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- Convenors:
-
Muhammad Kavesh
(University of Toronto)
Natasha Fijn (The Australian National University)
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- Discussants:
-
Sophie Chao
(University of Sydney)
Eben Kirksey (Deakin University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel connects critical debates on the transformation of human interactions with more-than-human selves and living beings through the forces of capitalism and neoliberalism, and considers how this jeopardizes both biological and socio-cultural diversity in a globalized world.
Long Abstract:
In this panel, we explore how the transformation of human interactions with living beings through the forces of capitalism and neoliberalism leads us into a precarious existence, jeopardizing both biological and socio-cultural diversity. Drawing from the works of Haraway (2016), Tsing (2015), and Kohn (2007, 2013), contributors to this panel are asked to re-think our connections with more-than-humans by taking guidance from local communities and Indigenous ways of co-existing with other beings. Many hybrid communities, both human and nonhuman, have developed ways for living alongside one another, including multiple species of mammal, biodiverse forms within forests, communities of fungi or plankton, or even humans existing with zoonotic diseases. We intend to critically evaluate the role of 'modern' forms of production, distribution and consumption in a globalized world. Through a multispecies anthropological approach, panellists have the opportunity to explore how materialistic, profit and market-oriented forms of engagement with more-than-humans may be in stark contrast to other kinds of co-existence with life on earth, such as mobile forms of pastoralism, or the sustenance of a community by the hunting and gathering of local species. This panel will explore how a post-industrial approach, perhaps including habitat destruction for commercial gain, Western-centric forms of conservation, intensive agriculture, or industrial-scale wet markets, can be detrimental to local socio-cultural communities while impacting species diversity. Instead of a destructive way of engaging with other beings, we could turn to different kinds of co-existence that more readily encompasses more-than-human worlds.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This talk critically explores transformations in the human-donkey relationship in Pakistan and examines how the use of the donkey skin for preparing a traditional Chinese medicine provide us with an alternate avenue to analytically reflect the sustainability approach of China's BRI.
Paper long abstract:
Recent scholarly studies supporting the sustainable approach of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) argue that China’s mega-money project spanning across more than 100 countries promises to bring sustainability through rapid completion of infrastructural projects. This talk instead focuses on the human-donkey relationship and, through a careful exploration of the lifeworlds of poor donkey keepers in Pakistan, argues that sustainability should be measured by determining the wellbeing of both humans and more-than-humans, and by preserving their knotted relationship that serves these communities. By critically analyzing the donkey trade and slaughter for developing a traditional Chinese medicine, ejioa, this talk examines the disappearance of donkeys from the local ecology, the animal’s shifting role from a valuable working partner for poor families to an exploitable commodity in a globalized world, and long term social, economic, and environmental impacts associated with a decline in the donkey population in Pakistan. By reflecting on the intertwined relationship between donkeys and their keepers, this talk provides an analytical reflection of the BRI and its sustainability.
Paper short abstract:
This talk discusses fears of the Gwadar fishing community where China’s billion-dollar development of strategic seaport, a flagship project of CPEC, has been threatening fishers’ indigeneity and disregarding the local consciousness while deepening the Eurocentric culture/nature division.
Paper long abstract:
The development of the strategic deep-water seaport of Gwadar, a key feature of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), is a multi-billion-dollar project that has been contemplated as a game-changer in Pakistan. However, the local fishing communities of Gwadar, the gateway for China’s trade ambitions, face threats of displacement, migration, and unemployment. These threats not only target the socio-cultural fabric of these people but also their centuries-old wisdom which directs their perceptions of ecological wellbeing, sustains their livelihoods, and ensures a continued relationship with nature. This talk explores the ramifications of China’s growing interests in the fishing industry for developing broader socio-economic and ecological recommendations. It moves beyond critique, and towards a policy-oriented analysis that offers recommendations for sustaining the knots of indigeneity. Going beyond the generalized modes of reasoning that envisage development as an instrument toward the hankering of economic growth, it offers to closely recognize the astounding role of the bio-cultural continuum in the lives of local fishers.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores rooftop rearing practices in urban Egypt, where lower-middle class families rear some animals for food. Women, laboring rooftop animals into food, always contrast their rooftop-reared animals with store-bought meat, whose quality and gastronomic history are dubious and unknown.
Paper long abstract:
Rearing animals on urban rooftops in Egypt is a long-standing practice through which people sustain their requirements of meat protein. Rooftop animals include ducks, chickens, geese, goats, rabbits, and sheep among various others. It is usually urban lower-middle classes who opt for rooftop rearing, which mainly takes place in four or five-floors extended family homes. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork, this research explores rooftops as gendered spaces in which women practice what I propose calling "bread-nurturing", a gendered labor by which women secure and provide nutritious and delicious, preferably rooftop-nurtured, food for the family. Broken down into household leftovers and fodder, a rooftop animal feed helps nurture and shape the taste of a rooftop animal as "clean", that which my interlocutors always casted as superior to any store-bought animal whose feed is unknown & untrusted. A rooftop animal's essential value, then, is its taste, expressed through knowledge and control of the animal's [gastronomic] past. In light of dwindling rooftops and the proliferation of cheap imported poultry and meat, rooftop rearing practices expose a different mode of multispecies engagement. This intimate multispecies engagement is what grants rooftop animals a special status: They are never sold or exchanged beyond kin networks and immediate families. Imbued with nurturance, care, and countless hours of feeding, cleaning, and rearing, rooftop multispecies relations deviate from market-oriented forms of engagement in industrial poultry farms in which feed is engineered to accelerate the growth of animals and amass largest profits in shortest time spans.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the place of the animal in Egypt's colonial history to complicate contemporary definitions of cruelty and actions of care. It imagines more attentive, localized ethical codes that take into account the context of both animals and humans.
Paper long abstract:
This paper, based on ethnographic research in Egypt, complicates unchallenged notions of cruelty and animal rights by looking at the history of colonization and the imposition of western ethical codes through development rhetoric and animal care projects. It takes an intersectional approach to explore how contemporary animal care projects are affected by Egypt's colonial history to argue for the embeddedness of animals in our political and social worlds. “Animals” are not the same everywhere: innocent and saveable and so context is important in deciding the care they need.
The paper specifically interrogates the impulse of foreign women to intervene and give care or "save" animals in the Global South without regard to their context and existing relationships. It argues for more attentive, localized ethical codes and care practices that take into account the context of both animals and humans.
The paper ends with an opening of imagination: what would our world look like if we build our ethical codes and definitions of care in community with non-humans?