Paper short abstract:

Mongolia is one of the few places where the herding community still practices mobile pastoralism. Seasonal mobility is important to Mongolia’s cultural heritage, allows for biodiversity of both wild and domestic species, and is a key means of co-existence with multiple species of animal.

Paper long abstract:

Mongolia is home to one of the largest, continuous intact grassland ecosystems left on the planet, in large part through herding families’ ongoing unique management of their multispecies herds in this landscape. The grasslands contain a rich diversity of plant species, supporting large ungulates, including takhi, wild ass and camel, and therefore apex predators, such as wolves and snow leopard. Over thousands of years the nomadic pastoral way of life successfully co-existed within this rich and diverse grassland ecosystem. This paper proposes that a key means of retaining this ongoing pastoral existence and the accompanying biodiverse domestic and wild animal populations, relates specifically to a mobile way of life. A focus on mobility is also a feature of newer pastoral methods, such as regenerative or holistic farming practices and rotational grazing patterns and is now practiced in contrast to more sedentary, intensive farming methods. The conservation focus here is on the mobility of both humans and more-than-humans as a means of retaining both socio-cultural and biological diversity in Mongolia, through minimal fencing and containment meaning that both domestic and wild mammals can co-exist as part of an interconnected ecology.

Paper short abstract:

Lively acts and contests of heterogeneous actors surrounding Qing Tannu Uriankhai and a Mongolian national park reveal multiscalar, co-constitutive coexistence of different modes of relationality, economy and territoriality, figures of place(s) and people(s), and forms of commodi/ties/fication.

Paper long abstract:

Enlivened by eth(n)ographic fieldwork among Dukha reindeer pastoralists in northernmost Mongolia, and with special attention towards historical and contemporary reindeer herd(er)s and their homeland, this presentation exposes forms and fashion(ing)s of value, capitalization and territorialization. Expounding territorial activities and contests among diverse private, institutional and spiritual actors (local, regional, state, and foreign) in the Qing imperial territory of Tannu Uriankhai and in the Mongolian Tengis-Shishged National Park, the coexistence of different entangled modes of relationality, economy and territoriality unearths figures of place(s) and people(s), and forms of commodi/ties/fication. These figures and forms (and the actual bodies, practices and processes they trace) emerge, perdure and transform through interstitial differentiation.

The ontogenetic mould of (supra-)local and radically intersectional mastery in, surrounding and concerning ambiguously peopled, valued and processed lands that head waters of the Great Yenisey River is one of contested co(-)modification. This co(-)modification, its motivative and phenomenal actuators, and their consequentiality are mutually constitutive. This mutual constitution is fuzzy, messy and hazy, cross-cutting, cross-pollinating and transpo(u)nding variegated matryoshka dolls of partial fractality along a meshwork of Gordian-like-strands-(un)becoming(-of)-knots that tie, tug at, tear and mend not quite anfractuous symbionts at multiple non-planar scales in a crucible of liveliness. De/sur/facing figures and actualities of more-than-merely-human people, places, ontologies, capabilities, affordances, aspirations, (dis)inclinations, relations and character(s), as well as catalogues of resources, and of identity and related authenticity, strengthens not only analytical grasp of biological, socio-cultural and economic dimensions to globalization in and par-delà Mongolia, but also strategy vis-à-vis eth(n)ofuturistic concrete utopia(s).

Paper short abstract:

In India, street dog subjectivities are often reduced to bodies that consume waste which further locate them in spatial politics of urbanisation. By reconsidering street dog lives through Uexkull’s umwelt, the paper asks how we can think about multiplicity outside human social histories.

Paper long abstract:

In India, street dog subjectivities in multispecies cities are often reduced to bodies that are out of place (‘stray’) and biological in their action and metabolical in their intention (carriers of rabies and consumers of waste). Rapid urbanisation has altered the lifeworlds of street dogs making them increasingly dependent on flows of garbage and food waste. I want to suggest that an imbrication at such an intimate level with human society and consumption produce a resistance that prevents us from imagining the lifeworld of the ‘other’. By tracing these entanglements such as the postcolonial legacy of waste rooted in “slow violence” and the caste history of scavenging, we can begin to see how garbage as sustenance locates street dogs in a multispecies city. I argue that this location is fixed as the street dog is trapped in these anthropogenic landscapes and cannot exceed them to produce any other meaning. I suggest that to break this intellectual bind, we ought to revisit Uexkull’s notion of the umwelt that sought to preserve subjectivities in a world free of hierarchies and human meaning. Intriguingly, each being is also guided by an affective frame of mood and tone. Depending on the ‘mood’ of the stray dog, a pile of garbage could be food (feeding tone), possible home (dwelling tone) or shelter (protective tone). I ask two interrelated questions: is waste waste if it is not perceived so by the street dog? Are nonhuman lifeworlds accessible to us through human socio-capital histories, however multiple?

Paper short abstract:

This paper evaluates a case study illustrating one instantiation of human-javelina relations in Texas: community. I use the metaphor of "shadows" to elucidate ways in which multispecies relations become ambiguous through alterity and thus require creative approaches for conviviality.

Paper long abstract:

Javelinas (Pecari tajacu) are porcine-like mammals that range from the southwest United States to northern Argentina. While common in west and south Texas, United States, they are encountered infrequently in the Texas Hill Country. One group of javelinas resides on private property in the Hill Country and are members of a broad, multispecies community in which they participate in community-making alongside human and other neighbors.

I argue that human-javelina relations on this private property in the Texas Hill Country are formed by intimate negotiations of space and being that rely on mutual sensing and interpreting: a multispecies politics. It is through participating in multispecies politics that community is made. In order to participate with other-than-human community members, ambiguity must be addressed. For javelinas, ambiguity results from divergent modes of perception and the presence of obscuring lively interlopers (feral hogs) that, while resembling javelinas, are ecologically and behaviorally distinct. This case study demonstrates one way in which anthropocentrism is challenged, not by rejecting Western ontologies, but by modulating attention and a willingness to participate.