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- Convenors:
-
Liana Chua
(University of Cambridge)
Sara Asu Schroer (University of Oslo)
Ursula Münster (University of Oslo)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel ethnographically explores contemporary biodiversity conservation beyond one of its most basic units of thought and intervention—the species concept—and asks what other scales, units and analytics shape its workings in multiple contexts.
Long Abstract:
The species concept has had a long, 'lively existence' (Kirksey 2015) in both biodiversity conservation and popular imaginaries of extinction and environmental crisis. Yet its 'apparent conceptual transparency' (Youatt 2015) belies its highly contingent and even contradictory character. On the one hand, species boundaries and categories are heterogeneous and malleable, acquiring multiple meanings and politics across different contexts (e.g. Braverman 2015; Kirksey 2015; Youatt 2015). On the other hand, species-based classifications and taxonomies can purify and essentialise, undergirding rigid biopolitical regimes unable to account for real life's messy, transgressive transformations and relations (e.g. Fredriksen 2016; Mitchell 2016).
Building on recent problematisations of this concept, this panel aims to explore different forms and practices of conservation beyond species. We invite contributions that ethnographically describe, interrogate or think with other units of and for conservation thought and intervention, such as landscapes, multispecies communities, biosocial ecologies, and microbial terroirs (among many other things). Some of these units nuance, expand or coexist alongside the species concept; others may undermine or contradict it. By foregrounding them, we seek to provoke thought about how conservation works with (or without) species, and what new relational formations and dynamics are emerging in contemporary conservation contexts. How might careful, critical attention to soils, bacteria, and viruses, for example, reshape the object(ive)s of conservation? How can we view living (and non-living) beings through different registers? How do we (re)scale the more-than-human stakes of conservation by thinking beyond species?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Coral reefs are symbiotic assemblages whose study has expanded community ecology. Drawing on ethnography with reef-dependent peoples in Indonesia and conservation science, I examine the evolution of marine protected areas, and the ways in which they have grappled with conservation beyond species.
Paper long abstract:
Perhaps because of the overt physics of the milieu, and perhaps because large-scale changes in biological science towards ecology and then systems biology have developed simultaneously with increased ocean exploration, marine biology has a long engagement with research beyond speciation. One of the most emblematic examples of this reframe is coral reef ecology. From their base form reefs have challenged categorization: corals themselves are faunal-floral-mineral symbiotic assemblages that build living landscapes that host complex communities. They cover less than one percent of the global ocean, but play a role in roughly a quarter of life there (NOAA 2021). Through this role, they also nourish the millions of humans who have ocean-dependent livelihoods. At the same time that reefs were pushing science towards better understandings of community, mutualism, and phylogeny, many were dying. In part because of their intensively inter-specied life histories corals are specifically vulnerable to ocean temperature and chemistry changes caused by global warming and other anthropogenic environmental stressors (Hughes et al 2018, Sully et al 2019). Marine conservation bodies have struggled to adapt both to these messy, relational life histories and to their co-evolving threats. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with reef-dependent communities in eastern Indonesia and ten years of engagement with marine conservation research, in this paper I examine the evolution of marine protected areas in the Coral Triangle of Southeast Asia, and analyzes some of the ways in which conservation practice there has been variously able and unable to tackle management and conservation beyond species.
Paper short abstract:
This paper proposes that alongside conserving species, conservation should go beyond species by foregrounding people’s co-constituted relationships to an environment. In the Sundarbans, both the tiger and the tiger demon animate everyday life and the forest ethos. What might conserving both entail?
Paper long abstract:
The Sundarbans mangrove forests that range across the borders of India and Bangladesh are home to 5 million human inhabitants, a diversity of wildlife, including large numbers of tigers and tiger- demons. In this landscape of fear, several animated, nonhuman agents of the forest—such as the forest deity Bonbibi and the tiger-demon Dokkhin Rai, guide both resource use and social relationships through their punitive and protective powers, espoused by what are a set of ‘rules’ (niyams) to be followed by those who enter the forests. These ‘rules of the jungle’ emerge from the mythological memory of the forest and in turn engender a particular ethos in it. For instance, it is believed that the tiger-demon attacks fishing boats that take from the jungle more than they need. Dokkhin Rai’s presence encourages a form of self-limitation and Bonbibi eschews greed in the forest. Mythology, literature and storytelling are perhaps one of the most creative means through which communities living in a dangerous landscape attempt to understand, dwell with and alongside several other entities and beings. While national and international conservationists spend huge resources to conserve the tiger species, the Sundarbans tiger-demon, who plays an equally active role in everyday ethical life, might slowly become a ‘cultural gimmick’ showcased in museums. This paper proposes that alongside species conservation, conservation should go beyond species by foregrounding people’s relationships to an environment and how residents co-constitute themselves vis-à-vis animated landscapes and its nonhuman beings.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses Xunan kab (Melipona beecheii) - a stingless, eusocial bee endemic to the Yucatan peninsula - asking what it means to be "specialist pollinator" in blasted landscapes.
Paper long abstract:
The population decline of Xunan kab (Melipona beecheii) - a stingless, eusocial bee endemic to the Yucatan peninsula - is a familiar story in a time of global insect biodiversity loss. In this paper, I ask what it means to be a “specialist pollinator” in blasted landscapes (Tsing 2014), centralizing the Xunan kab bee as a key actor in both ecological and cultural regeneration. Unlike the European honey bees (Apis mellifera) also cultivated in the region, Xunan kab has co-evolved with native flora in ways that make the species indispensable to the regeneration of degraded tropical forests. Ongoing conservation efforts have focused on promoting traditional beekeeping practices among indigenous Maya communities, for whom the Xunan kab bee has enormous cultural significance. However, the number of knowledgeable practitioners (and Melipona hives) continue to decline, requiring new understandings of how ecological and cultural loss are interconnected.
In this paper, I draw on ethnographic engagement with Xunan kab hives and their caregivers to explore pollinator sociality as a way of thinking through native bee conservation. Pollinators are transgressive beings, troubling conventional species lines in their involvement in extra-species propagation. A critical focus on pollination not only highlights non-human modes of interspecies relationality, but recasts them as mutualistic acts of co-survivance. Drawing on Greeson’s (2019) concept of “pollinator assemblages” as a multispecies unit of landscape analysis, I trace the circular interspecies relationships between Melipona beecheii and plants, people, and other bee species. In doing so, I explore how these shifting relationships influence conservation outcomes.