Nurturing Alternative Futures [1 ed.] 1032563265, 9781032563268

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Nurturing Alternative Futures

“Nurturing Alternative Futures engages in uniquely creative and critical ways with the situatedness and interconnectedness of more-than-human entanglements in an age of planetary unravelling. Centring the dynamics of proximity and distance in the (un)making of biocultural lifeworlds, its richly textured and varied contributions offer urgent avenues for nourishing alternative futures, anchored in an atmosphere of multispecies care, concern, and justice.” – Sophie Chao, author of In the Shadow of the Palms (2022) “This critical and imaginative collection invites us to embrace futures that are teeming with probiotic viruses, Indigenous companion species, donkeys, peccaries, microbial cultures, aquatic multispecies assemblages, and forested ecotones. As market forces destroy cherished lifeways, this collection invites us to make worlds with new generative stories.” – Eben Kirksey, author of Emergent Ecologies (2015) Developing upon emerging environmental humanities and multispecies anthropological theories, this book provides a fresh perspective on how we might rethink more-than-human relationality and why it is important to “nurture alternative futures.” The diverse chapters examine the life trajectories of people, animals, plants, and microbes, their lived experiences and constituted relationality, offering new ways to reinterpret and reimagine a multi-species future in the current era of planetary crisis. The ethnographic case studies from around the world feature a combination of biological and cultural diversity with analyses that prioritize local and Indigenous modes of thinking. While engaging with Mongolian herders, Indigenous Yucatec Mayan, Congolese farmers, rural Pakistani donkey keepers, Australian heritage breed farmers, Croatian cheesemakers, Japanese oyster aquafarmers, Texan corn growers, Californian cannabis producers, or Hindu devotees to the Ganges River, the chapters offer a grounded anthropological understanding

of imagining a future in relationality with other beings. The stories, lived experiences, and mutual worlding that this volume presents offer a portrayal of alternative forms of multispecies coexistence, rather than an anthropocentric future. Muhammad A. Kavesh is an Australian Research Council DECRA fellow, affiliated with the Australian National University’s School of Culture, History, and Language. Natasha Fijn is Director of the Australian National University’s Mongolia Institute. An ethnographic researcher and observational filmmaker, she is recipient of a mid-career Australian Research Council Future Fellowship.

Nurturing Alternative Futures Living with Diversity in a More-than-Human World

Edited by Muhammad A. Kavesh and Natasha Fijn

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Muhammad A. Kavesh and Natasha Fijn; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Muhammad A. Kavesh and Natasha Fijn to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9781032563268 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032573588 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003439011 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003439011 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of figures vii List of contributors ix Acknowledgementsxiii

Introduction: Storying Cultural and Biological Diversity1 MUHAMMAD A. KAVESH AND NATASHA FIJN

  1 Blood Ties: Kinning and Killing on Australian Heritage Breed Farms

15

CATIE GRESSIER

  2 Demystifying the Promise of Sustainability through the China-Pakistan Donkey Trade

33

MUHAMMAD A. KAVESH

  3 Of People and Peccaries: Perception and Politics in the Texas Hill Country

51

ADAM P. JOHNSON

  4 Mongolia’s Biocultural Landscape: The Importance of Domestic and Wild Multispecies Diversity

67

NATASHA FIJN

  5 Cultivating the Ocean: Reflections on Desolate Life and Oyster Restoration in Hiroshima

85

MARIKO YOSHIDA

  6 Entangled (After)Lives: Naturalcultural Matricides and Reproduction in Northeastern DR Congo CATHERINE WINDEY

104

vi Contents   7 Threatened Maize, Threatened Language: Indigenous Engagements with Biocultural Conservation in Yucatan, Mexico

122

ERIKO YAMASAKI

  8 Ecotones in the Emerald Triangle: Zones of Multispecies Co-Occupation, Coexistence, and Conflict in the California Redwoods

137

GORDON ULMER, DARA ADAMS, RHIANNON CATTANEO AND RICKI MILLS

  9 “Cheese” and “Cheez”?: On the Relation between PlantBased and Dairy-Based Cheeses

153

SARAH CZERNY

10 Microbes and Biocultural Diversity in the Ganges: Antibiotic Modernity and the Revival of Phage Therapy

169

VICTOR SECCO



Afterword: Rethinking “Green” Energy Futures through Avian Landscapes

187

SARA ASU SCHROER

Index193

Figures

1.1 Sean with his mob of cattle 2.1 The synergy between the SDGs and the BRI 2.2 Donkeys support herders by not only protecting the cattle from feral dogs but also develop an intimate bond with cows and buffalos 2.3 Donkeys working as garbage collectors to keep the city clean 3.1 Collared peccaries, also known as javelinas or skunk pigs, are native to south and west Texas. This javelina is feeding on corn dispersed from an automated feeder. This individual is displaying anxiety, indicated by the hairs standing up on the back 3.2 Javelinas engaging in a “squabble.” This involves opening the mouth widely, a distinct “wobbly” vocalization, and sometimes shaking their head back and forth, striking the con-specific. These are often short-lived and are resolved quickly 3.3 Hours-old babies follow their mother to the drip pond. Photograph by Roger Gray© 4.1 Herder riding a horse, while leading a train of ox carts. Image: Natasha Fijn, Bulgan province, 2005 4.2 Wooden cart being utilised for a different purpose, as a drying rack for dairy products. Image: Natasha Fijn, Arkhangai province, 2017 4.3 In picking this blue gentian (khukh degd), the boy was told to leave some of the plants intact. Image: Natasha Fijn, Arkhangai province, 2017 5.1 Oyster boats in operation for seafloor cultivation to improve the sediment condition in Jigozen. Copyright: Mariko Yoshida 5.2 An oyster producer pulling a steel tiller on board to wash away the sludge. The tiller measures approximately 165 × 193 × 60 cm in size. Copyright: Mariko Yoshida

27 37 41 42

52

54 61 73 74 79 88 89

viii Figures 5.3 Oyster producers in Jigozen scattering bags full of oyster shells into the sea. Copyright: The Jigozen Fisheries Cooperative 6.1 A former colonial palm oil factory taken over by plants 7.1 A man looking at his corn in the milpa 2019 9.1 Filtering the milk for cheese production with a cheese-cloth 9.2 A selection of plant-based cheeses 9.3 Microbes (Pencillium roqueforti) transforming cashew milk into cashew cheese 10.1 Waste piles in front of houses on the Assi River bank. Humans, dogs, cows, pigs, and crows are commonly seen sharing space in Varanasi among waste and water. Photo by the author 10.2 Sampling water from the Ganges River. Photo by the author

97 105 125 157 160 165

172 175

Contributors

Dara Adams is a research associate and lecturer in environmental studies and anthropology at Cal Poly Humboldt. Her research centres on themes around community ecology and interspecies interactions. Her research has been published most recently in scientific journals such as Ethology, Animal Behaviour, and American Journal of Primatology. Rhiannon Cattaneo is a graduate of Cal Poly Humboldt with an emphasis on multispecies ethnography, post-colonial theory, ecofeminism, and cannabis studies. She has worked on the ecotones project since its inception and has been engaged in multiple research activities including ethnographic fieldwork, data management, autoethnography, and literature review. Sarah Czerny works at the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka. She is a social anthropologist who is interested in human-animal relations, with a particular interest in milk production and consumption. She is the author of “Absent Interests: On the Abstraction of Human and Animal Milks” (Brill 2022). Natasha Fijn is Director of the Australian National University’s Mongolia Institute. She has been awarded a mid-career ARC Future Fellowship to conduct research on “A Multi-species Anthropological Approach to Influenza” (2022–26). Natasha wrote a seminal multispecies ethnography based in Mongolia, Living with Herds: human-animal coexistence in Mongolia (2011). Catie Gressier is an Australian Research Council (DECRA) Fellow in the School of Agriculture and Environment at the University of Western Australia. An environmental anthropologist with regional expertise in Australia and southern Africa, her research explores foodways, interspecies relations, tourism, and health and illness. Adam P. Johnson is associated with the environmental anthropology program at the University of Texas at San Antonio and also teaches at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His current research explores

x Contributors encounters between humans and javelinas in Texas, with a focus on positive associations that illustrate the potential for multispecies justice. Muhammad A. Kavesh is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at the Australian National University. He is the author of Animal Enthusiasms (2021, Routledge) and co-editor of two special journal issues (Anthropology Today [Feb 2023], The Australian Journal of Anthropology [2021]). He has also published with American Ethnologist, Journal of Asian Studies, Oxford Journal of Development Studies, South Asia, Society & Animals and Senses & Society among others. Ricki Mills is a graduate of Cal Poly Humboldt with an emphasis on cultural anthropology, gender, and cannabis studies. She has worked in the cannabis industry in Northern California through its evolution since 2000 and brings this tacit knowledge into her research on female legacy growers’ role in regional development. Sara Asu Schroer is an anthropologist and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the University of Oslo. Based on empirical research in Europe, her work engages predominantly with environmental topics, i.e., modern hunting, domestication, conservation as well as with questions of ethics and care in changing anthropogenic landscapes. Victor Secco is an anthropologist researching health matters connecting humans, microbes, and environments. His research at the University of Manchester focused on bacteriophages in the Ganges River. He currently follows ethnographically large-scale environmental microbiome research in Europe as part of the HealthXCross project at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Gordon Ulmer is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Ethnographic Research Lab at Cal Poly Humboldt. He has published on themes of environmental change and migration, resource extraction and labour, the effects of climate change on health and somatic stability, waste infrastructure, and unequal ecological exchange. Catherine Windey is an Associate Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Development Policy of the University of Antwerp and Policy Advisor for International Climate Negotiations and Cooperation at Belgium’s Climate Change Department. Her scholarly interest lies in environmental/climate policies, and in changing human-nonhuman entanglements from the perspectives of anthropology and critical geography. Eriko Yamasaki is a social anthropologist who specializes in biocultural diversity. Currently, she researches and teaches at the University of Marburg, Germany. Her postdoctoral research project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) studies indigenous engagements with agrobiodiversity and language maintenance in Yucatan, Mexico.

Contributors  xi Mariko Yoshida is Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University. She has authored several articles on the intertwined trajectory of ecological uncertainty and precariousness through the Pacific Oyster’s commodity chain. Her monograph, provisionally titled “Thinking with Oysters in an Age of Uncertainty,” is in preparation.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the Ngunnawal people, upon whose ancestral lands we work at The Australian National University, as well as the ancestral lands of the Indigenous peoples who are important collaborators in the research that went into the content of this book. This book had its origin in a panel we co-organized at The Royal Anthropological Institute conference, “Anthropology and Conservation” in October 2021. Our panel titled “Living with Diversity in a More-than-Human World” attracted 19 submissions, from which we selected 16 papers. Running over four days, the papers were eloquently commented on by discussants Eben Kirksey and Sophie Chao. We would like to thank all who participated, facilitated, and commented within the panel discussions during the RAI conference. We have received support from the Australian Research Council (ARC) for our respective projects, which made work on this book possible. An ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (DE220101073) was instrumental to Muhammad Kavesh’s work, while two separate ARC grants contributed towards Natasha Fijn’s contribution (DP190103110; FT210100452), based at the School of Culture, History, and Language at the Australian National University. We are grateful to our colleagues in anthropology for their suggestions and support. Muhammad Kavesh also completed some work on this volume while working as a Faculty of Arts and Science Fellow at the University of Toronto and would like to acknowledge the generosity and kindness of his mentors, Naisargi Dave and Waqas Butt. We are deeply grateful to the contributors within this volume for submitting many versions of their papers and reworking drafts according to tight deadlines. Their contribution reflects the rich possibility of thinking beyond a limited future, integrating local and Indigenous worldviews to sustain diverse multispecies relationalities. They all have been phenomenal in bringing conceptual novelty, methodological specificity, and an accessible writing style to their chapter contributions. Our appreciation to Katherine Ong and her team at Routledge for careful handling of this project, and to two anonymous reviewers for offering generous and insightful comments.

Introduction Storying Cultural and Biological Diversity Muhammad A. Kavesh and Natasha Fijn

Despite ongoing trysts with capitalism and the objectification of nature as an appropriating category, zoonotic diseases, such as the coronavirus pandemic and newly emerging forms of influenza, indicate that our futures are inextricably knotted with more-than-human beings on multiple scales. Contact between domestic and wild species can create the opportunity for deadly viruses to recombine within new carrier species. Even though the primary source of the coronavirus pandemic may perplex scientists for years, it is irrefutable that habitat destruction and capitalist modes of production have crafted a unique multispecies entanglement, exposing our bodies to microbes and pathogens, resulting in the spread of newly mutated diseases.1 While transforming others, humans are forever changed in ways never imagined before. Humanity has been forced to excogitate the value of uncharted assemblages, becoming just one component of an enveloping multispecies world. As anthropologist Agustín Fuentes points out, humans coexist mutually with the holobiont to occupy the same ecological space and body—we “are multispecies communities and are in multispecies communities” (2019: 157, original emphasis).2 Physical distancing, lockdowns, sheltering in place, and other containment strategies have troubled our conception of, what anthropologists Thomas Strong, Susanna Trnka, and Lisa Wynn (2021) have called, “the ethics of nearness and farness,” prompting us to reconsider our structured proximity and distance in relation to other beings. Capitalism tends to cultivate proximity through distance by destroying forests, degrading habitat, deconstructing spaces reserved for animals, and, paradoxically, forcing the more-than-human, including the microbial, to enter our lives. In capitalist frameworks, there is a tendency to value the aesthetically beautiful, focussing our attention on beaches, tree-lined lanes, or mountain valleys, but there are what Val Plumwood (2008) referred to as “shadow places”—locations that are less appealing to the human eye, forgotten and exploited places such as mining sites, landfill, or areas of industrial wasteland that continue to shape the stories of our collective futures.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003439011-1

2  Muhammad A. Kavesh and Natasha Fijn Developing upon emerging environmental humanities and multispecies anthropological theories, this book invites readers to “nurture alternative futures.” The alternate future is not imminent, or in the words of a pioneering Sufi philosopher from the 12th century, al-Shaykh al-Akbar Ibn al-’Arabi, it is existent in relation to whether present actions bring about positive change, remaining a possible future.3 In other words, an alternate future could happen in different ways from what may have already been imagined or perceived, but with a broadening of our knowledge through attention towards biosocial diversity, there is the potential for a positive and nurturing future, as opposed to a destructive and degraded one. An immanent future laid out in front of us is in the form of a sixth mass extinction, where many species are endangered due to habitat loss, depletion of resources, exponential population increase, climate change, and devastating human-induced consequences (Ceballos and Ehrlich 2018; Rose et al. 2017). The capitalist modes of harvesting resources, industrial-scale production, factory farming, and controlled interactivity with microbial subjects for producing medicines and food products have brought us “face-to-face” with other beings (Atterton and Wright 2019). And yet, we can speculate a different future, where we form kinship or, as Donna Haraway (2016, 141–68) eloquently shows through the Camille Stories, we stay with the trouble by connecting in myriad ways with other species on the edge of disappearance. There have been many proposed names for this age we are living in, whereby the Anthropocene has become the most critical one, a geologic era where human industry and nuclear testing have left an indelible mark within rock cores and ice sheets. As Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2021) cogently points out, the Anthropocene does not only refer to a loss of biological diversity but also involve the integration of different cultures around the world into a global economy through the domination of imperialism and capitalism. He proposes that this results in the homogenization of diversity in the form of monocultures and an impoverishment of ecosystems. This process, Eriksen (2021, 2) argues, “is frequently a result of upscaling, creating a growing gulf between life on the ground and the level of decision-making, as well as unintended consequences leading to global tragedies of the commons.” Within this volume, we stay firmly on the ground, in local communities, with the intention of highlighting the biocultural diversity of different ways of life in the company of other beings, as a counter to this global homogenization. The central emphasis of this book is on the transformation of our interactions with living beings through the forces of the global market economy in today’s world, revealing how this gives rise to a precarious existence, jeopardizing our perceived, imagined, and possible futures as well as breaking down biological and socio-cultural diversity. While there is no universal solution to the complexities of the Anthropocene, an inspiration to the foregrounding of potential alternatives involves the prioritization of an intersectional approach to envisioning life during

Introduction  3 the current human-induced environmental crisis. To employ Ghassan Hage’s (2017) concept of “generalized domestication,” the book contests modes of existence that dominate other beings, applying a critical eye towards popular dominating, colonizing, and racist practices, including attitudes towards other beings and the current environmental crisis. Working through layers of experiences, resilience strategies, and self-motivated sustainable actions amongst Indigenous and local communities, the chapters within this book explicate upon what it means to live enmeshed in relationalities within a more-than-human world, to think carefully about our interspecies entanglements, and nurture the prospect of alternative futures. The contributors develop multispecies ethnographic stories that are told through and from those who have been living with more-than-human others for centuries to relate narratives of inequality and marginalization as well as survival, co-existence, and co-sharing. Some of the chapters focus on co-living in hybrid communities with domestic animals, as part of what Tim Ingold and Gísli Pálsson (2013) have referred to as “biosocial becomings”—an integration of biological and social perspectives to move beyond the repeated critique of dualism between nature versus society. This attention to both the biological and the social is recognized as a necessity within conservation frameworks too, whereby “biocultural” approaches involve an attention towards “sustaining the biophysical and sociocultural components of dynamic, interacting and inter-dependent social-ecological systems” (Gavin et al. 2015, 3). Similar to Charles Stépanoff and Jean Denise Vigne’s (2018) volume on hybrid biosocial communities, we are emphasizing different aspects: the human, more-than-human, the domus, or domestic sphere, while extending further to encompass the surrounding ecology, searching for a “common ground” between species. Developing on ethnographic research from five separate continents (Asia, Oceania, Europe, Africa, and North America), the chapters in this book focus beyond the human on different scales: large mammalian species, including domestic donkeys, heritage breed cattle, a hybrid between cattle and yak, and wild javelina; plant species, such as cannabis, Indigenous maize, and healing medicinal plants; or beyond the naked eye to a bacterial and microbial level. While they entail novel conversations, the chapters uncover a need for a multisensory, bottom-up approach to multispecies ethnography, prioritizing local ways of understanding for generating alternative futures (see also Fijn and Kavesh, 2024). The geographical span of these multispecies stories offers a wide lens to comprehend the urgency of an understanding of Indigenous, cross-cultural, and local knowledge, while highlighting interspecies assemblages. The stories, lived experiences, and mutual worlding that this book presents offer a portrayal of different forms of coexistence in the Anthropocene. Together, these stories lay a path for generating what Bruno Latour (2018, 94) has called, “alternate descriptions,” or accounts of our unconventional existence with others despite despair, fear of loss, and

4  Muhammad A. Kavesh and Natasha Fijn looming existential threats. The project of weaving stories of our intricate entanglements is urgent and important as it enables us to discover innovative possibilities for living with others on a damaged planet (Tsing et al., 2017). Co-living with others is possible through a relationship of care—a “concern…of others” (Parreñas 2018, 6) and a “sense of obligation and responsibility” (Gagné 2018, 7) that exists in the presence of neglect, avoidance, and politics of violence to form more-than-human “relatedness” (Blanchette 2020, 20; Cassidy 2002; Govindrajan 2018, 25; Kavesh 2021).4 Care is a mode of existence that emphasizes “being in good relations” to counter hierarchically exploitative modes of engagement (Tallbear 2019, 25). Despite its asymmetrical nature, as María Puig de la Bellacasa (2017, 98–99) intimates, care is to touch while also being touched, to think through and beyond our modes of engagement with others. She considers care as a situated and speculative relationality that sustains existing (more-than-human) worlding while offering new, alternative, and nurturing modes of ethical, practical, and affective ways of engagement. Naisargi Dave (2023) takes interspecies touch further beyond the realm of touching and being touched and considers its violent manifestations such as refusal, disgust, and deletion, predominantly displayed through conceptions of purity and danger, caste politics, and indifference to “polluted” animals. Touch, both through caring and indifferent gestures, continues to structure interspecies relationality, helping to generate a possibility to think with, from, and through others, and not just about them. Marshall Sahlins’ (2013) re-examination of the anthropological notion of kinship includes an emphasis on mutualistic care between beings and suggests how histories of more-than-human kin are sometimes enmeshed with our own, leading us to conceive nurturing, caring, and even killing as responsible gestures. In Chapter 1, Catie Gressier unravels practices of kinning and killing, or the “blood ties” of Australian heritage breed farmers with their livestock, showing how these breeds are raised through strong emotional ties and as a part of the family. In her analysis, breeds, bloodlines, animal welfare, and biocultural heritage all become intertwined. Exploring the intricacies of interspecies relatedness through the complexities of the life-death conundrum on heritage breed farms, she shows how both kinning and killing become alternative modes of expressing nourishment and care, offering a different way of engaging from the impersonal industrial-scale farming practices that are a feature of farms owned by large international corporations. Sustaining existing relational bonds between nature and culture remains indispensable for nurturing alternative futures. Anthropologists Philippe Descola (2013), Viveiros de Castro (2014), and Eduardo Kohn (2013) build on their substantive ethnographic research from Amazonia to suggest an ontological departure from the dichotomous Western modes of thinking. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (2020) too, reinterprets relationality and takes it as a form of knowledge-making that imagines and describes

Introduction  5 associations and disassociations across phenomena. Persons, including both humans and other than humans, are enmeshed in a relational world and are endlessly creating, repairing, and disavowing relations while living with one another (2020, 11). By re-exploring philosophical and anthropological debates, Strathern adds to the works of prominent multispecies scholars such as Haraway (2003), Tsing (2015), and Kohn (2007, 2013) and argues that “when it comes to interspecies relations, present reformulations that extend this truth to beyond the human are powerful and compelling” (2020, 171). A focus on sustaining present relationality to preserve futurity permits Strathern to reinvent relations, epistemically speaking, beyond the human, and offer alternative modes of world-making. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose (2011, 30) offers critical perspectives by bringing Emmanuel Levinas and other philosophers face-to-face with her Indigenous teacher, Old Tim Yilngayarri, to debate what it means to experience relational lifeworlds. Like Descola, Viveiros de Castro, Kohn, and Strathern, she calls for the generative possibilities of ontologically distinct relationalities. As she delves into a potentiality for kin-making or flourishing in the presence of dingoes and others, she considers how relationality has broadly emerged as a prominent trope in multispecies scholarship in anthropology and beyond, helping to explore the politics of plurality and the ethics of alterity to reconceive of the meanings of life in a shared world (Topolski 2015).5 Muhammad Kavesh in Chapter 2 develops on multispecies relationality to question the contrasting use of “sustainability” as a development tool and a policy-related term and considers the possibility of nurturing inclusive futures beyond sustainability as a conceptual category. His emphasis is on the trade of thousands of Pakistani donkeys to China where their skin is boiled to prepare a Chinese traditional medicine, ejiao, to serve the ever-increasing demands of the burgeoning Chinese middle class. He argues that the trade of donkeys through the multi-billion-dollar China–Pakistan Economic Corridor not only breaks the relational bond between marginalized Pakistani donkey keepers and their cherished donkeys but also unravels the fractured conception of “sustainability” championed by the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and their unconditional support to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Breakage of interspecies contact zones, affective entanglements, and intimate assemblages, he contends, is unsustainable and perpetuates poverty in Pakistan. Such breakages between species are happening on the community-habitat level, but are also occurring repeatedly on a larger scale, due to rupturing across international borders. Nayanika Mathur’s (2021) “beastly tales” of human encounters with big cats in the Himalayas; Shafqat Hussain’s (2019) analysis of “specter and spectacle” of conservation in Northern Pakistan; Sophie Chao’s (2022) exploration of the entanglement of Indigenous Marind communities of West Papua with their homeland subject to encroaching oil palm cultivation; Theresa

6  Muhammad A. Kavesh and Natasha Fijn Miller’s (2019) interpretation of multispecies kinship of Indigenous Canela people of Brazil amidst deforestation and climate change; Juno Parreñas’s (2018) efforts to decolonize ethics of care in orangutan rehabilitation centres in Borneo; or Thom van Dooren’s (2019) encounters with the extinction of crows are just some of the stellar examples of how alternate stories of care of more-than-human others have the potential to rethink ethical and moral attitudes. Multispecies ethnographies, such as these, support the conceptual debates in this book. Adam Johnson in Chapter 3, for instance, brings our attention to the human-peccary relationship, which includes active encouragement of entanglements with peccaries by humans. In the Texas Hill Country of the United States, Johnson shows how in ever-increasing anthropocentric spaces, multiple modes of relationality encourage creating, negotiating, and renegotiating boundaries of mutual sensing, leading to possibilities of individual agency within a multispecies politics. As the book intends to break down the usual research divisions between examining either “domestic” or “wild” species, we consider interrelations between multispecies assemblages, including the combination of the biological with the social. In Domestication Gone Wild (2018), an edited volume oriented towards re-examining and challenging the classic archaeological origin narrative of domestication, Heather Swanson and colleagues consider how the trope of domestication became a site of analysis for understanding how the so-called Euro-American “natural order of things” narrative emerged. In Chapter 4 of this volume, Fijn explores the domestic and wild aspects of multispecies mobile pastoralism and considers whether biocultural knowledge practices are being passed on over generations in a mountainous region of Mongolia. Reflecting on the transformations of ox-cart movement and migration with motorized methods and the replacement of local medicinal plants for treating humans and more-than-humans with pharmaceutical biomedicines imported from Russia and China, Fijn examines how entangled biocultural elements are in danger of disappearing, posing challenges to the multispecies, mobile pastoral way of life. In ongoing research, Fijn considers how herders’ multispecies domus can be thought of as jointly encompassing a homeland, or in zoological terms, a home range, through co-existence with different species, while being intrinsically integrated within the surrounding ecosystem (Fijn, 2011). Anthropologist Marianne Lien (2005) has conceptualized an expanded notion of the domus, or the domesticated sphere, beyond the confines of the cage, shed or barn to encompass commercial fisheries. In her work on the salmon industry in Norway, she engages with the liquid materiality of water and Atlantic salmon as actors to think through economic, social, and scientific relationships. Similarly, Mariko Yoshida considers the oyster domus in a multi-scalar way, a transformative becoming within capitalist structures. In Chapter 5, she develops an analysis of aquatic multispecies assemblages in post-industrialist Japanese society by emphasizing how small-scale oyster

Introduction  7 farmers have been trying a different method of seafloor cultivation. Oyster aquaculture has been threatened by nutrient imbalances due to dam developments and the government’s effort to alter the water through sewerage treatment. To restore their lives and livelihoods tied to oysters, members of a local oyster farming cooperative plough in an effort to restore nutrient distribution, while reconfiguring and managing the multispecies seascape of the sea floor. This small-scale Japanese fishery attempts to balance environmental considerations with commercial aquaculture production. In this case study, Yoshida emphasizes how oyster farming has a fluid, fractal, and everchanging materiality in connection with the ocean. Environmental philosopher Val Plumwood (2002) raised the need for a fundamental change in Euro-centric philosophy, to break down hyperseparated dualisms within Western thought in order to tackle the environmental crisis, deconstructing the categories of subject versus object; human versus nonhuman; man versus woman; culture versus nature. To avoid such dichotomizations, contributors of this book employ Donna Haraway’s (2003) term “naturecultures” with a particular emphasis on a combination of biological and cultural diversity. Instead of the colonialist-settler monocultures of intensive farming or large-scale plantations, we highlight differing perspectives from dominating, homogenous capitalist approaches. Catherine Windey in Chapter 6, for instance, emphasizes the precarious existence amongst the ruins of a colonial agro-scientific research facility in Yangambi, Democratic Republic of the Congo as a part of surrounding naturecultures. She draws parallels in the divide between blackness and whiteness with tradition and modernity, or human and more-than-human worlds. Slaves were removed from their motherland and separated from kin, social community, and cultural practices, meaning that these ruptures are still evident in her field area in the Kinsangani Hinterland today through lingering colonialism and increasing forms of globalization. This is also evident in a rupture in the biodiversity and ecology to a homogenization of crops. Carefully comparing the slowly harvested crops consumed locally with shortcycle commercial food crops that are labour-intensive and mostly exported, Windey shows how human-vegetal encounters could repair more-than-human relationships. While offering different forms of coexistence, a need for a non-linear, multi-scalar anthropological approach to the current environmental crises becomes necessary. Such an approach is crucial because, as Kathryn Yusoff (2018) strongly argues, it helps to launch a different kind of world-making, something that asks for “unthinking mastery” (Singh 2018). By accenting local ways of forging relationalities, this approach prioritizes, what philosopher Édouard Glissant (1997, 190) calls, “opacity” in order to establish a multi-layered analysis without reductionist generalizations to assist the reader in tracing similarities and differences. As a focus on opacity replaces the Western-centred emphasis on transparency, this supports not only playing

8  Muhammad A. Kavesh and Natasha Fijn with ways to “speculatively fabulate” (Haraway 2016, 10–12) productions of knowledge-making within dominant capitalist modes of understanding but also ensures that Indigenous practices are acknowledged. Supporting Indigenous modes of relationality in critical ways provides suggestions for how to alternatively frame an approach for coexistence with all living beings for an interwoven future (TallBear 2017; Todd 2016; Sundberg 2014; Winter 2021). Eriko Yamasaki engages with such a conceptual framework in Chapter 7, advancing new ways of sharing imaginaries that bind us with a more-thanhuman world and furnishing an overarching analytical lens that actively incorporates local voices and practices. Based in Mexico, her research shows how Indigenous Yucatec Mayan engage in digital and social activism to challenge the capitalist model of development that seeks to objectify and commodify cultural and biological diversity. Focusing on the conservation and restoration of milpa agricultural practices that ensure the survival of Indigenous maize, Yamasaki discusses how these efforts are extended to the preservation of the Yucatan language from the influence of colonially introduced Spanish. This resistance is an Indigenous imagining of a decolonized future, conceptually separating from the colonial legacy of environmental and societal marginalization and destruction. Attention to multispecies relationships and responsibilities amidst ecological crises is also evident in some inspiring anthropological works, including Anna Tsing’s descriptions of the lives of Matsutake mushrooms, and their pickers, traders, and consumers. By cultivating the “arts of noticing” to witness the resistance of life despite wide-scale environmental destruction, Tsing invites us to focus on assemblages and relationalities that lead us to collaborative survival in the Anthropocene (2015, 37).6 Eben Kirksey (2015) similarly focuses on “emergent ecologies,” where novel pathways form through symbiotic association. Haraway (2016, 102) too emphasizes the philosophies of kin-making with others, adding that despite the fear of global climatic destruction or comic faith in technofixes, “who and whatever we are, we need to make with—become-with, compose-with” others. Tsing, Kirksey, and Haraway’s work all challenge apocalyptic modes of thinking to embrace unexpected flourishing through a playful, flexible, and open-ended analytical approach. Ulmer and team (Chapter 8) align with such analytical suggestions by borrowing the biological concept of “ecotones” to understand the boundaries, borders, and edges between both social and biological communities. For them, multispecies assemblages include feral hogs, cannabis, cannabis growers, redwoods, and Indigenous peoples in the Emerald Triangle of Northern California. A multispecies ethnographic examination helps to understand how such assemblages have been reshaped through the expansion of capitalist development in the region. Their concept of the ecotone is a liminal space between the domestic human sphere and “the wild” with a deep, entangled

Introduction  9 social history. Instead of viewing these interrelations as inevitably ones of conflict, however, they provide room for relationships of positive interdependence and co-existence. From the largest cannabis-producing area of the United States (Chapter 8) to the lucrative oyster farming industry in Hiroshima Japan (Chapter 4), to the trade of massive numbers of donkeys from Pakistan to China (Chapter 2), the authors of this volume are attuned to what Haraway (2003) refers to as “contact zones,” or points of interspecies engagement and co-existence. In an acknowledgement of an intertwined future with pathogens and microbes, two modes of coexistence are evident: cultural practices of eating and healing. Food products, such as cheese, as Sarah Czerny demonstrates in the context of Croatia (Chapter 9), can be made through plant-based or dairy-based products, where microbial agents can be thought of as active cheesemakers. There is, however, a tension between old or traditional ways of engaging beyond the human, and in this case, the making of cheese is part of an older, transhumant way of life, which can clash with modern imperatives, including international health regulations and cross-border trade, as part of a larger global economy with complex consumer supply chains that are difficult to track. Microbial cultures assist humans in cheesemaking with the potential to work as allies rather than as adversaries, to add taste to daily consumption. Heather Paxson’s (2008) post-Pasteurian approach and Jamie Lorimer’s (2019) environmental humanities-oriented attention towards the human microbiont and holobiont are relevant here, highlighting a more nuanced approach towards our engagement with microbes. This approach involves an orientation towards a balance with diversity through the promotion of probiotics; a mutualistic relationship with microbes, rather than one of antibiotic obliteration. Like Czerny, Victor Secco (Chapter 10) engages with microbes as active social agents, whereby non-industrial healing practices not only kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria but also offer a radically different understanding of more-than-human assemblages. He develops upon Lorimer’s (2020) broad use of antibiotics as a term for controlling, eradicating, and simplifying life with the resultant loss of biosocial diversity, to critically evaluate the premise of “antibiotic modernity” in our age of contemporary industrialization, hygiene, and global capitalism. Engaging with both microbiologists and Hindu devotees, who intimately relate to the holy waters of the Ganges River in Varanasi, Secco argues that a focus away from capitalistic modes of relating with more-than-human entities could bring alternative forms of conceiving microbes in the future. He brings our attention to phage therapy as a means of healing, with the potential to live with pluribiotic microbes as living entities. As with Fijn’s analysis (Chapter 4), Secco engages with the lessening of biological and cultural diversity in the context of medicinal use. In the disparate contexts of devotees on the Ganges River in India with herding families in the mountainous Khangai of Mongolia, these communities have been

10  Muhammad A. Kavesh and Natasha Fijn influenced by unregulated sales of biomedicines and antibiotics, impacting local healing practices, ongoing knowledge systems, and the different species that make up a holobiont. While the process of crafting alternative descriptions largely exists within care entanglements, it also comes after entanglements (Giraud 2019), as a mode of activism, resistance, and exclusion. Ethics of resistance are becoming a part of an emerging multispecies justice scholarship (Celermajer et al. 2021; Chao et al. 2022; Tschakert et al. 2021), confronting the climate crisis afresh by adopting an inclusive approach and acknowledging histories of environmental harm. This emphasis on living with others despite their alterity remains a centrally constitutive theme of this book, guiding the discussion to suggest a relationship of mutual respect for the life and death of others, despite persistent threats from habitat loss or capitalist agribusiness around the world. While engaging with the rich diversity of Mongolian herders, Indigenous Yucatec Mayan, Congolese farmers, rural Pakistani donkey keepers, Australian heritage breed farmers, Croatian cheesemakers, Japanese oyster aquafarmers, Texas corn growers, California’s cannabis producers, or Hindu devotees to the Ganges River and the multiple beings they engage with, the book offers a grounded anthropological understanding to imagine a future in relationality with other beings. It considers diverse lived experiences of humans and more-than-human encounters to speak loudly amidst the noise of capitalistic screeching, retracing different paths, to contribute towards alternative descriptions for envisioning a different future where human and more-than-human lives are transformed with and through each other. In the afterword to this book, Sara Schroer reiterates this point by exploring the unintended consequences of “green” energy projects in Europe as a threat to the biodiversity of avian species. As Schroer points out, the effects of climate change are impacting later in the Global North, such as in Europe. She suggests a need for adopting a cautionary approach in the conservation of biodiversity, while being attentive to emerging localized climatic crises. Biological and cultural forms of diversity are seldom stable, but constantly changing in this era of the Anthropocene. The book’s point of departure is in contrast to the homogenization of materialistic, profit, and global market-oriented forms of engagement with more-than-humans through local ways of being and conceiving others, sustaining life in collaboration, uncelebrated relationalities, and obscure affiliations. While most chapters draw examples of multispecies engagements from small-scale non-industrial cases, they provide a critical perspective to think about the need for nurturing alternative modes of relationality within intensive systems of production and exchange. Such community-based rethinking can allow for entangled multispecies futures, to counter the predominant narrative of destruction for commercial gain, intensive agriculture, or industrial-scale food production and international trade, which is often

Introduction  11 so detrimental to our relationship with other beings. By offering alternative stories of diversity, relationality, and coexistence, in proximity and distance, through the self and the other, contemporary and ancient, dominant and marginalized, and those that add to our survival in the world, this book asks, what would it mean for more-than-humans to flourish and how can humans explore the possibility of a nurturing way of life in a more-than-human world? To echo Donna Haraway’s (2016, 12) juxtaposition, “what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories”? Notes 1 See Brown and Nading (2019), Chadarevian and Raffaetà (2021), Kirksey (2020). 2 In a special issue of Anthropology Today (February 2023), guest editors Fijn, Gressier, and Kavesh explore the more positive aspects of this multispecies, colived relationship. The issue includes an op-ed piece on the subject by the editors as well as five different analyses of forms of mutualism in the context of Croatia, Mongolia, Pakistan, India, and Australia. Although focussed on mutualism, the issue interconnects with this volume in the joint attention to diverse bio-social, multispecies communities. 3 See Chapters 1 and 2 of al-Futûhât al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Openings), vol. 1. 4 On the juxtaposition of care and non-care relationships, see also Marvin (1988), Theodossopoulos (2005), and Campbell (2005). 5 This should be viewed in the presence of those debates that counter the conception of ontological entanglement and relationality and instead focus on lived experiences, see, for example, Narayanan (2017), Wadiwel (2018), and Srinivasan (2022). For critique, see Büscher (2022). 6 Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster (2016, 5–6) have suggested transforming noticing into “arts of attentiveness” that meaningfully responds and pays attention to Others while keeping in view the ethics of relationality through life and death in a shared world.

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14  Muhammad A. Kavesh and Natasha Fijn Stépanoff, Charles and Jean-Denise Vigne. 2018. Hybrid Communities: Biosocial Approaches to Domestication and Other Trans-Species Relationships. London and New York: Routledge. Strathern, Marilyn. 2020. Relations: An Anthropological Account. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Strong, Thomas, Susanna Trnka, and L. L. Wynn. 2021. “‘L’enfer, c’est Les Autres’: Proximity as an Ethical Problem during COVID-19.” Cultural Anthropology 36 (3): 341–49. Sundberg, Juanita. 2014. “Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies.” Cultural Geographies 21 (1): 33–47. Swanson, Heather Anne, Marianne Lien, and Gro B. Ween, eds. 2018. Domestication Gone Wild: Politics and Practices of Multispecies Relations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. TallBear, Kim. 2017. “Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking, and the New Materialisms.” In Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, edited by Emma Kowal and Joanna Radin, 179–202. Cambridge: MIT Press. TallBear, Kim. 2019. “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming.” Kalfou 6 (1): 24–41. Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios. 2005. “Care, Order and Usefulness: The Context of the Human-Animal Relationship in a Greek Island Community.” In Animals in Person, edited by John Knight, 15–36. Oxford and New York: Berg. Todd, Zoe. 2016. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29 (1): 4–22. Topolski, Anya. 2015. Arendt, Levinas and a Politics of Relationality. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Tschakert, Petra, David Schlosberg, Danielle Celermajer, Lauren Rickards, Christine Winter, Mathias Thaler, Makere Stewart-Harawira, and Blanche Verlie. 2021. “Multispecies Justice: Climate-Just Futures with, for and beyond Humans.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 12 (2): e699. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt. 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Van Dooren, Thom. 2019. The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds. New York: Columbia University Press. Van Dooren, Thom, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster. 2016. “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness.” Environmental Humanities 8 (1): 1–23. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2014. Cannibal Metaphysics. Translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wadiwel, Dinesh. 2018. “Chicken Harvesting Machine: Animal Labor, Resistance, and the Time of Production.” South Atlantic Quarterly 117 (3): 527–49. Winter, Christine J. 2021. Subjects of Intergenerational Justice: Indigenous Philosophy, the Environment and Relationships. New York and London: Routledge. Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

1 Blood Ties Kinning and Killing on Australian Heritage Breed Farms Catie Gressier

The livestock industry’s favouring of a small number of high-yielding commercial breeds has resulted in the extinction of almost 10 percent of domestic animal breeds globally, with at least 1,000 more at risk (IPBES 2019). On heritage breed farms, the intimacy enabled by the small scale of operations,1 along with the risk of extinction many of these breeds face, heightens the stakes of human–animal relations. Living together, feeding, reproduction, and the sharing of substance and emotion constitute the daily relations between farmers and animals. These are also the characteristics of relatedness that Janet Carsten (2000, 34) identifies in her seminal work driving anthropology’s revived interest in kinship. In this chapter, I propose extending conceptualisations of relatedness across species boundaries by exploring the complex imbrication of social relations and biogenetic substances within the enduring relationships between heritage breed animals and farmers. Economic viability is a constant challenge with these slower-growing breeds, and farmers who chose to perpetuate their bloodlines do so because of a love of their breeds, who they value for qualities beyond the economic. Small-scale farmers of commercial breeds share much in common in terms of their values and practices as I demonstrate through a description of a home kill of an Angus cow below. Yet, the extinction risk heritage breeds face, and farmers’ commitment to their breeds notwithstanding their lesser productivity, renders the stakes of interspecies relationships particularly high. Heritage breed farms are thus fascinating sites in which to examine the rich potential of interspecies relatedness as an alternative configuration to the prevailing model of unidimensional commodification of livestock in pursuit of financial gain. Over the past half-century, the livestock sector has subjected farm animals to heavy selection pressure and extensive crossbreeding to maximise profitable traits, such as rapid growth and prolificacy. Performance gains have been extraordinary, yet the global dissemination of these fast-growing, high-yielding types has resulted in the extinction of numerous heritage breeds in Australia, with many more under threat (RBTA 2023). This is part of a broader global paradigm where the loss of agrobiodiversity evident in diminishing variety in seeds, breeds, and bloodlines poses a significant risk to DOI: 10.4324/9781003439011-2

16  Catie Gressier farm ecosystems, food security, animal welfare, and cultural heritage. As one example, 184 cattle breeds are now extinct globally (FAO 2015, 35), which is around 17 percent of known breeds (Taberlet et al. 2008, 275). The neoliberal reconceptualisation of food from nourishment to commodity underpins the homogenisation of our diets globally, whereby a small number of multinational companies determine our diets to a significant extent. As Saladino (2022) observes: the source of much of the world’s food – seeds – is mostly in the control of just four corporations; half of all the world’s cheeses are produced with bacteria or enzymes manufactured by a single company; one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer; from the US to China, most global pork production is based around the genetics of a single breed of pig; and, perhaps most famously, although there are more than 1,500 different varieties of banana, global trade is dominated by just one, the Cavendish. Predating this shift, heritage breeds are those purebred animals with a documented breed history, who existed prior to the development of commercial types. Self-sufficiency and survival traits have been encouraged over time to ensure adaptation to their local environments (Livestock Conservancy 2022). Heritage breed farmers across Australia are concerned about breed extinction and the erosion of agrobiodiversity. Consequently, even though economic viability is a challenge with their less productive breeds, they see the longevity, fertility, temperament, and hardiness of heritage breeds as an invaluable legacy from the past and a safeguard for the future. Beyond such practical value, living interdependently with a particular breed, often over generations, means that farmers tend to consider their animals to be family. Greg, a Red Poll cattle farmer living in Girai wurrung country, described to me in detail the personality traits of his favourite 18-year-old cow. Upon hearing his voice crack with emotion, I somewhat sheepishly asked if his cows were family. He unhesitatingly and ardently affirmed this, before continuing to speak at length about the wisdom and intelligence of this much-loved cow. In the same vein, of his sheep, Brenton living in Tommeginne country observed: I consider them to be family; they have been our family for over 150 years. I talk to them, and the rams in particular talk to me. Sorry if I sound like a silly old man, but you must talk to them. I gave myself a 60th birthday present by commissioning a large portrait of an English Leicester head which hangs in our kitchen (I do not have a painting of my wife2). I have photos, ribbons and certificates of our sheep going back over 100 years, probably more photos of sheep than human ancestors. I can trace the pedigrees of my English Leicesters back for perhaps 80-100 years.

