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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:
- Wednesday 27 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 Wednesday 27 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Addressing the auditory dimensions of captive gibbon breeding, this paper investigates the ways in which the biopolitical emphasis on the species as locus of care is complicated and resisted through the listening practices conducted by skilled caretakers.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines a set of listening practices encountered in the context of captive breeding programs meant to ensure the survival of various endangered species of gibbon, arboreal apes endemic to the shrinking rainforests of Southeast Asia who maintain their monogamous pair-bonds through the daily bouts of coordinated vocalization that primatologists term “duets.” Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork at a dedicated gibbon conservation facility in Southern California, I show that for the skilled caretakers tasked with implementing breeding recommendations determined by an advisory body, auditory attention to the development and maintenance of these pair-bonds—without which reproduction in captivity will not occur—becomes a crucial site not only where concern is directed, but also where the biopolitical emphasis on the species as unit of conservation (e.g. Chrulew 2011; van Dooren 2014; Fredriksen 2016; Parrenas 2018) is complicated and resisted. At this facility the caretakers are perpetually torn between hearing vocalizations as the audible index of two incommensurable units and scales of conservation: one following the primatological emphasis on auditory species “stereotypes” (Geissmann 2002; cf. Mundy 2018) that reduce living organisms to generic tokens, and another grounded in their commitment to individual gibbons as radically unique beings and species as reductive abstractions. Addressing their aural negotiation of these conflicting pressures and obligations offers a way to listen beyond species that does not make audible an alternative unit, but rather hears the species itself as a single component in a fraught ethico-political assemblage of concepts and bodies perpetually in a process of aural reconfiguration.
Paper short abstract:
There is a curious mirroring of bird-human encounters enacted in geophysical places (habitats & migration routes) and in “virtual menageries” of policy documents such as the EU Bird-Habitat Directive (Berland 2019). Like virtual wings, names are lexical forms enabling travel among bodies & texts.
Paper long abstract:
In our preliminary ethnographic study of the EU Bird-Habitat Directive, we find a curious mirroring of bird-human encounters enacted in geophysical places (habitats and migration routes) and in the “virtual menageries” of policy documents (Berland 2019). We find that species names, like virtual wings, function as elemental lexical forms that enable travel between bodies and texts. Collected into categories of habitat and endangerment level, species names are mobilized as the basic building blocks of new lists called annexes. The annexes appear sui generis, as travelling actors, crossing scales and jurisdictions through different policy documents. Thus, the deeper the species names travel into policy realms, the farther they are from birds’ actual being and becoming. And yet, the policy documents are designed to circle back through their own abstractions and scales to the jurisdictions with habitats, and ultimately to improve the well-being of the birds who bear the species names (and their companions). Our paper articulates this species-based process of dematerialization and rematerialization through the five-century ornithological history of the birds known to humans as stone curlews (Burhinus oedicnemus). We argue that because the architecture of policy documents relies on species names for its basic building blocks, this may overdetermine the use of existing species categories in environmental law more broadly. And perhaps more problematically, it cements the reliance of scientific researchers on reproducing existing species categories and on species logic more generally. This argument contributes to the critical analysis of the relationship between evidence-based science and law.
Paper short abstract:
The concept of the ‘flyway’ was first introduced as a means of drawing together scientific research on bird migration with conservation. This paper re-examines the flyway concept through a comparison between different groups of birds and the various ways they inhabit flyways.
Paper long abstract:
The concept of the ‘flyway’ was first introduced by Frederick Lincoln in the 1920s as a means of drawing together scientific research on bird migration with conservation. The science of bird banding revealed new details about migration routes and the places they were traced as passing through came to be known as flyways. The concept was first developed in North America to better understand and conserve waterfowl that undertook migrations between the Arctic and wintering areas further south. Flyways were later identified in other parts of the world, connecting places across and between continents through the seasonal movements of birds. The guiding principle was that flyways demonstrated that conservation required cooperation between nations to protect migratory birds and the places they relied upon.
This paper re-examines the flyway concept through a comparison between different groups of birds and the various ways they inhabit flyways. These groups include waterbirds, which have been the traditional focus of flyway thinking because they are clearly reliant on wetlands along their routes for resting and feeding; raptors, which require aerial conduits between land masses more than feeding areas on the ground; and songbirds, which have less pronounced connections to migratory stopovers but are more resistant to the scrutiny of science and the efforts of conservation. The paper will also consider how birds embody flyways through their journeying and how this could help rethink flyways, migration and conservation as ways in which life and world are embodied, connected and politicised.
Paper short abstract:
Small farmers from the Andes do not conceive the native potatoes they grow identifying each species, but in a collective way (ch’aqru). Drawing on ethnographical data, we propose to reflect on the possibility of beyond species’ conservation.
Paper long abstract:
The Species is the main concept in science-driven conservation projects. Bur this way of conceiving the biological diversity may not be relevant for small farmers or Indigenous people who still cultivate this material and contribute to in situ conservation. In this paper, we propose to analyze the way small farmers from the Andes conceive the native potatoes they grow. We will show that, despite the impressive knowledge they have on their potatoes, they do not base their cultivations practices on the identification of the different species they grow. On the opposite, they consider their material in a “mixed” way (ch’aqru), showing the importance of considering the material they grow in a collective way, and in interaction within potatoes, with the farmer and even other beings. This might generate some difficulties to enhance in situ conservation practices informed by scientists. This reflection is based on ethnographic fieldwork realized in the Potato Park (Pisac, Peru), the main in situ conservation area held by Indigenous people, and we propose to reflect on the possibility of beyond species' conservation.