Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Muhammad Kavesh
(University of Toronto)
Natasha Fijn (The Australian National University)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussants:
-
Sophie Chao
(University of Sydney)
Eben Kirksey (Deakin University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 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 Friday 29 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Heritage breed farmers have complex, interdependent relationships with their animals, who they often regard as kin, yet routinely kill. I look to Indigenous ontologies in making sense of the complexities of loving and killing animals to sustain breed and bloodline diversity on heritage breed farms.
Paper long abstract:
Indigenous Australians have long counted both native and domestic animals among their kin, with care for country and its inhabitants—including respectful killing—the corollary (Bird Rose 2012; Musharbash 2017). By contrast, the economic imperatives of settler-colonialism have transformed large swathes of Indigenous Australian country into sites of agricultural extraction. Intensive breeding programs have increased the productivity and profitability of a small number of modern commercial livestock breeds, which has in turn resulted in the homogenisation of bloodlines, and the extinction of numerous heritage breeds. Perceptions of farm animals are increasingly polarised among non-Indigenous Australians, with livestock treated as expendable commodities by agribusiness, while animal rights activists condemn all forms of animal death.
Between these two poles, Australian heritage breed farmers persist with their less profitable breeds, as they value their unique qualities and histories, and contributions to agrobiodiversity. While selling animals for meat underpins these farmers' livelihoods, living interdependently with their particular breeds, often over generations, means that many farmers love their animals and consider them kin. In this paper, I look to Indigenous ontologies in making sense of the complexities of the life death conundrum on heritage breed farms, and the role of kinning, killing and love in the conservation of rare and heritage breeds.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how European Union food safety regulations have helped to homogenise human-microbe relations in local cheese production in Croatia. It argues that one consequence of this is that some cheese cultures may die out, and asks how these human-microbe relations might be reanimated.
Paper long abstract:
Concerning human-microbe relations in food production, European Union legislation predominately places its focus on keeping those microbes that are harmful to human health under control. As such, this legislation takes a Pasteurian approach whereby human-microbe partnerships such as the ones Paxson (2008, 2013) has described in her writing about post-Pasteurian cheese makers are absent. Based on fieldwork on human-microbe relations in dairy production in Croatia and building on work by scholars working in similar ‘post-socialist’ contexts (Dunn 2003, Jung 2014, Mincyte 2014), I describe how this approach taken in EU legislation serves to homogenise human-microbe relations: to work legally, farmers must follow these regulations and employ the food hygiene technologies they proscribe. One effect of this is that it has the potential to contribute to the homogenisation of the local microbiome, since cheeses that are made using “traditional” techniques are no longer legal. These starter cultures are not being nurtured by farmers in the same way as they were before, where there is less and less interest in making cheeses using these now "illegal" methods. In this paper, and in response to this, I consider from a number of different angles how human-microbe relations in cheese-making in this particular social context could be reanimated.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines relations between humans, microbes and divinity in the Ganges River through the lenses of microbiology. I bring together viruses, holy water, and pharmaceuticals to explore alternatives to the configurations of “antibiotic modernity” that are averse to more-than-human diversity.
Paper long abstract:
The waters of the Ganges River are teeming with microbial lifeforms. Water quality testing and bacteriological analysis indicate extremely high levels of faecal coliforms and the prevalence of antibiotic resistant bacteria in the river. According to scientific data the river’s waters are not fit for drinking, bathing and at parts not even agricultural use, all of which are central to the daily lives of the local population for subsistence and religious purposes.
In this paper I propose to look at the Ganges water as more-than-human substance, filled with microbes and divinity, to think about the different microbiological and religious approaches that collide in the river. More specifically I explore the entanglement of bacteriophage research and the purifying powers of the Ganga goddess in water that challenge the categories of modernity and tradition.
I contrast antibiotic understandings of microbes based on Pasteurian conception of public health that aim at erasing germs widely to more contemporary possibilities of using life to manage life that have been brewing in the same waters. I argue antibiotic approaches to microbes are intrinsically attached to capitalist forms of production, distribution and consumption that produce the current configuration of scientific and public health concerns and possibilities that impact all other aspects of daily life. Focusing on probiotic understandings of human-microbe relationship I consider alternative possibilities of doing science and medicine that are more attuned to more-than-human diversity.
Paper short abstract:
We explore the practices of modelling human cells in nonhuman organisms and how researchers approach interspecies relationships within organisms. Broadening of interspecies relations across cellular levels can reframe boundaries structuring research between human research subjects and animal models
Paper long abstract:
Interspecies relationships are becoming key units of analysis in the anthropology of biomedicine. Nevertheless, anthropological approaches to interspecies relations should be broadened in light of both the history and present practices of ‘chimera biology’ - a series of 20th and 21st century experimental techniques and processes that use interspecies organisms as model organisms and research tools. Drawing on multi-sited research conducted between 2020 - 2021 with bioscientists, we explore the practices and processes of modelling human cells and tissues in non-human organisms, and how researchers approach interspecies relationships that occur deep inside developing organisms. We argue that a broadening of interspecies relations across embryonic, cellular and organismic levels can help us reframe dominant boundaries that structure clinical and translational research between human research subjects and animal models, along with contributing to anthropology’s disciplinary ability to respond to the ethical and technical demands of contemporary bioscience.