Blood Ties  17 A eulogy in an association newsletter for another respected heritage sheep breeder described him as having raised “a human and many varied animal family, the welfare of the second often taking priority over the first.” Along with these articulations of animals as family, which I have heard countless times during my fieldwork, farmers regularly employ kinship terms, such as “aunty” or “baby” in reference to particular animals. Some speak of “adopting” animals from other farms; framed photographs of favoured animals sit alongside human family members on mantle pieces; and farmers post abundantly on social media commemorating animal births, deaths, and milestones, such as the first egg laid by a chicken (“so proud!”). These are just a few of the many ways that farmers’ incorporation of animals into imaginaries of relatedness is linguistically encoded and enacted in daily behaviours. Alongside emic constructions of farm animals as family, a conceptual openness to interspecies relatedness grows from the work of the numerous anthropologists who have sought to extend the bounds of kinship traditionally conceived. Recognition of Eurocentric assumptions of human universalism (Vilaça 2002; Schneider 1984)—alongside the rise of reproductive technologies and the diminishing significance of biology vis-à-vis nurture in LGBTQIA+ families (Weston 1991)—have left kinship, historically conceived, on shaky ground. Yet, a disinclination to abandon a concept with such profound community significance has led anthropologists to extend conceptualisations of kinship beyond a focus on genealogy to encompass its sociocultural variability and mutability over time. With the role of biology remaining contested, kinship tends to be understood as much about “postnatal modes of creating substance-based links through purposeful acts of feeding, caring, loving and sharing” (Bamford and Leach 2009, 10). This represents a shift in understandings of kinship from the biological towards the cultural as a “mutuality of being” characterised by the “transmission of life-capacities” (Sahlins 2013, 28–9). On heritage breed farms, interspecies relationships are obviously not built through shared descent, but through quotidian experiences of social and economic interdependence. Consequently, I follow Carstens (2000, 4) in favouring the term relatedness “to signal an openness to indigenous idioms of being related rather than a reliance on pre-given definitions or previous versions.” Relatedly, Howell’s (2003, 465) notion of “kinning”—the acts and processes through which ongoing relationships are built and maintained between formerly unrelated parties—is also helpful in making sense of my ethnographic context, as is the work of Van Horn (2021). Kinning, he observes, “is cultivated… and it revolves around an ethical question: how to rightly relate?” (Van Horn 2021, 3). There are excellent precedents in the literature exploring this question and the ethics and values underpinning human–animal relationships in all their complexity. Emel et al. (2015, 165) make a compelling case for livestock as “coworkers,” “cooperators or collaborators” within relationships of heightened respect in permaculture systems in North Carolina. Anne Galloway (2020, 205) experiences her Arapawa sheep as “companions and friends”

18  Catie Gressier in New Zealand. Elsewhere, I have theorised the relation as a form of mutualism (Gressier 2023). In this chapter, I follow Haraway (2016, 1) in her contention that “the task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other.” In certain cultural contexts, of course, these theoretical propositions are already an ontological reality. 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 2011; Musharbash 2017). Among non-Indigenous Australians, perceptions of pets as kin are certainly growing in Australia, where 88 percent of those surveyed in a representative sample claimed their companion animals were family (Franklin 2007, 15). This echoes research indicating pets are similarly perceived within kinship idioms in parts of Europe, the USA, and Israel (Tjørnhøj-Thomsen 2015; Kirksey 2015; Charles 2014; Shir-Vertesh 2012). Yet, case studies of farm animals as kin remain less common, albeit with some excellent exceptions (Govindrajan 2015, 2018). While justifications for pets as kin rely on the rationale of non-utility—of animals valued for their companionship above functionality—on heritage breed farms, animals are valued precisely for their practical and economic contributions. This is through the provision of ecosystem services, such as managing grass loads, and through providing food and resources, including meat, milk, eggs, and hides, which in many instances require animals to be killed. Consequently, while at first glance the notion of human–animal relatedness may read as romanticising interspecies dynamics, on the contrary, these relationships reflect the complexity, conflict, and high stakes that to varying degrees are inherent to all familial groupings. Indeed, the relatedness concept is compelling precisely because of its recognition that close relationships tend to be constituted by obligation and burden, as much as benefit. Drawing upon ethnographic research I have undertaken with heritage breed farmers since 2020, in this chapter, I analyse, in turn, the entanglements of living together, reproduction, and the sharing of substance and emotion that are the building blocks of relatedness. The most contentious aspect of this argument is in respect of the killing and eating of farm animals considered kin, to which I then turn, including a description of the home kill of a heifer. Far from negating relatedness, as endangered breeds of domesticates whose longevity into the future depends on serving a function to humans—as ethically complex as this may be—I suggest that blood ties are central to the endurance of interspecies relatedness over time. I conclude by offering a brief consideration of how extending relatedness to animals enacts a politics of rare breed conservation, specifically, and of interspecies respect, more broadly, which offers an exemplar of a potentially more convivial multispecies future. Living Together On small-scale family farms, animals are constant companions, with shared rhythms and knowledge developing across seasons and generations. Walking

Blood Ties  19 through his herd at sunset on a cold winter’s evening, Greg talked me through the biography of each of the cows we passed, noting their dam, sire, siblings, and offspring. He knows which cows like a scratch and where (mostly between the shoulder blades or above the tail), and he recounts their individual habits and personality quirks. In contrast to the focus on averages and uniformity within intensive livestock systems (Blanchette 2020, 53), heritage breed farmers recognise and respond to animal individuality, and their animals, in turn, discern and show different behaviours to different members of the family and strangers. It is calving season on Greg’s farm, and his 20-yearold daughter, Brittany, predicts Bella will have her calf the following day. Brittany’s cattle knowledge is patent. She recently finished a year working in a bull semen collection centre, handling massive bulls, day in, day out, and coming away with extraordinary stories, and a few scars from bull attacks, one of which was serious. Greg and his wife and daughters talk cattle endlessly, and during a recorded conversation on another day, Greg’s pride shone through when, of Brittany, he told me: She’s got her heart set on being a cow vet… She’s sort of like an animal whisperer… She’s had difficult horses and knows how to handle them… Yeah, she’s got a good knack, animals seem to rise to her. Like when she was two, I remember I found her asleep in the dog kennel with the dog. That’s the sort of kid she was. And she’d come home, and she’d be in the bath, and there’s this little duckling swimming around in the bloody bath! You go, ‘oh God, wait until your mother’s seen this!’ For Brittany, her upbringing has resulted in a love for, and ability to understand, communicate, and effectively work with animals, and her life, like her parents and grandparents before her, will be centrally focussed around cattle and other animals. Greg’s family exemplifies the world of kin that Van Dooren and Chrulew (2022, 2) recognise as “a world of interwoven, intergenerational, more-than-human connectivity that both sustains and obligates, calling out for care and responsibility.” Families are not, however, solely sites of recognition, comprehension, and care. Cohabitation can just as readily lend to tension, competition, and conflict. At the level of the nation, settlers’ brutal eviction of First Nations communities was in large part justified by colonial powers on the grounds of agricultural development, with livestock integral to progressing the colonial frontier. While structural and quotidian racism persists across Australia, there is a growing number of farmers recognising and wishing to face the nation’s brutal history and the complexities of farming on unceded lands. They speak with varying levels of anxiety about the seeming intractability of the land question in a nation still riven with prejudice and inequality. As a result, some farmers—though they are certainly in the minority—are attempting to work together with local Indigenous communities in their regions towards conciliation, while participating in initiatives such as “Pay the Rent” (see AFSA 2022).

20  Catie Gressier On the level of immediate kin, farmers routinely kill their animals for the market and personal consumption, while animals at times attack each other and farmers. Farmers mitigate against animal aggression through particular animal handling practices, and by breeding for temperament, while keeping animals, such as bulls or rams but also age and sex cohorts, separated for their own safety. What is particularly interesting in respect of interspecies relatedness, owing to the hierarchical social structures of the commonly farmed species, for the most part, “humans are able to control them by substituting for the dominant animal” (Russell 2007, 36). This is significant as it indicates that not only do humans imbricate animals within their systems of kin relations but animals also draw humans into theirs (cf. Kirksey 2015, 160). Carolyn, a Highland cattle breeder living in Barunggam country, for example, describes how she has integrated herself at the top of the social order of her cows. “Highlands are social,” she said, “they’re matriarchal, so you have your boss cow and then their family… and they fight to move themselves up the ladder of ranking.” She told me about a house cow3 she had that was constantly beaten up by the rest of the Highland herd. At one point, the herd had the house cow pinned on the ground, and her husband had to run in and pull the others off by their horns, before dragging the 300+ kilo cow to safety. Her husband asserts his dominance in the herd physically in this way, while Carolyn uses certain vocalisations and physical posturing to demonstrate her authority within the kin hierarchy. The result is that not only do Carolyn and her husband see their cattle as family but the cattle also appear to conceptualise their humans within the logic of the herd. Reproduction That animal procreation forms the foundations of farm livelihoods is widely understood. In intergenerational farming families, human and animal bloodlines are reproduced over decades in parallel, as animals are passed down across generations (Gressier 2021). That animals are central to farmers’ identities and intraspecies kinning is perhaps less well understood. On a symbolic level, heritage breed farmers’ reputations depend upon their skill in making the selective breeding decisions that determine the quality of their animals. For the individual animals involved, these are life and death decisions, and, particularly when the breed is rare and the gene pool is small, these decisions are key to the health of the herd or flock into the future. In this respect, at the “individual level, death confirms transience, but on the level of the ecological community, it can affirm an enduring, resilient cycle or process” (Plumwood 2008, 329). Consequently, breeding and killing—in this case for the removal of animals deemed poor quality from the bloodline—are key to farmers’ identity and standing in the community. Far more than a job, farming is an all-encompassing identity and way of life, with farmers strongly identifying, and being associated by others, not

Blood Ties  21 only with the vocation, but the species and breeds they raise. In their community, as one example, as Highland breeders Carolyn and her husband are affectionately known as the “hairy cow people.” For heritage breed farmers, though, these associations are not always positive. The marginal status of heritage breeds, and the lower prices they often attract, can result in stigmatisation from commercial breeders who in Australia, as in Italy, see heritage livestock as “breeds of the past” (Grasseni 2004, 45). At cattle saleyards, heritage breeds are at times regarded with bemusement, if not derision. With his traditional Herefords, Tom, an intergenerational sheep and cattle farmer living in Dja Dja Wurrung country describes: “The disdain! It’s the contempt. It’s not even, ‘ah good on you, keeping the old bloodlines going’.” Similarly, Greg will be a Red Poll man for life, even though this comes at a cost: You see this massive drop [in price per kilo], and you feel like a leper,’ he said. ‘It’s a terrible sinking feeling, and you might know some people at the saleyard, and they go, ‘oh Greg, you should have just put Red Angus4 on them, and you would have made top dollar’. But he never would. Powers (2021, 750) could have been writing about Greg’s enduring commitment to his bovine family when he observes: Kinship is the ability to see my fate in theirs, even when the family resemblance is largely a leap of faith. This impulse toward expensive, even disastrous acts of identification—call it love—may be merely an epiphenomenon, a fluke spin-off of runaway kin selection misdirected into bonds with no apparent adaptive advantage, or perhaps even a net loss. Greg perseveres with Red Polls even though Angus would be more profitable, but this is not despite the breed’s unique traits, but because he passionately believes they produce excellent beef while being cheaper to run, with lower inputs, greater fertility and fewer vet bills as a hardy old breed. He, like so many other heritage breeders, sees the market fixation on a small number of commercial types as misguided and detrimental to the health of the national herd as a whole. Particularly in the climate change era, farmers see their heritage breeds as an invaluable resource that can better withstand the changing conditions the future holds. Along with influencing heritage farmers’ identities, heritage breed animals also often facilitate human kinning. Tom’s parents met while showing their traditional Hereford cattle at an agricultural show. Tom’s Dad’s family lawyer initially resisted putting half the farm into Tom’s mother’s name, but his father insisted given she had brought her Romney stud sheep with her. In the same vein, the gifting of dairy cows consecrated the marriage of Greg’s parents in both a symbolic and practical sense: when his mother met and

22  Catie Gressier married Greg’s father, his grandmother gave them two of her best cows, two buckets, and a separator to get them started off in their own dairy. Significantly, animals not only facilitate but can also prohibit human kinning. A heritage poultry producer recounted how his partner had left him for a time because of his devotion to his birds. After the death of two family members, who were also partners in the family business, alongside coping with grief, he had a steep learning curve in taking full control of the family’s poultry farms, resulting in 80-hour working weeks. His partner of five years issued an ultimatum: if he wanted to continue the relationship, he had to get rid of the poultry. He recounted to me how he had replied: “Look, I can’t do that,” he had said: It’s family, it’s part of my family heritage. As much as I love you—and we were talking about marriage—you’re asking me to do something that, if I did it, I would resent you for the rest of my life. As she was leaving, he said she had walked out to the paddock and, in a poignant moment, told his beloved Swedish Blue ducks that they had won. Over the year that followed, however, she came to feel that her request had been unreasonable, and their relationship resumed. This example demonstrates the loyalty and commitment of intergenerational farmers to their animal kin, even at the risk of great personal loss. These brief examples illuminate the fact that animals are core actors in the lives of farmers, both in the significance of interspecies connections, but also in facilitating, and at times obstructing, human social relations. Substance Sharing diverse substances is an integral aspect of relatedness, and this is sometimes consciously enacted in processes of interspecies kinning. In giving advice to a new farmer on habituating a Dexter cow and her calf for milking, a more experienced breeder offered the following: Before birth, teach Mum to be fed in a yard, so she gets used to the routine. Handle her often. Never get between the cow and calf. Don’t forget to spit in the calf’s mouth to imprint your scent. That helps, and everyone is family then. While not all farmers follow this particular practice, the visceral nature of farming and husbandry invariably results in the swapping of substances. On the one hand, interspecies microbial exchanges positively affect human health, with rural dwellers exhibiting greater protection against asthma, hay fever, and allergic sensitisation than urbanites (von Mutius and Vercelli 2010). On the other, close proximity of partner species creates opportunities for detrimental interactions, including pathogen transfer. Most pig illnesses

Blood Ties  23 are transmitted by the “leaky bodies” of humans, resulting in strict biosecurity protocols in intensive systems (Blanchette 2020, 50). Some heritage breed farmers are wary, too. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, I had flights booked to conduct fieldwork in Tasmania, and I worried in a message to a heritage pig farmer about whether I should still come. Her reply was quick: she was less concerned about her risk of exposure to COVID-19 than she was of my inadvertently passing a pathogen from another farm to her pigs. Space prohibits further exploration of the fascinating flows of milk, blood, embryos, sperm, sweat, tears, microbes, and more across species, but that substance is core to interspecies kinning is clear. Emotion Given the complexity of caring for and killing animals, Ellis (2013, 95) observes that “ranching is emotionally labor intensive.” Stress, anxiety, and frustration are fuelled by the complexity of daily decision-making, where much—from rainfall to markets—is beyond farmers’ control. The complexity of killing triggers complex emotions including guilt and sorrow, which are counteracted by the love, amusement, and affection inherent to processes of kinning. Regarding the latter, farmers describe animals as offering different modes of emotional connection, in that their love is less demanding, complicated, judgemental, and conditional than the range of ambivalent dynamics within human connections. Animals don’t care how you look, how much money you earn, or if you say the wrong thing. Of their animals, heritage breed farmers would concur with Van Dooren and Chrulew’s (2022, 8) observation that “[m]ore than simply embodying the good, they interrupt and reorient, transforming the status quo through the provision of comfort, connection, recognition, guidance, and loyalty.” Farmers’ decision-making—not least because of the high value placed on this form of relationality—results in emotion being contrasted with rationality, with decisions at times based on affect above economic and other pragmatic considerations. Tom—who gave up a lucrative 20-year career in the hard-nosed world of mining to return to the farm when his parents were no longer able to manage it—articulates this explicitly: “my belief, based purely on my emotional status, is that it is a good idea to keep these cattle.” His sheep, cattle, and dogs connect him to his parents, grandparents, and ancestors, ensuring his perception of his animals is infused with layers of memory and meaning. As one small example, Tom measures his life in epochs determined by which of the four dogs he had with him at the time. Animals’ affective lives are more challenging to apprehend. Attribution of emotion to animals has historically been condemned as unscientific anthropomorphising. However, as Law and Lien (2016, 36) observe, understandings have changed over time, given that sentience is not only “embodied, located, material, but also, sometimes, socially and discursively constituted.” It is now accepted that animals experience negative emotions, such as fear

24  Catie Gressier and anxiety, and mounting evidence confirms the presence of positive emotions exhibited through play, vocalisations, and affiliative behaviour (Boissy et al. 2007). Heritage breed farmers certainly recognise sentience, along with significant individual differences in character, behaviour, and expression among their animals. Individual variation between animals’ responsiveness to stimuli is referred to as temperament (Blach and Bickell 2010). Temperament in animals has a strong genetic base, and calmness and a lack of aggression tend to be prioritised in breeding selection to ensure docility for human safety, higher productivity, and better animal welfare outcomes (Boissy et al. 2007, 376). Greg assesses temperament via visual communication. “It’s something we’ve become very proud of” he mused: “They’ve just got a kind eye, you can pick them with your eye, a kindness in there. And my Mum used to talk about kindness in the eye, you can see it in horses, you can see it in cattle.” But can good temperament be held to reflect love and affection from animals for farmers? Animals certainly develop positive associations with people, in that they recognise individuals, will actively seek them out, or come when called. Whether this is motivated by self-interest—such as via seeking food or pleasure through soliciting a scratch—or whether it is something akin to human affection is difficult to determine. As both pragmatists and romantics, most heritage breed farmers would say it is both. Boissy et al. (2007, 376) note, “given the very nature of emotional self-experience, there is ultimately no way to know if animals experience emotions similar to humans.” Yet, they go on to say that “[b]ehavior, structure, and brain chemistry are similar in humans and in a large number of animal species. It is therefore likely that they feel as we do” (Boissy et al. 2007, 376). While irrefutable evidence may remain elusive, according wisdom and intelligence to farm animals inverts the mastery paradigm and lends to relationships of respect and care. By contrast, when “animals are seen as mindless bodies” they are more readily “excluded from the realms of ethics” (Plumwood 2012, 79). Instrumentalising Kin: Feeding and Feeding Upon I now turn to the most complex aspect of the argument for interspecies relatedness on heritage breed farms: feeding upon kin. Significantly, in the animal realm, maternal cannibalism is in some circumstances understood to be “a form of parental care” (Mociño-Deloya 2009, 145). Heritage pig producers describe sows on occasion eating piglets they have inadvertently crushed. Some farmers theorise that this is to stop their carcasses attracting predators and jeopardising more of their young. Chickens also at times eat their own eggs, which can be the result of calcium deficiency, but once they take up this practice, it is difficult to get them to stop. Regardless of the animal’s motivations, these examples indicate that the notion that kinship precludes eating is not necessarily shared by all animals.

Blood Ties  25 Farmers do not eat their human kin. Yet, feeding, and feeding upon, is central to the cycles of reciprocity that farmers see as characterising their relationship to farm animals. From the microbial level upwards, Heldke (2018, 257) describes “an elemental feature of our lived reality: namely, the pervasiveness of eating and being-eaten-into relationships.” This “eating into” relationships is summed up neatly by a Berkshire pig farmer, who commented: From the moment they’re born, I love my pigs, and they love me. I make every meal for them. I put them on fresh pasture. I make sure they have mud to wallow in and water to drink. And, at the end of the day, they make sure me and my family have food on the table and love in our hearts. Most of the farmers I work with relish eating the meat of their animals, who they know have enjoyed a good life, and who they tend to enthusiastically claim have the tastiest meat of all breeds, irrespective of which breed they keep. However, there are some exceptions to the rule. Farmers will eat some, but not other, categories of animal kin. This is both across species— Australian farmers never deem dogs consumable, for example—but also in terms of individual farm animals. Two of Greg’s most prized breeding cows, he has afforded the ultimate reverence by burying, rather than consuming or selling. Other farmers would see this as a waste of a valuable resource, with honouring the animal’s life felt to be best demonstrated through respectful consumption within the cycles of death, life, and regeneration. In Tom’s case, the strong bond to his oldest cattle means there is no more respectful and valued act than home butchery and consumption (see Peemot 2017). He says, there is no pleasure in eating an old, much-loved cow, but it is an act of reverence. On the flipside, some farmers joke about the pleasure gained from eating an animal with a poor temperament that has given them trouble. These divergent views demonstrate that the ethics of consumption are individually contingent yet are negotiated within frameworks balancing various emotions with pragmatism. Farm animals do not routinely consume people and, in this respect, there is an asymmetry (Peemot 2017, 144). This asymmetry does not, however, result in farmers lacking care for their animals, as some may assume. A dominant Western belief posits a distinction between non-utilitarian animals (pets and wildlife), who are loved and respected, while utilitarian farm animals (as evoked by the very term livestock) are seen as commodities unworthy of love (Franklin 2007). A recent blog post on a popular food research website encapsulates this dichotomy with its opening question, “How do we decide which animals to eat and which to care for?” (McGuire 2021). While some systems of livestock production certainly compromise animal welfare, the substantial amount of time I have spent on small scale and heritage breed farms across the country has made it clear that farmers love and provide

26  Catie Gressier high levels of care for their animal kin, alongside consuming them. Indeed, animals are valued precisely for their practical and economic contributions to the family, and the strong interdependence these contributions foster. In 2021, I was present for the home kill of Green 9,5 a two-and-a-halfyear-old Angus heifer (who had failed to ever get in calf—hence being chosen for slaughter) on a farm in Minang country in Western Australia. Sean raises Angus cattle (a commercial breed) and heritage-breed chickens and sheep. He poured himself a bourbon, and paced around the paddock while I asked him questions about what lay ahead. Part way through answering, he looked at me intently and said, “it’s starting to get real now.” His neighbours soon arrived to help, and while I was busy greeting them, Sean strode purposefully into the paddock and shot the heifer at close range, killing her, before his neighbour, a trained butcher, ran to the cow and slit her throat to commence bleeding her out. The other 20 or so cattle in the paddock rushed to the dead cow, sniffed her, bellowed, and jostled to smell and see the carcass. The process was quick—the heifer was laying down ruminating and likely never knew what hit her—but the echo of the rifle crack on an overcast day, the sheer bulk of the warm, gushing carcass, and the reaction of the rest of the mob made for an intense mood. Like many farmers, Sean only undertakes a home kill once or twice a year, so killing, while a standard part of seasonal farm life, is neither routine nor banal. And there is no turning away from killing here; it is visceral, it is bloody, and it is hard work, both physically and emotionally. After Green 9 had hung in the cool room for ten days, we spent a day and a half butchering her, including making mince and sausages and then stacking her meat in freezers to provide nourishment for Sean’s family. Sean was tired, withdrawn, and a little grumpy at the end of the first long day of cutting, bagging, and labelling the meat. I made some inane comment sympathising with his feelings, and he countered, “it’s fine. If I stop feeling something, then that’s the point where I no longer deserve to be a farmer.” Farmers see this kind of emotional engagement as underpinning an ethic of care that ensures a more humane approach to raising and killing animals. Yet, not everyone sees intimate killing as more ethical. Gillespie (2011, 120) argues that: All of the justifications for DIY slaughter as a way to connect to food, to become an artisan, to embody rusticity, and to make slaughter more humane are enlisted to conceal what the process really does. DIY slaughter connects participants to the violence against the animal, and not to the animal him/herself. This “connection” is a wholly false connection. While certainly the outcome of a home kill is meat, farmers would vehemently disagree that their connection is “false.” In a WhatsApp chat a few months later, of the previous cow Sean had killed for domestic consumption,

Blood Ties  27 he recounted to me a conversation he had with his young sons about this “old girl,” who had been shot and consumed on account of a hip injury: Emotional moment to have the discussion about sausages. [My 9-yearold son] asked how I knew that one was Green 7… I said we had birthed her. Nurtured her. Helped her raise her babies. And on 19th Feb 2018 we noticed she had a limp…. He then sent me several images and a video of the limping cow, as well as notes he had taken in 2018 about her deteriorating condition. I asked if his kids got upset by eating an animal they have known and raised, to which he replied: Not as much as me. They’re family. That mob are my first born… 2011 drop… Her story matters. [The kids] felt it before I said it. It’s respectful. She actually seriously did taste fucking awesome too… I’m a little teary, sorry. She birthed a heap of calves. Sean’s role in building his bloodlines through facilitating the breeding, births, and deaths of cattle is central to his extension of familial relatedness to his mob, while the intimacy and respect between him and his cows spills over in a complex range of emotions throughout the acts of killing and consuming (Figure 1.1). A home kill, of course, involves a level of intimacy that does not extend to cattle destined to becoming commercial beef. Sean sells about 40 cattle a year either directly to the abattoirs, where they are trucked away to be killed, butchered, sold, and consumed, or to the saleyards, where they go to other farms, feedlots, or the abattoirs. Significantly, however, this distancing from animal deaths does not always come, as one might assume, as emotional respite for farmers. In late 2021, I zoomed into a meeting of a collective of 12 small-scale heritage breed farmers living in Dja Dja Wurrung country in central Victoria. Together they are training to get their meat inspectors licenses, with the goal of building and running a small abattoir for use by the local community. One of the Dexter cattle farmers attending described her motivation as deriving from her concerns about the stress of transport, and

Figure 1.1  Sean with his mob of cattle

28  Catie Gressier the treatment of her animals at the abattoir. She told the other farmers that she invariably drives away from dropping her Dexters with tears in her eyes. She worries about how the abattoir workers unload her animals. She wonders what goes on behind closed doors. The other farmers agreed saying it is heart breaking not being able to finish the cycle of nurture and care after putting so much love and energy into every other aspect of the animals’ lives. But legally, to be permitted to sell meat, they have to use a licensed abattoir, so building their own will enable closing the circle of life and death for their animal kin. For small scale and heritage breed farmers, then, loving, kinning, and killing are by no means mutually exclusive. Powers (2021, 74) attunement to the potency of blood ties echoes through his observation that “[m]aybe nothing elicits a sense of relatedness more deeply than feeling our dependence on other living things. A predator depends entirely on its prey; that, too, is a kind of blood bond.” These farmers take pride in raising their animals with care, and a frequent mantra is that their animals have a great life and just one bad day. Farmers are aware, of course, that this mantra fails to account for the fact that for animals bred for meat, that one bad day shortens their lifespan considerably. In grappling with the emotional complexity of killing animals they love, farmers justify their practice by looking to predation, and cycles of life and death in nature, while contrasting their high levels of care and intimate killing with what they see as the vastly worse conditions of intensive production. Discussion: Blood Ties as a Pathway to Agrobiodiversity Conservation and Convivial Multispecies Futures From vermin to pets, how people conceptualise categories of animals has profound impacts on their treatment. Humans have long designated certain people, who may or may not share biogenetic substance, as kin, in order to foster affection and obligations for care (Barclay 2019, 92). Echoing Haraway’s (2016, 138) push for “intentional kin making across deep damage and significant difference,” extending relatedness to farm animals provides a practical relational framework for engendering relationships of reciprocity that offer an alternative model for a more convivial multispecies future than the current paradigm of commodity-focussed livestock production. This is not to say it should be the only model, as a diversity of relations, as much as breeds or bloodlines, is surely necessary for healthy systems. Yet, including animals within circles of kin is compelling, as it foregrounds the deeply entrenched interspecific interdependence underpinning the long history of human–livestock relations. Theoretically, it challenges the ethnocentric and anthropocentric traps that have at times characterised anthropological understandings of relatedness, while offering the literature a case study for conceptualising kinship across alterity. On heritage breed farms, this conceptualisation is already in place. Interspecies relatedness is enacted through daily rituals of nourishment and care; it is evident in the economic and emotional interdependence of animals and

Blood Ties  29 farmers; it manifests in shared substance and the blood ties built through breeding and feeding upon; and it endures across generations. Far from instrumentalism negating conceptualisations of relatedness, farm animals are valued precisely for their practical and economic contributions to the family. These relationships reflect the complexity, conflict, and high stakes that to varying degrees are inherent to all familial groupings. That companion animals are often seen as family is fairly well established. This chapter’s contribution is in highlighting that farm animals—those most routinely cast as expendable commodities—can also be included within ideations of relatedness. But what work might such a conceptualisation be doing for farmers themselves? This varies between individuals, but on the one hand construing animals as kin enables a framework for making sense of their deep emotional responses to animals. It also justifies keeping heritage breeds, even though this at times defies the prevailing norm of economic rationalism. This in turn has important ramifications not only for animal welfare but also breed conservation. Unlike in Europe, where government subsidies reward the conservation efforts of rare and heritage breed farmers (Ligda and Zjalic 2011), there are no government incentives supporting breed diversity in farm animals in Australia. With no systematic cryo-preservation or live population conservation programs, creating a commercial demand for meat, milk, eggs, and fibre is currently the only means of ensuring heritage breed survival in Australia, paradoxical as this may seem, given it entails killing to sustain life. Heritage breed farmers could readily make more money at the saleyards by raising faster growing, higher yielding commercial breeds, yet the depth and complexity of their relationships with their particular breeds and bloodlines is proving the cornerstone of breed conservation in Australia, providing a key safeguard for agrobiodiversity into the future. Notes 1 Since the 1960s, farms have grown considerably in Australia. “Large farms – those with receipts above $1 million per year in real terms – have increased their share of total farm numbers from around 3% to 15% over the past 4 decades.” (ABARES 2022, 4). In contrast to these large agribusinesses, of the approximately 100 heritage breed farmers I have come to know in the course of my research, with two exceptions, all are small-scale farmers with family undertaking most farm labour. Many rely on off-farm income to support their livelihoods, as economic viability is a constant challenge. 2 Who, it should be noted, he clearly adores. 3 A house cow is milked to provide food for the family. She is usually kept close to the home and is often a particularly loved member of the interspecies family. 4 A popular commercial breed. 5 Cattle are identified by ear tags, and sometimes brands and tattoos, indicating the property and year of birth, along with a unique number. Tag names become imbued with meaning, in much the same way as people’s given names. After shooting Green 9, Sean gave me one of the ear tags, and kept one for himself, along with her hide, which he had tanned and kept to commemorate her life. Animals live on in the memories and stories of farmers, much as deceased human kin do.

30  Catie Gressier References ABARES. 2022. “Snapshot of Australian Agriculture 2022.” Accessed June 27, 2022. https://www.awe.gov.au/abares/products/insights/snapshot-of-australianagriculture-2022#agricultural-production-is-growing. AFSA. 2022. “First Peoples First.” Accessed April 15, 2023. https://afsa.org.au/ first-peoples-first/. Bamford, Sandra and James Leach. 2009. “Introduction: Pedigrees of Knowledge: Anthropology and the Genealogical Method.” In Kinship and Beyond: The Genealogical Model Reconsidered, edited by Sandra Bamford and James Leach, 1–23. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Barclay, Katie. 2019. “Emotional Lineages: Blood, Property, Family and Affection in Early Modern Scotland.” In Historicising Heritage and Emotions: The Affective Histories of Blood, Stone and Land, edited by Alicia Marchant, 84–98. Abingdon: Routledge. Bird Rose, Deborah. 2011. Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Blach, Dominique and Samantha Bickell. 2010. “Temperament and Reproductive Biology: Emotional Reactivity and Reproduction in Sheep.” Revista Brasileira de Zootecnia 39: 401–8. Blanchette, Alex. 2020. Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Boissy, Alain, Gerhard Manteuffel, Margit Jensen, et al. 2007. “Assessment of Positive Emotions in Animals to Improve Their Welfare.” Physiology and Behavior 92: 375–97. Carsten, Janet. 2000. “Introduction: Cultures of Relatedness.” In Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship, edited by Janet Carsten, 1–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Charles, Nickie. 2014. “‘Animals Just Love You as You Are’: Experiencing Kinship Across the Species Barrier.” Sociology 48 (4): 715–30. Ellis, Colter. 2013. “Boundary Labor and the Production of Emotionless Commodities: The Case of Beef Production.” The Sociological Quarterly 55 (1): 92–118. Emel, Jody, Connie Johnston, and Elisabeth Stoddard. 2015. “Livelier Livelihoods: Animal and Human Collaboration on the Farm.” In Critical Animal Geographies: Politics, Intersections and Hierarchies in a Multispecies World, edited by Kathryn Gillespie and Rosemary-Claire Collard, 164–83. New York: Routledge. FAO. 2015. The Second Report on the State of the World’s Animal Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, edited by Beate D. Scherf and Dafydd Pilling. FAO Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture Assessments. Accessed June 29, 2022. http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4787e.pdf. Franklin, Adrian. 2007. “Human-Nonhuman Animal Relationships in Australia: An Overview of Results from the First National Survey and Follow-Up Case Studies 2000–2004.” Society and Animals 15 (1): 7–27. Galloway, Anne. 2020. “Flock.” In Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, edited by Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian, 203–208. Brooklyn: Punctum Books. Gillespie, Kathryn. 2011. “How Happy Is Your Meat?: Confronting Dis)connectedness in the ‘Alternative’ Meat Industry.” The Brock Review 12 (1): 100–28. Grasseni, Cristina. 2004. “Skilled Vision. An Apprenticeship in Breeding Aesthetics.” Social Anthropology 12 (1): 41–55.

Blood Ties  31 Govindrajan, Radhika. 2015. “The Goat That Died for Family’: Animal Sacrifice and Interspecies Kinship in India’s Central Himalayas.” American Ethnologist 42 (3): 504–19. Govindrajan, Radhika. 2018. Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gressier, Catie. 2021. Bovine Bloodlines. Anthropology News, March 1, 2021. DOI: 10.14506/AN.1583 Gressier, Catie. 2023. “Mutualism on Australian Heritage Breed Farms.” Anthropology Today 39 (1): 11–14. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Heldke, Lisa. 2018. “It’s Chomping All the Way Down: Toward an Ontology of the Human Individual.” The Monist 101 (3): 247. Howell, S. 2003. “Kinning: The Creation of Life Trajectories in Transnational Adoptive Families.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9 (3): 465–84. IPBES 2019. “Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.” Accessed March 3, 2021. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3831673. Kirksey, Eben. 2015. “Multispecies Families, Capitalism, and the Law.” In Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively Legalities, edited by Irus Braverman, 155–74. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Law, John and Marianne Lien. 2016. “The Practices of Fishy Sentience.” In Humans, Animals and Biopolitics: The More-Than-Human Condition, edited by Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitro, Steve Hinchliffe, 30–47. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Ligda, Christina and Milan Zjalic. 2011. “Conservation of Animal Genetic Resources in Europe: Overview of the Policies, Activities, Funding and Expected Benefits of Conservation Activities.” Animal Genetic Resources 49 (1): 79–86. Livestock Conservancy. “Heritage Breeds.” Accessed June 29, 2022. https://livestockconservancy.org/heritage-breeds/ McGuire, L. 2021. “Loving Some Animals, Eating Others: Food Preferences in Childhood.” Accessed April 7, 2022. https://tabledebates.org/blog/loving-some-animalseating-others-food-preferences-childhood. Mociño-Deloya, Estrella, et al. 2009. “Cannibalism of Nonviable Offspring by Postparturient Mexican Lance-Headed Rattlesnakes, Crotalus Polystictus.” Animal Behaviour 77 (1): 145–50. Musharbash, Yasmine. 2017. “Telling Warlpiri Dog Stories.” Anthropological Forum 27 (2): 95-113. Peemot, Victoria. 2017. “We Eat Whom We Love: Hippophagy among Tyvan Herders.” Inner Asia 19 (1): 133–56. Plumwood, Val. 2008. “Tasteless: Towards a Food-Based Approach to Death.” Environmental Values 17 (3): 323–30. Plumwood, Val. 2012. “Animals and Ecology: Towards a Better Integration.” In Eye of the Crocodile, edited by Lorraine Shannon, 77–90. Canberra: ANU Press. Powers, Richard. 2021. “A Little More than Kin.” In Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations. Volume 3: Partners, edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer and John Hausdoerffer, 72–8. Libertyville: Center for Humans and Nature Press. RBTA. 2023. “Rare Breeds Trust of Australia.” Accessed April 16, 2023. https:// rarebreedstrust.com.au/. Russell, Nerissa. 2007. “The Domestication of Anthropology.” In Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered, edited by Rebecca Cassidy and Molly Mullin, 27–48. Oxford and New York: Berg.

32  Catie Gressier Sahlins, Marshall. 2013. What Kinship Is—And Is Not. Chicago, IL and London: Chicago University Press. Saladino, Dan. 2022. Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them. New York: Macmillan. Schneider, David. 1984. A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Shir-Vertesh, Dafna. 2012. “Flexible Personhood: Loving Animals as Family Members in Israel.” American Anthropologist 114 (3): 420–32. Taberlet, Pierre et al. 2008. “Are Cattle, Sheep, and Goats Endangered Species?” Molecular Ecology 17 (1): 275–84. Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, Tine. 2015. “Kinning Animals, Animals as Kin.” In Critical Kinship Studies, edited by Charlotte Kroløkke, Lene Myong, Stine W. Adrian, 289– 304. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Van Dooren, Thom and Matthew Chrulew. 2022. “Worlds of Kin: An Introduction.” In Kin: Thinking with Deborah Bird Rose, edited by Thom Van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew, 1–14. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Van Horn, Gavin. 2021. “Kinning: Introducing the Kinship Series.” In Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer and John Hausdoerffer, 1–11. Libertyville: Center for Humans and Nature Press. Vilaça, Aparecida. 2002. “Making Kin Out of Others in Amazonia.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8 (2): 347–65. Von Mutius, Erika and Donata Vercelli. 2010. “Farm Living: Effects on Childhood Asthma and Allergy.” Nature Reviews Immunology 10 (12): 861–68. Weston, Kath. 1991. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.

