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Paper short abstract:

This talk focuses on necro-political care developed by subjects involved in a global conservation project of invasive species eradication. It shows their partial resistance to globalization by attending to their daily and affective relations of care for animals, ecosystems, and colonial pasts.

Paper long abstract:

My research in Patagonia centers on a globalist conservation project that seeks to eradicate all the beavers. Once brought from Canada, they are today severely damaging native ecosystems. While I critically address the militaristic and colonial approach of the project, in this talk, I focus on the partial care practices that resist the standardization of ethics, technologies, and nature protection.

Inspired by Anibal Quijano and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s reflections on the coloniality of mestizo subjectivities and desires to become Euro-America, I explore the partial responses of care in which biologists, trappers, and park guards with colonially troubled subjectivities engage. These involve care for the beavers, the forests, and the ecosystems but also for the ghosts of violent memories of colonization, militarization, and national assimilation.

I highlight two cases. The first is a park guard who refuses to use traps mandated by the project, considered humane by European standards. His refusal centers on daily relationships with the beavers and the environment from which notions of ethics based on shared suffering are privileged over maximizing efficiency and economic cost reduction. The second involves a married couple of biologists from Santiago de Chile who joined the eradication project. Focusing on their first animal killing attempts – and their failures-, I examine how the act of killing haunts them both and the silences they navigated. Grappling with masculine mandates in the region patriarchal dynamics within their relationship and within science, they find some responses to care for the beavers and learn to kill better.