Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores crofters’ caring relationships with their animals in the Scottish Highlands. I emphasise the importance of broader political economic factors in shaping these relations, while considering how they also sustain the more-than-human assemblages comprising local landscapes.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation draws upon ten months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Skye and Lochalsh region of the Scottish Highlands (Gàidhealtachd). My doctoral research explored the diverse ways people in this region cultivate caring relationships with their natural landscapes, viewing them as both spaces for recreation and labour. Here I draw upon interviews and participant observation conducted with crofters, smallholders who are required to make purposive use of their land under the 1993 Crofters (Scotland) Act. Crofting has been at the heart of various debates regarding land use in the Gàidhealtachd, particularly regarding environmental conservation. In this presentation, I focus on crofters’ relationships with their animals, examining the interspecies affective encounters they engage in. I also consider how such relationships are fundamentally shaped by broader questions of political economy and capitalist integration. I explore the history of crofting as a form of social reproduction, with particular reference to the Gaelic concepts of dùthchas and tuath, and use the framework of "ecosocial reproduction" to describe how crofters sustain the human and more-than-human assemblages that comprise local landscapes. I discuss the corncrake, a bird whose conservation is deeply intertwined with crofting, to illustrate how such forms of more-than-human communal renewal can promote ecological justice in an otherwise ecologically devastated region.