2 Demystifying the Promise of Sustainability through the China-Pakistan Donkey Trade Muhammad A. Kavesh

In May 2022, hundred scholars from 17 countries wrote to the United Nations (UN) urging it to rethink its model of sustainability, which is currently being implemented via the 2015–30 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They highlighted that SDGs have a strong allegiance to global capitalism, have failed to achieve food security and equality, and have worsened environmental, social, and economic conditions. Technofixes, they suggested, are “merely a convenient myth” and there is an emergent need to rethink the “systemic problem” within the global sustainability mechanism, which mostly recommends continual economic expansion rather than equitable degrowth (IFLAS 2022). In this chapter, I criticize the promise of sustainability as an overarching idea that ensures a secure future and wellbeing for all. I suggest that we need to reconsider and reinterpret sustainability as a theoretical category and policy tool, with a focus on relationality. This call is inspired by the “multispecies turn” and the “ontological turn” in the social sciences and humanities, which encourage us to consider not only our entanglements with other living selves, including domestic companions (Govindrajan 2018), industrial animals (Blanchette 2020), wild beasts (Hussain 2019; Mathur 2021), forests and plants (Kohn 2013; Chao 2022), fungi (Tsing 2015), spirits (Nadasdy 2007; Taneja 2018), and viruses (Keck 2020; Doron 2021), but ask us to understand and study contact zones where “becoming is always becoming with” (Haraway 2008, 244). As we become-with Others, these contact zones emerge as a space of encounter to imagine our knotted bonds and entangled relatedness with more-than-human life forms that encapsulate our material, spiritual, and emotional worlds. However, as I show, despite the emergence of sustainability as an ethical ideal for ensuring a stable future and wellbeing for all, the focus on sustaining, persevering, and continuing contact zones, transformative encounters, or multispecies relatedness has been largely ignored. I argue that such negation has roots in a generalized construction of sustainability that, particularly after the mid-2010s, has emerged as a global development model to achieve social, economic, and environmental benefits through a focus on infrastructural development while selectively neglecting the existence of multispecies connectedness. This anthropocentric DOI: 10.4324/9781003439011-3

34  Muhammad A. Kavesh construction of sustainability may promise the continuation of life, but it ignores affective entanglements between humans and more-than-human beings through contact zones. My companions in this chapter are donkeys—animals whose economic viability, environmental value, strategic significance, and social status have changed greatly in the last few centuries. In the Global North, donkeys as beasts of burden and animals who supported the colonial settler project (Celermajer and Wallach 2019), lost their usefulness with the invention and adaptation of the internal combustion engine. In the Global South, however, donkeys remain close companions of humans and shape the lives and livelihoods of millions of people on a daily basis. With the recent surge in demand from China for donkey hide to prepare the traditional Chinese medicine ejiao, the donkey in most developing countries is not only in danger of losing their contact zone with human companions but also faces a looming existential threat (Donkey Sanctuary 2017). In Pakistan, for example, donkey farms are being developed in three cities—Mansehra, Dera Ismail Khan, and Okara—to collect, cull, and transport the skins of thousands of donkeys to China through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a mega infrastructural project that forms part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). As larger numbers of donkeys travel to China from Pakistan, the price of donkeys in Pakistan not only increases, the connectedness that humans and donkeys have created over centuries is also unsettled. In such a situation, how can sustainability emerge as an inclusive concept to ensure a safe future and well-being for humans, donkeys, and the human–donkey relationship? In precarious times, when more-than-human worlds are intertwined, sustainability as a policy concept and a practice apparatus must promise to preserve, maintain, and continue “assemblages” and “transformative encounters” (Tsing 2015). As a relational and ethical concept, and as a developmental tool, sustainability can help preserve multispecies encounters and reinforce how wellbeing is achieved—not only at the point of living but also at the point of dying with the critters we value most (Rose 2011; Van Dooren 2019). Building on such promises and expectations, I explore the conceptual underpinning of the term “sustainability” and examine how an entwinement between SDGs and the BRI has substantially reshaped the core pillars of this concept. I show how the donkey skin trade via the CPEC challenges the conceptual construction of sustainability. This guides me towards a call for a focus on a multispecies relational approach, a reinterpretation that could help reknit and become-with Others in the face of an uncertain future. Sustainability and the SDGs–BRI Synergy In the 1980s and 1990s, theoretical and empirical debates intensified among social, management, and natural scientists to discover a sustainable solution for the world’s existing and future issues (Redclift 2005). These debates challenged human-centred development models that disassociated the ecosystem

Sustainability through the China–Pakistan Donkey Trade  35 from economic prosperity and social wellbeing. Sustainability emerged as an idea that promised an improved world through the conservation of nature and the promotion of culture (Rolston 1994, 18); reconsidered values of human development and their interdependence on ecological security (Clark 1991, 2); and unravelled mismatches of scales amongst human responsibility and natural interactions (Lee 1993, 560). Sustainable development became a policy tool and a model for “green” progress that promised to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the capability of future generations to accomplish their own particular environmental, economic, and social needs (Barbier 1987, 103; Hawken 1993, 139); aimed to improve the quality of life (The World Conservation Union 1991, 10); promote flourishing human civilizations (Costanza et al. 1991, 8; Gore 1992, 10–15); and guide humans to make prudent use of all resources (Ludwig et al. 1993, 548). From the outset, sustainable development as a paradigm faced significant resistance from other existing logics: “the pro-growth approach,” which focuses on expanding profitability by exploiting natural resources, maintaining human superiority by objectifying nature, and seeking smooth exponential growth (see Bailey 1993; Ray 1993); and “the deep ecology approach,” which urges ontological integration with life-giving nature, conservation ethics, and non-interference with fragile natural systems (see Devall and Sessions 1985; Daly 1992; Swimme and Berry 1992). Backed by the UN, sustainable development challenged these contrasting logics, suggesting a middle path that aimed at stewardship of nature, conservation, and managing resources according to scientific principles to ensure humanity’s survival and welfare in a rapidly changing world. In reconsidering the balance between culture and nature, human and animal, morality and ethics, embracing and protecting, and pastoral care and responsibility, sustainable development nonetheless advocated preserving and maintaining human supremacy. The SDGs were devised by a formal UN working group in 2013 with the aim of achieving sustainable development. However, the SDGs soon faced multiple challenges; they were “fuzzy, ambitious, often unimplementable and contradictory” (Sultana 2018, 187), and needed external support. Conflicts within multiple SDGs also emerged (see, for example, Zhang et al. 2019, 483), while alternative conceptual and theoretical frameworks, such as degrowth, appeared to question the logic of economic growth championed by the SDGs (Banerjee 2003; Robra and Heikkurinen 2019). The financial potential of China’s BRI, which Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled on a visit to several Southeast and Central Asian countries in 2013, promised an opportunity for the SDGs to realize most of their sustainability targets. On 26 April 2019, at the opening of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing, the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres acknowledged that the world is only “halfway towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by the target date of 2030”; the major reason he gave for this underachievement was a lack of financial resources. Recognizing China “for its central role as a pillar of international

36  Muhammad A. Kavesh cooperation and multilateralism,” he remarked that “the world will benefit from a Belt and Road Initiative that accelerates efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.” He went on to explain how the BRI’s five pillars are “intrinsically linked” to the 17 SDGs and that an alignment between the two will ensure “maximum sustainable development dividends” (UN Press Release 2019). This alignment sharpened as the SDGs and the BRI focused on achieving similar targets: poverty alleviation, better health conditions, economic well-being, education, renewable energy production, and green development (Feng et al. 2019; Hong 2017). Later, the BRI ensured acceleration of the SDGs by providing financial support, mobilizing resources, and developing much-needed infrastructure (Horvath 2016), while the SDGs legitimized the BRI’s development agenda by countering geopolitical antagonism (Lewis et al. 2021).1 The underlying concept that tethered the SDGs to the BRI was sustainability, which itself was transformed through the association of these two projects. For instance, sustainability as an overarching developmental agenda was mostly depicted through its tripartite definition, as “three intersecting circles of society, environment, and economy, with sustainability being placed at the intersection” (Purvis et al. 2019, 681). These three pillars continued to influence almost all discussions on global development, including the17 SDGs that were adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015 as a 15year global development agenda. According to the UN, these SDGs sought to integrate and “balance the three dimensions of sustainable development: the economic, social and environmental” (The United Nations 2015, 1). The BRI added “infrastructural development” to these three pillars by focusing on connecting countries through roads, railways, and ports (Figure 2.1). Among its eight priority areas for development, the BRI’s investment in infrastructure remains paramount. In many developing countries where the BRI is operational, poor infrastructure has been described as the obvious reason for underdevelopment. China, with its recent history of achieving the highest index of infrastructure development, is well placed to engage in bilateral infrastructural cooperation to achieve sustainable development. The BRI continues to fund projects in power and energy infrastructure, transportation, telecommunications and IT networks, climate change, and health and education (Lewis et al. 2021, 59). The underlying idea is that by improving infrastructure, “quality of life” can be enhanced and general wellbeing can be achieved (Xiao et al. 2018, 12).2 Infrastructural investment now promises a sustainable future (Xiao et al. 2018; Yin 2019), promoting regional connectivity, integration, and sustainable growth that influences the targets of almost all SDGs (Bhattacharya et al. 2015; Casier 2015). However, most BRI infrastructural development projects have been criticized for being unsustainable. For example, studies examining the debt vulnerability index of BRI recipient countries demonstrate that more than 50 percent of these countries are likely to be burdened by debt following

Sustainability through the China–Pakistan Donkey Trade  37

Social

Environment

Economic

Social

Environment

Sustainability

Infrastructure

Sustainability

(a) Conventional pillars of sustainability

Economic

The mediating role of SDGs

(b) BRI influenced model of sustainability, with the inclusion of infrastructure development

Figure 2.1  The synergy between the SDGs and the BRI.

completion of proposed infrastructure projects (Bandiera and Tsiropoulos 2020). Debt crises worsen when the economies of many developing countries seek support from International Monetary Fund bailout packages. Moreover, infrastructural development through international partnerships is sometimes conceived of as a geopolitical and geoeconomic threat. For example, Chinese infrastructural initiatives in the Indian Ocean have been interpreted as a geopositional balancing strategy to “encircle” China’s major regional rival, India, for strategic advantages (Garlick 2018; Hussain 2019; Sharma 2019). This has led to the formation of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (or the Quad) by the United States, Australia, Japan, and India, which considers the BRI as a geo-political threat rather than a sustainable development scheme (Gale and Shearer 2018). In 2017, India and Japan unveiled plans for an Asia-Africa Growth Corridor, a “calculated effort” to counterbalance the BRI’s powerful, and geopolitically instrumental presence in Africa and the Indian Ocean (Panda 2017, 1-11). And, the trilateral security partnership, announced in September 2021, between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (Aukus) to develop nuclear-powered submarines for Australia, has been described as a multi-national strategy to counter geo-political challenges posed by BRI-related infrastructural development. The BRI’s emphasis on infrastructure development could be equally unsustainable, particularly when the project emphasizes some aspects of sustainability and overlooks others. For example, although most of the BRI’s major infrastructure projects promise to bring economic development and some environmental benefits (such as green energy production), they largely ignore

38  Muhammad A. Kavesh the social component. In other words, instead of approaching development from the bottom-up, the infrastructural approach supports development from the top-down, often ignoring grounded relationalities. In such a situation, when infrastructure development emerges as potentially unsustainable, how can sustainability be achieved? Using the donkey skin trade between Pakistan and China through the CPEC as a case study, I show how the emphasis on infrastructure remains in tension with relationality aspect of sustainability, and how a general understanding of sustainability is narrowed by its focus on infrastructural progress. This enables me to argue that sustainability as a concept should involve preserving, maintaining, and continuing knots of relatedness that structure worlds of humans and more-than-human Others. The CPEC and the Donkey Skin Trade Strategically located, Pakistan is an emerging partner in China’s ambitious BRI and, in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s words, an “Iron Brother” who will strengthen China’s political and strategic positioning not only in South Asia but in the Middle East (Fels 2017). Through the CPEC, a $62 billion project that was launched in 2015 as part of China’s BRI, the two “allweather friends” envision economic cooperation and strengthening their political and strategic relationship (Khan et al. 2020). The CPEC aims to revitalize the earlier Silk Road and serve as a strategic platform to connect billions of people in South Asia, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. In doing so, it promises to bring economic development through the creation of thousands of jobs for Pakistani people and ensure sustainability through green development and renewable energy projects. Largely, the project’s economic and environmental progress is measured through its promise of rapid infrastructural development. However, the impact of this massive infrastructural economic corridor on Pakistan’s society, culture, and people remains uncertain. How will the CPEC impact the social fabric of Pakistani society? How will it bring social well-being to marginalized segments? And how will it affect rural people’s long-standing tradition of developing personalized relationships with other-than-human communities? The questions, the latter in particular, are often not addressed in the CPEC’s policy documents or within the larger narrative of BRI, the SDGs, or in accepted definitions of sustainability. To tackle such questions and infer wider theoretical implications, I critically assess the case of the human–donkey relationship in rural Pakistan, its historical and social significances, and its key role in assessing the social impacts of the CPEC. The donkey, as it was in the old Silk Road, has become an important partner in the new Silk Road. Archaeological records dating back 4,000 years suggest that the donkey’s impressive stamina and lowwater needs meant that it became an important factor in the trade between

Sustainability through the China–Pakistan Donkey Trade  39 Indus Valley Civilization and Mesopotamia (Ratnagar 2004, 237). Donkeys traversed the hilly terrains of the Silk Road and assisted merchants from China, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Antioch in Southeastern Turkey to trade silk as well as musk, pepper, camphor, brass, turmeric, copper, and medicines (Goesch and Stearns 2007: 68). In the 7th century, merchants from Sogdia (modern-day Uzbekistan/Tajikistan), who worked as middlemen between China and lands to its west, relied heavily on donkeys in their trading business (Skaff 2003, 510–12). Although the camel famously carried greater loads and were in Chinese historical art, donkeys and mules were the major beasts of burden as they sometimes travelled more than 2,500 kilometres carrying goods and other heavy loads (Mitchell 2018, 180; see also Hansen 2012, 79). During the Tang dynasty, when Silk Road commerce was in its golden age, the demand for donkeys as a means of transport and trade increased significantly in China as well as in other parts of Central Asia and South Asia (Han et al. 2014). Over the last 200 years, donkeys as animals of trade significantly lost their importance in South Asia, and during the colonial period, they were largely used as draft animals. After Partition in 1947, the donkey population steadily grew and the animal became invaluable work companions for rural people belonging to lower caste and class groups, helping them to carry fresh water for household consumption and fodder for livestock. In the Baluchistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Sindh provinces, donkeys are regularly used by daily wage labourers to facilitate the mining of coal, copper, and minerals, and in the northern areas of Gilgit-Baltistan, they continue to serve as trusted travel companions on harsh hilly terrain. In urban centres of Punjab and Sindh, such as Karachi, Lahore, and Rawalpindi, donkeys are employed by waste workers, particularly, tribal immigrants and marginalized groups, to dispose of thousands of tons of waste every day (Shah et al. 2019). Through these and many other ways, donkeys continue to be indispensable in the lives and livelihoods of people belonging to the economically impoverished classes in Pakistan. In the new Silk Road, however, donkeys are no longer animals of trade carrying commodities; instead, they are animals being traded as a commodity. Through the CPEC, the new Silk Road’s key project, Pakistan is exporting about 80,000 donkeys via “The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa-China Sustainable Donkey Development Program” and many more through a recently developed donkey breeding farm in Okara, Punjab. In 2014, Pakistan exported almost 60,000 donkey hides to China, and the figure reached approximately 130,000 in 2015 (Rana 2015). Anticipating that the disappearance of donkeys could result in a considerable increase in the animal’s price in Pakistan and could affect the lives of the lower classes who rely on donkeys to fetch firewood, bring freshwater, and carry fodder for cattle, the then government of Pakistan decided to impose a temporary ban on donkey export. This ban, however, was lifted in 2019 (Tariq 2019).

40  Muhammad A. Kavesh The reason for the importation of donkeys into China lies in the gelatine that is extracted from the animal’s hide to develop a traditional Chinese medicine known as ejiao—a medicine that is believed to cure low immunity, ageing, and impotence (Köhle 2018). Ejiao has now become a desirable commodity for the country’s burgeoning middle class (Bennett and Pfuderer 2020), and its development has caused a significant decline in the Chinese donkey population which, according to estimates, fell from 11 million in 1990 to 3 million in 2017 (Donkey Sanctuary 2017). After an initial ban imposed by Pakistan in September 2015, China sourced donkey hides from Africa (Uganda, Tanzania, Botswana, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Nigeria, and Kenya), South America (Brazil), and Central Asia (Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan). As ejiao production requires about 4–10 million donkeys per year, this led to a rapid worldwide decline in the donkey population (Binda 2019; Lesté-Lasserre 2019), leading many countries to impose a donkey trade embargo with China. Moreover, many non-government organizations have declared ejiao an existential threat to the animal. By supplicating empirical evidence from some donkey-exporting countries, they show how the disappearance of donkeys seriously impacts the lives and livelihoods of the poorest (Under the Skin 2019). Notwithstanding, the Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa governments in Pakistan have recently reinstated plans to export thousands of donkeys to China, Pakistan’s geo-political and geo-economic partner, through the CPEC (Ansari 2021). To ensure “sustainability,” the state has proposed that only donkeys bred in farms in Okara, Dera Ismail Khan, and Mansehra will be exported. However, minimal transparency, a weak corruption management system, and low accountability suggest that once the trade commences, donkeys from all over Pakistan will travel to local abattoirs to have their skin transported (Tariq 2019). Even if we accept the state’s narrative, farming 80,000 donkeys over three years is a mammoth task. In a hypothetical scenario where barriers to infrastructure, trading routes, animal welfare, and cultural and governance issues are removed, a model developed by Bennett and Pfuderer (2020) suggests that, millions of donkeys would be required for 50 years to sustainably produce a few hundred-thousand donkey hides. Problems such as a long gestation period (a foal is born every 17 months), two years required for the foal to mature and have its skin ready for ejiao production, and mortality through disease are some of the issues that strongly question the “sustainability” of donkey farming. Thus, donkey farming in Pakistan will most likely utilize the existing donkey population, which is mostly kept by marginalized segments of society. Donkeys and people from the poorer classes in Pakistan have a contact zone that involves multispecies sociality based on companionship and affective labour. For people like Qasim and Naveed whom I met during a field trip in rural South Punjab in 2014–15, donkeys are persons and able to communicate their needs and demands, and generate a multitude of feelings. Earning about USD 2.50 per day, Qasim mostly used his donkey to transport goods,

Sustainability through the China–Pakistan Donkey Trade  41 including ice blocks, burnt bricks, and sacks of fertilizer or fodder to and from town. Naveed, in addition to using his donkey for various economic reasons, also used the donkey cart as a means of family transportation— to drop his young son at school, fetch household items, or even visit the medical clinic in a nearby town. His wife would also use the donkey cart to wash clothes at a nearby tube well and fetch fodder for cattle. Both Qasim and Naveed told me that their companion donkeys were intelligent animals who even knew how to find their way home: “returning home on wintery nights, I would clad a blanket and sleep on the cart and my donkey would bring me home, safe and sound,” Naveed said. The relationship of trust and labour was mutual; in return for their labour, Qasim and Naveed affectionately cared for their donkeys, bathed them in summer, took them to the local veterinarian when they were sick, and regularly cleaned their hooves. Despite the entrenched poverty of their keepers, the animals had a good diet (Figures 2.2 and 2.3). The state narrative in Pakistan is that the CPEC is a sustainable way to reduce poverty and improve the livelihoods of the country’s lower classes. However, as the above discussion suggests, the CPEC can also have adverse effects. Keeping donkeys, affectionately petting them or using the donkey cart for livelihood activities is omnipresent among poorer people in Pakistani townscapes. The skin trade, however, results in a substantial increase in the price of donkeys, and for many small donkey keepers like Qasim and Naveed, there is an added challenge to replace their companion animal. The short-term profit that the provincial governments are able to earn through this trade transforms into a long-term loss for marginalized communities. For many poor donkey keepers residing in all four provinces of Pakistan, the donkey is an extremely valuable companion who supports their livelihood,

Figure 2.2 Donkeys support herders by not only protecting the cattle from feral dogs but also develop an intimate bond with cows and buffalos

42  Muhammad A. Kavesh

Figure 2.3  Donkeys working as garbage collectors to keep the city clean

transports their goods, serves as a co-worker in mines and forests, and assists as a trusted ride on hilly terrain where other means of transport are inefficient. As knotted companionship between donkeys and people develops more-thanhuman emotional communities (Webb et al. 2020), they are tied through fundamental assumptions, values, goals, and accepted modes of expression, to explore inter-species dependency. Inter-species dependency develops through contact zones, which Donna Haraway describes as a type of meaningful entanglement that forms assemblages between species “outside their comfort zones” (2008, 217). Contact zones, she suggests, are mutual processes that “change the subject—all the subjects—in surprising ways” (2008, 219). Such contact zones are also evident in Anna Tsing’s inspiring ethnography where mushrooms, humans, trees, and rocks all collectively emerge through encounters and flourish. “We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are,” Tsing (2015, 27) suggests, showing that transformative encounters mostly lead to the emergence of mutual worlds. The mutual worlds of Pakistani donkeys and their keepers are also the product of these encounters, contaminated through contact zones, leading them to explore the possibilities of shared relatedness. As these encounters shape their understanding of being in a relationship with more-than-human Others, they strive to maintain and continue these relationships amidst the workings of larger infrastructural projects like the CPEC. The sustainability of contact zones for these poor donkey keepers holds higher meaning, and unfortunately, these meaningful assemblages are unintelligible for development practitioners pursuing sustainability through the rapid completion of infrastructural projects. Conclusion: A Prospect for Relational Sustainability Since the mid-2010s, the synergy between the SDGs and the BRI has allowed the latter to propose “infrastructure development” as the fourth pillar of

Sustainability through the China–Pakistan Donkey Trade  43 sustainability. In this chapter, I suggest that instead of measuring sustainability through the completion of infrastructural projects, we must utilize non-traditional parameters, such as the value of a given project towards the maintenance of knots of relatedness between human and more-thanhuman communities. Building on the case of the donkey skin trade through the CPEC, I critically evaluate the conceptual construction of sustainability and call for a focus on sustainability’s relational and ethical possibilities. When donkeys move from Pakistan to China, the cultural meaning of work and (co-)worker is altered, forcing many disadvantaged donkey keepers like Qasim and Naveed to not only find alternative forms of livelihood but also to witness a vanishing relationship that once was meaningful. As the emerging demand for ejiao changes the role of donkeys from a valuable resource for poor families to an exploitable commodity in a globalized world, we end up witnessing not only the looming possibility of yet another species extinction in the Anthropocene (Rose, van Dooren, Chrulew 2017) but a rupture of contact zones. While the production of ejiao may appear to be the main cause of the rupture of the human–donkey relationship, I contend that it is in fact the fraught conceptualization of sustainability, which disregards any possibility of preserving, sustaining, and continuing multispecies relationalities.3 In this chapter, donkeys help me argue that sustainability as a concept, from its development in the 1980s and 1990s to its adaptation as a global developmental agenda in the mid-2010s, misses the key emphasis on preserving, appreciating, and sustaining the contact zones, affective entanglements, transformative encounters, and intimate relatedness between beings, species, and living selves. This point coincides with the recently emerging relational sustainability approach which, as an ontological paradigm, seeks to understand how beings are primarily constituted into relationships of different kinds (West et al. 2020). Developing a synthesis of many philosophies and critical scholarship from in science and technology, the environmental humanities, and the posthumanities, the relational sustainability approach suggests finding an ontological, epistemological, and ethical ground that provides a mechanism for a relational understanding of sustainability (Walsh et al. 2021). However, the meaning of “relationality” as an overarching concept in conjunction with sustainability remains unclear. Instead of indulging in the debate around agency as relational or consciously intentional, I adopt what Haraway (2016) calls “speculative fabulation,” (SF) as a mode of attention to understand how a generalization of broader concepts, such as sustainability, lead us to stay blind to the significance of encounters and contact zones that relationships often produce. Speculative fabulation (SF), Haraway (2016) suggests, needs science facts (SF) to untangle knots of string figures (SF), to understand how making kin is a process of making oddkin, of living and dying with one another in troubled times. Artist Karin Bolender in her The Unnaming of Aliass (2020), carefully shows how weaving speculative fabulation with science facts unravels entangled stories. On the road with her donkey companion, Bolender pursues

44  Muhammad A. Kavesh complex relationalities by prioritizing other-than-human “ways of knowing and narrating, thereby vanquishing prospects for more inclusive worldings in the stories we make and pass on” (2020, 37). Stories of marginalized donkeys and their poor-human keepers in Pakistan require them to become-with, live and die, and flourish, and their string figures are not only entwined through fabulations but also facts (Van Dooren 2014). However, the very concept of sustainability, which should protect the intertwined relationship between these oddkin, this game of string figures that form myriad contact zones, is breaking apart those connections that matter. To stay with the trouble in serious multispecies worlds, Haraway argues, “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, …what ties tie ties” (2016, 12). These are the knots, ties, or encounters and contact zones that matter for donkeys and humans, and it matters how these knots form, shape, and influence other knots, stories, ties, lifeworlds, and ways of being with others. In the Anthropocene, when more-than-human worlds are conjoined in politically and ethically complex ways, seeking collaborative survival through assemblages is crucial for multispecies flourishing (Fijn and Kavesh 2021, 3). These assemblages and kinship should not be explored in abstract forms but through “embodied and impassioned rhetorical styles” (Mathur 2021, 11), by using empirical evidence to support and lead our analysis, and by acknowledging grounded realities in the pursuit of justice. Justice is not anthropocentric as human beings are not isolated actors or unattached to the more-than-human world. We need a multispecies justice that is ontologically relational and “can recognise the multiplicity of different types of being, in their own terms and their involvement in thick relational webs” (Celermajer et al. 2021, 120; see also Chao et al. 2022). The relational webs between humans and donkeys in the context of Pakistan demand justice that promises the preservation and continuity of entangled and embodied contact zones. Sustainability, as an overarching idea for global development, can be inclusive by fostering collective futures in the Anthropocene and by paying serious attention to transformative encounters that make us who we are in relation to and with others. This means that beyond the act of killing, the moods and modes of making beings killable remain crucial (Singh and Dave 2015, 233–36). To exist in a multispecies world sustainably, we can start by preserving the entangled knots of relatedness among present generations and develop a mechanism to sustain it for future generations to engage in meaningful ways with Others. This leads to an interpretation of sustainability that seeks not only to improve the quality of life but focuses on improving the quality of relatedness between different beings by developing frameworks that are inclusive and heterogeneous in structure. Therefore, in these precarious times, despite the fear of global climatic destruction, we can reknit and become-with Others to face our uncertain future, and make and experience stories of life and death together.

Sustainability through the China–Pakistan Donkey Trade  45 Notes 1 In April 2016, China signed an agreement with the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific to promote BRI’s interconnectivity. By November 2016, the UN General Assembly recognized China’s BRI as part of its resolution. In 2020, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs initiated a multicountry project “Jointly Building Belt and Road towards SDGs.” 2 The Asian Development Bank considers infrastructure to be a major pillar of sustainable growth, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (established by China) has prioritized investment for sustainable infrastructure. 3 The case of feral donkeys in Australia offers a good comparison, where the world’s finest donkey breeds were once imported by the colonial settlers to “terraform the land” through agriculture and mining (Celermajer and Wallach 2019, 230). However, in the first half of the 20th century, most were allowed to go feral in the wild. In the 1970s, the Australian Government started to aerially “cull hunt” thousands of donkeys to ensure environmental sustainability. Such eradication programs were also supported through an ill-perceived idea that as a non-native species, their killing did not add to the suffering of Indigenous communities (Rose 2008; Vaarzon-Morel 2021). Like Pakistan, Australia in the recent past has made plans to send their donkeys to China for the production of ejiao.

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Sustainability through the China–Pakistan Donkey Trade  49 Skaff, Jonathan Karam. 2003. “The Sogdian Trade Diaspora in East Turkestan during the Seventh and Eighth Centuries.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 46 (4): 475–524. Sultana, Farhana. 2018. “An (Other) Geographical Critique of Development and SDGs.” Dialogues in Human Geography 8 (2): 186–90. Swimme, Brian, and Thomas Berry. 1992. The Universe Story. New York: Harper Collins. Taneja, Anand Vivek. 2018. Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Tariq, Waleed. 2019. “Proposal to Export Donkey Hides from Pakistan to China Incites Outrage.” The News Lens International Edition. May 17, 2019. https:// international.thenewslens.com/article/118744. The Donkey Sanctuary. 2019. Under the Skin: Update on the Global Crisis for Donkeys and the People Who Depend on Them. London: The Donkey Sanctuary. https:// www.thedonkeysanctuary.org.uk/sites/uk/files/2017- 11/under_the_skin_report.pdf. The United Nations. 2015. “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” A_RES_70_1_E. New York: UN General Assembly. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. UN. 2019. “United Nations Poised to Support Alignment of China’s Belt and Road Initiative with Sustainable Development Goals, Secretary-General Says at Opening Ceremony.” UN Meetings Coverage and Press Releases. https://www.un.org/press/ en/2019/sgsm19556.doc.htm. Vaarzon-Morel, Petronella. 2021. “The Silence of the Donkeys: Sensorial Entanglements between People and Animals at Willowra and Beyond.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 32: 114–31. Van Dooren, Thom. 2014. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2019. The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds. New York: Columbia University Press. Walsh, Zack, Jessica Böhme, and Christine Wamsler. 2021. “Towards a Relational Paradigm in Sustainability Research, Practice, and Education.” Ambio 50 (1): 74–84. Webb, Thomas, Chris Pearson, Penny Summerfield, and Mark Riley. 2020. “MoreThan-Human Emotional Communities: British Soldiers and Mules in Second World War Burma.” Cultural and Social History 17 (2): 245–62. doi:10.1080/14780038 .2020.1744879. West, Simon, L. Jamila Haider, Sanna Stålhammar, and Stephen Woroniecki. 2020. “A Relational Turn for Sustainability Science? Relational Thinking, Leverage Points and Transformations.” Ecosystems and People 16 (1): 304–25. World Conservation Union, United Nations Environment Programme, and World Wide Fund for Nature. 1991. “Caring for the Earth: A Strategy for Sustainable Living.” United Nations Environment Programme Switzerland: Gland. Xiao, Hongjun, Junjie Cheng, and Xin Wang. 2018. “Does the Belt and Road Initiative Promote Sustainable Development? Evidence from Countries along the Belt and Road.” Sustainability 10 (12): 4370.

50  Muhammad A. Kavesh Yin, Wei. 2019. “Integrating Sustainable Development Goals into the Belt and Road Initiative: Would It Be a New Model for Green and Sustainable Investment?” Sustainability 11 (24): 6991. Zhang, Qian, Shuming Liu, Tao Wang, Xiaohu Dai, Yvette Baninla, Jun Nakatani, and Yuichi Moriguchi. 2019. “Urbanization Impacts on Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions of the Water Infrastructure in China: Trade-Offs among Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).” Journal of Cleaner Production 232: 474–86.

3 Of People and Peccaries Perception and Politics in the Texas Hill Country Adam P. Johnson

Anthropology has prominently situated more-than-human animals (henceforth animals) as significant figures in human life throughout its history. For example, Evans-Pritchard’s (1940) writings on the Nuer—an Indigenous people of South Sudan—are filled with discussions of their interdependent relationship with who actively structure their everyday life. Likewise, Douglas’ (1957) discussion of animal symbolism among the Lele demonstrates that classification systems shape human’s attitudes towards animals. These and many other classic ethnographic examples of multispecies connections have been greatly expanded recently. Now animals figure into anthropological research in all sorts of ways: as companions and kin (Haraway 2013), predators (Knight 2003), prey (Brightman 1993), industrial products (Blanchette 2020; García 2019), symbols (Geertz 2000), commodities (Collard and Dempsey 2013), and proxies (Sharp 2013). Over the last two decades, anthropologists have provided critical attention to “the host of organisms whose lives and deaths are linked to human social worlds” and whose “livelihoods shape and are shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces” (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010). Nevertheless, while investigations of animals are lively and generative, sometimes they have been neglected as insignificant agents in human lives. This dimension of human-animal relations has been explored more deeply in other disciplines, such as philosophy (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011; Meijer 2019), political science (Ahlhaus and Niesen 2015), and geography (Gillespie and Collard 2015). However, much attention has been paid to animals within human spheres, such as domestic animals as livestock or pets, those used for laboratory research, and caged in zoos. At the same time, less attention has been devoted to human and wildlife engagement, particularly how this relationship unfolds within small-scale, intimate spaces (Mathur 2021). Recent ethnographic research has attended to several ways intimate multispecies relations emerge as an effect of mutual sensing and interpreting. The intimate knowing of animal others can result in new relational possibilities that go on to resituate humans within the multispecies world. Care and grief (Dave 2014; García 2019), kin-making (Costa 2018; Govindrajan 2018), DOI: 10.4324/9781003439011-4

52  Adam P. Johnson and hunting (Keil 2021; Nadasdy 2007) have all been rich topics of multispecies research involving intimate relations between humans and other animals. This chapter intends to contribute to this emerging discourse by exploring how long-term convivial relations at a private property in the Texas Hill Country occur as a result of intimate negotiation between sensing subjects. This chapter aims to describe and analyze the long-term intimate relationship between Roger, a private property owner, and a group of collared peccaries that reside on a 60-acre property in the Texas Hill Country. The ethnographic data were gathered over the period of 18 months of intensive fieldwork using participant observation, a series of semi-structured and unstructured interviews, and ethology as a part of a larger project on humanpeccary relations throughout Texas. Following Hartigan’s (2020) methodological approach that he developed through his study of horse sociality in the face of repa das bestas—a ritual corralling and shaving of wild horses in Galicia, Spain, I use ethology in human-animal studies to take peccaries seriously as knowable ethnographic subjects. The ethnographic use of ethology permits me to interpret the peccaries’ conspecific social behaviors and responses to Roger during causal sensory encounters (Figure 3.1). I argue that the multispecies relationships that occur on Roger’s property result from the intimate negotiations of the encounters between Roger and the resident group of collared peccaries that live on his property. In addition, I argue that the consistent conviviality between Roger and the peccaries emerges from creating, negotiating, and renegotiating boundaries and requires mutual sensing and interpreting of one another, something that I call

Figure 3.1 Collared peccaries, also known as javelinas or skunk pigs, are native to south and west Texas. This javelina is feeding on corn dispersed from an automated feeder. This individual is displaying anxiety, indicated by the hairs standing up on the back.

Perception and Politics in the Texas Hill Country  53 multispecies politics. I draw on work by Meijer (2019) and Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011) to extend the concept of politics to non-human animals as the intersubjective negotiation of competing interests. While political activity occurs at all levels of social life, I will focus primarily on the politics that happens in the moments of intimate contact between sensing subjects. Recognition of diverse actors in multispecies communities exercising their agency opens up a space for myriad new possibilities. Below, I first briefly describe the site and peccaries and then demonstrate the importance of perception, mutual sensing, and interpreting in interspecies politics. Then I will go on to discuss how Roger and the peccaries form relational possibilities by setting boundaries and negotiating their encounters through their mutual sensing. The Texas Hill Country The site is a private ranch and permanent residence of Roger, his wife, and canine companion in Bandera County, TX. The property extends from the Sabinal River to the cabins, a mile down a dirt road that winds up the hills emblematic of the Texas Hill Country. The cabins are nestled on the side of a hill, 40 meters above the surrounding valley. The hill rises to the north to a maximum of 635 meters, an additional 80 meters above the cabins. The property is dominated by Ashe juniper (Juniperus ashei) and live oak (Quercus virginiana) trees with Texas persimmon (Diospyros texana) and prickly pear cactus (Opuntia sp.), all of which are relevant to the peccaries. In addition to the native plant life, Roger has installed a drip pond and automated corn dispenser to attract birds for his wildlife photography. The modifications that Roger has made have mostly been to improve wildlife diversity and regularly has visits from deer and foxes in addition to daily visits from the peccaries. The site even hosts endangered golden-cheeked warblers (Dendroica chrysoparia). Collared Peccaries Collared peccaries are medium-bodied mammals belonging to the family Tayassuidae and are widely distributed in the Americas, from northern Argentina to the southwestern United States. Interviews with participants in the larger study demonstrate a great deal of confusion, with some believing that they are pigs and others thinking they are a kind of rodent. Collared peccaries occupy a variety of environments, including tropical rainforests of the Amazon Basin, scrublands of South Texas, and the deserts of the American Southwest, demonstrating their great adaptability. In addition to collared peccaries, two other peccary species are only found in South America: whitelipped (Tayassu pecari) and Chacoan (Catagonus wagneri) peccaries. The other two species are not found across the same diversity of habitats as collared peccaries and are only found throughout the Amazon River and Chaco basins, respectively (Sowls 1997).

54  Adam P. Johnson

Figure 3.2 Javelinas engaging in a “squabble.” This involves opening the mouth widely, a distinct “wobbly” vocalization, and sometimes shaking their head back and forth, striking the con-specific. These are often short-lived and are resolved quickly

Collared peccaries are highly social, living in groups of 5–50 individuals (Sowls 1997). They engage in mutual grooming (Fradrich 1967), sleep in contact with one another (Eddy 1959), and exhibit grief behavior (de Kort et al. 2018). While much of their social behavior is affiliative, they use agonism in intragroup conflicts, ranging from threat vocalizations to violent squabbles. Hierarchy and spacing behaviors rely largely on auditory communication as peccaries have poor vision, being unable to clearly distinguish objects from more than three meters away (Schweinsburg 1969). Tooth chattering is used in intraspecific conflict to maintain hierarchy and resolve disputes—typically over food. Tooth chattering involves rapidly clacking the large canine teeth, producing a staccato sound (Sowls 1974). When non-contact agonism does not resolve disputes, squabbles can erupt. Squabbles begin abruptly, with two individuals facing off and with open mouths, striking tusks, sometimes resulting in cuts to the head. While squabbles seem brutal, they are brief, and the individuals nearly always return to feeding alongside one another (Figure 3.2). Interspecific behavior overlaps but is largely distinct from intraspecific communication. At the property in the Hill Country, peccaries regularly displace deer feeding at the automated corn feeder by chasing the deer away. While tooth chattering is used seemingly to convey frustration or annoyance, other interspecific communication includes piloerection when a peccary is anxious or unsure, barks/huffs, and wide-mouthed yawns when feeling threatened (da Silva et al. 2020). These behaviors comprise the majority of Roger’s repertoire to interpret and respond to their moods and intentions. In addition, these behaviors are salient for human-javelina interactions at other sites in the study, indicating that the intra- and interspecific behaviors observed at Roger’s ranch translate across locations in Texas.

