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- Convenors:
-
Bernardo Couto Soares
(Utrecht University)
Cormac Cleary (Dublin City University)
Ritti Soncco (CESIE)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Posthumanism
- Sessions:
- Thursday 24 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This panel considers the ecologies, politics, and economies of a global capitalist regime that place nonhuman animals in positions of vulnerability, anxiety, and defiance. The engagement within human-nonhuman interactions with the potentiality of reconstituting knowledge, practices, and relations.
Long Abstract:
The Capitalocene (Haraway, 2016) shapes the relations of interdependence between human beings and other species and is greatly maintained by humanist Western-centered knowledge practices and politics that assume a universalistic “Gods trick” (Haraway 1988) over reality. Within this global regime, labor is more than just human, and globalization translates into Eurocentric networks of resources and intellectual capital. Within these recompositions and relocations of ecosystems, blasted landscapes (Tsing, 2015) translate into ecologies and economies violently collapsing into states of ruin and anxiety, but also of defiance of rules, as in the case of mushrooms growth in nuclear disaster zones (Tsing, 2015) and ticks prospering in areas of deforestation and climate change (Ostfeld, 2011; Pfeiffer, 2018).
Within lively capital (Haraway, 2008), nonhuman animals integrate the multispecies chain of factory farming, the pet industry, or veterinary health. But within biomedical practices, the engagement within human-nonhuman interactions have the potentiality for “thinking with care” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) as a relational force that resists moralistic visions. And even within the precarious conditions of a dairy farm, there is a possibility for the construction of different knowledge that question the human-animal divide, by acknowledging non-human language in cows (Leonie, 2019).
Our speakers are encouraged to consider possibilities of thinking and living in a multispecies world that defies dominant capitalist culture. Which relations and practices may be considered? Which knowledge production politics should be contested? How can we decolonize politics and science? What ethics are possible within a more-than-human living?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 24 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at the practice of rehoming ex-battery hens using an on-line forum as a data-base alongside interviews. Rescuing chickens is seen as a challenge to commercial production. It leads to intimate hen-human relationships that can help improve people's mental health and well-being.
Paper long abstract:
The production of chickens for eggs and meat in the UK is part of a vast industrialised system of food production. Welfare standards are pitiful and the lives of the birds short and often painful. This paper looks at some of those who seek to rehome ex-battery chickens whose egg producing lives are over. The personal motivations of chicken-keepers and their relationships with their birds are examined using an on-line forum as a data-base, alongside interviews. There are areas of ambiguity and negotiation, which online forum moderators seek to control, in areas such as the hatching of chicks, the culling of cockerels and vegetarianism. A perhaps surprising result of this study is the extent to which rescued chickens can help improve people’s mental health. There is something about the act of rescuing and the innate friendship offered by many hybrid laying hens, that provide a powerful resource. Intimate relationships that clearly benefit both the birds and their keepers are often achieved. An on-line, international human community is created in which the degree of involvement and sentiment shown by members, both for one another and for their birds, can seem wildly at odds with the normative view of chickens as a mass commercial product.
Paper short abstract:
Affirming animal agency and animal voices, this research shows how animal sanctuaries make space for the possibility of learning and experimenting towards a world beyond capitalist anthropocentrism. The practices of care-giving are knowledge-producing for all those involved, human and nonhuman.
Paper long abstract:
The practices of taking care are knowledge producing for all those involved, human and nonhuman. In the context of formerly farmed animal sanctuaries, human care-givers provide a space of refuge, respite and pleasure for the nonhuman inhabitants. Such places become spaces of contestation, in which all those involved, and those on the margins, are slowly transformed through the knowledge that emerges in daily interactions. The human care-givers learn what the nonhuman animals need, individually, the animals learn to navigate a new kind of life, away from exploitation, veterinarians learn to provide a different sort of care, not precisely the same as it would have been on a farm, and the local villagers get to see nonhuman animals with new eyes, living their lives regardless of what they are ‘good for’. Using qualitative methods, specifically, semi-structured interviews with the humans involved, this research wishes to remain in conversation with other critical animal scholars. Following previous research, affirming animal agency (Blattner, Donaldson, & Wilcox, 2020) and animal voices (Meijer, 2019), it is shown how the sanctuary space provides possibilities for learning and experimenting towards a world beyond capitalist anthropocentrism.
