonsais at exorbitant prices.
As much as the displacement of the olive trees reflects the authoritarian turn in Turkey, their emplacement and commodification has also something to do with the same process. While Erdoğan is single-handedly signing the orders of expropriation, his wife promotes the olive as the immortal tree, referring to and rejuvenating a religious mythology around the olive, encouraging the market for its circulation as a looted and displaced entity. The multispecies relations between humans and olive trees change drastically under this neoliberal authoritarianism, while centennial trees are afforded new lives as specters of themselves, being subjected to violent displacements.
This paper is based on ethnographic research in western Turkey, including interviews with nursery owners, villagers and officials.
Paper short abstract
Bhutan’s rituals and meat culture are being remade by Buddhist ethics and global animal-welfare campaigns. Life-release ritual expands as sacrifice to mountain deities is moralised and replaced with symbolic gifts. Animals shift from ritual agents to ethical subjects, creating new pastoral tensions.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how Buddhist ethics and global animal-welfare discourse are reshaping ritual practice and meat culture in Bhutan, generating polarised multispecies conflicts within a state–monastic regime of moral governance. Drawing on multispecies ethnography, it compares two animal-centred ritual complexes: Buddhist tsethar (life-release) and vernacular sacrifice to mountain and place deities.
Tsethar has expanded from episodic “rescue” to a moral project in which merit is judged by post-release welfare. Civil groups purchase animals en route to slaughter, relocate them to high pastures, and document their well-being for donors, aligning with populist moral campaigns around compassion and welfare. Yet “release” often entails renewed human management: pastoralists may be compelled to host tsethar herds on commons, provide salt and winter care, and pledge never to kill them, shifting labour, costs, and risk onto herders.
A contrasting case from Phobjikha’s Habe rites traces the decline and symbolic transformation of sacrifice under increasingly authoritarian monastic regulation and state-aligned Buddhist norm enforcement. Villagers test substitutions—yak to sheep to hen to eggs—reading misfortune as feedback from deities; monks increasingly conduct the rites and reframe human–deity negotiations in Buddhist idioms without blood.
I argue that these transitions reorder human–animal relations: animist cosmologies recognise animals as agents in exchange, whereas Buddhist compassion safeguards life while rendering animals ethical subjects.