Perception and Politics in the Texas Hill Country  55 Human-Peccary Encounters and Perception For intimate multispecies politics to occur in the first place requires the cocreation of understanding. Understanding can only be realized as an effect of participants’ experiences during encounters. Anthropologists such as primatologists, trained in ethology, know the importance of demonstrating to more-than-human others that they are no threat. Their research participants accept the presence of human interlopers, a process called habituation. As Hanson and Riley argue, habituation is a “mutually transformative process” where all participants learn to interpret and respond to the actions of one another (2018, 854–55). This is not only true for scholars who directly contact their research subjects but also for interspecies relationships resulting from long-term contact like that observed at the site in the Hill Country. Habituation is a continuous practice of negotiation made up of a series of cumulative encounters in which participants learn to interpret and predict one another based on intersubjective experiences. Faier and Rofel describe encounters as “engagements across difference” that “prompt unexpected responses and improvised actions” and involve the meeting of sensing bodies and distinct subjectivities (2014, 364). The encounters at the Hill Country ranch are not isolated chance meetings. Instead, each is an instance of a long-term association that arises from the actions and decisions of Roger and the peccaries. Both Roger and the peccaries have become habituated to one another, as described by Hanson and Riley (2018), through constant negotiation of the encounters. For such a negotiation to occur, participants must understand how the other communicates their intentions and how to convey theirs in comprehensible ways. From Roger’s position, working knowledge of peccary behavior and perceptual capacity allows Roger to participate in encounters with the group, negotiate the outcomes, and maintain conviviality. The peccaries must also accept Roger’s presence and respond in turn. The development of this understanding comes from practicing the arts of attentiveness (Van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster 2016, 6). Furthermore, it is necessary to understand the perceptual worlds of other-than-humans to “relate to other beings as subjects with the ability to communicate beyond language and to engage in a more meaningful way toward interspecies knowledge-making” (Fijn and Kavesh 2021, 13). Von Uexküll (2013) argues that the perceptual worlds that animals live in are distinct due to their unique evolved capacities to perceive. The unique sensory worlds that animals inhabit, called umwelten, result from unique evolutionary histories and individual development. As such, while animals can share an environment, they only have access to a limited part through their senses. Roger and the peccary group share the ranch, but because their umwelten differ—peccary worlds are dominated by olfaction and humans by sight—they must bridge the gap. Since peccaries have poor eyesight and sometimes inadvertently wander close to Roger, creating the potential for conflict. He understands that simply being visible is not sufficient to communicate

56  Adam P. Johnson his location and will talk to the peccaries in a calm voice so that they know where he is on the property. By intentionally making his presence known, the peccaries have the choice to remain or retreat to the cover of the juniper forest. In cases where they still approach closer than Roger is comfortable, a sharp “Boo!” will send the group scurrying off like what he refers to as “furry little cannonballs.” Despite the abrupt shock, the peccaries nearly always make their way back out of the forest with a bit more distance. In this example, Roger can exert his intentions—avoiding potential conflict—by attending to the peccaries’ umwelt. While Roger accounts for the idiosyncratic umwelt of the peccaries, they have a more general approach to setting boundaries. For instance, while feeding around in the yard or visiting the drip pond while Roger is active outside, they will pause, and the hairs down their back become erect. They then investigate Roger, smelling in his direction. Sometimes they follow up by stomping the ground, huffing, tooth chattering, or opening their mouths to display four large tusks. These behaviors are used in intra- and interspecific interactions to communicate anxiety, create space, and communicate aggression and submission (Byers and Bekoff 1981; Sowls 1997). Roger understands that when he is the recipient of such behavior, it is necessary to adjust his current actions, which typically means giving them a wider berth, which results in their return to feeding without further incident. It is important to note that while the general behavioral and perceptual capacities hold for peccaries across individuals and sites, their personalities still play a significant role in encounters. Some group members at the Hill Country Ranch are warier and less apt to engage Roger directly. However, some seem to show little reticence and will approach Roger, feeding nearby. One peccary, whom Roger named Lindbergh because they “flew solo,” was the target of persistent intergroup agonism over time, eventually leading to their dispersal. Lindbergh retreated to Roger during the attacks. If habituation is a mutually transformative process that hinges on mutual sensing, then Lindbergh’s demonstration of trust in Roger is one potential outcome. Roger enters into meaningful, convivial relations with the peccaries by extending his senses and modes of communication beyond the typical visual and linguistic modalities we humans so often rely on. Roger attends to and takes the peccaries’ position in the encounters seriously to maintain a relationship that has developed over several years. Roger’s approach to living with the peccaries rejects both anthropocentric and anthropomorphizing postures and instead accepts peccaries as agentive beings with their ontologies and intentions. Other research participants report having less-than-friendly encounters with peccaries who direct aggression at humans or their pets. It is common to hear stories of people being treed by peccaries. In these instances, the stories usually include peccaries chasing or attacking people relentlessly. In other cases, people report peccaries attacking their pets or harassing their livestock. It is difficult to parse what led to these outcomes but based on participant

Perception and Politics in the Texas Hill Country  57 observation at the site in the Hill Country and ethological research with peccaries at other locations throughout Texas, it is possible that there was a failure to communicate across species lines. Without understanding how the peccaries set boundaries and communicate displeasure, benign encounters may erupt into dangerous situations. When I discuss these stories with Roger, who hears the same kinds of reports, he laughs them off. He retorts with instances where small birds such as black-crested titmice have run off an entire group of peccaries feeding on corn from the automated feeder. Sensing and interpreting are not limited to sight and sound, two modalities humans rely heavily upon, and peccaries use as secondary or even tertiary forms of perception. Olfaction is a vital part of the human-peccary encounter. From the human’s perspective, it is often the odor of peccaries that signifies their presence. Roger describes the smell as “skunky beer,” indicating how they got one of their colloquial names: the skunk pig. Many research participants attest that the first thing they notice when in the presence of peccaries is their smell; several participants report that “you usually smell peccaries before you see them.” The odor is not particularly offensive, but it is quite distinct. Peccaries produce the odor in scent glands on their rump and use it in communication and maintaining their home range. It is common to see peccaries line up head-to-tail and rub on one another’s scent glands, identifying group membership (Bissonette 1982; Sowls 1997). Their distinct odor was my first introduction to the peccaries on Roger’s property. After a brief tour of the property with no sightings of peccaries, I made the ascent to the top of the hill where Roger suspected the peccaries primarily lived. I scrambled up the steep slope along the west side of the property, following the fence line. Immediately upon cresting the hill, I was met with the pungent odor of peccaries, an unfamiliar scent then but one to which I would soon become accustomed. Despite the smell being unambiguous, the peccaries themselves eluded me as I could not know how long it had been since they were present or in which direction they might have gone. Their smell represented them but also misrepresented them. However, only moments after smelling them, I spotted a peccary through the brush. Immediately, they were no longer ambiguous; instead, this individual became manifest with shape, location, time, and action. They led me to the group; I counted five then and followed them around the top of the hill for about 15 minutes before they disappeared into the Ashe juniper. When I was following the group, they were aware of my presence, evidenced by their pause to smell in my direction and periodic huffs and tooth clacking, a sign that they were anxious about me following and that they perceived me as a potential threat. As the group worked to make sense of my being, they became tolerant of my presence and went on foraging until they quietly disappeared into the brush. Later in the day, as the evening started to fall, I sat near the deer feeder with Roger and his dog, eagerly awaiting a visit from the peccary group. I

58  Adam P. Johnson wanted to revisit my initial encounter with the group and have Roger help me understand his experiences with them. The deer feeder went off and within minutes the entire group of 11 filed out of the forest from the west—not down the hill where I had first encountered them—and began feeding. For the first several minutes, they did not acknowledge our presence. They went about eating corn without any indication that we were of any import to their feeding. We were, as Heidegger (1962) argues, available (ready-at-hand) but not occurrent (present-at-hand). We were part of the situation, but our significance was not of immediate interest. Drawing on Gibson’s (2014) concept of affordances—perceiving the intentions of another social actor—Roger and I communicated as best we could our intentions (e.g., providing food, talking calmly, avoiding startling movements), and the peccaries responded in turn by largely ignoring our presence. However, the carefree feeding was disrupted by the click of my camera shutter. Suddenly, we went from being of little interest to the peccaries to being ambiguous; the peccaries were not sure of our intentions. About five meters away, the nearest peccary became alert and turned to face us. Instead of relying upon their vision, the peccary turned up its snout and began interrogating us through smell. Our intentions were no longer immediately understandable, so they responded with a huff and retreated. This experience communicated to the rest of the group that circumstances had changed, so they made their way back into the forest. Despite my disappointment, Roger reassured me: “don’t worry, they’ll be back.” Sure enough, after just a few minutes, the peccaries returned to feed, thus assenting to further opportunities to participate in this multispecies encounter. It was clear that the encounter had changed as the peccaries continued to investigate by periodically pausing and smelling in our direction, sometimes with piloerection, huffing, stomping, or tooth clacking to reaffirm the nature of the encounter. It felt as though they were accusing us of being predators and reminding us that they were not prey. Roger stated that they are showing us “how tough they are.” We were now of direct interest to the group and, having broken the previously shared understanding established earlier, became a point of anxiety for the group. While Roger and I spent time visually observing the peccaries, much of the encounter was multi-sensory. We could smell the peccary group that shaped our participation in the encounter. The peccaries used olfaction to assess the situation for danger and decide how to feed out in the open. Our calm conversation and intentional movements communicated to the peccaries that we were present and not a threat, except with the introduction of an ambiguous sound: the camera shutter. The peccaries expressed anxiety by pausing, using piloerection, and making various vocalizations which Roger understood as displeasure through years of attentive participation in encounters with these peccaries. For the peccaries, participation in the “scentspace”—sensing atmospheric dimensions of encounter (Keil 2021)— is most salient (Sowls 1997).

Perception and Politics in the Texas Hill Country  59 Rogers’s cultivated attention to peccary subjectivities allows his interpretation of their affect and intentions. Roger’s interpretations have proven accurate as his responses maintain friendly interactions and, in cases where conviviality is disrupted, the conflict is resolved. The peccaries also demonstrate their participation in the mutual sensing and interpretation at the property by visiting the feeder despite food widely distributed away from human activity. The relationship between Roger and the peccaries begins with the immediacy of sensing and responding. However, the relationship is produced through the negotiation of encounters and the reconciliation of competing interests: multispecies politics. Intimate Multispecies Politics Politics has traditionally been relegated to the human sphere. Arendt (2013) conceptualizes politics as an active form of community participation, whereby matters of interest are deliberated, and participants can exercise their agentive power: a uniquely human activity. However, this articulation of politics does not preclude a politics that incorporates the more-than-human world. Relegating politics to a purely human activity obscures the more intimate politics that occur in our everyday encounters, the diverse communities we share with other beings, and the ways they interpenetrate human lives. Arendt’s (2013) articulation of the human condition is being re-evaluated to consider ways in which non-human communication and action can be understood as forms of political agency that are scrutable to human interlocutors (Rossello 2022). Suppose we accept more-than-human beings as political agents enmeshed in human lives. In that case, the encounters in these multispecies communities are not stochastic and unpredictable but instead are emergent and arise out of the ebbs and flows of everyday contact across differences (Faier and Rofel 2014; Kirksey 2015). They involve negotiating distinct, sometimes conflicting interests among the participating actors. It is this negotiation that I will explore in this section of the chapter, and it is this sort of negotiation that occurs at Roger’s property in the Texas Hill Country. Roger sits in a canvas portable folding chair, camera in hand, photographing birds that visit the birdseed scattered around the drip pond in the morning light. Roger often photographs in the morning—facing west, or in the evening—facing east, to get the best light. There is a pronounced crunching of fallen leaves and sliding rocks from the shadows beneath the Ashe juniper and live oak trees on the slope of the hill. Then out from the trees emerges one, two, and then the rest of the peccaries. When they first come out into the open, they proceed with two or three steps before pausing, taking account of the air, before continuing. They repeat this pattern during the first several moments in the open before committing to the space. The group continues to the drip pond where they feed on the birdseed, only a few meters from Roger’s position. Sitting at Roger’s feet is his canine companion, not visibly interested in the peccaries feeding nearby. While feeding, the peccaries

60  Adam P. Johnson wander close, making Roger uncomfortable: “I’m not worried about myself, but I don’t know how they are going to react to Dobie [the dog].” Roger makes a sharp sound and the peccaries bound off into the treeline. After a few minutes, one returns to the birdseed, and then shortly after, the rest follow, and the peccaries finish their feeding bout before moving into the treeline until later in the day. Roger demonstrates that it is essential to understand how peccaries perceive the world so that encounters have peaceable outcomes. In this instance, the peccaries intended to take advantage of the available birdseed. Roger was pleased to have them visit the drip pond even though they disrupted his bird photography. However, when the situation changed and Roger needed to establish a boundary, he chose to do so comprehensibly to the peccaries. The peccaries responded in turn, and the situation returned to one acceptable to the group and Roger. This instance is emblematic of the multispecies dynamics that occur at the property. Roger and the peccaries contact one another nearly every day, and Roger reports that the encounters are always positive, even when there is apparent conflict within the group. I understand these negotiations as intimate politics across species boundaries. Engaging in multispecies politics requires resisting anthropocentric notions of politics and decentering the human perspective. Haraway argues that sensing is always a political act of positionality, and denying participants in an encounter their subjectivity and agency is a form of political violence (1988, 585). Denying another’s subjectivity is the monopolization of power and, without attending to the other’s interests and positionality, is a point from which conflict can emerge. Thus, engaging in truly multispecies politics requires the participation of sensing subjects in an intersubjective negotiation. To be clear, this is not politics about another species, such as policy implemented for the management or conservation of a species or the regulation of human behavior as it relates to other kinds of beings. Instead, it is a participatory politics that requires extending oneself beyond linguistic and other human ontologies to find ways to engage with other lively community members; and to create an interspecific “discourse” that allows participants to determine their positionality in the social and physical space. Meeting another at this level requires a move outside human language to allow for more sensuous forms of communication in close encounters between sensing bodies (Abram 2012). Despite politics’ relegation to human spheres, Meijer (2019) and other scholars (Donaldson 2020; Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011; Rossello 2022) argue that more than-human beings also participate in human lives as political actors. Such scholarship has primarily focused on the role of domesticated and tamed animals such as pets, livestock, and animals exhibited at zoos. In addition, scholars focus on the roles animals play in shaping policies and consider ways to provide animals with avenues for participation in political debates that shape the structures and policies of society. However, little attention is paid to the intimate politics that occurs when species meet in the world as part of the flow of everyday life. Furthermore, while theorized as

Perception and Politics in the Texas Hill Country  61

Figure 3.3 Hours-old babies follow their mother to the drip pond. Photograph by Roger Gray©

political actors, wild animals have not received the same degree of empirical examination, so less is understood about how they may practice politics with other species. Despite having intentions that bring them into contact with one another, Roger and the peccaries find ways to share the space and afford the other the freedom to exercise their will and meet their interests. Roger creates goodwill by providing food in the form of corn from the automated feeder, birdseed, and sometimes tossing out carrots to the group. The peccaries respond by keeping an even disposition while in the yard and, in one of the starkest examples, bringing hours-old babies to the yard with the family group despite plenty of foodstuffs distributed throughout the property. The group’s willingness to bring the babies to the yard while Roger is outside has developed throughout the project and appears to be an effect of Roger creating a safe and trusting environment. Now the peccaries come to the yard with babies in tow, sometimes still with umbilical cords attached. The latest example of this demonstration of trust was on April 10, 2022, with the tiniest newborns yet seen (Figure 3.3). Additional informants throughout Texas report having similar relationships with resident groups of peccaries, where mothers bring young onto the property in the presence of humans. Descriptions of convivial relations with resident peccaries take on many forms, some similar to those from Roger’s property. Others report more tenuous but mostly friendly interactions with groups of peccaries that property owners frequently encounter. However, this seems best explained by individual mothers’ parenting strategies and property owners learning to recognize the mothers who are more anxious about their presence and accommodating these differences accordingly. Even in chance, short-term encounters, tourists at Big Bend National Park observe peccaries feeding in the campgrounds without incidence. The peccaries seem to know what to expect of the sorts of humans in these spaces and act accordingly. When there are fewer campers in the summer heat, they use entire portions

62  Adam P. Johnson of the campgrounds but are more discerning when traffic is higher, choosing to visit the grounds once activity reduces at night. While there are many examples of long-term relationships between private property owners and peccaries in Texas, it is more common to hear first and second-hand accounts of peccaries behaving aggressively. One informant told of an experience conveyed to them by a friend, where a group of peccaries chased the friend up a tree and remained at the base for hours. Roger has also heard these stories when sharing photographs on Facebook interest groups. Since Roger has daily, close contact with peccaries, he is dubious of such accounts and shared one of the more harrowing tales: This friend of mine or this guy I knew got treed by peccaries, and one of them swears that this guy they knew was killed by peccaries. He got treed and couldn’t stay up in the tree long enough and the peccaries just waited below the tree for him and tore him to shreds. While I can’t say that didn’t happen because I wasn’t there, I see peccaries two to three times a day at least and I’m often six or eight feet away from them, and the… First off, they are so small. [laughs]. A hog, I would be afraid of a hog. They can get into a couple of hundred pounds or larger range. A javelina doesn’t even come up to your knee. And I don’t know how you could be much more skittish than peccaries. Roger is skeptical of stories where peccaries kill people but understands that wild animals can sometimes act unpredictably. A survey of publically available news reports reveals no reported human deaths in the United States by peccaries, with a few injuries and reports of killed pets. These contradictory narratives raise the question of why Roger does not have similar experiences of aggressive peccaries at his property. Throughout the study, when he is outside, Roger always anticipates a peccary visit and is attentive to their presence so that he can respond to the peccaries’ manners. Roger’s ability to respond is an effect of a cultivated knowledge of peccary behaviors, forms of communication, and modalities for perceiving. With this foundation, he and the peccaries coexist in the space, not in separate spheres, but constantly touch base throughout the encounter by reaffirming and re-establishing the relationship (Govindrajan 2018). Furthermore, the intimate negotiation in each encounter is part of broader patterns of relating that have set expectations over the years. Each new generation of peccaries born into the site learns and performs these patterns, even as the herd composition has shifted since Roger purchased the property. The long-term, transgenerational relationship that Roger and the peccaries share resembles the animal agora described by Sue Donaldson (2020)—a space created through the mutual making of shared interspecies worlds. As Donaldson argues, to occupy multispecies worlds, we must engage in a more embodied politics that considers non-linguistic, non-institutional forms of political activity (2020, 724). As such, a new public commons is imagined whereby actors that move through these spaces have a voice in how they are

Perception and Politics in the Texas Hill Country  63 constituted. Roger points out the peccaries were on the land before he moved to the property—further corroborated by the previous landowners’ claims of seeing peccaries on the hill when they were children—and so feels as though he has to accommodate them as it is their home too. The peccaries also seem to reciprocate while still exercising their territorial claim on the space. A community emerges where the myriad interests of the many beings that make up the space are considered and appreciated. The human-peccary relations at the site in the Hill Country represent one aspect of the broader multispecies community that includes the other animals (e.g., deer, foxes, and birds) that live at and visit the site. Roger recently published an article in the American Birding Association’s monthly magazine Birding about the development of the drip pond from its earliest iteration as a hose dripping into an aluminum pan to its current form today. Roger explains that it is an oasis that attracts many animals, and because of its inclusion, the pond has become the key feature at which the multispecies community interfaces (Gray 2022). This community is maintained through mutual sensing, interpreting, and acting that considers the specificities of the perceptual capacities of the participants. Since peccaries have limited vision, the scentspace that Roger, his canine companions, and the peccaries share shapes the respective subjectivities of the actors (Keil 2021). For Roger and his dog, the distinctive odor of peccaries betrays their presence. He can then act by their presence to ensure a diplomatic encounter. The peccaries use smell to interrogate the space to ensure that it is suitable to step out of the shadows of the forest and visit the drip pond or automated feeder. In response to disruptions to predictability, such as a swooping bird, rapid movement, new sound, or strange smell, the peccaries display outward signs of anxiety or run for the nearest cover. Through these phenomenological dimensions, sensings and sensed bodies are known and interpreted through emplacement, where the participants are part of a complex “ecology of things” (Ingold 2011; Pink 2011). As such, they are “organisms in relation to other organisms and their representations in relation to other representations” (Pink 2011, 354). They become-with both in terms of the relations to one another and as an effect of the site itself (Govindrajan 2018; Haraway 2016). The site constitutes and is constitutive of the negotiated social relations and the emergent community that follows. Conclusion The chapter shows that the relationship between a private property owner and a group of peccaries in the Texas Hill Country is the consequence of the intentional negotiation of the site by all actants. The negotiation occurs through the cultivation of attention, whereby the property owner, Roger, develops his understanding of peccary behavior and the particularities of the resident peccary group to accommodate their presence on his property as part of a multispecies community. I understand this negotiation as an intimate and emplaced politics that spans species boundaries. Each participant comes to know one another

64  Adam P. Johnson and responds accordingly in comprehensible ways to other interested parties. As an effect, the conflict between Roger and the peccaries is mitigated or outright avoided, and the site serves as a lively space of interspecies conviviality. Meijer (2019) argues that more-than-human politics, like that occurring at the property in the Texas Hill Country, requires us to rethink our sovereignty and citizenship. I have attempted to extend this argument in my analysis of multispecies community-making and multispecies politics. Following Meijer’s (2019: 2) suggestion that humans should not simply consider other beings and instead “reformulate political and social relations in interaction with [other beings] in order not to repeat anthropocentrism,” my discussion provides attentiveness to more-than-human perception and communication. I suggest that we can find ways to participate in diverse communities with other beings by taking them seriously as “thinking, feeling, intending” political actors (Ingold 2011, 95). With our mutual interest in living and co-living, understanding others and making affordances, we can re-make spaces for co-existence and multispecies convivially. As humans continue to colonize and displace other animals in the Anthropocene, it is necessary to consider the possibilities for nurturing alternative futures across species differences. Without segregating our futures from the future of animal, we must plan with the interests of multispecies communities and attend to their responses to anthropogenic activities (Latour 2012). Haraway (2016) argues that whatever we will be, we will be so in relation to other beings, and we have to find a way to “live and die well in multispecies symbiosis, sympoiesis, and symanimagenesis on a damaged planet…” (2016, 98). Doing so requires acceptance of other beings as political actors and meeting them in negotiation through intelligible means to all participants. By resisting anthropocentric formulations of the more-than-human world and looking toward those moments of intimate encounters, we may find meaningful ways to participate in multispecies communities. This chapter serves as a multispecies translation of peccary “voices” that illustrates a possibility in which humans can reimagine and participate in the myriad relationships that they form through various encounters. This consideration encompasses relations with others—both humans and more-than-humans. Anthropology, with its ethnographic emphasis and an engagement with local communities, is best situated to make meaningful contributions to our understanding of the many possibilities for living well with others in a world composed of different ways of being, knowing, perceiving, and communicating. Anthropology must thus resist the urge to transform heterogeneous others into mere objects on which human activity can be imposed and accept them as political agents that co-create the diverse communities that serve as the foundation for making futures that include many “voices” and interests, human and otherwise. References Abram, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a Morethan-Human World. Vintage, New York. Ahlhaus, Svenja, and Peter Niesen. 2015. “What Is Animal Politics? Outline of a New Research Agenda.” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung, 40 (4) 7–31.

Perception and Politics in the Texas Hill Country  65 Arendt, Hannah. 2013. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press. Blanchette, Alex. 2020. Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brightman, Robert Alain. 1993. “Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships.” Berkeley: University of California Press. Bissonette, John A. 1982. Ecology and Social Behavior of the Collared Peccary in Big Bend National Park, Texas. US Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Washington, D.C. Byers, John A, and Marc Bekoff. 1981. “Social, Spacing, and Cooperative Behavior of the Collared Peccary, Tayassu Tajacu.” Journal of Mammalogy 62 (4): 767–85. Collard, Rosemary-Claire, and Jessica Dempsey. 2013. “Life for Sale? The Politics of Lively Commodities.” Environment and Planning A 45 (11): 2682–99. Costa, Luiz. 2018. The Owners of Kinship: Asymmetrical Relations in Indigenous Amazonia. HAU Books. da Silva, Mariane Mendes, Carlos Magno de Faria, Fernanda de Souza Sá, Dhiordan Deon Lovestain Costa, Beatriz Cristiana da Silva, Gabriela Luiza de Deus, Robert John Young, and Cristiano Schetini de Azevedo. 2020. “Ethogram and TimeActivity Budget of the Collared Peccary (Pecari Tajacu, Tayassuidae): Implications for Husbandry and Welfare.” Journal of Natural History 54 (25–26): 1617–35. Dave, Naisargi N. 2014. “Witness: Humans, Animals, and the Politics of Becoming.” Cultural Anthropology 29 (3): 433–56. de Kort, Dante, Mariana Altrichter, Sara Cortez, and Micaela Camino. 2018. “Collared Peccary (Pecari Tajacu) Behavioral Reactions toward a Dead Member of the Herd.” Ethology 124 (2): 131–34. Donaldson, Sue. 2020. “Animal Agora: Animal Citizens and the Democratic Challenge.” Social Theory and Practice, 46 (4): 709–35. Donaldson, Sue, and Will Kymlicka. 2011. Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. Oxford University Press. Douglas, Mary. 1957. “Animals in Lele Religious Symbolism.” Africa 27 (1): 46–58. Eddy, Thomas Allen. 1959. “Foods of the Collared Peccary Pecari Tajacu Sonoriensis (Mearns) in Southern Arizona.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Arizona. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1940. “The Nuer, a Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Clarendon.” Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1940. “The Nuer, a Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People.” Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK. Faier, Lieba, and Lisa Rofel. 2014. “Ethnographies of Encounter.” Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 363–77. Fijn, Natasha, and Muhammad A Kavesh. 2021. “A Sensory Approach for Multispecies Anthropology.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 32: 6–22. Fradrich, H. 1967. “Das Verhalten Der Schweine (Suidae, Tayassuidae) Und Flusspferde (Hippopotamidae).” Handbook of Zool 8 (26): 1–44. García, María Elena. 2019. “Death of a Guinea Pig: Grief and the Limits of Multispecies Ethnography in Peru.” Environmental Humanities 11 (2): 351–72. Geertz, Clifford. 2000. Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. Springer. Gibson, James J. 2014. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception: Classic Edition. Psychology Press. Gillespie, Kathryn, and Rosemary-Claire Collard. 2015. Critical Animal Geographies. Taylor & Francis. Govindrajan, Radhika. 2018. “Animal Intimacies.” In Animal Intimacies. University of Chicago Press: Chicago. Gray, Roger. 2022. “Hill Country Wildlife Oasis.” Birding, May 2022.

66  Adam P. Johnson Hanson, Katherine T, and Erin P. Riley. 2018. “Beyond Neutrality: The Human– Primate Interface during the Habituation Process.” International Journal of Primatology 39: 852–77. Haraway, Donna J. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99. ———. 2013. When Species Meet. Vol. 3. University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Hartigan Jr, John. 2020. Shaving the Beasts: Wild Horses and Ritual in Spain. U of Minnesota Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie, and Edward Robinson. 7th ed. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK. Ingold, Tim. 2011. “The Animal in the Study of Humanity.” Readings in Zoosemiotics, edited by Timo Maran, Dario Martinelli and Aleksei Turovski, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2012, pp. 357–376. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110253436.357. Keil, Paul G. 2021. “Rank Atmospheres: The More‐Than‐Human Scentspace and Aesthetic of a Pigdogging Hunt.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 32: 96–113. Kirksey, S. Eben. 2015. Emergent Ecologies. Duke University Press. Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 25 (4): 545–76. Knight, John. 2003. Waiting for Wolves in Japan: An Anthropological Study of People-Wildlife Relations. Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2012. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press. Mathur, Nayanika. 2021. Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Meijer, Eva. 2019. When Animals Speak: Toward an Interspecies Democracy. Vol. 1. NYU Press. Nadasdy, Paul. 2007. “The Gift in the Animal: The Ontology of Hunting and Human–Animal Sociality.” American Ethnologist 34 (1): 25–43. Pink, Sarah. 2011. “From Embodiment to Emplacement: Re-Thinking Competing Bodies, Senses and Spatialities.” Sport, Education and Society 16 (3): 343–55. Rossello, Diego. 2022. “The Animal Condition in the Human Condition: Rethinking Arendt’s Political Action beyond the Human Species.” Contemporary Political Theory 21 (2): 219–39. Schweinsburg, Raymond Eugene. 1969. Social Behavior of the Collared Peccary (Pecari Tajacu) in the Tucson Mountains. The University of Arizona. Sharp, Lesley. 2014. “Hybridity: Hybrid Bodies of the Scientific Imaginary.” In Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology, edited by Henriertta L. Moore and Todd Sanders. 276–81. John Wiley and Sons Ltd, West Sussex, UK. Sowls, Lyle K. 1974. “Social Behavior of the Collared Peccary, Dicotyles Tajacu,(L).” In The Behavior of Ungulates and Its Relation to Management, vol. 24, edited by Valerius Geist and La Faber Walther, 144–65. Morges: IUCN. ———. 1997. Javelinas and Other Peccaries: Their Biology, Management, and Use. Texas AandM University Press. Van Dooren, Thom, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster. 2016. “Multispecies StudiesCultivating Arts of Attentiveness.” Environmental Humanities 8 (1): 1–23. Von Uexküll, Jakob. 2013. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning. Vol. 12. University of Minnesota Press.

4 Mongolia’s Biocultural Landscape The Importance of Domestic and Wild Multispecies Diversity Natasha Fijn Mongolia is home to one of the largest, continuously intact grassland ecosystems left on the planet with an area of over 386 million acres, in large part through herding families’ ongoing mobile form of management of their multispecies herds in this landscape, the small amount of industry or cropped agriculture and sparse human habitation. The grassland steppe contains a rich diversity of endemic plant species, while there have been minimal introductions of exotic and invasive weed species. Over 83 percent of the country is still used by herd animals for grazing purposes, supporting large populations of domestic and wild mammalian ungulates, including wild horse (takhi, Equus przewalskii), Asian wild ass (khulan, Equus hemionus), wild sheep (argali, Ovus ammon), bactrian camel (Camelanus bactrianus ferus), goitered gazelle (Gazella subgutturosa), Mongolian saiga (S. t mongolica), Siberian ibex (Capra siberica) and apex predators, such as wolves (chono, Canus lupus), bear (Ursus arctos gobiensis) and snow leopard (Uncia uncia) (Reading et al. 2006). There is a global-level awareness of the importance of conserving these increasingly vulnerable mammalian species. Mongolia has shown an ongoing commitment to special protected areas for the conservation of these species (Reading et al. 1999). There has, however, been little focus on the unique biological and genetic heritage of ‘native’ or Indigenous Mongol breeds of herd animal that co-exist with families in multispecies herding encampments in Mongolia, nor has there been much attention regarding the diverse species of medicinal plant consumed by herd animals, both domestic and wild, and herding families who co-exist on the grassland steppe. As with human communities, the generalisation of the term ‘native’ for breeds of herd animals is problematic. Herders refer to those that are specific to Mongolia as ‘Mongol’ but have names for the varieties that are adapted to specific regions, for example, the main breed of horse is ‘Mongol’, but those horses born in Sukhbaatar Province are known for their speed and endurance. Many of the breeds of herd animal that are endemic to Mongolia have genetic links to the wild ungulate forms that still live in Mongolia, including the Mongol horse, Bactrian camel, goat or sheep breeds.1 Minimal fencing DOI: 10.4324/9781003439011-5

68  Natasha Fijn and containment mean that these ‘domestic’ and ‘wild’ species co-exist as part of an interconnected ecology. In the Khangai Mountains, where the author has predominantly conducted fieldwork, there are no camels, but there are Mongol horses (mor’), Mongol cattle (ukher), yak (sarlag) and yak-cow hybrids (khainag), as well as combined herds of sheep and goats (bog). All co-exist with the herding family, returning to the co-domestic sphere of the encampment as their ‘home’. The emphasis here is on entanglements, an intertwined co-becoming between nature and culture, the social and the biological, the human and nonhuman, the domestic and the wild (Ingold 2000). This chapter relates the socio-ecological engagement of Mongolian families, highlighting the importance of the conservation of multispecies herds, mobility and the promotion of species diversity as long-held, ancient means of managing herd animals across a steppe ecosystem in an environment that is particularly subject to climatic and environmental extremes. In a previous article with Tom White, we emphasised how it is important to recognise multi-scalar aspects of multispecies relations in the Inner Asian region (White and Fijn 2020). The significance of Mongolia’s intangible cultural heritage has been acknowledged by UNESCO with reference to the music of the horse-head fiddle, Mongolian traditional epics, long song, throat singing or classic calligraphy. Even the traditions relating to other beings are included, such as a coaxing ritual for camels, or falconry. Ovoo, or rock cairns, are designated sacred sites in the surrounding landscape and are often located on mountain passes. The ovoo has been identified as an intangible cultural heritage, but this designation has also become a means of conserving, not only the heritage of the archaeological aspects of the stone cairn itself but also the accompanying cultural and spiritual elements (Hutchins 2021; Watters 2021). As Caroline Humphrey (1995) has indicated, the Mongolian worldview is that humans are intrinsically a part of the land and interconnected with a wider ‘nature’ (baigal’), through a reverence for powerful supernatural beings that reside in the landscape. Rebecca Watters (2021) points out that the reverence for ovoo is a way that Mongolians actively engage with other entities as inherent parts of the surrounding landscape, ‘everything that is’ (baigal’), whereas conservationists tend to still perceive the preservation of ‘nature’ as something separate from humanity. In countries that are part of the European Union, there has been a growing awareness of the need for legislation to conserve endangered domestic heritage breeds to maintain genetic diversity (FAO 2015, 396). The Mongol horse has been found to be a particularly ancient breed with a high degree of genetic diversity compared with other horse breeds (Bjornstad et al. 2003). Native sheep breeds across the Mongolian Plateau also have a high degree of genetic diversity through their ancient lineages. From archaeological burials and petroglyphs, ancient sheep populations are thought to have arrived in the region 5,000–7,000 years ago (Ganbold et al. 2019). One physical factor

Mongolia’s Biocultural Landscape  69 that is indicative of the ancient heritage of Mongol sheep is that they still shed their fleece, rather than relying on humans to shear their fleece every year. Each species of herd animal in Mongolia, therefore, includes particular breeds that are well adapted to the extreme continental conditions on the Mongolian Plateau. The rangeland ecology literature based in Mongolia has tended to focus on the importance of herders’ traditional ecological knowledge by analysing environmental aspects, such as climate, water and land use, or Soviet and post-Soviet government policies and how these factors have influenced grassland management practices. Part of the analysis has been whether Indigenous knowledge practices align with scientific frameworks with the intention of assisting herders with adaptations to changing environmental conditions (see, for example, Fernández-Giménez 2000; Fernández-Giménez et al. 2014; Marin 2010; Shaw-Reid et al. 2021). Richard Reading and colleagues have acknowledged the importance of pastoralism as a part of biocultural heritage: ‘effectively conserving Mongolia’s rangelands would not only help ensure a sustainable rural economy, but also help preserve the nation’s cultural and natural heritage’ (2006, 10, also see Reading 1999). Steve Brown and Bas Verschuuren (2018), as specialists in heritage, consider that biological and cultural heritage exist as a part of an entangled landscape, interwoven as naturecultures. They note that UNESCO has started to recognise the need to break down the dichotomies between biological and cultural heritage to align better with Indigenous perspectives, where such separate binaries do not tend to exist. The focus within this chapter is not so much on an analysis of different forms of land use or an environment-based focus, but on multispecies and ecological connections: social relations between different species, including herders, intertwined as part of an interconnected socio-ecological sphere (Fijn 2011). I highlight how the way of life inherent in multispecies mobile pastoralism allows for biocultural diversity and should be recognised as such through the preservation of the significant biological and cultural heritage still evident on the Mongolian Plateau. Two ethnographic examples are illustrative of the significance of this biocultural diversity: the knowledge and employment of unique breeding between yak and Mongol cattle to form generations of oxen, well adapted to the surrounding mountainous terrain, which includes wooden ox-carts employed to move to different encampments; while in the second part of the chapter I turn to the utilisation of a wide range of medicinal plant species that are picked and prepared for the prevention and treatment of both human and herd animal ailments. Barbara Seele (2017) and Barbara Seele et al. (2019) also recognised this need, from a biodiversity conservation perspective, documenting ethnoveterinary knowledge as an important aspect of Mongolia’s biocultural heritage, while recognising that these plants help to sustain the diversity of the surrounding grassland-steppe ecology.

70  Natasha Fijn The multispecies ethnographic approach within this chapter stems from living in the countryside during much of 2005 and in the spring of 2007. I returned to field research in Mongolia in the spring and autumn of 2017, in the autumn of 2019 and summer of 2022. Fieldwork involved travelling to different encampments within herding communities (bag), filming and recording semi-structured interviews and informal conversations, while basing longer periods of participant observation within two extended herding families in Arkhangai and Bulgan provinces. Seasonal Mobility with Oxen Roads across Mongolia today would have originally been established by the tracks of horses as part of the fast-paced postal network (zam), or slowerpaced ox or camel trains (jing). Caroline Humphrey (2020) has written about the use of slow-paced transport caravans (jing teekh) from oral history accounts of elders in 1974, remembering the transport networks of the 1930s through until the 1960s. Her respondents emphasised the advantages and pleasures of the slowness of these ox-cart caravans, even though the way of life was hard: These moved at a very slow pace, such that they could easily be overtaken by a man walking. Large cart wheels made from heavy timber and not perfectly round accentuated the sluggishness. Journeys were often measured by time, days or months, rather than by distance. (2020: 18) Similar to these trade-based transport caravans, the migration to a new encampment follows seasonal rhythms and the bio-ecological needs of the herd animals. It also allows herders to observe the state of the pasture while travelling. At a point when Mongolia was still transitioning from a Soviet state to democratic independence, Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath questioned whether Inner Asia was experiencing The End of Nomadism? (1999). They pointed out at the time that over the Russian border from Mongolia in Buryatia agroindustry had occupied herding areas, causing damage to fragile steppe soils with deep ploughing and the application of chemical fertilizers. Low mobility in both Buryatia and Inner Mongolia in China had resulted in considerable pasture degradation in comparison to the more intact pastures of Mongolia. They emphasised the ongoing importance of mobility as a central component of Inner Asian pastoralism. Diligent herders in the forest-steppe region of Mongolia, or the Khangai Mountains, still move the entire family encampment during each season up and down broad river valleys. Movement may be seasonal, but also on a smaller scale, whereby herders are constantly moving the sheep and goat herd to seek out new pastures to graze upon. Herders also head out on otor

Mongolia’s Biocultural Landscape  71 in autumn, which involves seeking out fresh pasture over longer distances, remaining away from the family encampment for a night or two with the intention of fattening the herd. In times of severe drought or winter disaster (dzud), in order to survive herders may move much longer distances to other districts, or even other provinces, to find enough pasture for their herds (Lindskog 2014). The following is an ethnographic example from 2005 of an annual seasonal migration from a large summer encampment to a more temporary autumn encampment in the high-altitude Jargalant River valley in Arkhangai. I was residing with Choijo’s extended family encampment at the time, comprising five family yurts (ger) and home to three generations. The summer encampment was located just as the valley narrows with nearby mountain slopes, situated on a flat, elevated terrace with plenty of space for the summer milking and where herd animals could wander out to graze on river flats, or up onto the steep hillsides after milking. The new autumn encampment was mid-way between the summer and winter encampments, close to running water and the grass was lush and long nearby. Choijo’s extended family had the most horses in the local district (bag), but also a large cattle herd. Choijo’s extended family had 14 oxen at the time, while in the migration to the autumn encampment, it took nine strong oxen to move two families and the contents of their respective homes. Although trucks were occasionally used to move some possessions, not many herders owned a vehicle and petrol was prohibitively expensive, so families generally used oxen hitched to oxcarts to migrate to different encampments, particularly moves involving shorter distances between the spring and autumn encampments. Mongolians mainly herd cattle, but in higher altitudes mainly herd yak. Most of the cattle belong to three separate Indigenous cattle, the Mongol, Selenge and Khalkhun Golon with some genetic influence from Ukrainian and Russian breeds during the Soviet era. Mongolian cattle have been found, as are the Mongol horse, camel, sheep and goat, to be genetically diverse in comparison to other domestic breeds. Through the use of oxen pulling carts across the grassland steppe during the Khan Empire, these cattle would have spread their genes across Eurasia with the Mongol army (Ganbold et al. 2018). The Mongolian cattle are small but strong, while the Indigenous form of yak is somewhat larger and able to cope with mountainous, rough terrain. Castrated yak-cattle hybrids (khainag) are the result of herders selectively inter-breeding a yak bull (sarlag) with a Mongol cow (ukher). The result is an interesting physical mix between Mongol cattle and the yak, as the khainag has a face and muzzle like a yak and a similar fluffy tail but does not develop a long flowing skirt of guard hair (yet is still quite fluffy in winter, in comparison to European breeds of cattle). Yaks vocalise in low grunts, while cows moo, while the khainag utters a comical mix between a grunt and a moo. The female khainag provides creamy milk, as does sarlag, but produces more, while castrated male hybrids grow to be larger in size when compared

72  Natasha Fijn with both sarlag or Mongol bulls (see Fijn 2011 for more details on herders hybridising yak and Mongol cattle). Young oxen were trained gradually over a few weeks to respond to various voice commands, while being led beside an ox cart by a ring through the nostrils, before being expected to pull a fully laden ox cart.2 Wooden oxcarts (ukher tereg) were hand-made from the nearby forest, without the use of nails, and slotted together using techniques handed down over the generations. Even the wheels were mainly hand-made out of wood, some were also made from metal or adapted rubber tyres. According to Caroline Humphrey (2020), the use of heavy, not-quite-round wooden wheels was designed to assist with loads up mountain inclines and to prevent them from barrelling out of control on steep downhill gradients. To preserve the wood and keep a cart in working order, the men would submerge the wheels of the cart in the nearby river. The carts were then pulled out for the move to another encampment. Yurts were rapidly dismantled with other families from neighbouring encampments arriving to help. Internal furnishings, including wooden chests, the central stove and chimney, metal beds, cooking implements, leather herding equipment and personal possessions, were piled high onto the carts, followed by the wooden internal structure, felt and outer canvas of the yurt, then all firmly strapped down using tightly plaited horse-hair ropes. It was a slight teenager’s herding task to manoeuvre these beasts, who were much larger and stronger than him, through vocalisations and commands. They readily complied as he asked them to move around into the correct place so that a simple yoke could be placed across their withers and the two sides of the cart lowered into position. The oxen were led by their nose-rings into one long line with their respective carts, each family’s home piled high. The khainag would occupy the same placement in the line-up of carts so that they accepted who was ahead or behind them. The lead ox was selected as an individual that was particularly ‘nomhon’, or tame and quiet, while responsive to vocal commands. It was the teenager Saikhanaa’s task to scoot up and sit astride the lead ox’s broad back, spurring all the oxen to move forward with a loud ‘khudg’. One of the men would tend to ride alongside the team on horseback, constantly vocalising or an occasional crack with a whip, to keep the oxen in check and moving along (Figure 4.1). Ox caravans could be heard from some distance away through the herder emitting constant whoops and yells to the oxen to keep up a steady pace. As with many herders, the teenager Saikhanaa would sing herding songs as he rode on the lead oxen’s back, keeping time with the rhythm of the oxen lumbering along and the squeaking wheels of the cart as they slowly turned. Once the ox train arrived at the autumn site, the first task was to release the oxen from their heavily laden burdens and allow them to graze on the lush autumn pasture. With neighbours gathering around to help, the external structure of each yurt was set up rapidly. There was a warm feeling as we all

Mongolia’s Biocultural Landscape  73

Figure 4.1 Herder riding a horse, while leading a train of ox carts. Image: Natasha Fijn, Bulgan province, 2005.