Blattner, C. E., Donaldson, S., & Wilcox, R. (2020). Animal Agency in Community: A Political Multispecies Ethnography of VINE Sanctuary. POLITICS AND ANIMALS, 6, 22.
Meijer, E. (2019). When animals speak: toward an interspecies democracy. New York: New York University Press.
Paper short abstract:
While commodification often creates alienation, Borana herders continue their intimate relations with cattle. Does the market economy provide herders with a means to exercise a novel form of dominance? How could it contribute to the understanding of classic human-cattle equation?
Paper long abstract:
While it is commonly observed that the process of commodification creates alienation, my fieldwork with Borana herders in Southern Ethiopia suggests that their intimate relations with cattle continue. During the period of the socialist Derg, Ethiopian government organised and purchased cattle from Borana herders, to both fund its own economy through trading with the Middle East, and to support the war against the Somali. Borana herders did not transform their intimate relations with cattle into a form of commodified alienation. Instead, many of them utilised it as a strategy to enlarge their herd. They sold their cattle in the market, earned the cash, with which they purchased calves. Cattle was not turned into ordinary goods. However, the mode of herd management was transformed. In order to enlarge the herd, they could now not only rely on the reproductivity of the herd, but also the market. With ethnographic evidence, I ask if the market economy provides herders with a means to exercise a form of dominance that did not exist previously? How could this layer of understanding contribute to the classic human-cattle equation in the studies of pastoralism in Africa? And ultimately, how could we understand the role of the state in terms of negotiating herders’ relations with their cattle?
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the relations developed between autistics and horses during equine therapy. It seeks to investigate the knowledge and practices produced in these human – non-human sensory and affective interactions and embodiments.
Paper long abstract:
Critical disability studies have stressed the interconnection of species in the context of the autonomous, able-bodied subject’s displacement. Disabled embodiments and differences in touching, sensing and communicating create new understandings in unmapped areas of knowledge production. Interdependence with animal guides and companion animals create vital bonds and alter existing human and non-human power relations. Many autistics have verbally noted, or shown through their acts and embodiments, their familiarity with animals and the intimate relations they form with each other. During equine therapy, autistics’ affective and sensory experiences are shaped in relation with the horse’s movements and sensory state. These human and non-human interrelations and becoming together decenter anthropocentric concepts and social organization of language, senses, affects and normative modes of living together. The paper seeks to explore the practices involved in these human-animal relations. It asks whether equine therapy values autistics’ non-normative sensory processes as well as horses’ interactions and deconstructs the dominant human-animal divide or whether the concept of ‘cure’ and ‘therapy’ normalize autistics’ modes of communication. The discussion in question regards the tensions between normative concepts of cure and realities of unexpected care. How is knowledge shaped in these human-animal contexts? How are these experiences of relating to animals bridged with existing social understandings of human superiority?
Paper short abstract:
This article explores the potentials of acquiring an hyphenated identity as a herder-ethnographer as an anthropological method to go beyond anthropocentric restitutions of life-worlds and towards multispecies ethnographies that pave the way to more inclusive knowledge production.
Paper long abstract:
In a pastoral ecosystem, the herders', the animals' and the environment's respective roles and identities are intertwined, interdependent and mutually constitutive. Yet, for too long, the latter two were only deemed good to "think with", as "hapless bearers of symbolic projection" (Latour 2005:10), in order to better understand human beings: the story was always one-sided. Anthropology, as a discipline etymologically concerned with human beings, is trying to find its place. The epistemological question at stake touches upon the possibility of studying the relationships between human beings and other-than-humans and how these are mutually shaped (Meuret and Despret 2016, Haraway 2008, Deleuze and Guattari 1980) - while, on the one hand, avoiding anthropocentrism and on the other, not taking up the role of amateur ethologists by focusing exclusively on other animals. It is in this sense that a growing number of authors call for an expansion and a redefinition of anthropology as the study of more than one species, as an "anthropology of life" (Pitrou 2015:1810). I would like to argue that acquiring a hyphenated identity (Plumwood 2002:16), that of a herder-ethnographer, is a promising methodology in this endeavour. We have all been witnesses to the disastrous consequences on our world and fellow earth beings (Caneda 2015) that our anthropocentrism have had in recent times. Anthropology has as much to gain from, as a discipline concerned with knowledge production, as to contribute to the understanding of other life-worlds and, thereby, in paving the way to co-inhabit the Earth on fairer grounds.