Contribution short abstract

Evading modalities of movement of chamois and mountaineers in the Tatra mountains, form a more-than-human alliance that resists modernist conservation policies. Moreover, they are both actors in larger neoliberal, anthropocentric, and extractivist forces causing decay in the mountain ecosystem.

Contribution long abstract

Tatra National Park has governed the Tatra mountains since the mid-20th century through regulations enforced by rangers and legitimised by scientific research and public relations. This authority is concentrated in the figure of the endemic and endangered Tatra chamois.

Yet after nearly fifty years of research, employees remain uncertain about the chamois’ main threats, the causes of population fluctuations, and why the animal defies an imagined figure of a timid, rare endemic species by exhibiting synanthropic behaviour which is deemed “unnatural” by conservationists.

Mountaineers—framed as a threat to the chamois and as drivers of its synanthropy—use infrapolitical bodily tactics (Scott 1985, 1990) to evade park oversight, control, and sanctions. They also ally with synanthropic chamois-as-friend, further undermining conservation policies and their legitimacy.

I argue that these evading modalities of movement of both chamois and mountaineers, form a more-than-human alliance that resists protectionist epistemology, modernist relation to nature (Descola 1996) as well as assumptions of care and justice rooted in “knowledge-as-illumination,” itself entangled with colonial and extractivist violence (Neimanis 2023).

I draw on a twelve-month multispecies ethnography following researchers, chamois, and mountaineers—walking, sneaking, hiding, climbing, and collecting excrement with them.

To avoid romanticising either group, I delink resistance from progressivist emancipatory teleology or subaltern heroism (Hoodfar 1997; Mahmood 2005). Instead, I position my arguent within broader environmental struggles in which both the Tatras and the park are shaped by neoliberal, anthropocentric, and extractivist forces contributing to the decay of the institution and the mountain ecosystem.