sat around for a break afterwards. One of the women blessed the four winds and made an offering, and then we all sat down with some salty-milk tea in recognition of the new encampment as ‘home’ (khot ail). To supplement this ethnographic description, see a video segment of this seasonal migration with the oxen. The segment includes another location in Bulgan Province too, focussing on the mobility of the herd animals migrating to the summer encampment, then the smaller-scale movement of the cow’s out to pasture after the morning’s milking (see: https://vimeo.com/14312685). A Change in Mode of Transport In the spring of 2017, after not having been back for ten years, I returned to Choijo’s extended family encampment. No one in the valley was moving encampments with ox carts anymore. The matriarch of another family I resided with, Dogsomjav, told me that the big red ox that I had been fond of was her last ox. While residing in their encampment in 2005, as part of the daily routine in the autumn it had been my task to hitch Red (Ulaanaa) to a cart with a water barrel and walk beside him (along with one of the dogs from the encampment who had bonded with the ox) to the river to collect water for the day’s household cooking and cleaning. Wooden carts are still sighted in the Mongolian countryside but are often abandoned on the grassland steppe, or re-purposed as drying racks for dairy products (Figure 4.2). Rock art from the Bronze Age clearly depicts bovines pulling wheeled carts in Western Mongolia (Jacobson-Tepfer 2012). These carts were similar in design to the ox carts still being used ten years ago, indicating that these carts had been utilised in a similar manner in the Altai and Sayan mountain

74  Natasha Fijn

Figure 4.2 Wooden cart being utilised for a different purpose, as a drying rack for dairy products. Image: Natasha Fijn, Arkhangai province, 2017.

regions of Mongolia and Siberia since the second millennium BCE. The use of ox carts is, therefore, an ancient practice and has been an important part of the cultural heritage of Mongolian pastoralism for thousands of years. Lkhagvadorj and colleagues (2013) noted that all families in the western Khangai, where they conducted a study on the ecological impact of mobile animal husbandry after de-collectivisation, would move about ten times annually, but all families owned a truck to make these moves by 2011. The change to motorised vehicles has resulted in a different focus in relation to the herd animals in the Khangai region, as now the big, tame hybrid males (khainag) have no functional purpose, apart from ending up as food or leather products. Only one yak is chosen as the bull to produce the progeny of the entire herd and this carefully selected individual tends to be brought in from elsewhere. The disappearance of oxen and ox carts has occurred throughout much of the world. Many people do not know what an ox (castrated male bovine, much less a hybridised one) even is, while most male cattle are now killed for meat as calves and never have a chance to grow into adulthood.3 While conducting fieldwork in 2019, when asking herding elders what they thought about oxcarts not being used anymore, they replied that they were not concerned about it, perhaps because they have not yet had the length of absence to become nostalgic for these lost aspects of herding life, as trucks make moving encampments considerably quicker and easier. One other significant factor is that herding had the skills to train the oxen to work with ox carts and signal to them with specific vocalisations have either moved into local centres to be closer to amenities or passed away, while the younger generation of herders need to rely on other herders from their own generation to pass on the ox training knowledge that still remains. The ox-train drivers who Caroline Humphrey (2020) interviewed in the 1970s, who would have retained a

Mongolia’s Biocultural Landscape  75 lifetime of knowledge in relation to the training, taming and communication with oxen, would have long passed away. With petrol becoming more affordable in the past ten years and the subsequent increase in motorbikes and trucks, herding families have become more reliant on the market economy, while becoming less reliant on their larger herd animals, which included horses, oxen and camels, as modes of transport.4 The motorcycle has been replacing the horse as a means of visiting other encampments, travelling to the local township (soum), or even for dayto-day herding. With less use of the large species for mobility, it has resulted in a shift in the dynamic of how herds are structured and managed, with large, castrated male cattle, horses or camels having reduced roles. This section highlighted the interconnections between the practice of building wooden carts, a knowledge that still exists amongst the herding community; with the accompanying vocalisations, training and skills needed to manage and drive ox caravans; as well as the significance of the unique genetics of the local breed of yak, inter-bred with the breed of Mongol cow. These interconnecting intangible aspects of cultural and natural heritage are not currently recognised by international organisations, such as UNESCO or the FOA. The skill involved in making an oxcart by hand is no longer being employed, nor the training of oxen through specific vocalisations, a change occurring within the space of a decade, in less than a generation. This is just one example of entangled biocultural elements that are in danger of disappearing altogether across the Mongolian Plateau region of Inner Asia. Rangeland ecologists have expressed concern about the decline of pastoral mobility and have emphasised the need for Mongolian pastoralists to continue the strategy of setting aside reserve pastures for the long winter months and other mobility factors in order to avoid a decline in the viability of Mongolian grasslands (see, for example, Fernández-Giménez et al. 2018). Seele and colleagues (2019) suggest that inter-generational knowledge relating to medicinal plants could potentially play a role in maintaining herders’ connections with their homeland, encouraging families to retain their mobility in their search for medicinal plants. In the second part of this chapter, the focus turns to the biodiversity of medicinal plant species as an important component of pastoral management in Mongolia, enhancing the health and wellbeing of herding families and the mammalian ungulates they live amongst. The Biodiversity of Medicinal Plants To understand Mongolian herders’ multispecies mobile pastoral practices, it is important to understand how they engage with other species in the surrounding ecology. Mongolian herders make use of a wide diversity of different species of plant, animal and fungi as a means of improving the health of the herding family and their herd animals (see Fijn, forthcoming). There are over 600 species of plant with bio-active medicinal properties growing in Mongolia, while each region has medicinal herbs that are adapted to the specific climatic and topographic conditions (Ligaa and Tsembel 2003,

76  Natasha Fijn 119–20). Within each homeland (nutag), herders have a detailed knowledge of the growth habits of plants on the pastures where their herd animals graze, including their edibility and life history across different seasons, and have a strong understanding of their ecological relationships (Fernández-Giménez 2000). Medicinal plants are particularly diverse in the mountainous taiga zone. As a veterinary couple from Sukhbaatar emphasised, Mongolian herd animals consume a variety of medicinal herbs while they forage, due to the free-range way they are managed by herders, with the intention that the herd animals develop good levels of immunity against illness and disease. Mongolian herders ascribe to a kind of animist philosophy, defined broadly by Graham Harvey as ‘the understanding that the world is a community of persons, most of whom are not human, but all of whom are related, and all of whom deserve respect’ (2019, 80). A lone tree, for instance, may be designated as sacred, a residing place for the ancestors or powerful deities, part of a ‘sentient landscape’ (Anderson 2017). David Anderson (2011) employs the term a ‘healing landscape’, as a concept to ascribe healing in connection with the place. Medicinal healers and patients alike are concerned with forces and spirits and how their place in the landscape affects their health. In the Khangai Mountain region, herders similarly perceive the surrounding mountains, water sources and grasslands within their homeland as both a healing and sentient landscape. A knowledgeable herding elder in his seventies, Shagdar, collected 280 different species of the medicinal plant just within his homeland (nutag), most of which he collected just before I visited him in September 2019, over a period of one month between 20 June and 20 July. He compiled dried specimens of each species within pages of newspaper. He described the Mongolian names and often the scientific name by memory for each, as well as any uses for both humans and various species of herd animal. As he went through his extensive herbarium with me, he commented on whether the plant was abundant and relatively easy to find or whether he had observed the plant becoming scarce within recent years, which was the case with quite a few specimens. The basis for Shagdar’s extensive knowledge of plants is his keen attention to the surrounding grassland steppe since he was a teenager, noting what plant species the herd animals graze upon, whether herd animals avoided a particular plant due to its bitter taste, or seek out a plant out for its medicinal qualities. He combined this practice-based learning approach with knowledge passed on by herding elders with an ongoing connection with monks in the local monastery nearby, as well as supplementing his knowledge with taxonomic-type books written by botanists in the Mongolian language: a notably pluralistic approach to healing and medicine. According to Tatiana Chudakova (2017), the legitimacy of a traditional Buddhist medical doctor in Buryatia was in their ability to identify different medicines and compound these together as ingredients from scratch, rather than importing pre-made pharmaceuticals. In Mongolia too, a practitioner or healer’s ability to find, collect, prepare and compound medicinal products from the surrounding ecology is important, particularly in the countryside.

Mongolia’s Biocultural Landscape  77 Herding families store a number of medicinal plant species in order to treat different ailments throughout the year, in effect a traditional medical first-aid kit. The plants are carefully collected, then dried and kept in small bags, often made from old clothing, but traditionally made out of leather. In the autumn of 2017, we stopped by to stay in an encampment for the night. The occupant was a herder in his mid-50s, whom one of my Mongolian companions had known from childhood. He had been lying in his bed and struggled to get up to greet us. He explained in the morning that his horse had spooked a few days earlier and he had fallen off, with his foot caught in a stirrup he had been dragged across the ground. As a result, he had internal injuries, probably cracked ribs, so had been given altan gagnuur as a liquid medicine in a small brown bottle. He swallowed a few drops after he got up in the morning to help his bones and muscles heal. Altan gagnuur (Rhodiola spp.) is a medicinal plant that herders say they used to gather in the past but tend now to buy in liquid form from the local township (soum), which is used for the treatment of just such ailments as broken bones and muscle injuries. Here there is only space to detail the uses of just one other medicinal plant in greater depth.5 The following is drawn from accounts of the use of the Tseene root by seven separate herders in Arkhangai and Bulgan provinces, from conversations that related to their overall use of medicinal plants on both humans and herd animals, so I was not targeting this plant in particular at the time. The herding families collected, stored and used this plant specifically for medicinal purposes. The Peony as a Medicinal Plant

The tseene (peony, Paeonia lactiflora and Paeonia anomala) is located due to its delicate white (tsagaan tseene) or pink flowers (yagaan tseene), which are usually found under larch forest canopy. The root is long and thick and looks like a withered horn. Once picked, the plant is kept in a cool, dry place so that the root is not exposed to the sun to keep the strength and essence of the plant intact. If it is dried in the sun, it will dry too quickly resulting in the medicinal essence being lost. The taste of the plant is bitter and astringent but with a warm potency. The root can be used to season meals, to improve energy or to make food peppery in flavour (see also WHO 2013, 133–34). According to these herders, the peony is good for treating glandular problems, kidney problems when children or elders have difficulties with frequent urination (seruudekh), or in the treatment of tired and weak animals in spring. Barbara Seele (2017, 27) found during her fieldwork that herders made a decoction with the tseene root and it was then given orally to reduce swelling, while the flower was given orally for problems with the intestines.6 In the spring of 2017, a ranger of a protected area commented on how at that time of year wild deer are known to eat tseene root in the forest to gain strength after the long, hard winter months. He also herds animals and

78  Natasha Fijn related how he, ‘gave three litres of tseene root brew to a weakened animal that couldn’t stand up. The animal was able to stand up the next day. It’s definitely good [in a medicinal sense]’. Herders are careful about the season and exact timing of when to dig up the peony (tseene) root. While at his spring encampment, again in 2017, Tulga commented on how it should be ‘picked on the new moon in autumn, preferably by an 18-year-old girl. The timing is important. When your feet are suffering from the cold, if eaten with food, your feet will no longer feel cold’. While out riding on horseback in the autumn of 2017, Myagaa, an older herder who lives in the same river valley confirmed that you need to be punctual. While out herding you spot it and mark it during the day. You come back in the evening, camp nearby, have tea and beg for it from the Abundant Khangai [the mountain deity]. You pray for your share in its abundance. You then dig it out at night on the 17th of the middle month of autumn. The root has to be picked in odd numbers, like seven, nine or fifteen. Tseene is a superb medicinal plant. Through inter-generational knowledge, Bömbög and her mother Dogsomjav, at separate times and in separate encampments, related how peony roots are to be picked on the 15th of the middle month of autumn. The plant should be used in winter, while once dried and pounded it turns into the consistency of flour. Amaraa remembered while holding up the powdered, sandy-coloured root in a re-used jar: ‘Tseene should be collected at daybreak in the middle of the second month of autumn according to the solar calendar. That was what the old people used to say. Nowadays people just go and take it.’ Although the exact day differed among individuals, all agreed that the timing when it was picked, according to the position of the moon in autumn, was important for the potency and healing potential of the medicinal plant. If this seasonal timing is abided by, it will incidentally help to ensure that a plant is not over-harvested and less threatened by constant human use. Changes in Medicinal Approach Mongolian studies scholar Ruth Meserve writes how the effectiveness of medicinal plants is linked to the top layer of the soil, the ‘earth’s skin’ or ‘living land’ (hörs), while land that has been farmed or built upon has ‘lost its skin’ or becomes ‘dead land’. She writes that it was thought that living on such dead land caused illness, such as oedema or scurvy (bam). ‘The cure was to take the patient away from this “dead land” to new, green spring pastures and give fresh milk and kumiss [airag] from the herds’ (Meserve 2003, 155), which would have increased the amount of vitamin C in peoples’ systems, preventing scurvy.

Mongolia’s Biocultural Landscape  79 Mongolian herders believe that if other beings, including plants, are not treated with respect, powerful forces in the surrounding landscape will bring harm or misfortune to people (Humphrey et al. 1993). I was informed of a flower on a particular mountain in Hovd Province that is very rare but wellknown to Mongolians. Two white flowers grow together, one male and one female. It is commonly known that the flower is not to be picked, unless there is a real need, or the person will be struck down by lightning. To prevent dire consequences, the flower must be covered by a cloth first, so that the plant is picked discreetly to avoid angering the mountain deity, and then another plant is offered in return (see also Meserve 2003, 157). Herders interviewed in the spring and autumn of 2017 noted that there were fewer medicinal plants than there had been in the past. They attributed the reasons to a combination of influencing factors: people not heeding the traditional tenets of when to pick plants; not making sure the plant is left intact for the future by leaving a part of the flower or the root (Figure 4.3); or overgrazing of pasture by herd animals where the medicinal plant is usually found. One middle-aged herder noted that part of the problem of not being able to source certain plants was due to angered mountain deities, through people not abiding by ritual protocols and performing rituals that then anger the deities (such as inexperienced ‘not-quite-shamans’, Pederson 2011), or visitors worshipping at local ovoo in an incorrect manner. Herding families are increasingly buying biomedical supplies from local pharmacies or clinics to treat themselves and their herd animals, as it is less time-intensive and requires less energy than searching for plants, drying them and preparing them (Fijn 2022). The pharmaceutical drugs are expensive for herding families who do not tend to engage much with the broader market economy. The more affordable pharmaceuticals are imported in bulk from

Figure 4.3 In picking this blue gentian (khukh degd), the boy was told to leave some of the plants intact. Image: Natasha Fijn, Arkhangai province, 2017.

80  Natasha Fijn Russia or China and are often sub-standard, or unregistered (Khurelbat et al. 2014). In the span of ten years, I noted a change in the way medicinal plants are used in the local markets within the regional centres of Tsetserleg or Erdenet. A whole range of medicinal plants are picked by individuals residing close to these centres and then sold in small packets in stalls as a means of making a living. Certain medicinal plants that are utilised within Buddhist Mongolian medicine have become commercialised, whereby they are processed in a factory. In Ulaanbaatar, for example, a factory has been set up next door to the Manbarasan, or Buddhist medical hospital, in the production of Mongolian medicine. The berry of the sea buckthorn (Chatsargana, Hippophae ramnoides) is particularly ubiquitous in local stores and pharmacies, for instance. This berry is known across the Arctic regions of Eurasia for its medicinal qualities, as the berry is full of antioxidants and beneficial vitamins (WHO 2013, 82, 83). The commercialisation and ease of use of such products, however, means that the locations where these plants are generally known to be found can become over-exploited for monetary gain, in comparison to how such plants have been used traditionally, which involves sparing, seasonal use by the local herding community, specifically for the health of the family and herd animals living in the same location as the medicinal plant species and therefore all are entangled within the same ecosystem. Mongolian scholars, Ligaa and Tsembel, with expertise in Mongolian medicine, urged ‘national and international experts to expand their efforts to elucidate the potential beneficial properties of plants native to Mongolia and to build on the centuries of accumulated knowledge and experience that is such an important part of Mongolian culture’ (2003, 122). Commercialisation and commodification of such medicinal plants, however, should not come at the cost of the health of the herding encampments and the surrounding ecology, which both domestic and wild species rely upon for survival. Conclusion As a nation known for an ongoing ‘nomadic’ way of life, or what I refer to as multispecies mobile pastoralism, there is a deep connection between herding families, the different species of herd animal and plant species in the surrounding ecosystem. Unique species and breeds are well adapted to local, extreme environmental conditions, as an integrated part of Mongolia’s cultural and biological heritage. A key means of retaining biodiverse domestic and wild populations relates to a mobile way of life, moving constantly to new pastures, while living with multiple species of herd animal; living alongside a wide diversity of plant species gathered for medicinal purposes. As Reading and colleagues recognise (2006, 15), the diversity and conservation of wild species are crucially and inextricably interlinked with the sustainability of mobile pastoralism in Mongolia. If Mongolian herders are to continue to live with herds in extreme environmental and climatic conditions, with the

Mongolia’s Biocultural Landscape  81 added impact of more frequent disastrous winters (or dzud) due to climate change, there is a need to retain the inter-generational herding knowledge that is, remarkably, still evident in Mongolia in comparison to many other countries across the globe. As with most places in the world today, no longer utilising large horses, camels and oxen for mobility with the transition to different forms of motorised transport, fundamentally shifts how pastoralism across Inner Asia works. There are changes in the way individual animals are selected for breeding, as well as the herd structure and species composition, which in turn results in changes to the genetic composition of the unique breeds. A reduction in mobility and a reorientation to a more settled, mechanised existence, in conjunction with imported monoculture breeds, and more intensive agricultural practices is likely to result in fundamental changes, not only to the cultural heritage of nomadic pastoralism, but the biological heritage of the genetically diverse species herding families rely upon. Entangled, knotted relationships will inevitably break apart if there are such changes to the multispecies composition of herds, mobility and species diversity. Part of the intention of this chapter, however, is to nurture an understanding of the positive socio-ecological aspects of the Mongolian herding way of life, which includes an inherent integration between naturecultures, rather than advising on potential development strategies, how this way of life should be adjusted to fit with a rapidly changing world through governmentlevel and foreign environmental or agricultural initiatives. The way of life that has been lived on the grassland steppe of the Mongolian Plateau for thousands of years has not been devastating for the surrounding ecology, while the multispecies, mobile pastoral management strategy has allowed for a more intact and diverse biocultural landscape than many places around the world. A multispecies mobile form of pastoralism can provide an alternative perspective as to how humanity could approach a more nurturing future, encompassing humans within a larger socio-ecological network of significant beings. Notes 1 There are numerous separate sheep and goat breeds that have adapted to specific local conditions. There may have been wild yak in the Altai Mountain region in the past, but the sarlag in Mongolia are now tame. Mongol cattle do not have an ancient wild derivative surviving today, as the Auroch became extinct thousands of years ago. 2 Good khainag were sometimes also trained to be ridden and would come into their own in winter and early spring when ploughing through muddy tracks or deep snow in the mountains with their specially adapted, splayed hooves. 3 Oxen were used in logging camps in the colonial settlement of Australia. Similar to the communication with oxen in Mongolia, there were specific vocalisations and different cracks of the whip to signal the intention of the driver, instructing the team to move to the left or right, forward or back, while each individual ox was referred to by name (pers. comm. with an old farmer in Braidwood, New South Wales).

82  Natasha Fijn 4 There has also been a change in the use of camels as pack animals for moving between encampments in Mongolia. Camel numbers, for instance, have declined to half as many as there were in 1990 (Lkhagvadorj et al. 2013, 726). Horses and bovines have not declined by quite as much, mainly because mares and cows are still important as sources of milk and their young are less problematic in terms of complications with births, compared to the difficulty in the birth of camels (Divangar, head of veterinary services in Mongolia, pers. comm, 2017). 5 The author describes the use of another plant, the pasque flower (yargui), in-depth within another linked article focussing on mutualism and ecological interconnections (Fijn 2023). 6 Peony root has also been used in Chinese medicine and has been analysed for its medicinal compounds. It is used for a wide variety of medicinal treatments, including as an anti-inflammatory, anti-tumour, antiviral, antibacterial, antifungal, antioxidant (Yang et al. 2020).

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Mongolia’s Biocultural Landscape  83 Transfer of Different Modes of Medicinal Knowledge, edited by Li Narangoa, Natasha Fijn, Benedikte Lindskog. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Ganbold, Onolragchaa, Seung-Hwan Lee, Dongwon Seo et al. 2018. “A Review of Population Genetics Research on Domestic Animals in Mongolia and Recommendations for Improvements.” Journal of Animal Breeding and Genomics 2(1): 9–20. https://doi.org/10.12972/jabng.20180016 Ganbold, Onolragchaa, Seung-Hwan Lee, Dongwon Seo et al. 2019. “Genetic Diversity and the Origin of Mongolian Native Sheep.” Livestock Science 220: 17–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.livsci.2018.12.007 Harvey, Graham. 2019. “Animism and Ecology: Participating in the World Community.” The Ecological Citizen 3: 79–84. Humphrey, Caroline. 1995. “Chiefly and Shamanist Landscapes in Mongolia.” In The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, edited by Eric Hirsch and Michael O’Hanlon, 135–62. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Humphrey, Caroline. 2020. ‘‘Fast’ and ‘Slow’: Abstract Thinking and ‘Real’ Experience in Two Mongolian Non-Pastoral Modes of Travel.” Inner Asia: 6–27. https:// doi.org/10.1163/22105018-12340133 Humphrey, Caroline, Marina Mongush and B. Telengid. 1993. “Attitudes to Nature in Mongolia and Tuva: A Preliminary Report.” Nomadic Peoples 33: 51–61. Humphrey, Caroline and David Sneath. 1999. The End of Nomadism? Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hutchins, Kip G. 2021. “With Each Pass, another Stone. Ovoo at the Heart of Heritage, Environment, and Conflict.” Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines, 52. https://doi.org/10.4000/emscat.5165 Ingold, Tim. 2000. Perceptions of the Environment: Essays in Livelihoods, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Jacobson-Tepfer, Esther. 2012. “The Image of the Wheeled Vehicle in the Mongolian Altai: Instability and Ambiguity.” The Silk Road 10: 1–28. Khurelbat, Daariimaa, Gereltuya Dorj, Enkhtuul Bayarsaikhan, Munkhdelger Chimedsuren, Tsetsegmaa Sanjjav, Takeshi Morimoto, Michael Morley, Katharine Morley. 2014. “Prevalence Estimates of Substandard Drugs in Mongolia Using a Random Sample Survey.” PMC. https://doi.org/10.1186/2193-1801-3-709 Ligaa, Urtnasangiin and Danzanhuugiin Tsembel. 2003. “Medicinal Plants of Mongolia.” In Mongolia Today: Science, Culture, Environment and Development, edited by Dendevin Bardarch and Raymond A. Zilinskas, 114–40. London: Routledge, Lindskog, Benedikte V. 2014. “Natural Calamities and the Big Migration: Challenges to the Mongolian Health System in the ‘Age of the Market’.” Global Public Health 9(8): 880–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2014.940361 Lkhagvadorj, Dorjburgedaa, Marcus Hauck, Choimaa Dulamsuren, Jamsran Tsogtbaatar. 2013. “Twenty Years after Decollectivization: Mobile Livestock Husbandry and Its Ecological Impact in the Mongolian Forest-Steppe.” Human Ecology 41(5): 725–35. Marin, Andrei. 2010. “Riders Under Storms: Contributions of Nomadic Herders’ Observations to Analysing Climate Change in Mongolia.” Global Environmental Change 20(1): 162–76. Meserve, Ruth. 2003. “On the History of Medicinal Plant Research in Mongolia.” Studia Orientalia 97: 155–67. Pedersen, Morten. 2011. Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Mongolia. New York: Cornell University Press.

84  Natasha Fijn Reading, Richard P., Mark D. Johnstad, S., Zambiin Batjargal, S. Amgalanbaatar, H. M. Mix. 1999. “Expanding Mongolia’s System of Protected Areas.” Natural Areas Journal 19(3): 211–22. Reading, Richard P., Donald J. Bedunah and Sukh Amgalanbaatar. 2006. “Conserving Biodiversity on Mongolian Rangelands: Implications for Protected Area Development and Pastoral Uses.” In Rangelands of Central Asia: Proceedings of the Conference on Transformations, Issues and Future Challenges, edited by Donald J. Bedunah, E. D. McArthur, Maria E. Fernández-Giménez, 1–17. US Salt Lake City: Department of Agriculture Forest Service Proceedings, Rocky Mountain Research Station 39. Seele, Barbara C. 2017. Conservation Implications of Ethnoveterinary Knowledge: A Mongolian Case Study. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Cape Town: University of Stallenbosch. Seele, Barbara C., Karen J. Esler and Anthony B. Cunningham. 2019. “Biocultural Diversity: A Mongolian Case Study.” Ecology and Society 24(4): 27. https://doi. org/10.575/ES-11207-240427 Shaw-Reid, Indiana, Azjargal Jargalsaihan, Robin S. Reid, Chantsalikham Jamsranjav and María E Fernández-Giménez. 2021. “Social-Ecological Change on the Mongolian Steppe: Herder Perceptions of Causes, Impacts and Adaptive Strategies.” Human Ecology 49: 631–48, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-021-00256-7 Watters, Rebecca. 2022. “The Middle of the Story. Ovoos and the Ecological Imagination in Mongolian Conservation.” Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines 52. https://doi.org/10.4000/emscat.5194 White, Thomas and Natasha Fijn. 2020. “Introduction: Resituating Domestication in Inner Asia.” Inner Asia 22: 162–82. https://doi.org/10.1163/22105018-12340145 World Health Organisation. 2013. Medicinal Plants in Mongolia. Geneva: World Health Organisation. Yang, Yong, Shan-Shan Li, Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva, Xiao-nan Yu, Liang-Shen Wang. 2020. “Characterisation of Phytochemicals in the Roots of Wild Herbaceous Peonies from China and Screening for Medicinal Resources.” Phytochemistry 174. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.phytochem.2020.112331

5 Cultivating the Ocean Reflections on Desolate Life and Oyster Restoration in Hiroshima Mariko Yoshida

Thinking through Multiscalar Unknowings What emerges when lives, once promised continued growth-based development, gradually come to an end? What does it mean to narrate the vulnerabilities disproportionately distributed across the multispecies strata interconnected by productive forces on a global scale? 1 What kind of theorization and storytelling in anthropology can and should be at the core of degrowth during times of an unparalleled scale of uncertainty and ineluctable crisis? When aquaculture landscapes are inextricably linked to our collective consciousness embedded in a historical configuration, we should exercise caution in reinterpreting coexistence amid interspecies contingencies. In this chapter, I examine the social practice of metabolic maintenance carried out by small-scale oyster farmers in the coastal waters of Hiroshima Prefecture. Hiroshima, the Japanese prefecture that stands as a metonym for the devastation caused by nuclear weapons, is recognized as the nation’s largest oyster-producing region, supplying two-thirds of the country’s oysters (Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Bureau, Hiroshima Prefecture 2021). After World War II, the fishing ground expanded to the entire bay due to the spread of hanging aquaculture using bamboo rafts, resulting in an annual production of shucked oysters reaching 30,000 tons, double the current level. The ontological distinctiveness of oysters as filter-feeders offers insight into understanding the residues of extractive features of the post-war rapid economic development in this region. Although it is widely believed that the 1945 Typhoon Makurazaki, which swept through Hiroshima one month after the bombing, washed away the radioactive materials, the discharge of large amounts of industrial wastewater associated with the rapid population increase contributed to red tides and oxygen-deficient water masses. The Law Concerning Special Measures for Environmental Preservation of the Seto Inland Sea, which included strict effluent regulations, came into effect. Ironically, the subsequent construction of sewage treatment infrastructure resulted in over-purification of the water quality, which threatened the living

DOI: 10.4324/9781003439011-6

86  Mariko Yoshida condition of the oysters. Oysters in Hiroshima have long been a reservoir for patchy and uncertain trajectories of the Anthropocene. And today, the final response to these adverse oligotrophic and eutrophic conditions is a method known as “seafloor cultivation” (kaitei kou’un), a practice of human intervention that has been applied to restore the poorly fed coastal waters of western Hiroshima Bay caused by both the oligotrophic and eutrophic conditions under post-war industrial development. I argue that this unintended multispecies reciprocity emerging from this practice, spanning temporal, political, and affective scales, reconfigures the human in times of degrowth and offers the prospect of an alternative future. With both depopulation and deteriorated ocean health, the futures envisioned by local producers for this metabolic maintenance do not always align with the scientific modelling that marine biologists engage in. Complexities of unknowables unfold, irrespective of whether their efforts are commensurable with scientific interpretations or proportionate to the future they hope to generate. I delve into narrating these fragmented spatiotemporal imaginaries in times of degrowth. Drawing upon the epistemological insights into the fractal aspect of the Anthropocene, I explore how local oyster farmers navigate the more-than-human seascape, reconnecting terrestrial and aquatic spaces that were decoupled through the excesses of extractive industrial urbanization in the post-war period. I begin by tracing community-based resource management and coastal restoration, practices considered by oyster producers as a last resort to enhance biogeochemical pathways and nutrient cycling. Their vision of oyster revitalization practice is garnered from the marginal arts of making the “satoumi,” a desirable state for coastal areas characterized by enhanced biodiversity and productivity. My focus is on examining how socioecological indeterminacy, stemming from the post-World War II economic boom and contemporary population decline, accounts for processes through which care and coexistence come to circulate as conflicting formations. Multiscalar thinking aids in our understanding of the oyster domus, revealing biophysical, social, political, and climatic processes and ruptures in mutually transformative becomings under the industrial-capitalist mode of development. A central claim of this chapter is that the multiplicity of knowings/conceivables and unknowings/inconceivables that the oyster domus conjures up urges us to redescribe what Marilyn Strathern (1991) refers to as “fractals.” My concern lies in exploring how oyster producers and oysters in practice construct, deploy, and change scales and perspectives invoked in this restoration practice. I argue that the ethnographic case of seafloor cultivation in Jigozen recalibrates the scope of consideration around the nature of predicaments of our time. This includes the radioactive fallout from the atomic bombing, the post-war dam-building boom and its impacts on biogeochemical cycles, and the contemporary transgression of some of the planetary boundaries, such as ocean acidification and rising water temperature.

Cultivating the Ocean  87 Satoumi Assemblages Mr. Takao Hayashi (Hayashi-san),2 a third-generation oyster producer from the Jigozen Fisheries Cooperative Association in Jigozen, Hatsukaichi City, located in the northwest part of Hiroshima Bay, detailed his struggles with the impoverished condition of the watershed where he had grown oysters for 30 years. Fed by pristine streams from the Ota River and Miyajima Island, touted as one of the Nihon Sankei (the three most scenic spots in Japan), Jigozen grew up around family-run oyster aquaculture for over a century.3 Until today, Hiroshima has been the largest producer of the Pacific oyster (Magallana gigas, formerly Crassostrea gigas; magaki), a species endemic to Northeastern Asia and recognized as the world’s most globally commodified edible oyster. Many small-scale aquaculture sites in Japan face challenges in adapting to an ageing and shrinking population, and Jigozen is no exception. Bleak workforce shortages, resulting from youth outmigration to urban areas, have brought a sense of precariousness to many of the 19 oyster producers on the verge of a socioeconomic downturn. It was not until almost a decade ago that Hayashisan, perhaps the last operator of his family-run aquaculture business, set up a shared dormitory for Vietnamese technical intern trainees who currently work under him right in front of the house where his father used to raise over 100 racing pigeons to be released at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony. Members of inquisitive new generations like Hayashi-san aim to shift away from the shackles of the traditional method. They envision Australian oyster aquaculture—characterized as land-based hatcheries and the production standardization of sterile triploid oysters—being more labour-saving and ensuring a stable year-round supply (Yoshida 2021). When I was first introduced to Hayashi-san by a wholesaler specializing in shellfish at the now-defunct Tsukiji Fish Market in 2016, during the early stage of my extended fieldwork, he had often visited oyster farms across Australia in order to enhance his knowledge on efficiently growing oysters using floating plastic basket longline systems. Since the late 1990s, Hayashi-san has kept a fixed-point waterproof camera attached to one of his oyster rafts so that he can record a cross-scale, cinéma vérité type of interspecies interactions that play out in situated manners, specifically the growth of his oysters, the changing types of fish species and wild birds that visit the raft, the development of the mountain areas, and the influx of driftwood and garbage after typhoons. With the sensory and material encounters that his GoPro camera has captured underwater, he pointed out that since the development of the estuarine watersheds in the 1970s and, more recently, the construction of a dam in the early 2000s, nutrients from the mountains have been unable to reach the sea. Dam reclamation has blocked forest nutrients, leaving only the supply of nutrients from the Ota River watershed. One afternoon in August 2021, when he took me on his boat out to his oyster rafts, several vessels passing up and down in the distance were brought

88  Mariko Yoshida to my attention. Unlike what I had seen at oyster farms across the country, neither massive piles of oyster spat (seed oysters) on strings of scallop shells nor the day’s oyster harvests were visible on the vessels. Hayashi-san’s robust bamboo oyster rafts were gently swaying in the rippling waves as the vessels moved forward. The vessel’s motor and the waves lapping against the ship’s bell almost drowned out our conversation. A method called “seafloor cultivation” (kaitei kou’un) was carried out that day from 8 a.m. until noon in Jigozen (see Figure 5.1). Since the early 1970s, local members of the Jigozen Fisheries Cooperative have undertaken seafloor cultivation once a year to reduce organic pollution, improving the uneven distribution of nutrients by stirring up the seafloor’s sediment layer and supplying oxygen. Seafloor cultivation has widely been recognized as restoring fishery functions and increasing benthic organisms that inhabit the area and the surrounding water. The submarine tiller accelerates the decomposition of organic matter in the bottom sediment and promotes seabed purification by forcibly agitating and reversing the solidified seabed surface. Doing so removes organic matter and harmful organisms that have accumulated in the fishing grounds, releasing the high concentration of nutrients in the bottom sediment into the seawater instead. This activity takes place with the aid of simple equipment at a relatively low-cost, easy-to-implement initiative: a steel girder attached to a pair of 8-meter-long wires and a 20-meter rope (see Figure 5.2) that the local producers tie onto the sterns of their small bottom-trawling fleet in order to dig and stir up sediments and hardened soil, mud, and sand. This method helps release nutrient salts such as nitrogen and phosphorus stored in the seabed into the sea, restoring an appropriate mix of nutrients, and creating the optimal environment for marine creatures. In principle, the producers of the Jigozen Fisheries Cooperative apply this method before the larval stages of

Figure 5.1 Oyster boats in operation for seafloor cultivation to improve the sediment condition in Jigozen. Copyright: Mariko Yoshida

Cultivating the Ocean  89

Figure 5.2 An oyster producer pulling a steel tiller on board to wash away the sludge. The tiller measures approximately 165 × 193 × 60 cm in size. Copyright: Mariko Yoshida

bottom sedimentation so as not to damage the growing shellfish or degrade the surrounding water’s environment by detaching seaweed. Hayashi-san sculled our way over to the side of his raft and said to me, The condition of our ocean resources has been unacceptable. (…) We’ve witnessed that the primary production of phytoplankton has been decreasing for the last 15 years. Changes in the composition of seawater nutrients have resulted in poor Pacific oyster growth. It’s apparent that the ocean has been impoverished and given smaller harvests. (…) If there is a big wave, the boat shakes roughly and dead oysters easily fall like volcanic cinders during harvesting operations! The oysters here have been poorly harvested for years. I have heard similar narratives from fishery cooperative association members across the Seto Inland Sea. This encounter, on both miniature and monumental scales, led me to ponder how this type of spatiotemporal relationality has been sewn into the postindustrial oyster aquaculture in Japan. Jigozen’s oyster producer’s engagement with the Pacific oysters provides an oscillating glimpse into Hiroshima’s collective sentiment concerning the atomic bombing, the post-war momentum of rapid economic growth, and the ecological cataclysm of the Capitalocene.4 Narratives and contingent events across spatiotemporal scales stir up the oyster producer’s vision of an uncertain future. What matters is how we can narrate the correlation “isomorphically” without falling into hierarchical or dualistic manners (Ghosh 2016; Jensen 2007, 833; Strathern 1991, xix). The fishery cooperative’s attempt to reconcile ecosystem conservation with stabilizing oyster yields simultaneously engages in “patterns of unintentional coordination” (Tsing 2015, 23). With

90  Mariko Yoshida this in mind, this chapter considers how this emerging practice of seafloor cultivation, as a new form of human disturbance, reconfigures the multispecies relationships in Japanese coastal aquaculture that are enacted by fluid, transitory, and open-ended assemblages. Seafloor Cultivation as a Makeshift Domus Aquaculture is characterized by the horizontal and vertical use of the water column, from coastal to open seas and from shallow to deep waters. The material distinctiveness of seawater as a liquid entity and that of oysters as immobile filter feeders offers a means for understanding how ontological positions redefine the notion of the domus as they become interwoven with sociopolitical and transhistorical contexts. My study builds on extensive work that has focused on political ecologies of local ecosystems and marine governance (e.g., Braverman and Johnson 2020; Mansfield 2003; Paprocki 2019; Song et al. 2021); materialities of the ocean (e.g., Bear 2013; Brugidou 2018; Helmreich 2009; 2014; Peters and Steinberg 2019; Roca-Servat and GolovátinaMora 2019); aquaculture infrastructure shaped by human and nonhuman entities (e.g., Lien 2007, 2015; Swanson 2018; Wakefield 2020); the analysis of “overworked” inter- and intraspecies labour (Blanchette 2020; Blanchette and Besky 2019); capitalist and extinction narratives and precariousness/uncertainty (Hébert 2015; Mathur 2021; Tsing 2015); and a feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) approach to care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). The ocean’s materiality is closely linked to a transcorporeal understanding of more-than-human relationships in that the seawater’s liquidity as “amalgams of the physical, formal, abstract, and agentive” decouples the nature– culture, terrestrial–aquatic, and human–nonhuman convergence and keeps it in flux (Helmreich 2014, 267). Furthermore, the local practice of stirring the seafloor and supplying oxygen therein exceeds the liquid realities of the seawater. Technological interventions, such as stagnation, ventilation, and recirculation and their social and material configurations that constitute the oyster domus, cannot be overlooked because both the atmosphere and the oceans are inseparable components of the planetary hydrological cycle. Research on commodity expansion through territorial deprivation and commodity deepening through technological innovation has analyzed the biosocial metabolism associated with creating new forces and imbalances within human and nonhuman bodies (Satsuka 2014). Throughout the overaccumulation of capital, all kinds of nonhuman modes of existence emerge as commodity frontiers. Recent studies in political ecology have examined the biophysical properties of natural resources as raw materials, such as gold taken from mining sites, forests exploited for timber production, and oceans and marine organisms disturbed by capital-intensive aquaculture and fisheries (Banoub et al. 2021; Saguin 2016; see also Satizábal and Dressler 2019). Both Marianne Lien and Heather Swanson expanded the notion of the domus as a comparative tool concerning salmon enactments (Lien 2007, 2015;

Cultivating the Ocean  91 Swanson 2018). In conventional animal studies, the term “domus” often denotes a device that holds animals in place. It is equated with outbuildings such as a cage, shed, or barn. Conversely, Lien and Swanson insisted on the importance of expanding the framing of salmon domestication beyond the confines of a particular location, method, and category. In particular, Lien’s study positioned the expansion of capital-intensive aquaculture as a recent turn in the history of domestication that is essentially tied to relocation. With a focus on the process through which the genetic stock of Atlantic salmon—initially translocated from eastern Canada—became a backbone of the commercial farming of Tasmanian Atlantic salmon today, Lien demonstrated how the liquid materiality of the water surface alters political, social, and scientific relationships across species barriers. Building on Lien’s work, Swanson approached salmon as a sentient species to analyze the mobility of hatchery-reared salmon’s mobility in the US Pacific Northwest. For example, she offered an account of the knock-on-effect of accidentally escaped salmon that are genetically incursive upon wild salmon. The prevalence of the farmed salmon’s straying into other waterways results in the reshuffling of the categorization between “wild” and “hatchery” fish. Swanson argued that the edges of the salmon domus are ever-emergent and contested (Swanson 2018). Thinking about the domestication of aquaculture species in this way is also about redefining the naturalized subject–object relationship between humans and nonhumans. In short, contemporary oyster aquaculture is a site of inter- and intraspecies labour to ultimately overcome their biological characteristics (cf. Blanchette 2020). The revitalization of the oyster domus in Jigozen addresses the local tuning of human interventions to create the relational seascape of the so-called satoumi. This concept refers to the hybrid and pliable ecosystem comprising the ocean (umi) and an agricultural or mountain village (sato). Satoumi is often associated with “satoyama,” which is characterized by a diverse landscape, including forests, fields, rivers, ponds, and various agricultural and forestry practices that are sustained by local communities. Aiming to foster an environment where the interconnection of forests, rivers, and the sea grow in unison, seafloor cultivation in Jigozen is carried out every June and the tree-planting festival (shokujusai) takes place every October. With sociopolitical dilemmas arising in contemporary Japan that range from the declining aquaculture output due to aging and depopulation to ongoing ocean change, the restoration implication of degraded marine ecosystems is a critical concern in fisheries and aquaculture governance. Satoumi restoration, in which the addition of human disturbance significantly affects terrestrial and aquatic diversity, works in practice while interlocked assemblages of human and nonhuman entities “drag political economy inside of them” (Satsuka 2014; Takeuchi 2010; Tsing 2015, 23). Intentional disturbances are necessary to maintain an equilibrium in local ocean environments. To put it another way, being attentive to nature as particularity and locality allows the disturbance to work. In the case of Jigozen,

