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Paper short abstract

In light of antibiotic resistance, this paper examines how poultry care in Tanzania unfolds within fractured ecologies shaped by extractive food systems. It traces how medicinal plants are mobilized as ambivalent actors in relational and affective practices that negotiate the limits of Cheap Nature.

Paper long abstract

Chickens represent paradigmatic symbols of the Capitolocene as their bodies and lives have been profoundly modified and cheapened in the pursuit of affordable protein within a system of power, profit and re/production (Moore 2017). Antibiotics have played a central role in this process by compensating for inadequate care and temporarily stabilizing productivity (Denyer Willis and Chandler 2019). The rise of antibiotic resistance, however, emerges as a material sign of the limits of this cheapening strategy: biological life can no longer reliably absorb the ecological costs displaced onto it. This raises the question of how poultry care is reworked at the multispecies margins of extractive food systems when the conditions for Cheap Nature begin to fray.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with poultry keepers in rural Tanzania, this paper investigates how human-animal interactions unfold within fractured health ecologies. Within this landscape, medicinal plants are increasingly re-incorporated into poultry healthcare practices, emerging as ambivalent yet transformative actors. While such practices cannot escape capitalism’s extractive logics, they recall the importance of the intimate, relational forms of knowledge and attentiveness required for more-than-human care. By critically attending to the multispecies labor that sustains poultry farming, the paper explores how the affective and practical engagements through which humans, chickens, and plants are entangled can be understood as situated endeavors of repair. In doing so, it examines how healing and care are redefined through a ‘politics of habitability’ (Langwick 2018) amid precarious lifeworlds.