92  Mariko Yoshida as I discuss in the next section, those everyday knowledge-making practices are attuned to the marine geophysical and microbiological particularity of the Seto Inland Sea (Setonai-kai) as an enclosed coastal sea. As such, satoyama/satoumi is not situated in a continuum of domestication as a hierarchal form but rather in a spectrum of the human–nonhuman “symbiopolitical” relationalities (Helmreich 2009). In this respect, the practice of seafloor cultivation appears to contrast with that of making cyborg seascapes, such as artificial insemination and incubation in onshore facilities, chromosome manipulation in oysters in a lab environment, and satellite-based remote sensing that provides synoptic observational data of microalgal populations. These types of hybrid domus enable laboursaving technologies and ensure cost-efficiency in production as controllable, predictable, and “scalable” projects (Tsing 2015; cf. Yoshida 2021). In the case of Jigozen, however, multispecies coordination acts as what I call a “makeshift domus” as a process through which they come to terms with degrowth. The oyster producers in Jigozen cultivate the seafloor to prevent further deterioration of the ocean environment, while also knowing that such efforts might no longer revitalize the sea, let alone make a profit out of the hypoxic ocean. As I argue in more detail later in this chapter, they have no alternative but to continue in this way. In this light, even though they mobilize oysters’ and the ocean’s natural life processes, it does not seem to imply a biopolitical, coherent, and self-perpetuating rationale of “humans trying to make nature appear and live in a particular way—not according to a social norm, but in the way they imagine is natural to oysters” (Wakefield 2020, 764).5 Trajectories of a Dead Zone in Coastal Waters In the past, the Seto Inland Sea used to be covered with eelgrass [Zostera] beds, Sargassum beds, and tidal flats, and the local people used seaweed and algae for food and fertilizer for their farmland in the mid-19th century. Seaweed beds and tidal flats also contributed to the maintenance of biodiversity, preservation of coastlines, and purification of water quality. During the postwar reconstruction period, food shortages became more severe, and increased production of food and chemical fertilizers and the cultivation of new fields were promoted. Until then, farmers and fishermen had cooperated in using eelgrass and Sargassum fulvellum, known as hondawara, as marine resources for fertilizers. However, due to the pollution of seawater caused by post-war development, chemical fertilizers have replaced them. The widespread use of chemical fertilizers eliminated such efforts, causing seaweed beds in a polar phase or with gaps to disappear. The populations of small fish that congregate in them plummeted (Yanagi 2010, 28). Flood disasters were relatively common in Hiroshima during the pre-war period, but mudslide disasters were more common after the war. One of the causes of this was the devastation of the land and deforestation, especially in

Cultivating the Ocean  93 mountainous areas, which had a significant impact. Another aspect was that levee construction on the Ota River to prevent flooding was neglected after 1942, when the war intensified, and few measures were taken for flood control (Yanagida 1975). The oyster domus – or oyster becoming in Hiroshima is enacted by the spatiotemporal patterns of sediments and nutrients. The coastline near the estuary was reshaped by mudslides caused by the September typhoon a month after the atomic bombing in 1945. Oyster farming had already been practised in Jigozen by then, but the cultivation was not on rafts as it is now but on bamboo and wooden piles. In this method, bamboo and wooden shelves were built in the shallows along the coastline, and oyster seeds were attached on the shelves. The 1945 typhoon largely washed away these shelves and stirred the deposits on the seabed (Takahashi 2008). If the nutrient inflow load is high, algae can thrive and the fish and shellfish that feed on them can reproduce.6 As I have noted, assessing the oyster domus urges us to consider contingent human–nonhuman assemblages and recalibrate fixed subject–object relationships. As I mentioned at the outset, oyster aquaculture has been driven by a desire to overcome oysters’ biological distinctiveness as immobile filter feeders that accumulate not only phytoplankton and nutrients but also viral pathogens that threaten their survival. In addition, they are sessile organisms that cannot move on their own and need to attach to something to grow by secreting underwater cementation. This suggests that their passive interaction with the environment makes them vulnerable to biofouling caused by long-term environmental changes. Unlike fish farming, oyster farming in Japan does not involve constant feeding throughout oyster’s lifecycle, so the rate at which faeces accumulates on the seafloor is slow. However, over a long period of aquaculture, organic matter and undigested material called pseudofaeces accumulate on the seafloor and decompose, leading to the formation of sludge. As this sludge accumulates and decomposes, dissolved oxygen in the seawater is consumed, which can eventually cause oyster mortality. I argue that the practice of seafloor cultivation unfolds a complex relationality mediated through symbiopolitical processes, including human population dynamics associated with settlement density since the post-war period; treated sewage water that contains nutrients including nitrogen and phosphorus; phytoplankton that use nitrogen and phosphorus as biophilic elements; and oysters that filter phytoplankton in the seawater. In this section, I trace the dimensions of political, legal, economic, and biomaterial life, asking how the more-than-human ocean in Jigozen has become central to the modes of aquaculture management in the way they are currently performed. After visiting Hayashi-san’s oyster farm, I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Kiyotaka Suzuki (Suzuki-san), a second-generation oyster producer in his late 70s and head of the Jigozen Fisheries Cooperative. A year later, in June 2022, I was fortunate enough to board his boat for two days—one of ten that went out that day for seafloor cultivation (see Figure 5.2). That was the first time I had heard Suzuki-san, as a second-generation A-bomb survivor (hibakusha),

94  Mariko Yoshida talk about his father, who was involved in the search and incineration of bodies washed up at Hiroshima Bay. Today, the amount of heat absorbed by the world’s oceans due to climate change is said to be equivalent to the detonation of seven Hiroshima atomic bombs per second (Abraham 2022), and the potential effects of ocean warming are the local producer’s lingering concern for the life cycle of oysters. The ongoing practice of seafloor cultivation, in essence, is an active act of linking the residues of the past into the uncertain future. Since before they established their current cultivation method, Suzuki-san has collected estuarine and coastal water samples in collaboration with various marine biologists, and he has co-published the results of their research in an academic journal (Arakawa and Tao 1977). He told me: It was around 1968 when there was a massive outbreak of tube-­forming serpulid worms [Hydroides elegans]. The rafts on which the oysters were hung got covered with serpulid worms and became completely white. Consequently, a large number of our oysters died. After a short while, I went to a marine biologist whom we had known for a long time in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture, to figure out what should have been done. He said that the lack of oxygen in the bottom layer of the sea was the most likely cause of the oyster die-off. (…) Typhoons, which usually stir the ocean, did not occur that year, worsening the anoxic conditions that tend to occur in September and October. (…) As a result, the lack of oxygen caused the serpulid worms to move up to the surface water. Serpulid worms can respectively tolerate low dissolved oxygen levels, but oysters can’t.7 The hypoxic water, leading to a substantial outbreak of tube-forming serpulid worms and oyster die-off, coincided with the full-scale work of the Great Hiroshima Reconstruction Plan in the late 1960s during the economic boom. Three phases of forest clearing and land reclamation were central to constituting commodity frontiers during the post-war economic boom in Hiroshima: the reclamation of the bypass, the reclamation of the commercial complex near the fishing cooperative, and the reclamation of the sewage treatment plant. This reconstruction plan, formulated by Hiroshima City in 1958, reflects a significant milestone for Japan’s record period of economic growth between the post-World War II era and the end of the Cold War. Moreover, the post-war housing shortage prompted the rapid construction of public housing on gentle slopes in mountainous areas, where land prices were lower than on flat land. Seafloor Cultivation as Uncomfortable Unknowings Adhering to the Act on Temporary Measures for Environmental Preservation of the Seto Inland Sea (1973) and its successor, the Act on Special Measures Concerning Conservation of the Environment of the Seto Island Sea (1978), the Japanese Ministry of the Environment has reduced nutrients such as nitrogen8 and phosphorus. According to an aquatic environmentalist who specializes

Cultivating the Ocean  95 in modelling biological and chemical processes in aquatic ecosystems from freshwater reservoirs to coastal seas at Hiroshima University,9 this so-called “total reduction” has been reviewed every five years. The current loadings of chemical oxygen demand, nitrogen, and phosphorus are about one-fourth, one-half, and one-third of the peak years, respectively. As a result, the water quality of the Seto Inland Sea, once considered a “dying sea” during the era of rapid economic growth between 1955 and 1961, has significantly improved. This expert explains that nitrogen and phosphorus are substances that are necessary for living organisms, but too much or too little can have a negative impact. Excessive richness of nutrients (eutrophication10) can lead to hypoxia and anoxia. Moreover, the subsequent revision of the Law Concerning Special Measures for the Environmental Preservation of the Seto Inland Sea marked a major change in direction, as water quality is now managed not only by reducing the inflow load but also by restoring and creating the environment, and by adding manpower to the process (Ministry of Environment, Japan 2011). Some fisheries researchers and hydrobiologists have claimed that sewage treatment—as part of the efforts to reach the government’s nationwide water quality standards—overpurifies the estuarine waters and thereby causes oyster maldevelopment (Wahyudin and Yamamoto 2020). Local government sewage-treatment plants increase the concentration of nutrients in the treated sewage water in winter when the level of phosphorus and nitrogen is low (Kokudo Kōtsushō Mizu Kanri Kokudo Hozenkyoku Gesuidō-bu [Sewage and Wastewater Management Bureau, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism] 2005). However, despite government’s attempts to address the problem, the nutrient imbalance remains. For local fishery cooperatives dependent on oyster growth for members’ livelihoods, the condition of the seawater was unacceptable. The nutrient concentrations in the seawater are declining, which also has an enormous impact on the fading colours of the nori seaweed and the amount of fish caught. The collective act of seafloor cultivation has been considered as a humaninduced typhoon. Suzuki-san recounted that typhoons have not occurred in the last couple of years, so the ocean is not mixed in: It is like a tranquil lake. Therefore, large amounts of dead plankton settle in the lower layers and become sludge-like due to biodegradation in the bottom layer. This condition will continue unless a typhoon causes a large wave. Fish can escape, but oysters can’t move.11 Suzuki-san muttered as he drove the boat at a slow speed, allowing the steel girder to cultivate the seafloor properly. His remarks suggest that seafloor cultivation becomes an opportunity to ensure the ocean is in equilibrium with oysters’ life processes as imagined, securing human life, as other restoration practices and modes of governance prove unviable. Tube-forming serpulid worms (kasane kanzashi) might have been suppressed by the sludge, but they did not grow in large numbers. There

96  Mariko Yoshida were no landings of octopus or sea cucumbers this year. It has been about seven years since we stopped seeing sea cucumbers … Konowata, a delicacy made from the intestines of sea cucumbers and pickled in salt, also played a central role in our seafood processing industry and represented the taste of the Seto Inland Sea.12 To address such a crisis, the oyster producers in Jigozen recognized the importance of mixing and ventilating the accumulated sediment layers to extend the ocean’s buffer capacity and enhance its ability to absorb disturbances. Instead of relying on regulatory measures to reduce inflow into the sea, as was done in the past, a significant shift occurred toward enriching the sea by managing it through human labor, including the regeneration and creation of the environment. In the Seto Inland Sea, which is an intricate, closed sea, seawater tends to stay in place, unlike the Sanriku coast facing the Pacific Ocean. Because it took several months per year for the seawater to be replaced, the oyster producers in Jigozen tried leaving a wider space between each oyster raft to improve the tidal flow. They initially used a bottom-trawling machine to clean the ocean floor, conducting a series of experiments to determine the optimal speed for the wooden boat pulling the iron machine and using resistance plates to measure water flow. In addition to the annual cultivation, they started experimenting with scattering dozens of tons of oyster shells into the sea this year to increase oxygen in the seafloor sediments and improve water quality (see Figure 5.3). This practice was inspired by another contingent collaboration set in motion between the oyster producers in Jigozen and rice farmers on Sado Island, located in the eastern part of the Sea of Japan. Sado Island has a brackish lake called Kamo Lake, where the local oyster farming has benefitted from the “half-farming and half-fishing” (hannō-hangyō) approach. In practical terms, it indicates that modes of subsistence rely on agriculture and fishery. Decades ago, Suzuki-san visited an oyster farm near Kamo Lake, where producers loaded uncrushed oyster shells directly into a boat and went offshore to spread them. They realized that oyster shells contain nutrients necessary for rice growth and established a method of improving cultivation that takes advantage of these characteristics and more effective organic fertilizers. Calcined oyster shells have a sediment purification effect by adsorbing hydrogen sulphide and phosphorus, and the water that passes through the shells promotes the growth of antibacterial microorganisms. The farmers on Sado Island established a method of improving cultivation that takes advantage of these characteristics and more effective organic fertilizers. The Japanese Fisheries Agency made its first reform to the country’s Fishery Act for in over 70 years in 2018. This reform aims to strengthen the management of fishery resources and promote corporate participation in the aquaculture sector, which the government believes is important for promoting more sustainable fisheries and revitalizing coastal areas. The reform envisions tighter catch regulations, deregulation of the fishing permit system,

Cultivating the Ocean  97

Figure 5.3 Oyster producers in Jigozen scattering bags full of oyster shells into the sea. Copyright: The Jigozen Fisheries Cooperative

and a rearrangement of access rights to ocean resources. This drastic shift in fisheries management from the community-based “tsukuri sodateru gyogyō” (fishery that produces and nurtures) to a neoliberal market-driven approach emphasizes concepts such as “blue fix” and “blue capital,” which involve the commodification and extraction of ocean frontiers. Marine resources are conceptualized as a form of governmentality that rationalizes new structural components of capitalist accumulation (Brent and Pedersen 2020; Ganseforth 2021, 2; Power et al. 2022). In the case of Jigozen, faced with such fisheries reform, the Fishery Cooperative has received Marine Eco-Label certification, which recognizes fisheries that actively work to protect resources and ecosystems. The recognition of seafloor cultivation and aquaculture operations devises new spatial, temporal, and institutional “fixes” to ensure blue capital accumulation. Seafloor cultivation is a source of value creation in the oyster commodification process. Oyster shells, nutrients, and tillage girders are transformed into new hierarchical relations insofar as their labour helps eliminate the threat of ecological degradation. I conclude this section with a small anecdote that an oyster producer in Jigozen once told me: In addition to using harvesting machines, the older generation used to catch oysters that fell from rafts with bottom trawl nets. This harvesting operation had the dual benefits of improving the oyster beds’ quality and effectively utilizing the marine resources. However, some unscrupulous fishermen intentionally shook the rafts to drop oysters and caught them with bottom trawl nets, so the practice was banned.

98  Mariko Yoshida The banning of oyster dredging resulted in the oxygen depletion in the bottom water and had the unintended consequence of worsening the seafloor environment.13 This story shows that the restoration practice did not unfold as intended and that relations between humans and oysters may shift. The Jigozen example underscores the significance of redescribing a neglected aspect of coexistence14 through human intervention, interference, or mediation among actors. It is also worth pointing out that although local efforts have been made to foster sustainable practices and an ethos of harmonious coexistence in order to revitalize the aquaculture landscapes, uncritically accepting the narratives of satoumi should be questioned for its romanticism. Hayashi-san explained to me that the practice of seafloor cultivation has yet to make them realize that they are not necessarily preventing further environmental degradation by continuing the practice every year. Rather, they may simply be unable to make the decision to stop due to its regularity. If the aquaculture environment deteriorates, the union president will be criticized, and if it worsens, the union members will say they did their best but could not prevent the degradation.15 The ethnographic case of seafloor cultivation highlights the unintentional and contradicting consequences of satoumi. I suggest that producers’ affective engagements with the compromise between productivity and conservation should also be at the forefront of discussions on coexistence. Conclusion: Intervention for a More-than-Human Coordination Seafloor cultivation, which today has become a widespread practice among oyster-producing prefectures facing the highly enclosed Seto Inland Sea, generates an understanding of the oyster domus’s fluid, in-between, fractal, and ever-changing materiality. As previously discussed, a national desire for economic growth and capitalist expansion during the post-war period led to overtreatment of wastewater that flowed into the Seto Inland Sea, resulting in the fatal decoupling of terrestrial and aquatic entities. I posit that the seafloor cultivation practice in Jigozen highlights aspects of how the seascapes are engineered to intervene the hyphenated boundaries of terrestrial and maritime space—or more semiotically—the troubled dualism of the wild and the farmed, and the natural and the artificial. As discussed earlier, wastewater has an opportunistic ontology. The discharge of nutrient-rich waste into aquatic ecosystems leads to eutrophication, a consequence of post-war industrial development. In contrast, oligotrophication occurs when there is an absence of nutrients due to over-purification. The oyster supply chain, as a biosocial metabolism, reshapes the concept of pollution as contaminants irreversibly encroach on the Earth system’s planetary boundaries. Another critical aspect of seafloor cultivation is that it serves as an alternative yet makeshift approach to care, taking the deliberate form of intervention. This perspective sheds light on recent discussions surrounding care as something that “intrinsically involves ethical and political intervention,”

Cultivating the Ocean  99 rather than being limited to a factual evaluation with a fixed goal (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017: 6). This intervention, spanning temporal, political, and emotional scales and involving more-than-human entities, is reshaping the human condition in times of social and political catastrophism. The complexity of the unknown emerges as local oyster producers’ efforts to maintain the ecosystem’s metabolism sometimes diverge from scientific modeling conducted by marine biologists. In the context of seafloor cultivation practice as a form of forms of intervention with relational approaches, the frictions and exclusions associated with intervention become apparent, foregrounding how these play a constitutive role in the composition of lived reality. Jigozen’s oyster producers have withstood the constant ecological fluxes that remain largely unpredictable and unknown by attending to oysters’ biological features of immobility, the nutrient cycles, and their sentient connection to the environment. Considering these seemingly hierarchical differences aids in recalibrating their way of working through the social, political, and ecological fluctuation, shifting to “blue degrowth” (Ertör and Hadjimichael 2020). Multispecies care thus requires nuanced and multidimensional modes of understanding elements of deep time and describing knowledge practices related to the uncertain future (Mathur 2021; see also Lynch 2022). I argue that this practice, which entails coming to terms with unknowingness, urges us to pay attention to what Mathur (2017) describes as “climate translation” (Mathur 2017, 10–16). As Mathur discussed, the politics of translation should not be limited to adding science to ethnography through reliance on rationalized science (Mathur 2017, 10; Venkataramani 2021). My observation suggests that local oyster producers’ efforts in seafloor cultivation provide us with a tool for redescribing nonhuman agency and assemblages beyond species-centric narratives. When it comes to how we engage with and respond to seascapes in times of ecological precariousness, it is crucial to explore how the geotemporal scale of the nutrients accumulated over recent decades in marine sediment mediates knowledge production among local oyster producers and marine biologists, involving the actions of oysters, seawater, oxygen, plankton, and their collective memories of placemaking. In short, seafloor cultivation is an active makeshift practice that keeps our beings in equilibrium, allowing alternative futures to emerge through temporal, embodied, and affective relations. Notes 1 My approach to conceptual and theoretical idioms in multispecies ethnography aligns with Chao’s (2023) critical engagement with hierarchical ordering of subjects rooted in colonial logic. This involves narrating vulnerabilities as situated and relational, beyond the confines of species-centered taxonomic framing and linear spatiotemporal forms. 2 The names of the research participants have been changed to ensure their anonymity. “-san,” which I adopt throughout this chapter, is a Japanese suffix attached to a person’s name. 3 Japan’s oyster farming began in Hiroshima Prefecture in the mid-1500s.

100  Mariko Yoshida 4 I agree with the various critiques of the Anthropocene (Haraway 2016; Moore 2014), which point out that the concept is largely steeped in Eurocentric and colonial understanding of anthropocentrism while dismissing gendered, racialized, and classed power relations. 5 In an incisive article on the mobilization of oysters as an urban ecological risk management solution in New York City, Stephanie Wakefield claims that oysters as a living infrastructure are biopolitical, in that a governmental technique enhances oysters’ life cycles as a method to secure capitalist human life (Wakefield 2019). 6 In contrast to the benefits of seafloor cultivation, several scientific studies on the negative effects of large-scale agriculture on soil microbiota have indicated that cultivation on land leads to a decrease in soil respiration. The removal of the nutritious upper soil layers through tillage, heavy rains, flooding, and dust storms decreases soil water content, which may lead to a change in bacterial composition (e.g., Domnariu et al. 2022; Gelybó et al. 2022). As such, no-till farming has been employed to reduce soil degradation, such as soil runoff and reduced soil moisture in arid zones. 7 Interview, August 6, 2021. 8 Nitrogen is an essential element for protein synthesis and exists in abundance in the Earth’s atmosphere. However, large amounts of nitrogen compounds are released into the atmosphere due to large-scale chemical fertilizer production, crop cultivation, fossil fuel combustion, and other processes. These compounds accumulate and flow into the ocean through the soil, groundwater, and rivers, where they can cause eutrophication and hypoxia in lakes and marine waters. 9 Interview, June 8, 2022. 10 In the process of eutrophication, phytoplankton and fish decrease, whereas nutrient concentrations and zooplankton abundance remain unchanged. During the eutrophic period from the 1970s to the 1980s, although red tides were frequent, the catch of oysters increased. In addition, during the oligotrophic period after the 1990s, red tides decreased, and so did the oyster harvest. 11 Interview, February 8, 2022. 12 Interview, August 6, 2021. 13 Unstructured discussion on the boat, June 14, 2022. 14 According to Gertenbach et al. (2021), the two concepts of “degrowth” and “coexistence” have different goal orientations toward the Anthropocene/Capitalocene crisis. They claim that although degrowth critiques capitalist accumulation, “coexistence” acknowledges the instrumental use of scientific knowledge and seeks to examine the political implications associated with technological innovation (Gertenbach et al. 2021). 15 Informal discussion, April 6, 2023.

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102  Mariko Yoshida Jensen, Carl Bruun. 2007. “Infrastructural Fractals: Revisiting the Micro-Macro Distinction in Social Theory.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25: 832–50. https://doi.org/10.1068/d420t Kokudo Kōtsushō Mizu Kanri Kokudo Hozenkyoku Gesuidō-bu [Sewage and Wastewater Management Bureau, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism]. 2005. Gesui hōryusui ni fukumareru eiyoenrui no nōdōteki kanri no tame no unten hōhō ni kakawaru tejunsho [Procedures for Operating Methods for Active Control of Nutrients in Sewage Effluent]. Tokyo: Kokudo Kōtsushō. Lien, Marianne Elisabeth. 2007. “Domestication ‘Downunder’: Atlantic Salmon Farming in Tasmania.” In Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered, edited by Rebecca Cassidy and Molly Mullin, 205–27. Oxford: Berg. Lien, Marianne Elisabeth. 2015. Becoming Salmon: Aquaculture and the Domestication of a Fish. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lynch, Kathleen. 2022. Care and Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mansfield, Becky. 2003. “From Catfish to Organic Fish: Making Distinctions about Nature as Cultural Economic Practice.” Geoforum 34 (3): 329–42. https://doi. org/10.1016/S0016-7185(03)00004-6 Mathur, Nayanika. 2017. “The Task of the Climate Translator.” Economic and Political Weekly LII (31): 77–84. Mathur, Nayanika. 2021. Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ministry of Environment, Japan. 2011. “Kongo no setonaikai no mizu kankyo no arikata no ronten seiri” [Discussion Paper on the Future of the Seto Inland Sea Water Environment]. Accessed June 1, 2022. Available at: https://www.env.go.jp/ content/900542111.pdf Moore, W. Jason. 2014. “Toward a Singular Metabolism: Epistemic Rifts and Environment-Making in the Capitalist World-Ecology.” New Geographies 6: 10–19. Available at: https://jasonwmoore.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Moore-­Towardsa-Singular-Metabolism-2014-NG.pdf Paprocki, Kasia. 2019. “All That Is Solid Melts into the Bay: Anticipatory Ruination and Climate Change Adaptation.” Antipode 51: 295–315. https://doi.org/10.1111/ anti.12421 Peters, Kimberley, and Philip Steinberg. 2019. “The Ocean in Excess: Towards a More-than-Wet Ontology.”  Dialogues in Human Geography  9 (3): 293–307. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820619872886 Power, Nicole, Jessica Melvin, and Charles Mather. 2022. “Multispecies Hierarchies and Capitalist Value: Insights from Salmon Aquaculture.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space : 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211060662 Price, Catherine, and Sophie Chao. 2023. Multispecies, More-Than-Human, NonHuman, Other-Than-Human: Reimagining Idioms of Animacy in an Age of Planetary Unmaking. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal 10 (2): 177–93. Puig de La Bellacasa, Maria. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Roca-Servat, Denisse, and Polina Golovátina-Mora. 2019. “Water Matters: Thinking with Water Class Experience.” Qualitative Inquiry 26 (1): 13–23. https://doi. org/10.1177/1077800419869965 Saguin, Kristian. 2016. “Blue Revolution in a Commodity Frontier: Ecologies of Aquaculture and Agrarian Change in Laguna Lake, Philippines.” Journal of Agrarian Change 16 (4): 571–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12114

Cultivating the Ocean  103 Satizábal, Paula, and Wolfram H. Dressler. 2019. “Geographies of the Sea: Negotiating Human–Fish Interactions in the Waterscapes of Colombia’s Pacific Coast.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109 (6): 1865–84. https://doi. org/10.1080/24694452.2019.1587282 Satsuka, Shiho. 2014. “The Satoyama Movement: Envisioning Multi-Species Commons in Postindustrial Japan.” In Asian Environments: Connections across Borders, Landscapes, and Times, edited by Ursula Münster, Shiho Satsuka, and Gunnel Cederlöf, Vol. 3, 87–93. Munich: RCC Perspectives. Song, Andrew M., Wolfram H. Dressler, Paula Satizábal, and Michael Fabinyi. 2021. “From Conversion to Conservation to Carbon: The Changing Policy Discourse on Mangrove Governance and Use in the Philippines.” Journal of Rural Studies 82: 184–195. Strathern, Marilyn. 1991. Partial Connections. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Swanson, Heather Anne. 2018. “Domestication Gone Wild: Pacific Salmon and the Disruption of the Domus.” In Domestication Gone Wild: Politics and Practices of Multispecies Relations, edited by Heather Swanson, Marianne Lien, and Gro Ween, 141–58. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Takahashi, Hiroko. 2008. “Genbaku Tōka Ippungo: Kesareta Zanryu Hōshasen no Eikyo.” [One Minute after the Atomic Bomb was Dropped: Erased Effects of Residual Radiation]. American Studies 42: 1–19. https://doi.org/10.11380/ americanreview.42.0_1 Takeuchi, Kazuhiko. 2010. “Rebuilding the Relationship between People and Nature: The Satoyama Initiative.” Ecological Research 25: 891–97. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11284-010-0745-8 Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Venkataramani, Chitra. 2021. “Waste’s Translations.” American Ethnologist 48: 337–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13047 Wahyudin, and Tamiji Yamamoto. 2020. “Modeling Bottom-Up and TopDown Controls on the Low Recruitment Success of Oyster Larvae in Hiroshima Bay, Japan.” Aquaculture 529 (735564): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. aquaculture.2020.735564 Wakefield, Stephanie. 2020. “Making Nature into Infrastructure: The Construction of Oysters as a Risk Management Solution in New York City.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 3 (3): 761–85. https://doi. org/10.1177/2514848619887461 Yanagi, Tetsuo. 2010. “Satoumi no gainen, satoumi sousei undo no mondaiten.” [The Concept of Satoumi and the Problems of Satoumi Creation Movement]. In Satoumi to shiteno Engan-iki no Aratana Riyō [New Use of Coastal Areas as Satoumi], edited by Tamiji Yamamoto, 22–32. Tokyo: Kōseisha Kōseikaku. Yanagida, Kunio. 1975. Kūhaku no tenkizu [A Blank Weather Chart]. Tokyo: Shinchō-sha. Yoshida, Mariko. 2021. “Kaki ga tsukuri sodate rarete iru toki.” In Kuu, Kuwareru, Kuiau: Multispecies Minzokushi no Shiko [Eat, Consume, Symbiose: Exploring Food Systems from the Perspectives of Multispecies Ethnography], edited by Kondo, Shiaki, and Mariko Yoshida, 67–106. Tokyo: Seido-sha.

6 Entangled (After)Lives Naturalcultural Matricides and Reproduction in Northeastern DR Congo Catherine Windey

People in Yangambi, a small town about 100 km west of Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of Congo “have regressed” since independence said Elasi, the director of the herbarium of the Biosphere Reserve. “They have taken back the forest to their fields,” he said, referring to the unruly character of local farmers’ fields. Yangambi can be a fascinating place for anyone interested in the “haunted quality of ruined landscapes” (Gan et al. 2017, G3) and precarious life among colonial capitalist ruins where stories of decay and renewal are interwoven (Tsing 2015). Yangambi used to be a small wealthy colonial town with opulent houses, a cinema, a private club with its tennis courts and swimming pools which were enjoyed by the white employees of the National Institute for Agronomic Study in the Belgian Congo, one of the world’s most important centre for tropical agriculture and forest research at the time. It was the “quintessence” of colonial scientific agrocapitalism: research served the productivity of export plantations, ranging from large-scale industrial and family plantations owned by European settlers to Congolese smallholder farms rigidly organized structured and controlled by Belgian agronomists. Today, for any first-time Western visitor, walking Yangambi might appear as a trip back in time. Its decrepit colonial buildings and furniture, its factories at standstill, its former oil palm, cacao, coffee or rubber tree experimental plantations seem at first sight unexploited and have been progressively and spontaneously taken over by other forms of lives, heterogeneous plants, trees and weeds (Figure 6.1). Elasi’s discourse around new attempts at eco-modernization, spirituality and what it means to live in Yangambi, was tinged with temporal, spatial and racial metaphors. He appeared deeply upset. He said: “here I have everything. All the forest areas that I need; but we do not have any scientific history. We are a country that comes out of the forest.” “We have a lot of money in Yangambi, we have 500 hectares of oil palm, 500 hectares of cocoa and so on; we have all the best products. But all we do is picking,” he continued. “What you do not want to accept, you Europeans, is that there is a lot of darkness in our minds. It is this darkness that causes one to have DOI: 10.4324/9781003439011-7

Entangled (After)Lives  105

Figure 6.1  A former colonial palm oil factory taken over by plants

a 500-hectare plantation and not exploit it.” Older people, the ones who learnt with the Belgians to plant in lines and in monoculture, “just stopped doing it like that.” For Elasi, the darkness that Congolese people are holding to is responsible for the failure of integrated development conservation programmes. “Europeans, you think that you can skip the phase of spiritual change and that is why after you leave, everything gets destroyed,” he concluded. My long conversation with Elasi was among the most memorable and unsettling ones I have had in Kisangani’s hinterland,1 formerly Stanleyville, a colonial station established by Stanley in 1883 which was also, at the time, one of the major strongholds of the Zanzibari-Arab slave trade. Though not always in such extreme wording, I have heard Elasi’s internalized colonial Manichean discourse in darkness/blackness and lightness/whiteness (Fanon 1952/2008, Mbembe 2002) many times and in many places in Yangambi and Kisangani’s rural hinterland where I have conducted regular ethnographic fieldwork since 2015 (see also Rubbers [2009] for similar accounts). Stories of blackness and whiteness are here interwoven with the human and more-than-human worlds. On the one hand, the unruly entanglement of numerous spirits and witches in the “traditional” belief system, and of wild and domesticated plants in polycultural fields are associated with blackness. On the other hand, the monotheistic spirituality of Christianity and the monocultural, homogeneity and ruled nature of the plantation are framed as whiteness. That the end of rational colonial management of agricultural plants, soil and forest resources has marked the end of progress, that “traditional” peasants’ beliefs and ways of being and doing are “antidevelopment,” “anti-modernity” – and thus, in racial terms, dark/black – are

106  Catherine Windey common narratives reinforced by the multiple developmental-environmental discourses that peasants are on the receiving end of (Ferguson 2006, Windey 2020). The landscape of Kisangani hinterland is haunted by both past ways of life and imagined futures (Gan et al. 2017). In this chapter, I explore the simultaneously contradictory and s­yncretic forms of human and more-than-human (after)lives in the “haunted landscape” of slavery and the unrealized plans of violently uneven racial agromodernization (Gan et al. 2017, Yarrow 2017). More particularly, from the perspectives of time, race and class, I think with nonhuman and non-­manifested beings in peasants’ fields and meanings to explore the co-­production of the social and the ecological that begets (after)lives (Benjamin 2018). (After)lives, not afterlives. The parentheses are key to the notion of time that runs across this essay. They indicate “dis/continuity” (Barad 2007) or the frictional social identities of different temporalities (Tsing 2005). Past, present and future are troubled and contemporaneous; there is no linear trajectory of “beforeafter,” “shock-aftermath,” “disaster-ruin” (Hunt 2016). Or, as Nyamnjoh (2017, 257) asserts in his analysis of the frontier nature of African societies and beings, “[t]here seems to be no end to dying, just as there is no end to living,” both for the human and more-than-human, both for culture and nature. These fruitful tensions that permeate the complex stories of the inhabitants of Kisangani hinterland, I will conclude, allow us to imagine convivial, bioculturally diverse possibilities while grappling with a present in which the future of humans and nonhumans can be increasingly difficult to imagine. Incomplete (After)Lives in the Negro-Plantationocene The term “natureculture” coined by Haraway (2003), has emerged as a provocation to the dominant Western ontological divide between nature and culture from which other hierarchized dualisms such as mind/matter, reason/emotion, men/women, master/colonized ensue (Plumwood 1993, Rose 2011). In conversation with other scholars, Haraway’s recent work on the “Plantationocene” has highlighted the inextricable entanglement of social and environmental destruction through the reproduction of a global plantation economy (Haraway 2015, Haraway et al. 2016, Haraway and Tsing 2019). The plantation is understood as a system of forced labour of people and nonhumans – plants, animals, microbes – characterized by homogeneity and control, and as central to the capitalist world system (Haraway and Tsing 2019). Critical of a colourblind conception that ignores race and blackness in initial Plantationocene scholarship, scholars in Black studies have urged us to seriously attend the embodied, colonial-racial politics that structure the disciplinary logics of plantation life (Davis et al. 2019, Tuana 2019). Davis et al. (2019) have argued that these matters have remained obscured largely because human labour is conceived as only one element – somehow lost – within a constellation of other exploited (nonhuman) lifeforms in the plantation economy. In the same way, Black feminist thinker Sharlene Mollett

Entangled (After)Lives  107 (2017) argues that “more-than-human” geography and anthropology should start by unpacking what is meant by “human,” highlighting that not all humans (culture) have always been treated as superior to animals (nature). Building on Quijano’s concept of “coloniality of power,” she shows how “racialized subjugation and superiority are materialized through processes of land appropriation, religious hegemony, and the forced labour of indigenous and black bodies” (Mollett 2017, 6). Bringing together the concept of Plantationocene and what he refers to as the Negrocene – which I conflate into the “Negro-Plantationocene” in this section’s title – postcolonial political ecologist and mestizo Caribbean native, Malcolm Ferdinand (2019) thinks of the ecological crisis in light of the “double fracture” of modernity materialized in ongoing plantation logics. This double fracture refers to the ongoing devastation of the human and nonhuman communities on the one hand, and a colonial fracture that resulted in slavery and the domination of gendered, indigenous and racialized communities, on the other. In this sense, Ferdinand thinks of “negro” more broadly, as all subaltern beings who work for someone else without being recognized for it, and connects it to the over-labouring of lands. More particularly, his book highlights the matricides – i.e., literally the killing of one’s own mother as lands stopped to be conceived as mothers – caused by the plantation. A first matricide corresponds to the replacement of a careful use of the motherland providing food for its dwellers by an extractivist conception of land as a resource that serves commercial interests and the selfish enrichment of a small number of non-native shareholders. Nonhuman life was put into productive labour, just like black bodies, and became a force to generate surplus. In other words, the nonhuman labour of land went into generating commodified encounters (Barua 2017). The destruction of agricultural relations simultaneously engendered the killing of affective, cultural and spiritual relations to land. Christian evangelization marked the end of a particular cosmogony that viewed land and the environment as sacred and made up of its spirits and nonhumans, and replaced a matriarchal conception of land as nourishing mother by a patriarchal one. Feminist scholars of the commons have similarly shown how the focus on capitalist productive labour – whether forced or waged – has obscured the un/ paid socially reproductive – but capitalist unproductive – labour most often performed by women; a socially reproductive labour that is simultaneously ecologically reproductive (Collard and Dempsey 2018, Federici 2004, Sato and Soto Alarcón 2019). Such matricides, Ferdinand (2019) argues, have created landscape, biodiversity and metabolic ruptures that destroyed habitats for many vegetal and animal species and robbed soils from their nutriments, hence impairing the reproductive capacity of the Earth. Colonial slavery, beyond its bodily and sociopolitical dimensions, was a means to extend the “colonial habitat” (Ferdinand 2019, 103), played a fundamental role in these ecological and landscape changes. For slaves, it meant a rupture from their own bodies as

108  Catherine Windey much as a rupture from African motherlands. Slaves were abducted from their kin relations, communal sociabilities, political organizations and cultural practices but also from their specific relations to nonhumans, connections to animals, plants, rivers, cultivated land, forests and spirits. Thinking back to Elasi’s discourse at the beginning of this essay, we can thus also think of matricides in terms of racialization of consciousness (Mbembe 2017) and a “colonial longue durée in which the slow inscription of phenotypical signification took place upon the human body [and the landscapes they dwell in], in and through conquest and enslavement, to be sure, but also as an enormous act of expression, of narration” (Winant 1994, 21, original emphasis). As this chapter will argue, it is of such matricides that peasants of Kisangani’s hinterland talk about when they talk about the socioecological changes they are experiencing in the imperial shadows of the Zanzibari-Arab slave trade, Belgian colonialism and uneven globalization. In light of (ongoing) matricides, ruptures and their bearing on culture and consciousness, what (after)lives are possible? Ruha Benjamin (2018), drawing on Black feminist Science and Technology Studies scholarship, suggests that ethnographic attention to afterlives2 is a part of deepening our knowledge about kin making and reproduction, beyond human and nonhuman relatives but also with everyday spiritual technologies and immaterial actants inhabiting and reproducing landscapes such as the materially dead/spiritually alive ancestors. In the second part of this essay, I will think with these multiple visible and invisible actants. Concerns about spirits and the world of the unseen, witchcraft and magic are not some “cultural survival of religious tradition in a modern world” (Bubandt 2019, 107) but endogenous epistemologies that produce meaning to understand the modern and build the world itself (­Benjamin 2018). Such an epistemology of the unseen is not steeped in dichotomies between the tangible/sensory and the intangible, spirits and the secular, magic and modernity – a vast majority of African lives are indeed entangled with Western “modern” ways of doing, seeing, knowing and ­becoming – but rather representative of a universe of ambivalence or “incompleteness” that opens infinite possibilities (Nyamnjoh 2017). Incompleteness assumes the possibility of the coexistence of multiple forms of being according to context and necessity; “spirits assume human forms, and humans can transform themselves into spirits, animals and plants” (Nyamnjoh 2017, 256). It is also this flexible capacity, Nyamnjoh (2017, 257) continues, that “makes absence present and presence absent in certain places and spaces,” meaning that [p]eople who die reappear elsewhere and are again available for death.” It is in this sense that I want to challenge the idea of after without parentheses before lives, to envision Congolese human and nonhuman subject’s life-in-death (Mbembe 2017) and death-in-life. It is this constant negotiation and navigation with the competing agentive forces of social and ecological destruction – through what local communities of Kisangani refer to as “desertification” – and reproduction – and thus of human and nonhuman labour relations involved in them – that is the subject of this chapter.

Entangled (After)Lives  109 Nonhuman Labour: Local Descriptions of Ecological Change What first brought me to Kisangani’s hinterland in 2015 was its identification as a deforestation “hotspot” by remote-sensing studies carried out in preparation for the implementation of the international Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programme. These studies’ conclusions were unidimensional: shifting cultivation is the main driver of forest loss and change (see Windey 2020, Windey and Van Hecken 2021 for critical readings of these conclusions and their effects). My interest was thus in gathering more complex, local stories than what satellite images tell about ecological change. For a while during my interviews with local peasant farmers, I systematically asked them about the changes they had seen over the years in their natural environment, in particular their forests, trying to avoid specific Western technical words such as deforestation or degradation. It quickly became clear that answers followed some of the geographical patterns of forest loss and change that are visible on satellite imageries. Quite logically, farmers located further away from the main (dirt) roads along which people were resettled during the colonial era, were often surprised by my question, looked around at the landscape and told me there were, obviously, plenty of forests. But for these people dwelling in villages on colonial roads, dense forests have become much more distant from their villages as Roger, an elderly, described it: If you try to compare, at the time when I grew up, we had the virgin forest just next to the house, but today the primal forest has gone away from the village. […] Now you need to go way beyond one or two kilometres from the road [to find primary forests]. Dwellers of these villages often explain that “here it used to be a large forest” before the Belgians opened the road in between the 1930s and the 1950s. Yet, they simultaneously refer to their large ancestral primary forests or to other groups’ forests, located away from the road; forests “with high-size trees” as Chef Assumani emphasized. Chef Assumani’s village is one in many that were part of compulsory cultivation and the more or less coercive paysannats indigènes schemes and that, today, have much fewer communal forests than other areas that were less controlled. Paysannats indigènes was an integrated rural development scheme that grouped farmers together along delimited cultivation blocs and monitored production and fallow periods according to scientifically pre-defined agricultural cycles. It was a blueprint model characterized by homogeneity, rationality and uniformity typical of plantation logic (Haraway and Tsing 2019). Subsistence crops were “planted in lines” along cash crops, as Elasi’s discourse evoked at the beginning of this piece. The scheme’s ultimate aim was to push towards sedentary monocultural agriculture and a shift from collective to individual property. In such villages controlled by paysannats indigènes, clans and households have remained in

110  Catherine Windey the divisions established by the Belgian agronomists even as the population has since grown for multiple reasons. Primary forest shortage in peasant farmers’ understanding is thus relative rather than absolute, in that it is seen as an issue of local scarcity due to the legacy of past resettlements which have led to high population density, proletarianization, land alienation by some groups and intensification in specific places. Igo summarized many of the discourses I heard along the main colonial and logging roads in the area. It is worth quoting him at length: If someone [a villager] needs money […] and that someone else from Kisangani comes to ask for a plot of land to rent with money, then the [villager] will rent out fields that he had left in fallow. Thus now when money comes, fallows are cultivated. And when these people [from Kisangani] rent land in this way, they usually use the [same] land for long periods. Let’s take the example of the Amex-Bois road3. It used to be a primary forest. That was our Lubuya collectivity’s forest reserve. But there are people who come from very far4 to buy large areas of land and today, this area […] has also become like a desert. […] The one who wasn’t a cultivator, has become one today. The one who wasn’t producing charcoal, does it today. But even this charcoal, we, local dwellers, we used to use one tree trunk for several months. But those who come with their chainsaws, they cut ten to twenty tree trunks per day. If they manage to exploit for a whole month or two, the whole forest disappears. There are two main elements in this quote on which I would like to build. First, it is the intensification of charcoal production and farming – I will focus on the latter – by certain classes of actors, which is rendered possible by various dynamics of land grabbing, that is causing forests to turn into “deserts” – this last word is important. The idea of desertification, which was very often mentioned to me in this area of the hinterland, refers to what is considered to be an overuse of resources – over-farming, over-hunting, over-“charcoaling” – on a limited, fixed, often customarily or legally privatized spatial area, that does not allow sufficient forest regrowth to occur. “They say the forest is disappearing… but the forest has not disappeared, because we still have space to cultivate. But we rather noticed that […] there are only small-size trees and tall grass [in the immediate vicinity],” said Tine. Local farmers particularly refer to one type of weed that their fallows are covered with and that they name, quite poetically, mokili mobimba in Lingala which means “all over the world.” Similarly to this weed, one type of grasshoppers has started to dominate and invade their fields, making their daily maintenance more complicated. The presence of these nonhuman disturbing agents echoes concomitant biodiversity loss in terms of plants, game animals and non-timber forest products, which peasants often mentioned. Such biodiversity ruptures are caused by an increasing homogenization of crops and of the biological

Entangled (After)Lives  111 content of the land that breaks equilibriums between species, making more prevalent specific plants, insects and animals that are more adapted to these conditions (Ferdinand 2019). When local peasant farmers use the word “desert” – in what appears to any Western eye as a very leafy environment – they also make clear what practice drives it: I am referring to desert because in the same area, people cultivate it more than three times and they exterminate all the big trees there. It is in this way that there remains only desert, but it is not in the real meaning of desert because we still produce in it. In other words, while there are new areas of expansion in the forests that go with the construction of road infrastructure as satellite data show, for peasant farmers, the heart of the problem lies in the excessive working of the soil. For many, this also leads to a reduction in fertility. Such an understanding of forest change as desertification, in this sense, reflects the matricides of the Plantationocene (Ferdinand 2019). The careful use of land through shifting agriculture that allowed the progressive regeneration of plants and forests more generally has been replaced by an intensive use, killing the soils of its nutriments that allowed biodiversity to thrive. Desertification indeed largely reflects the broken philosophy of shifting agriculture. As a local Pastor told me: “today we have issues because we stay in the same place while at the time, our ancestors would move barrier-free […] they considered that the whole forest belonged to them.” In the shifting agricultural worldview, ngonda – a forest with high trees – is not a pristine place independent from human farming activities; it is built and reproduced in cycles by humans and nonhuman forms of life alike. Such landscape ruptures thus lie in the disruptions of an extended and cyclical spatial-temporality (AllenPaisant 2021a, Ferdinand 2019). Desertification points to the killing of the reproductive capacity of the Earth. Human Labour: Tensions between Mutuality and Individuality When peasant farmers evoke ecological perturbations, they not only evoke the over-labouring of soils, forests and other nonhumans but also speak about changing human labour relations. The alienation of both land and labour is, in many ways, what underlies local discourses on “desertification,” highlighting how and why intensification is possible, by whom it is carried out and the inequalities it generates. The allotment of large areas to dwellers from Kisangani is often mentioned. Two “wise men” noted: “our neighbours are selling concessions from twenty to a hundred hectares to the Nande; someone who does one hundred hectares, that is a desert foretold.” Yet, peasant farmers, refer even more often to intra-community land alienation by some better-off “individuals who can, like that, cultivate two, three, four

112  Catherine Windey fields” per season or per year. Forest shortages that follow from the reduction of fallow years due to an expansion of annual crop land in the family/clan’s land area, are consistently linked by my informants to the rise of paid collective labour and daily labourers. Although the domestic unit functions as the basis for land access, production and consumption, farming ties each household to a wider social network in the village through the pooling of the group’s workforce. While the colonial system of paysannats indigènes required farmer households to work individually in a corridor, next to their fellow clan members, today’s production model is rather built on a tension between reciprocity/mutuality – maintaining relationships with others – and privatization/individualization. In the whole Kisangani’s hinterland, farming is mostly organized through a system of work tontines called liklemba in Lingala. They are integrated systems of credit-saving and community agricultural work. Members work in rotation on each other’s land. Forms of extended kinfolk’s collective labour can be traced to pre-colonial times, for the tasks of felling and clearing (Vansina 1990). Likelemba implies that the cultivation area is about the same for each member, and rarely exceeds 1–1.5 hectares. Such collective work happens periodically according to the schedule of agricultural activities: felling/clearing, sowing, weeding, and main harvests of short-cycle cash crops (rice, maize).5 When likelemba come together, food is foreseen by the host of the day and shared together. Only some days in the month are dedicated to mutual work. For the rest of the time, members work individually in their household’s field. Likelemba are thus a collective, reciprocal mode of production that allows everyone to have relatively bigger fields and maximize their output while solidifying community bonds and maintaining equality between members. The collective labour force of likelemba is also increasingly used as a wage labour force to increase cultivation areas, production and profit. Likelemba made up of young men, provide paid “farming services” on the land of other farmers in exchange of cash, food and drinks. Only better-off farmers who have access to larger plots of land and have some financial means can afford such services. They allow them to extend their cultivation areas per season, cultivate several fields a year over different seasons – rather than only one – and invest in shorter-cycle crops which require a “fast” harvest and higher value crops that are more sensitive to weeds. According to Likaka (1997), reliance on paid collective work can be traced to colonial forced cotton cultivation, during which some cultivators had to call upon their kin to help them work in their plot, which would otherwise not be ready when the controllers came. With the changing economic context and new needs, additional cash compensation became increasingly required, just as in these days. When likelemba engage in wage labour, they are generally referred to as associations and typically function as cooperatives. The money the association* earns is put in a common cash box which is managed by a trustworthy treasurer who is part of a larger management committee. Wages are thus

Entangled (After)Lives  113 not directly distributed to members but are pooled and then used to finance goods. Associations represent an economic alternative for some young ­people who are faced with land shortage and need some source of income while reinforcing ties with their generational community. The reproductive power of their collective labour thus serves simultaneously the reproduction of the community while generating individual maximization, in the sense that reciprocity remains at the core of its functioning but it is also used by better-off individuals in their self-interest, i.e., to extend the size of their fields (generally to 3–4 ha) and intensify production, leading to desertification. Yet, the production of wealth by these better-off individuals is generally considered to be constructive for the community, precisely because the money circulates within it (Gudeman 2008). The money young people of the associations make is not individually appropriated; it serves the young people, as much as the parents they help, while also producing value for particular farmers in the community. There is yet a third form of farming labour in Kisangani’s hinterland: purely privatized labour. Wealthier farmers use individual, underpaid daily labourers for regular field maintenance and harvests. Most of these daily labourers are recently arrived “allochthones” who are less integrated into community structures and have more difficult access to land, or autochthonous “landless” young men (rarely women) who are unable to generate an income from agriculture. For “autochthones” who have access to land and forest resources, the salary is often considered too low compared to the income they can get out of their own fields and related activities. Daily labourers are called upon by the most well-off farmers who grow more labour-intensive crops, e.g., groundnuts, maize, rice, on large plots of land but even more so by urban elites who have acquired large private concessions for staple and perennial cash crop agriculture (cacao and oil palm). Unlike likelemba and associations this individual form of labour is less “pro-social,” in the sense that it does not directly contribute to producing community social relations, in particular because many of the workers and users are non-native to the landscapes where agricultural production takes place. In this way, such individual privatized waged labour corresponds to one of the colonial matricides identified by Ferdinand (2019): land comes to be conceived as an extractive resource for the enrichment of non-native actors. Agricultural labour is thus more or less productive of social relations. Paid labour is simultaneously understood as a cause and an effect of social–­ecological change. It is, in local farmers’ understanding, a response to the family forest and land scarcity, unequal access to land and land alienation while allowing further intensification and expansion of annual crop land, for certain groups. Modernization, Spirits and Slaves In processes of knowledge and meaning-making about changing nonhuman and human labour relations that impact their social and ecological

114  Catherine Windey environment, people in Kisangani’s hinterland make links between material and spiritual transformations, the human and the more-than-human world and see a connected set of losses and gains that can be traced to their first exposure to colonial modernity (West 2016). For many, the monetization of the economy and the access to material goods, i.e., “development” in their words, marked the start of these changes. “Since the abundance of money and the arrival of development, people do large fields to make money,” said Loku. While their grandparents and parents were engaged in a bartering system, and thus just needed to do small fields for their subsistence only, Boni, an elderly man told me: “the white showed us how to do the market [economy], he opened roads […] but he was hiding the money from us; but after independence, we opened our eyes and we could make money and change came.” The “notion of lack” powerfully started to colonize the minds (Fanon 1968). Markets and native currencies existed in pre-colonial times, but the Western monetized economy spread with colonialism. It is under the compulsory cultivation system that indigenous agriculture started to become an (export) cash-making activity and that agricultural wage labour emerged, and would continue to be embodied in human-environment relations and incorporated in the landscape (Stoetzer 2018). Dwellers of Kisangani’s hinterland, said my informants, have developed increasing needs since then, and with “mundialization” as farmers often refer to. “Today, goods have become visible everywhere and people do everything to get them; there was the 4 × 4 bicycle and then another brand came, and so on,” said Pastor Augustin. Corrugated iron roofs, motorbikes, televisions are all signs of modernity as it is for most peri-urban populations throughout the region (see, e.g., Trefon 2011). This money is also what allows them to pay for school fees and, for the lucky ones, to send their children to school in Kisangani or to buy a small plot of land for their children. Emmanuel, the chief of a village located 15 km from Kisangani city centre added: “people want to have a better life, like people in the city. Just like our African brothers (Central African Republic, Sudan, etc.) have changed, we want to change too.” It is the urban-rural binary, i.e., culture-nature distinction, exported by colonialists, that my informants aim to break. As Allen-Paisant (2021b) puts, there is an “aspiration to leave the rural behind, because [it is] perceived to be an index of poverty.” The colonial epistemology of development and poverty is thus associated with a colonial epistemology of (non-)nature in forging the idea that social mobility “is about turning [your] back on the elements […], distancing yourself from the natural, the woodland, any space associated with the ‘primitive’ —and that includes folklore and myth, in which the woodland is the space of spirits” (Allen-Paisant 2021b). Sociomaterial transformations, in many peasant farmers’ discourses, have gone hand in hand with moral, spiritual change. The tentative replacement of polytheistic “traditional” beliefs – commonly referred to as la coutume

Entangled (After)Lives  115 in local French – by monotheism – mainly Christianity – many asserted, has caused the loss of the sacred character of the forests. Forests are no longer a source of ritual focus. This loss of sacredness, they say, is in turn what pushes p ­ eople to overuse forest resources causing “desertification” – ­echoing Ferdinand (2019)’s analysis in the Caribbean. Change in agricultural relations and their ensuing loss of biodiversity is, in peasants’ epistemologies, inseparable from the loss of spiritual relations to land. Believing in God rather than in spirits, charms or secret societies, is thought to lead to development. “Religion says that we should follow the life of the Jews… and the Jews lived better than us,” said Boni. “Darkness hunt is what benefited Europe’s development,” said Elasi – whom we met in this chapter – ­seeming to forget that the “development” they praise was built on the labour of their colonized bodies and land. Racial subjugation did indeed go hand in hand with religious hegemony (Mollett 2017, Vansina 1990). The racial imagery of “darkness,” the corollary of the “lack,” has deeply and enduringly colonized Congolese minds and thus contributes to shape understandings of social–­ecological change. The binary between blackness as rural/nature, uncivilization and primitiveness, and whiteness as urbanization, civilization and progress is indeed striking in such peasants’ discourses. Previous assertions, as much as what follows, have to be understood in this light. For most peasant farmers in Kisangani’s hinterland, this promised modernization yet remains an “economy of desired goods that are known, that may sometimes be seen, that one wants to enjoy, but to which one will never have material access” (Mbembe 2002, 271). Socially, the peasant farmers’ society of the hinterland has bifurcated between those who manage to cultivate large fields, to have good yield, and to access (more or less) “modernization” but contributing to “desertification,” and the majority who do not. This largely intangible character of modernity is, for many, an evidence of “white magic” that is inaccessible to black bodies. “White magic is technology” black people have “black magic,” said Papa Christian. Fonoli, one mode of black magic, came up many times in conversations about farming and forests. Fonoli, people told me, is a mystical, occult force that allows its holder to kill some members of their extended family and then exhume their bodies to enslave them for agricultural work in its own fields. “In the current world, someone will be dead, but he will be alive in the next world,” as Papa Christian explained; they are dead in life and live in death (Nyamnjoh 2017). Accusations of fonoli are aimed at individuals who have bigger and/or more productive high-yielding fields than others. Joseph explained its functioning to me: Fonoli is a system in which someone is killed through witchcraft so that this person who is supposedly dead goes working, at night, in the fields of the one who killed him. This person is not dead in a real way, he stays in the forest so that he can be used for working in the fields.

116  Catherine Windey We notice in the morning that this person’s field [of the witch] is always clean [weeded]. We ask ourselves: ‘how can his fields remain so clean every morning?’ And then we understand that someone works in it at night. It is difficult not to link fonoli to the violent dispossession of bodies and labour through the Zanzibari-Arab slave trade and forced proletarianization during the colonial era that the societies of Kisangani’s hinterland have endured. In these times, some village chiefs played a role in capturing their kin and selling them to slave traders, and later in enforcing compulsory cultivation schemes. Papa Christian highlighted such interpretations when he said: “Power… it always requires human sacrifice. That’s what’s wrong with us Blacks. You always have to kill your own brother, your own father.” Fonoli and the isolation in the forest that goes with it, further evokes such a matricide: the abduction from the village, from the place where the bonds of kinship are reproduced and maintained on a daily basis (Ferdinand, 2019) to permanently disappear in the darkness of the unknown. Such interpretations are not surprising given the brutal and forced proletarianization that accompanied the dispossession of these populations. As Jewsiewicki (2015) notes for Caribbean societies but resonates in this context too: slaves became goods whose labour capacity was their only value, and after abolition and decolonization, have been immersed in an endless conflict for the control of this capacity. In fact, the specificity of the Congolese situation is an all-pervasive distinction between slaves and freemen (MacGaffey 1983). Yet, “force” or power in many of my informants’ discourses has intertwined connotations: as economic capital, physical strength of labour and occult power. The three forces are all framed, often indistinctively, as human and nonhuman agents of social–ecological changes that they are experiencing. The three forces are in fact quite impossible to disentangle from each other in peasant farmers’ hidden interpretative transcripts although they are carefully distinguished in their public transcripts shaped by Christian worldviews (Scott 1992). The strength of paid labour, especially in its collective form, is the public positive equivalent of the dark negative fonoli* force, as this quote from Nestor illustrates: Fonoli to maintain the fields, does not contribute [to the community], it is only individual. It’s an anti-development system. We want the development of our community. If someone just pursues his own development at the expense of others, it is thus an anti-development. He has an abundant labour force thanks to fonoli. That’s not good. We, to diminish this system, we pay young people to clear our forests and maintain our crop fields. […] If fonoli was visible, it would be better. Thus this business is clandestine. It’s a really bad force. At the same time, farmers who employ young labour can also be accused of practising fonoli. I had a long conversation about fonoli with Victor who

Entangled (After)Lives  117 lives in a village 15 km away from Kisangani. When I asked him whether those who use fonoli are not using paid labour, he answered: “they pay people from the associations so that they do not get exposed but they do not use them often.” Clearly, fonoli is tied today to the tensions generated by capitalist social–ecological relations and the increasing social differentiation between farmers of the hinterland. But the enmeshment of different forces, of paid/visible and invisible labour forms, calls attention to “frontier” thinking and the de-emphasis of dualisms between the individual and the collective. An individual is allowed to pursue the fulfilment of it needs – not greed – and goals but it will be best acknowledged if it is harnessed by relationships with others and in conviviality with collective interests (Nyamnjoh 2017). Conclusion: From Matricides to Entanglements British-Ghanaian theorist and writer Kodwo Eshun calls the alternative temporal orientation of the Pan-African experience a “futurepast of time running backwards while it’s playing forward” (Eshun 1998, 01[011]), that is a marker of unrealized futures. My aim in this chapter has been to think in such polyrhythm and “incompleteness” (Nyamnjoh 2017) to explore Congolese (after)lives; that is adopting “genealogical sensibilities” to the incorporation of racial, social and environmental fractures while simultaneously foregrounding relational, polytheistic onto-epistemological possibilities beyond the logics of colonial modernity (Seedat, Suffla, and Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2021, Tuana 2019). In essence, I have argued that the ecological matricide – which local farmers refer to as “desertification”– brought by the Negro-Plantationocene touches deeply on identities and social relations. In local epistemologies, practices of making kin, that is of social reproduction, are inextricably linked to ecological reproduction, that is of the reproductive capacities of the earth. The reduction of biological reproductivity that leads some weeds to cover farmers’ “whole world,” mokili mobimba, is intertwined with the rupture in communal sociabilities of likelemba labour systems that historically allowed lands to regenerate. Wage labour and the growing of cash food crops are seen as pathways to bring transformations in people’s material lives but also as breakers of mutual and reciprocal kin ties normally sustained by the cyclical nature of social–ecological relations as stories of fonoli and its enslaved labour highlight. The stories farmers told me powerfully remind us that the environmental crisis is first and foremost a social crisis that arises from deep and violent inequalities; that the exhaustion of the “natural” is the exhaustion of social life. Within rural farmer communities of Kisangani’s hinterland, understandings of such matricides are articulated in simultaneously racial, moral and spiritual terms underpinned by Christianity and expectations of modernity and progress as much as by endogenous epistemologies that make sense of reality beyond sensory perceptions. In local discourses, the partial loss of forests’ sacredness and of traditional beliefs has led to destructive changes

118  Catherine Windey but their perpetuation, despite a century of forced Christianity, is perceived at the same time as a brake on development and on leaving the state of nature (Allen-Paisant 2021b). As much as polytheism defines spiritual beliefs in the hinterland and in the whole DR Congo, contradictions, articulations and complementarities are inherent to what it means to live in the rubble of imperialism where different systems of values and virtue, global and local capital, heterogeneous forest dwellers and users, and multiple farming labour practices interact to “make” and negotiate subjectivities. Peasant farmers of Kisangani’s hinterland embody the subverting of boundaries and practices within which they had been confined by the zero-sum game of rational modernity (Nyamnjoh 2017). The Black (after)lives and ecologies highlighted in this essay are innovative relational modes of being and kin-making that can offer guidance to an “ethico-political vision” that addresses the matricides of the Negro-Plantationocene (Davis et al. 2019, Ferdinand 2019). It is by recognizing the inherent multiplicity, polytheism of these ecologies that we can start collapsing the dualisms, dichotomies and binaries of culture/nature, subject/object, human/nonhuman, mind/body that are at the root of hierarchies of class, gender and race, and of ecological ruptures to enable both natureculture plurality and for existence across time. Notes 1 I use the word “hinterland” to break a sterile (colonial) dichotomy between the urban and the rural. Geographically, it corresponds to a radius of around 150 km around the city of Kisangani. But more largely than that, it refers to the material connections between the urban and rural, i.e., to the “supply area” of the city (agricultural produce, charcoal, etc.), as much as to their socio-cultural connections in that many people live “in between” the city and the village. 2 Benjamin (2018) does not use parentheses for afterlives. I will come back to this. 3 The “Amex-Bois” road is a private logging road that was opened in the late 1990s and that has been continuously extended since. 4 Igo here refers to the Nande from North Kivu – who are often portrayed as the Congolese most entrepreneurial group – and to urban elites from Kinshasa. 5 Long-cycle crops such as cassava or plantains are harvested throughout the season/ year and thus require low labour intensity.

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Entangled (After)Lives  119 Benjamin, Ruha. 2018. “Black Afterlives Matter: Cultivating Kinfulness as Reproductive Justice.” In Making Kin Not Population, edited by Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway. pp. 41–66. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press. Bubandt, Nils. 2019. “Spirits as Technology: Tech-Gnosis and the Ambivalent Politics of the Invisible in Indonesia.” Contemporary Islam 13 (1): 103–20. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11562-017-0391-9. Collard, Rosemary-Claire, and Jessica Dempsey. 2018. “Accumulation by DifferenceMaking: An Anthropocene Story, Starring Witches.” Gender, Place & Culture 25 (9): 1349–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1521385. Davis, Janae, Alex A. Moulton, Levi Van Sant, and Brian Williams. 2019. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises.” Geography Compass 13 (5): e12438. https://doi. org/10.1111/gec3.12438. Eshun, Kodwo. 1998. More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books. Fanon, Franz. 1952/2008. Black Skin, White Masks, Get Political. Original edition, 1967. London: Pluto Press. Fanon, Franz. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Federici, Sylvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia. Ferdinand, Malcolm. 2019. Une écologie décoloniale: Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen. Paris, FR: Seuil. Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Gan, Elaine, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Bubandt. 2017. “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt, G1–G15. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gudeman, Stephen. 2008. Economy’s Tension: The Dialectics of Community and Market. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Vol. 1. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, Donna. 2015. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (1): 159–65. https://doi. org/10.1215/22011919-3615934. Haraway, Donna, Noboru Ishikawa, Scott F. Gilbert, Kenneth Olwig, Anna L. Tsing, and Nils Bubandt. 2016. “Anthropologists Are Talking – About the Anthropocene.” Ethnos 81 (3): 535–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2015.1105838. Haraway, Donna, and Anna L. Tsing. 2019. Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation With Donna Haraway & Anna Tsing Moderated by Gregg Mitman. https://edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/ In Edge Effects Magazine. edited by Gregg Mitman. Madison, MI: Nelson Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hunt, Nancy Rose. 2016. A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Jewsiewicki, B. 2015. Dévoiler le travail de la mémoire de l’esclavage, L’Homme, 213 : 147–153. Likaka, Osumaka. 1997. Rural Society and Cotton in Colonial Zaire. Madison, MI: University of Wisconsin Press.

120  Catherine Windey MacGaffey, W. 1983. Modern Kongo Prophets: Religion in a Plural Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2002. “African Modes of Self-Writing.” Public Culture 14 (1): 239–273. Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mollett, Sharlene. 2017. “Irreconcilable Differences? A postcolonial Intersectional Reading of Gender, Development and Human Rights in Latin America.” Gender, Place & Culture 24 (1): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1277292. Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 2017. “Incompleteness: Frontier Africa and the Currency of Conviviality.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 52 (3): 253–70. https://doi. org/10.1177/0021909615580867. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge. Rose, Deborah Bird. 2011. Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Rubbers, Benjamin. 2009. “The Story of a Tragedy: How People in Haut-Katanga Interpret the Post-Colonial History of Congo.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 47 (2): 267–89. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022278x09003838. Sato, C., and J. M. Soto Alarcón. 2019. “Toward a Postcapitalist Feminist Political Ecology’s Approach to the Commons and Commoning.” International Journal of the Commons 13 (1): 36–61. http://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.933. Scott, James C. 1992. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Seedat, Mohamed, Shahnaaz Suffla, and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni. 2021. “Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ Speech: Mobilising Psycho-Political Resources for Political Reconstitution of Post-Apartheid South Africa.” African Studies 80 (3–4): 451–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2021.2012754. Stoetzer, Bettina. 2018. “RUDERAL ECOLOGIES: Rethinking Nature, Migration, and the Urban Landscape in Berlin.” Cultural Anthropology 33 (2): 295–323. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.2.09. Trefon, Théodore. 2011. “Urban-Rural Straddling Conceptualizing the Peri-Urban in Central Africa.” Journal of Developing Societies 27 (3–4): 421–43. https://doi. org/10.1177/0169796X1102700408. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tuana, Nancy. 2019. “Climate Apartheid: The Forgetting of Race in the Anthropocene.” Critical Philosophy of Race 7 (1): 1–31. https://doi.org/10.5325/ critphilrace.7.1.0001. Vansina, Jan. 1990. Paths in the Rainforests. Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial A. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. West, Paige. 2016. Dispossession and the Environment Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea. New York: Columbia University Press. Winant, Howard. 1994. Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Windey, Catherine. 2020. “Abstracting Congolese Forests: Mappings, Representational Narratives, and the Production of the Plantation Space Under REDD+.” IOB Discussion Paper 2020-01: 56p.

Entangled (After)Lives  121 Windey, Catherine, and Gert Van Hecken. 2021. “Contested Mappings in a Dynamic Space: Emerging Socio-Spatial Relationships in the Context of REDD+. A Case from the Democratic Republic of Congo.” Landscape Research 46 (2): 152–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2019.1691983. Yarrow, Thomas. 2017. “REMAINS OF THE FUTURE: Rethinking the Space and Time of Ruination through the Volta Resettlement Project, Ghana.” Cultural Anthropology 32 (4): 566–91. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.06.

7 Threatened Maize, Threatened Language Indigenous Engagements with Biocultural Conservation in Yucatan, Mexico Eriko Yamasaki Maintaining the variety of life is an acute concern in today’s world. Following the alert for massive species extinction formulated as a “biodiversity crisis” in the mid-1980s, linguists highlighted the endangerment of many of the world’s languages in the early 1990s, warning of a dramatic reduction in linguistic diversity in the future. Since the mid-1990s, increased attention has been paid to the interrelatedness of the processes concerning the decline in the world’s diversity – both nature and culture. In this context, the transdisciplinary research field of biocultural diversity (Maffi 2005) emerged, which approaches the variety of life – conceived of as biological, cultural and linguistic diversity – in an integrated manner. Explaining the interdependence of the multiple forms of diversity in nature and culture, studies focus on the role of indigenous knowledge, world conceptions and practices in the sustainable management of the local ecosystem (e.g., Zent and Zent 2007). Given that languages are an important vehicle for transmitting local knowledge and conceptions about the environment, the issues of maintaining biodiversity and indigenous languages are often closely interrelated (Zent 2009; BarreraBassol and Toledo 2014). Today, there is strong pressure on both biological and linguistic diversity as prevalent extractive practices as a part of neoliberal globalization jeopardize indigenous territories and ways of life. While the extraction of natural “resources” based on the capitalist notion of “nature” (Escobar 1999) continues, there is now substantial criticism of this unsustainable form of production that objectifies and commodifies “nature.” Decolonial thoughts from Latin America, for example, challenge the dominant western model of development and propose alternative visions of pluricultural and multispecies co-existence, drawing on indigenous conceptions of human-environment relationships (Escobar 2010; see also Kohn 2007). The role of indigenous transspecies engagement in biocultural diversity conservation can also be observed in the Yucatan Peninsula, where Maya speakers have conserved landraces, for example, those of the staple crop, maize in situ through their continued practice of polyculture farming. For Maya-speaking farmers in Yucatan, the cultivation of slash and burn DOI: 10.4324/9781003439011-8

Threatened Maize, Threatened Language  123 cornfields, milpa is not a means of producing commodifiable crops. Practicing polyculture farming for their subsistence entails being entangled with different lifeforms and spiritual beings. Moreover, milpa also enables farmers to maintain a relationship with their domestic animals as they are fed with maize produced in the cornfield. Thus, the conservation of local agrobiodiversity in Yucatan has been dependent on complex multispecies entanglements that the Maya-speaking population sustains. As is happening in many parts of the world, the two forms of diversity – agrobiological and linguistic – are currently under threat. The conservation of local agrobiodiversity is endangered as many of the younger generation are turning away from milpa agriculture, which has formerly maintained crop landraces. Simultaneously, in many families, the intergenerational transmission of Yucatec Mayan language has become interrupted as an increasing number of parents socialize their children in the majority language, Spanish. Based on the observation that local agrobiodiversity in Yucatan is sustained through a complex set of multispecies relationships, this chapter draws on an anthropology of life (Kohn 2007) to study biocultural diversity conservation in the present age. While the research framework of biocultural diversity (Maffi 2005) has been important in questioning the prevalent nature-culture opposition, there is still much to be explored with regard to how these forms of diversity – biological, cultural and linguistic – are related to each other. In order to understand why this diversity of life is threatened in the Anthropocene, it is essential to focus on ways in which human beings and other lifeforms are entangled with one another and how these relationships become transformed in today’s interconnected world. Accordingly, this chapter approaches biocultural diversity conservation in the contemporary Yucatan Peninsula, drawing on a study of the shifting relationship between maize, human beings and other life forms, interconnected through the traditional farming of milpa. Presenting the Yucatec Mayan case, it demonstrates how different forms of diversity are interdependent and thus, maintaining diversity in every domain is crucial for conceptualizing, designing, and acting towards liveable futures (see also Carneiro da Cunha 2017, 259). Agrobiodiversity and Language Vitality in the Yucatan Peninsula In Mayan societies, maize is a sacred plant that is essential to all aspects of cultural identity, ritual practices and social relationships. The symbolic connection between maize and human beings is an ancient concept in Maya culture, which is also attested in the Popol Vuh (Christenson 2010). According to the sacred book of the Quiché Maya People, the final creation of mankind was only successful after the discovery of maize, from which the flesh of humanity could be formed (Christenson 2007, 193–95). For many Maya speakers in the present Yucatan, maize is not only the staple crop but also the very definition of life. To date, people frequently use the adjective santo/

124  Eriko Yamasaki santa (holy) to refer to this life-giving entity (Re Cruz 2003, 495; Tuxill et al. 2010, 482). The crop diversity of maize and other comestibles is above all maintained through the continued practice of local slash-and-burn agriculture, known as milpa in Spanish, or kool in Yucatec Maya. Milpa agriculture traditionally practiced in Yucatan is characterized by polyculture, with the cultivation of maize (Zea mays L.) as the principal crop. The large quantity of varieties and species found in the cornfield to date has been sustained through human management of local plant resources (Terán and Rasmussen 2009). Traditional ecological knowledge (Zent 2009) needed for the management and utilization of these plant resources has been transmitted from generation to generation as an essential part of child socialization in rural Yucatan. Being a central means of subsistence food supply, milpa agriculture has long been the way of life on which cultural practices in Mayaspeaking communities have been centred. For communities cultivating maize in Yucatan, production, elaboration and consumption of corn is the primary way in which they relate to the environment. The local gendered labour of producing and processing maize involves multiple relationships with other lifeforms and spirit beings. For example, before making milpa, men ask spirit protectors’ permission before working the land. Once corn is harvested, it becomes transformed into tortillas by women’s hands (Re Cruz 2003, 495) (Figure 7.1). Due to its centrality in daily life among the Maya-speaking population, milpa agriculture can be considered a key to understanding the link between local biodiversity and culture including the indigenous language (Terán Contreras 2010). Within this “whole symbolically structured environment” (Bourdieu 1977, 87) of a rural indigenous habitus, Yucatec Maya language has been transmitted from generation to generation alongside other cultural knowledge. However, this basis of cultural reproduction that has sustained both agrobiodiversity and the vitality of the indigenous language is now fracturing. The system of production primarily oriented towards subsistence is facing a crisis owing to several ecological, political and socioeconomic factors, which include climate change, pressures from the global market and increased demands for cash. Consequently, there is an increasing tendency to turn away from agriculture, especially among younger generations. Apart from the difficulty of living off milpa agriculture, the abandonment was triggered by the emergence of new employment opportunities through transnational tourism development in the Mexican Caribbean since the 1970s. Meanwhile, many young people migrate to urban centres on the peninsula – to tourist cities along the Caribbean coast or the state’s capital, Mérida – often without acquiring the skills needed to work the cornfield (see, e.g., Re Cruz 1996; Baños Ramírez 2001; Gaskins 2003; Lizama Quijano 2007; Castellanos 2010; Pérez Ruíz 2015). In view of this situation, local agrobiodiversity is endangered given that its conservation has depended on the continued practice of milpa

Threatened Maize, Threatened Language  125

Figure 7.1  A man looking at his corn in the milpa 2019

agriculture based on the traditional agroecological knowledge transmitted from generation to generation (see Terán and Rasmussen 2009, 24). Parallel to this social transformation with biological consequences, there are significant changes in the language of Yucatec Maya. According to the latest census data, Yucatec Maya is currently spoken by more than 774,000 mainly in the states of Yucatan, Quintana Roo and Campeche, Mexico. In the state of Yucatan, which has the highest ratio of Maya speakers among the general population, 23.4 percent of the population older than three years speaks the language (INEGI 2020). Despite a large number of speakers, a language shift from Yucatec Maya to Spanish is advancing in many communities, as the census data demonstrates. The percentage of speakers among the general population is declining constantly. While Maya speakers represented the majority of the state’s population in 1980 (INEGI 1980), the language is spoken by less than a quarter of its population according to the latest census data (INEGI 2020). Moreover, the distribution of speakers among various generations suggests that the language transmission rate is decreasing. While speakers of an indigenous language

126  Eriko Yamasaki almost represent the majority among the population older than 65 years in the state of Yucatan, the percentage drops to 11 percent among the generation younger than 20 years (INEGI 2020). This tendency of language shift indicated in the census data corresponds to the observation made by various researchers that Spanish is replacing Yucatec Maya as a language for child socialization even in many rural communities of the Yucatan peninsula (e.g., Briceño Chel 2009; Sánchez Arroba 2009; Chi Canul 2011; Pfeiler 2014; Montemayor Gracia 2017; Yamasaki 2019). As is usually the case with language shift, this change in language socialization practices is to be attributed to various factors which frequently interplay with each other. Colonial and nationalistic language ideologies, which are still persistent in the Yucatan Peninsula, manifest themselves in both insufficient representation of the indigenous language in important public domains, as well as discriminatory treatment that Maya speakers experience in their everyday life. To date, Spanish continues to be the dominant language in education, mass media, biomedical health care and public administration. Moreover, many Maya speakers report that they have been the victim of stereotyping and discrimination especially in the urban environment. It goes without saying that such experiences that parents had as Maya speakers led to their preference of the majority language for their child’s socialization. In addition, the interruption of language transmission should also be seen in the context of regional transformations. Above all, transnational tourism development in the Mexican Caribbean since the 1970s and rapid urbanisation as a consequence have radically transformed the way in which children and youth in Maya-speaking communities grow up. Speakers’ orientation to urban wage work also has implications for language socialization in rural communities given that milpa agriculture has formed an essential part of the rural indigenous habitus in which Yucatec Maya has been transmitted from generation to generation. As a consequence, many children and youth are no longer acquiring the indigenous language in which their parents and grandparents have been socialized. In sum, both local crop diversity and the continued vitality of Yucatec Maya are threatened in parallel as the intergenerational transmission of cultural knowledge in these domains becomes interrupted in view of the regional transformations closely related to capitalist globalization. To counter this trend of biocultural erosion, there are numerous governmental as well as civil initiatives taken to conserve both agrobiodiversity and linguistic diversity. Regarding the conservation of agrobiodiversity, the current Mexican government published the Decree issuing the Federal Law for the Promotion and Protection of Native Corn in April 2020, which established the legal framework to conserve the crop diversity of the staple food, maize. Concerning the linguistic diversity in the country, indigenous languages are acknowledged as national languages by the General Law on Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples which has been in effect since March 2003. Moreover, even long before the passing of the law, there were several

Threatened Maize, Threatened Language  127 official initiatives to promote the preservation and the use of indigenous languages at the regional level. In the Yucatan peninsula, institutional support manifests itself for example in indigenous education and the Maya-speaking radio station. Accordingly, there have been some small changes in public policies and discourse in recent years, which are in favour of biocultural conservation. Despite this slightly favourable development, local biocultural diversity continues to be threatened because of the current social, economic and ecological circumstances which pose challenges to the indigenous way of life. In view of the situation, both agrobiodiversity and the indigenous language are maintained through Maya speakers’ everyday practices and efforts resisting this pressure. Indigenous Engagements with Biocultural Conservation in Yucatan The accounts on biocultural diversity conservation presented below are based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Yaxcabá and Tiholop, two rural communities belonging to the municipality of Yaxcabá which lies in the state of Yucatan, Mexico. The author of this chapter has been working in the communities since 2013, carrying out long-term ethnographic fieldwork on the topics of biocultural diversity, migration and the language situation. In accordance with the general tendency in the area, milpa agriculture is conducted as the main socioeconomic activity in the two communities. Due to the local environmental conditions, the cultivation of milpa generally only serves subsistence needs. Against this background, it has always been common for the milpa farmers to combine corn production with additional economic activities including occasional wage work outside of the communities during less labour-intensive periods of annual agricultural cycles. However, nowadays, wage work outside of the communities is increasingly replacing the milpa agriculture instead of being complementary to it as used to be the case. The two communities are bilingual, with the majority of the adult population having command of both Yucatec Maya and Spanish. Albeit to varying degrees, language shift from Yucatec Maya is noticeable in both Yaxcabá and Tiholop, with an increasing proportion of children and youth only speaking Spanish.1 Maize Diversity and Multispecies Entanglements in the Communities

To date, the majority of Yaxcabá and Tiholop farmers cultivate two to three varieties of maize in their cornfields, often combining those with different cycles of maturation. The common combination observed is that of long-cycle varieties (mainly X-nuuk Nal) and short-cycle varieties (e.g., X-mejen Nal) (see Tuxill et al. 2010 for the situation in Yaxcabá in the early 2000s). X-nuuk Nal, the traditional long-cycle maize variety is cultivated by most of the farmers as the principal crop. Especially in the case of X-nuuk Nal, farmers have

128  Eriko Yamasaki been conserving its seeds, breeding them from generation to generation within the family. Moreover, it is common among farmers in these communities to obtain new seeds through an exchange within the community or at regional seed fairs. Although some farmers also make use of purchased improved seeds which are increasingly available, these are rarely cultivated exclusively or as principal crops on their cornfields. Thus, to date, farmers in Yaxcabá and Tiholop continue to conserve traditional maize variety diversity through their farming practices (see Tuxill et al. 2010; Fenzi et al. 2017 for the case of Yaxcabá). Cultivating several landraces differing in cycle length is a strategy to minimize harvest risk and ensure food security in households (see Tuxill et al. 2010; Fenzi et al. 2017). While primarily resulting from uncertainties inherent to rainfed agriculture, the practice of conserving maize diversity is also closely related to the cultural and social significance of maize that is central to Mayan foodways (Tuxill et al. 2010). In producing, processing and consuming maize, households cultivating milpa in the two communities are engaged in multiple relationships – with human beings, other lifeforms and spirit beings. As Milpa is traditionally characterized by polyculture, farmers do not only plant maize in their cornfields. In addition to bean and squash, which are seeded simultaneously with maize, typically, other comestibles such as chilli, tomato and different kinds of tuber are cultivated in the milpa. Working the milpa also implies combatting weeds, either by hand or using herbicide. Cultivating milpa, farmers are frequently forced to engage with invading animals, above all, gophers, badgers, wild boars, birds and locusts that eat maize and place a risk on the harvest (see also Terán and Rasmussen 2009, 106f.). Cultivating milpa in turn enables farming households to keep domestic animals such as pigs and chickens that are fed with grown corn. Producing and consuming corn also means being in constant contact with spiritual beings during the entire agricultural cycle. Farmers give offerings to spirit beings and organize ceremonies for their sake, for example, asking for permission to work the land, making a petition for rain or giving thanks for the harvest (see also, e.g., Terán and Rasmussen 2009). In summary, cultivating and eating maize entails an entanglement with different lifeforms and spirit beings. The life-giving plant connects human beings with multiple other kinds of living selves (Kohn 2007). The central role that maize plays in the multispecies entanglements means that people’s abandonment of milpa agriculture has profound implications for these relationships. Shift in Multispecies Entanglements

There are some substantial changes leading to the fracture of the multispecies entanglements. As young people leave communities for wage labour without having worked on milpa, the knowledge and skills related to agriculture are no longer transmitted to the next generations in many households. The gradual abandonment of farm work implies a shift in the relation of dependency involved in food practice.

Threatened Maize, Threatened Language  129 In the two communities, hand-made tortillas from maize derived from their own cultivation are increasingly replaced by commodified ones made from corn based on large-scale commercial production. Accordingly, the complex entanglements between human beings, maize and other lifeforms gradually give way to people’s dependency on the global political economy to obtain their staple food (cf. Lind and Barham 2004). Not cultivating maize also implies a change in human-animal relationships. As domestic animals such as pigs and chickens in maize-producing households are usually fed with corn, the abandonment of farm work also influences the practice of keeping animals. Without maize production, like human beings, the domestic animals also have to be fed with purchased food. As it implies demand for cash, many households cease to keep animals such as pigs and chickens or diminish the quantity of their domestic animals in case they can no longer produce maize. In sum, due to the central role of maize in the life of both humans and animals, the decline in traditional farm work implies increasing disentanglements of human beings and other lifeforms in the rural communities of Yucatan. The tendency of disentanglement from other lifeforms can also be observed in the case of the continued cultivation of cornfields. While milpa agriculture is traditionally characterized by polyculture, there is a growing trend towards monoculture of maize as farmers dedicate less time to agriculture and increasingly make use of herbicides. Thus, the traditional system of agriculture is becoming reduced in complexity in relation to multispecies entanglements. The fact that farmers engage to a lesser extent with plants other than maize can lead to a gradual erosion of knowledge relating to the management of local agrobiodiversity. Disentanglement from Milpa

Those who turn away from the local polyculture farming explain their behaviour and by difficulties they have faced in living off milpa. As rainfed agriculture, milpa has always been very susceptible to climate variability and other environmental factors which can lead to crop failure. As early as the 1980s, a decline in soil productivity and the reduction in agrarian support provided by the Mexican government posed challenges to rural livelihoods (Baños Ramírez 2001). At the same time, the demand for cash has increased in households, ranging from payments of electricity bills, medical and travel expenses to the purchase of consumption goods and school supplies (see also Schüren 1997; Castellanos 2010). In recent years, farmers also report increasing rainfall anomalies through changing climates which enhance the risk of crop failure. Against this background, many of the farmers are discouraged from continuing to work the milpa as they consider “milpa does not pay off” or “one loses (after having invested a lot of work)”. Apart from the perceived unprofitability and instability of milpa, turning away from local polyculture farming

130  Eriko Yamasaki is closely related to a specific idea of progress. According to the notion still prevalent in postcolonial Yucatan, milpa – among other cultural practices – conceived of as indigenous habitus can be associated with rural backwardness. This point is eloquently addressed by a Maya speaker working in the government department of indigenous education. The research collaborator from Yaxcabá grew up in a household cultivating milpa. He explains the popular oppositional conception of tradition and modernity as follows: (…) “if you are to improve, you have to study, ah, but if you are to study, you have to stop speaking Maya. If you are a graduate, you should not go to the milpa, you should dress differently, it means, don’t practice your traditions and customs anymore because it is for ignorant people”, [this way] right? This belief still exists.2 The fact that the notion of progress is often disassociated from milpa has consequences for child socialization in rural communities. In many households, the ability to work the cornfield is no longer regarded as a skill that children should acquire to become competent members of society. On the contrary, as has been indicated in the statement above, learning to cultivate milpa is often considered incompatible with a higher education that children should strive for. Thus, the younger generation’s disinclination for farm work can even be evaluated positively as the following statement of a 32-year-old mother regarding her 14-year-old son demonstrates. As is common in the region, the research collaborator uses the term “forest” (monte) while referring to milpa. (…) He (my son) does not like the forest and I say to him “Well, how good that you don’t like the forest, in this way you will study and let us see if you become a teacher, or a doctor, or whatever, as you don’t like the forest”, I say to him. And I see that yes, he is applying himself (…).3 Children’s extended schooling often prevents them from learning the skills associated with milpa agriculture. After finishing school, a large majority of youth prefer to commute to cities for work instead of staying in the communities to work the cornfield. A 39-year-old father of three children explains it in this way, that the practice of working milpa is ceasing now. The research collaborator from Yaxcabá speaks Maya and cultivates corn on his own milpa. He occasionally takes his 15-year-old son to the cornfield. (…) those who are finishing school, COBAY4 for example, it is that (uncertainty) that they do not like. They say “ah, milpa does not leave anything [to you], milpa is more work than earning, therefore, I am going to earn my money.” They go [to work outside of the community]. For this reason, well it is difficult to find a boy working milpa nowadays (…) thus, I recognize that milpa is ending this way.5

Threatened Maize, Threatened Language  131 As the statements quoted above indicate, many people – especially those from younger generations – abandon the cultivation of milpa as it does not fit with the modern capitalist logic of prosperity and progress. Logic of Being Entangled with and Through milpa

While an increasing proportion of the population turns away from the local polyculture farming, there is also a continuous effort to maintain the milpa way of living off the land for a livelihood. For those farmers who have been socialized in multispecies relationships inherent to milpa, the cultivation of maize is the very definition of life which goes beyond mere economic considerations of profitability. No matter what happens – even if they experience total yield loss, in any event, they have to cultivate milpa every year “because ‘ti’ kuxa’ano’ob’ (we live from there)” as they explain in Maya. Moreover, while those who turn away from the local polyculture farming argue that livelihoods based on milpa are too uncertain and insecure, those who continue to cultivate corn consider it too precarious to be solely dependent on wage work. Many of those who migrated to cities for wage work at earlier times were likely to continue to work the milpa in a parallel way to have their own maize. In contrast, younger generations tend to start working in cities without having acquired the skills of milpa agriculture and this way do not have a fallback option to balance the urban employment, which is in many cases also low-paid and precarious (see also Gaskins 2003). The risk of relying completely on wage work became manifest for example as many people from the communities lost their jobs in cities due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Those who continue to work the milpa argue that in cultivating maize, at least they have something to eat even in a time of scarcity. In addition, for many of them, having their own maize is an important aspect of life which cannot be substituted for purchased maize, or even to a lesser extent for commodified tortillas. To date, in most maize-cultivating households, the staple food tortillas is made by women’s hands from maize every day. Meanwhile, prepared tortillas can also be purchased in the communities, but for many people, they are not comparable to handmade ones. Those who heavily depend on maize for their livelihoods – both for themselves and their animals report that maize in shops can run out or is not good quality. Against this background, they argue that it is indispensable to continue to work the milpa. A 50-year-old woman, a mother of four adult children makes the point, referring to her husband who cultivates maize on his own milpa. Well, sometimes, my children also say “Dad, why do you continue to work the milpa?” [My husband answers] “Anyway, the milpa, we need it”, he (my husband) says to them, “Sometimes, you have taken money, there is no maize in the shop”, he says, “how are you going to deal with it”, “I don’t think that you can eat this money”, he says [laughs]. Yes,

132  Eriko Yamasaki because it sometimes happens. You have the money, you are walking around to buy (maize) and there is none, what are you going to do with your money? [laughs] You won’t be able to swallow it [laughs].6 As the statement of the woman illustrates, maize from one’s own milpa is the life-giving entity which has irreplaceable meaning and value. Being the staple food for both humans and domestic animals, it makes multispecies coexistence possible in milpa-cultivating households. As milpa is closely connected to life, for many farmers continuing this form of agriculture is not a question of economic profitability, but that of maintaining a way of life grounded on multispecies entanglements. Threats to Biocultural Diversity

In the community of Yaxcabá where about 62 percent of the population older than five years spoke Yucatec Maya in 2010 (INEGI 2010), the language shift is already advanced with many in the population younger than 30 years old no longer having a comprehensive command of Yucatec Maya. Even in Tiholop, where Maya was spoken by over 96 percent of the population older than five years in 2010 (INEGI 2010), it could be observed during my fieldwork that many parents were beginning to socialize their small children in Spanish, which casts doubt on the long-term stability of the language situation. The notion of biocultural diversity highlights the interrelation between biological, cultural and linguistic diversity in terms of both their conservation and erosion (Maffi 2005). The argument here, is that in the two communities of Yucatan, the two phenomena – turning away from milpa and shifting from Yucatec Maya – are interrelated. As has been indicated above, both local agrobiodiversity and the indigenous language are under threat due to the course of intergenerational transformation. The parallels between changes in the domains of agriculture and language are especially notable if an intergenerational comparison is made within the same family. The following chart demonstrates the degree of dedication to milpa agriculture as well as that of bilingualism by male family members of three generations – grandfather, father and son of one family in Yaxcabá. All the family members in the chart have worked the cornfield and are able to speak Maya and Spanish. However, both the degree of dedication to milpa agriculture and the state of bilingualism significantly differ between generations. For the 75-year-old grandfather, milpa agriculture is clearly his mode of production and way of life, although he also has experience in migrating to cities for wage work in case of necessity. His language behaviour also reveals a similar pattern. Even though he is also able to speak Spanish, the main language used for communication in everyday life is without doubt Yucatec Maya. The generation of his grandsons in their 20s demonstrates a quite different pattern regarding their way of life and bilingualism. As their

Threatened Maize, Threatened Language  133 grandfather and father indicate, they have learnt to work the cornfield as they grew up in a household dedicated to agriculture. However, they neither have their own cornfield nor devote time to milpa agriculture as they are fully occupied with wage work in cities, as their father puts it, “they can work the cornfield, but they don’t stay [in the community].” Their language behaviour also follows a similar pattern. As they grew up in a Maya-speaking household, the young generation understands Yucatec Maya. However, neither of them actively speaks it, and can therefore be categorized as passive bilingual. In summary, there are striking parallels between intergenerational transformation in ways of life as well as language use. Similar intergenerational changes could be observed in many families in the two communities. Moreover, the above-mentioned example of intergenerational differences in way of life and language use indicates that the interrelation between the conservation of agrobiodiversity and linguistic diversity goes beyond the indigenous language’s function of encoding, storing and transmitting traditional ecological knowledge. Rather, it should also be seen in the way in which the two languages are in contact and are linked to different experiences and relations that people maintain in order to live in the world. Conclusion This case study on the shifting relationship among Yucatec Maya speakers, maize and other life forms highlights the importance of focusing on multispecies entanglements to understand the interrelations between biological, cultural and linguistic diversity in the contemporary world. This chapter discussed contemporary biocultural diversity conservation, drawing on ethnography regarding whether there has been maintenance of agrobiodiversity and the indigenous language in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. Observations in the two communities in the maize-cultivating zone of Yucatan demonstrate that the two forms of diversity – agrobiodiversity and linguistic diversity – are threatened in a parallel manner. These processes are closely related to people’s abandonment of milpa and, concurrently, disentanglement from complex multispecies relationships established through the cultivation of the sacred plant, maize. As they gradually turn away from the local polyculture farming and engage with wage work, eating the staple food tortillas entails being dependent on the global political economy instead of being related to other lifeforms and spiritual beings through milpa. This transformation in the way of life has consequences for both agrobiodiversity and the vitality of the indigenous language. As local landraces of maize have been maintained through the continued practice of milpa agriculture, its abandonment implies the loss of diversity. A language shift from Yucatec Maya parallels this development as language is a vehicle for conceiving and expressing specific ways to relate to the environment. As the case study with Yucatec Maya speakers demonstrates, different dimensions of diversity – biological, cultural and linguistic among others – are

134  Eriko Yamasaki radically interdependent in terms of both their preservation and erosion. Homogenizing effects of economic globalization pose a threat to these various facets of diversity, which results in reduced flexibility and future options (Eriksen 2021). Accordingly, alternative futures hinge on caring for diversity today. Against this background, contemporary ways of life that resist capitalistic modes of (un)relating with more-than-human entities should deserve more attention. Notes 1 The interviews and conversations with research collaborators were carried out in Spanish, Yucatec Maya or a mix of both in accordance with their language preference and proficiency. The interviews cited in this chapter were conducted in Spanish and translated into English by the author of the chapter. 2 Male 43 years old, interview conducted on June 10, 2014. 3 Female, 32 years old, interview conducted on July 4, 2014. 4 COBAY, Colegio de Bachilleres del Estado de Yucatán is a public institution of upper secondary education in the state of Yucatan, which corresponds to high school. Being the municipal seat, the community of Yaxcabá is equipped with the institution of upper secondary education. 5 Male, 39 years old, interview conducted on January 18, 2020 6 Female, 50 years old, interview conducted on March 7, 2022.

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8 Ecotones in the Emerald Triangle Zones of Multispecies Co-Occupation, Coexistence, and Conflict in the California Redwoods Gordon Ulmer, Dara Adams, Rhiannon Cattaneo and Ricki Mills It was an unusually warm, sunlit morning on a small farm off Highway 101 in Northern California, where our fieldwork takes place. Our research team sat down with a local farmer in Humboldt County to discuss her relationship with neighbouring wildlife and the various ways she and other farmworkers interact with neighbouring species through their labour. In response to a question about overarching problems that threaten local wildlife, the farmer cited industrialized development as a major driver and then differentiated it from smaller-scale agricultural development. She added: I know here—in agricultural lands— there’s that… in between, it’s the veld. It’s the place where the animals come, and humans as well, and those are really beautiful places where there is…exchange. The veld is…that intersection…there’s domestication […]and there’s wildlife […] you know it’s an edge, so edges are more biologically diverse. Veld (Afrikaans “Field”) is a South African term that is akin to a prairie or savanna. It is an open and flat, uncultivated grassland or low scrub. The veld is a place where different ecological communities interact and is reminiscent of the biological concept “ecotone.” Ecotones are “areas of steep transition between ecological communities, ecosystems, or ecological regions along an environmental gradient” (Kent et al. 1997). A diverse range of definitions and terms have been used to spatially describe these ecological transitions: borders, transition zones, tension zones, zones of intermingling, zones of transgression, and so forth. Ecotones can be either gradients or discontinuities, spatially or temporally defined (Danz et al. 2013), and characterized by rapidly changing vegetation (e.g., Salisbury 1927; Odum 1983; Gosz 1993; Walker et al. 2003). However, ecotones are not simply boundaries or ecological edges—they are defined by social and biotic interactions between different communities of species. We think of them as social spaces of interspecific intermingling. In this chapter, we engage with the biological concept of ecotones to understand the complex mosaic of community ecologies involving humans and DOI: 10.4324/9781003439011-9

138  Gordon Ulmer et al. other animal species in the Emerald Triangle of Northern California, which is the largest cannabis-producing area of the United States. Ecotones are where different biological communities, ecosystems, or biotic regions meet. We examine social life in these contact zones to consider how different assemblages of biological species have been reshaped through the expansion of capitalist development of the Redwood Coast. Cannabis has largely driven much of this development, and thus, studying the relations between humans, cannabis, and wildlife in the Emerald Triangle can help us better understand ecotones as lively social spaces where different community ecologies converge and interact and shape human social worlds and environmental history. This approach views humans and other species of life as “co-participants in shaping shared social and ecological worlds” (Malone et al. 2014). A relational approach underscores how ecotones in Northern California can be understood as social spaces of interspecific intermingling. They are spaces where “subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other[s] […] often within radically asymmetrical relations of power,” as Donna Haraway (2007, 216) reminds us in her discussion of what she calls “contact zones.” Anna Tsing similarly argues about interspecies intermingling that “[w]e change through our collaborations both within and across species. The important stuff for life on earth happens in those transformations” (2015, 29). Some of these co-relations involve the affective labor of caretaking other species, something similar to what Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate feminist scholar Kim TallBear (2017) describes as the obligations of human kin with more-than-human other kin (see also Yazzie and Baldy 2018). Indigenous cultural domains are crucial to account for as they define relationality in terms of “the self as part of others and that others are part of the self; this is learnt through reciprocity, obligation, shared experiences, coexistence, cooperation and social memory” (Moreton-Robinson 2001, 16). These perspectives draw our attention to the ways in which ecotones are socially situated in multispecies caretaking relationships. However, as we discuss later in this essay, themes of caretaking are juxtaposed with themes of necropolitics and the culling of species deemed killable, which illustrate the paradoxes of ecotones and human–environmental relationships in the region. We consider ecotones to be a generative concept that creates new questions about relationality and co-occupation, coexistence, and conflict between humans and more-than-human neighbours in Northern California. We take the landscape as a starting point to understand what Anna Tsing and colleagues (2019) describe as the “structural synchronicities between ecology, capital, and the human and more-than-human histories through which uneven landscapes are made and remade.” As our research elucidates, the introduction of cannabis monocrops in the redwoods has created new species assemblages and thus new social spaces along ecological edges. Focusing on these “contact” zones of interspecific interactions, we take a multispecies ethnographic approach to address three central questions. First, what do these landscapes of tensions and interactions tell us about different

Ecotones in the Emerald Triangle  139 multispecies assemblages around cannabis farms? Second, under what conditions can these relationships be categorized based on co-occupation, coexistence, or conflict? Finally, how can conviviality define more multispecies assemblages involving diverse human communities in the Emerald Triangle? This chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Northern California that has been ongoing since September 2020 and includes semi-structured interviews with a variety of social actors including scientists, parks employees, tribal officials, firefighters, California Wildlife and Fisheries employees, National Park Service rangers and scientists, food producers, cannabis farmers, rural residents, among others whose professions, and/or personal lives relate to our focus of ecotones. Our research team includes four trained anthropologists (two professors from Cal Poly Humboldt and two alumni/local collaborators with tacit knowledge/experience in cannabis production). We have been engaged as participant observers in a range of activities that include working at farms, attending meetings and ceremonies hosted by members of local Native communities, spending time with residents at their homes and sites of work, volunteering at farm stands, hiking through landscapes, among other activities that deepened our understanding of ecotones in the redwoods. The Emerald Triangle The Emerald Triangle refers to a tri-county region of Northern California (Humboldt, Mendocino, Trinity counties) that comprises the largest cannabis-­producing area in the United States. An estimated 20 percent of people in this region were involved in the cannabis industry at the time of writing this essay. There are approximately 15,000 documented grow operations in Humboldt County, of which 4,428 were visible outdoor operations on private land such as greenhouses and crops (Franklin et al. 2018). We are writing from Cal Poly Humboldt, which is situated about ~250 miles north of San Francisco and ~90 miles south of the Oregon border. The region is considered part of the Klamath and North Coast bioregion, which is distinguished by its rocky coastline, forested montane areas, and low human population density. Humboldt is best known for its impressive coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens), which are the tallest and oldest trees globally. The region is sparsely developed and contains over 600,000 square acres of parks, reserves, and other protected areas that support the highest rates of wildlife biodiversity across California. It is not uncommon to see or interact with foxes, deer, elk, waterfowl, marine mammals, salmon, mountain lions, bears, and other fish and wildlife. Humboldt County contains numerous ecotones: where the redwoods meet the sea, edges where riparian habitats meet with upland habitats, estuary-stream ecotones, and especially important to our research question, wildland–urban interfaces (WUIs)—zones of transition between “wildlands” and human development where human–wildlife interactions are more frequent (Radeloff et al. 2005).

140  Gordon Ulmer et al. These WUIs of the coastal redwoods are particularly distinct. A wildlife biologist whom we interviewed described how ecotones in this region are shaped by divergent land uses: There are hard lines. In America we believe in the property line, it’s part of our culture — ‘this is yours; this is mine.’ So, we’ve carved up the landscape with these systems. It creates really hard ecotones. Literally on one side of the line are trees that are 2,000 years old, on the other side is a cow! We saved these trees to see what Earth looked like thousands of years ago, and on this side, well, this is for a hamburger. Our project critically examines these tensions and others that emerge in anthropogenic ecotones. Cannabis Production and the Patchy Landscape Northern California has long been a hotbed of alternative communities, from Finnish Communists in Fort Bragg to the evangelical Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry in Redding. Cannabis farming for many cultivators in rural Northern California is not only a way of living but also a way of life. Cultivation in the region coincided with the “Back to the Land” movement that began in the late sixties. The Back-to-the-landers are part of a broader story of urbanization, social disequilibrium, economic crises, labour struggles, racial violence, and other upheavals of the 1960s (Brown 2011). “Lifestyle immigrants” who sought self-sufficiency in Northern California created a loose fabric of small communities across the region, many of whose income depended on clandestine cannabis cultivation operations (i.e., “guerrilla grows”) on federal and tribal lands. The rise of cannabis in the region coincided with a decline in the once-prominent timber industry. As a result of the industry’s decline in the Pacific Northwest, devalued land was broken up and inexpensively sold (Bauss 2020). By the 1980s, small-scale farms were largely replaced by large-scale grow sites and California became the nation’s leading cannabis producer with the Emerald Triangle at the epicenter (Franklin et al. 2018). CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Planting) is a multi-agency task force consisting of local, state, and federal law enforcement that was established in 1983 to eradicate cannabis operations. The campaign drove cultivators in Northern California deeper into the forest to harvest illicit crops, which further changed the landscape and altered community ecologies across the region. Law enforcement raiding cannabis crops is not the only way farmers lose a crop to a surprise visitor. Our research team learned this one day during a conversation in a parking lot with an illicit farmer who mused, “Pigs raided my place…[it’s] so funny, I mean wildlife!” The farmer laughed at their own pun. Historically, cannabis farmers and others critically refer to law enforcement officers as “pigs.” When “pigs raid” a property it usually means they are followed by CAMP helicopters arriving to burn down the plantation. But this farmer was referring to wild boars that visited overnight and razed their

Ecotones in the Emerald Triangle  141 entire crop of two 60-foot hoop houses packed full of mostly ripened cannabis flowers. The farmer said, “They came in and ate fully budded plants, ate them all, my full fall crop gone!” Wild boars (Sus scrofa) in contemporary Northern California are descendants of domestic pigs introduced by Russian settlers in the mid-1700s, though domesticated free-range swine were common since the Spanish arrived in the 16th century. They were released to forage in oak woodland areas to take advantage of acorns, which in turn provisioned extractivists who hunted them during the gold rush in the mid19th century. They eventually were interbred with introduced European boar in the 1920s and gave rise to the hog herds common today that raze cannabis crops (Frederick 1998; Waithman et al. 1999). Another farmer who was present during the conversation about the feral hogs contributed to the discussion, “They are hungry this year!” The other farmer also recommended putting out alfalfa as a deterrent. Alfalfa, which is a perennial, becomes a stable part of the landscape for wildlife throughout the year. Many species prefer this anthropogenic landscape, thus transforming the edges of cannabis crops into lively ecotones of multispecies encounters. Alfalfa is an insectary plant that hosts a diversity of insects, some of which help manage cannabis crop pests like mites. Alfalfa also deters grazing animals, including deer, elk, antelope, and boars, away from cannabis. Numerous smaller-bodied animals also forage in alfalfa, which subsequently attracts hawks, eagles, coyotes, mountain lions, foxes, and other predatory species to hunt opportunistically in the crops. Through the creation of other ecological spaces of intermingling, alfalfa provides an alternative to more deleterious approaches to pest mitigation, which we further describe shortly. Cannabis cultivation in Northern California often results in forest fragmentation and patchy landscapes. Permitted and unpermitted farmers alike seek rural and remote areas to conduct growing operations. These areas are often near or within highly sensitive ecosystems that are home to vulnerable species (Wengert et al. 2021). Operations rely on road construction, deforestation for crop space, and habitat disruption from the clustering of grow sites (Butsic and Brenner 2016). The decreasing amounts of connected forest habitat space in Humboldt County means more exposed edges and reduced forested areas (Wang et al. 2017). Increased crop space creates forest fragmentation, which thereby creates more ecotonal contact zones between agricultural space and habitats, resembling what Tsing et al. (2019, S186) describe as “uneven conditions of morethan-human liveability in landscapes increasingly dominated by industrial forms.” These types of patchy landscapes are ubiquitous wherever there are monocrop plantations such as sugar, cacao, coffee, or cannabis, and they can have devastating consequences for ecosystems. Cannabis grow operations have numerous environmental impacts, especially plantations that rely on illegal damming or diversion and extraction of water from streams. Mature cannabis crops take an abundance of water to produce with each plant consuming an average of six gallons per day (Zheng et al. 2021). A recent study

142  Gordon Ulmer et al. found that among sampled Humboldt County cannabis grow sites, 25 percent were within 500 meters of Chinook salmon habitat (Butsic and Brenner 2016). Cannabis farms also pollute water sources with pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and nutrient run-off that contains concentrated levels of macronutrients (e.g., nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium), which alter soil health and become metabolized into the food web through bioaccumulation (Zheng et al. 2021). Cannabis, as we describe in the following section, also emerged as an important local environmental issue in informal conversations and semi-structured interviews with Northern California residents. Disposable Animals: Rodenticides, Chemosociality, and Killability A hunter we spoke with sent off the liver of a recently hunted deer to his friend working with the Bureau of Land Management for testing. “They found Warfarin!” he proclaimed. Lab results showed high levels of the anticoagulant drug Warfarin, which is used in rodenticides at illicit cannabis grows. Anticoagulant rodenticide poisoning constitutes a critical threat across trophic levels in the region and it is used widely in grow operations. The industry around anticoagulant rodenticides—rat poisoning—and its profound ecological impacts can be examined through the lens of chemosociality, or how chemicals mediate multispecies social worlds. Kirksey (2020, 25) describes that: As ethnographers start to follow chemicals through complex landscapes—­ shaped by industrial production, modern war, urban planning, and real estate speculation—it is important to not just treat the environment as a backdrop to human agency, industry, and action. It is critical to consider emergent chemosocial assemblages in multispecies worlds. Necropsy reports of various species around grows have found evidence of food web contamination and secondary anticoagulant rodenticide poisoning (e.g., Franklin et al. 2018), including in the Northern Spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina), a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act that has garnered much attention and conservation support as a charismatic species. Northern spotted owls tend to forage near edges of openings in forested landscapes—ecotones—that have been shaped over millennia by various earth system processes including wildfire. As mentioned earlier, cannabis grow operations have been shown to have an increased edge with forest areas and contribute to patchy complexes. These patchy complexes are rich in biodiversity and are where predators such as the northern spotted owls thrive. However, these ecotones are increasingly becoming point sources of food web contamination. In the case of the spotted owl, rodenticides are introduced through its prey, the dusky-footed woodrats. These rodents are attracted to cannabis plants for food and for the plants’ larvicidal properties, which are beneficial for nest material that can better protect the woodrat’s offspring (Wengert et al. 2021).

Ecotones in the Emerald Triangle  143 As we followed anticoagulant rodenticides across the landscape in the Emerald Triangle, we learned about its widespread effects. The industrialization of anticoagulant rodenticide was evident through our discussions with cannabis farmers in Mendocino and Humboldt Counties. One of our interlocutors in “Mendo” commented that the local garden supply store in a nearby town: …supplies one-hundred and seventy-seven grow stores in NorCal— pretty much everything you buy in Northern California for cannabis is through them as a supplier. They are the largest seller by volume of rat poison of any outlet in the USA… Rat poison is the number one biggest downside to cannabis growing on any scale! A different farmer we spoke with noted that: When you are a hunter and you actually shoot a bear, you have to send their tooth in to get tested to see if they have any diseases cause you cannot eat a diseased bear… so if you’re hunting a bear you’re not gonna hunt a bear to eat a bear in a neighbourhood because they’re getting into all sorts of things. Indeed, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife found that 83 percent of black bears sampled across eight counties in California tested positive for anticoagulant rodenticides (McMillin et al. 2018). The cannabis farmer added, “Well those large industrial farms they’re gonna use poison and traps they aren’t even gonna fucking think about coexisting, that’s just a given.” This discussion about the ubiquity and industrialization of anticoagulant rodenticide resonates with Alex Nading’s warning about chemosociality in which: …the most engaged anthropologists among us risk erasing the ethical and political insights that might be gained from interlocutors, collaborators, and friends—be they scientists, activists, or even corporate functionaries—who recognize that toxic worlding has few if any fully innocent participants. (Nading 2020, 219) One of the co-authors of this chapter resides in a cannabis growing community in the Emerald Triangle and encounters ongoing wildlife fatalities near their home. An autoethnographic field note they wrote emphasizes the conflictual relationship cannabis cultivators have with their more-than-human neighbours who jeopardize their cash crops. “Animals keep showing up dying at my doorstep,” began the field note. The latest animal was a fox that exhibited strange behaviours consistent with exposure to rodenticide, including lethargy, ataxia, and immobility. It is likely that the fox had consumed

144  Gordon Ulmer et al. a rat that had directly ingested poison considering many of the ~15-hectare parcels of land in the area are used for cannabis cultivation and rodenticide use is widespread. Another autoethnographic field note further reflects on the death and disposability of wildlife around nearby cannabis grows: “People on this hill will take extreme measures to protect their crops whether it’s with poison or rifles. Wildlife are treated as trespassers.” These sentiments are echoed by other residents our team interviewed. For example, in a separate interview, a retired biology teacher commented to us, “There is this mentality to shoot anything that you don’t like. I know my neighbour shot a possum on the back porch. It is distressing.” This “mentality” is apparently not limited to land-based fauna that threaten economic interests, as another resident informed us that, “Commercial fishermen are notorious for shooting sea lions here! Anything that eats their fish— they shoot.” Shooting wildlife in nonhunting scenarios is common in the region. During an interview, a cannabis cultivator in Mendocino County who provisions wildlife described an ongoing conflict he has with neighbours over the differing ways they approach their more-than-human neighbours: I got these redneck motherfuckers who are all like ‘oh man I saw a 14-point buck layin’ on your yard, man, it’s gonna be dinner this fuckin fall! I’m like, “No it’s not! I’ve been feeding that motherfucker for years, dude. You don’t get to kill it. It looks way better walking through my yard a few times a year than it would be sitting on your wall. […] Everybody is like live and let live on the hill […] nobody I’m aware of is actually an active hunter on our mountain […] Everyone’s developed their own protocols to keep the wildlife at bay. You know, good fences make for good neighbours that includes with the animals. I don’t have fences, I’m too lazy! [laughs], so I deal with them in another way. I just feed them. The culling of biotic life that threatens cash crops such as cannabis exemplifies the multispecies necropolitics of plantations. Necropolitics can be used as a framework for understanding power dynamics in decisions around the right to life and exposure to death (Mbembé 2003). Which animals are culled or permitted to live around the plantation is a question of “killability,” or the contextual hierarchy in which different animals are perceived and therefore deemed killable or worthy of living (Ogden et al. 2013). Mazhary (2021, 5) points out that “what determines the boundary making of who is and who is not killable is often aligned with the human/nonhuman boundary and is upheld by human exceptionalism.” Species that cannabis farmers deem “excess” or “pesty” are considered killable and culled through the process of “ecological simplification” (Tsing et al. 2019), or the reduction of biodiversity for monocrop cultivation. As we have described in this chapter, wildlife such as deer, rodents, and feral hogs pose an economic threat to cannabis farmers, which brings into

Ecotones in the Emerald Triangle  145 relief how multispecies relationships come into “friction” when capital is at stake (Tsing 2004). As one of our participants from a Karuk community commented, species like “wolves are a threat to capitalism … and other settler agriculture.” The systematic use of anticoagulant rodenticides in cannabis plantations and the toxic reverberations of these chemicals across trophic levels has been described as the “slow violence of pollution” (Davies 2018). As illicit cannabis agricultural operations have been shown to increase pollution and toxicity, both common symptoms linked to other extractivist industries, it continues the slow violence of settler colonialism. The necropolitics of wildlife management policies remains a salient public concern in Northern California, largely because of the prevalent wildland– urban ecotones that characterize much of the region. In May 2020, growing public awareness and political pressure led Humboldt County to approve a new contract with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services program to prioritize non-lethal mitigation measures to wildlife conflicts. Humboldt County’s decision to join Mendocino, Monterey, Shasta, Siskiyou, and Sonoma counties in reforming wildlife management programs illuminates the growing importance and political pressure around human–environmental relations in Northern California (Center for Biological Diversity 2020). Our team learned through interviews and participant observation in cannabis grows that cultivators are often reluctant to call animal control services for issues involving bears, mountain lions, or venomous snakes due to the illegal status of their grows or the grey area of an unpermitted cannabis farm that could attract the attention of state actors. As our team witnessed on multiple occasions, residents frequently take matters into their own hands. One project intern who lives in a Yurok community was taking a walk when they encountered a skinned and decapitated bear carcass thrown into a pile of trash where car parts were illegally dumped by non-Yurok people (i.e., settlers). The devaluation and disposability of the bear on Indigenous land is part of a broader violence of mutual devalorization of the environment and Indigenous sovereignty, as we further explain below. Indigenous Sovereignty and Models of Multispecies Relationality In 2019, the Yurok Tribe declared rights of personhood to the Klamath River, making it the first river in North America to be granted legal rights (Yurok Tribel Council 2019). This movement was precipitated by the rapid depletion of Chinook salmon ultimately due to hydroelectric river dams that are preventing the fish from accessing hundreds of miles of spawning and rearing habitats. A wildlife biologist for the neighbouring Karuk Tribe whom we interviewed described the Klamath River to our research team as: a very rich river but it has been dammed for the past hundred plus years and the salmon only have access to about half of the watershed area. A big part of what I’ve been doing with the Karuk tribe is working with

146  Gordon Ulmer et al. salmon restoration and dam removal. We are going to see the largest dam removal in the world in the next couple of years. The announcement of the dam removal followed the Yurok tribe’s resolution, so this new legal approach has not been formally tested in court to our knowledge. The legal personhood of the Klamath River provides a different framework from traditional western legal conceptions of nature—it constitutes a new way to potentially address problems like water pollution, droughts, and climate change. It also suggests a rethinking of ecotones in ways that do not presuppose an anthropocentric explanation or dichotomized understanding of human–wildlife relationality. Fishing and spirituality are deeply intertwined in Yurok culture. Chinook salmon are understood as kin, not objectified and seen as natural resources. Yurok biologist and TEK scholar Seafha Ramos describes the Yurok concept of hlkelonah’ue-megetohl (to take care of the Earth) as “a system where Yurok people and wildlife collaboratively strive to create and maintain balance of the Earth via physical and spiritual management in tandem” (Ramos 2019, 86). Fellow Cal Poly Humboldt colleague and Yurok scholar Kaitlin Reed (2021, 56) describes this caretaking relationship in the context of salmon and the threat of illicit cannabis cultivation: As Salmon People, Yurok are obligated to protect Salmon relatives and depend upon Salmon for subsistence and cultural practices. By contaminating and diverting water for cannabis agriculture in an already overtaxed Klamath River Basin, cannabis cultivation presents a worrisome threat to the health and vitality of salmon populations for Yurok and future generations. There were previously 150 active grow sites that diverted municipal and private water sources and contaminated them with pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides as well as fertilizer and human waste. Cannabis cultivation also denigrated water sources used for salmon, which threatens food sovereignty and the ability to sustain a nutritious diet in this isolated region. Illicit armed grows on Yurok land by non-Yurok people also demonstrates how “cultivation brings with it the threat of violence and physical intimidation, which in a sense, holds Yurok People hostage within the boundaries of their own reservation” (Middleton et al. 2019). Reed (2021, 53) points out that “[c]annabis has long been both aid and witness to the colonization of what would become the United States.” This is particularly true for the Native Nations of Northern California’s cannabis country, especially the Yurok. To paraphrase anthropologist and Métis scholar Zoe Todd (2016), fish have survived on this Earth for an estimated 510 million years and yet are struggling to survive a few hundred years of settler-colonialism. The Yurok tribe, Klamath River, and Chinook salmon are intertwined in a relationality that exemplify how there are multiple, divergent human and

Ecotones in the Emerald Triangle  147 more-than-human relationships in the Emerald Triangle. This relationality challenges us to think in different ways how borders, transition zones, zones of intermingling, and zones of transgression between humans and other life are defined, regulated, and maintained. Our initial research findings brought to light how a “human-animal” framework implies an undifferentiated grouping of humans with a monolithic relationship to the environment. Such flattening of the social landscape where this research takes place ignores the sovereignties, cultures, and identities of the Indigenous nations of this area, including the Hupa, Karuk, Mattole, Tolowa, Wiyot, Yurok, and others who have intimate and profound relationships with local flora and fauna since time immemorial (Baldy 2015). The restoration of multispecies relationalities is about Indigenous sovereignty and the #LandBack movement is fundamental to this process. Our team was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the ceremony of the return of Tuluwat Island to the Wiyot Tribe, which was the first time in the settler history of the United States that a municipal government voluntarily returned stolen native land to a tribal government. The ceremony, which occurred at the Adorni Center in Eureka, California on October 21, 2019, was a powerful recognition of Indigenous survivance and an exemplar of what materially substantiated decolonization looks like (Tuck and Yang 2012), where land, water, plant, and animal relations are restored with their Indigenous human caretakers. These multispecies relationships were fundamentally disrupted in 1860 when Tuluwat Island became the site of a genocidal massacre where settlers killed most of the Wiyot tribe while they were holding the World Renewal Ceremony. The massacre ushered in extractivism and settler colonial society, which built over Indigenous societies through ongoing genocide, renamed plants, animals, lands, mountains, and waterways, and violently replacing Indigenous environmental relationalities with capitalist objectification and commodification. Native American Studies scholar Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy gave a speech during the Tuluwat Ceremony and concluded with a point about Indigenous futurity: “We can envision a future, a radical future… a future with no dams, a future with salmon that are healthy. A future with our children that are singing. A future where we are dancing all the time.” The Tuluwat ceremony was more than a commemoration; it was also a radical imagining of alternative futures where human and more-thanhuman relationalities are in balance. We Are Neighbours We take a multispecies approach to suggest that organisms are “situated within deep, entangled histories” (Van Dooren et al. 2016). The entangled social histories of feral hogs, anticoagulant rodenticides, cannabis farmers, California Native nations, and other life beings have shaped the ecotones of the redwoods in Northern California. In this chapter, our interest has focused on contact zones around cannabis operations where particular

148  Gordon Ulmer et al. ecologies, capitalist conditions, and relations between diverse humans and more-than-humans define much of the landscape. Border contestation of wildland–urban ecotones are ongoing discussions across rural communities in Northern California. Humans and wildlife are often presumed to occupy separate rather than overlapping domains. Many comments during our interviews with cannabis farmers, residents, and other participants point to either human encroaching on wildlife land or wildlife encroaching on human domains. As one resident commented, “We live around the forest— that is their home. For every time you see a mountain lion, it’s already seen you a thousand times. Get over it or don’t live on the edge of the forest.” In other words, do not live in an ecotone unless you can accept your morethan-human neighbours. Acampora (2004) suggests the category of neighbour for thinking of the more-than-human lifeforms surrounding us, arguing that it is our proximal residence, not human sapience, that qualifies a neighbour. Diane Michelfelder (2003, 86) contends that we need to seek ways of how we may best co-inhabit urban areas with wildlife … in what we might conceivably wish to identify as a multispecies society… and thereby enrich and enhance a sense of belonging to the urban environment. This alternative multispecies society could be shaped by the integration of diverse needs of local and migratory organisms across taxa and may synthesize elements of urban reforestation, landscape connectivity, rewildering to restore natural ecosystem processes, wildlife crossings and ecoducts, and other non-anthropocentric infrastructures designed for a more sustainable future that foregrounds bio-cultural diversity. The study of human–animal relations inevitably entails human-to-human relationships. Conflict between humans and animals is often rooted in conflict between people who have differing goals, attitudes, values, political and economic capital, and relations to their environments. Conflict with wildlife is often rooted in struggles over power and access to resources. Viewing ­human–wildlife interactions through the lens of conflict is anthropocentric— focusing on how wildlife damage crops, injure or kill domestic animals, or put humans in peril. Conflict does not account for the complex ways that humans and other animals exist in increasingly converging community ecologies in a changing climate. One cannabis farmer described their relationship to the plant as one of interdependence and coevolution: It [cannabis] has a plan and we’re a big part of that plan! [laughs] I mean, we’ve been coexisting with that plant for millennia, and we have an endocannabinoid system that is perfectly designed with receptors that match what the cannabis has to offer in such a glorious way. It’s somehow connected to humanity in a way that will ensure its propagation and evolution probably as long as humans can cultivate. […]

Ecotones in the Emerald Triangle  149 there’s no other plant on Earth, except maybe roses, that gets that much attention from humanity. Ecotones are more than ecological transition zones. By approaching these “zones of intermingling” in the Emerald triangle as spaces of multispecies sociality, and by considering human political economy and its anthropogenic ecological impacts, we can simultaneously attend to the histories that have shaped human-more-than-human dynamics in these spaces from the gold rush to the “green rush” (Reed 2021), and also imagine new radical multispecies futures. The environmental personhood of the Klamath River and the sacred kinship tribal nations of this region have with Chinook salmon further break down nature–culture, urban–wilderness, human–animals, and other dichotomies. Ecotones are generative spaces that create new questions about conflict, co-occupation, coexistence, and even about kinship and caretaking. References Acampora, Ralph. 2004. “Oikos and Domus: On Constructive Co-Habitation with Other Creatures.” Philosophy & Geography 7 (2): 219–35. https://doi.org/10.108 0/1090377042000285426. Baldy, Cutcha Risling. 2015. “Coyote Is Not a Metaphor: On Decolonizing, (Re) Claiming and (Re) Naming “Coyote”.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 4 (1): 1–20. Bauss, Cristina. 2020. “Mapping Marijuana Cultivation Sites and Water Storage in the Redwood Creek Watershed, Southern Humboldt County.” Humboldt Geographic 1 (1): 19. Brown, Dona. 2011. Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-sufficiency in Modern America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Butsic, Van and Jacob C. Brenner. 2016. “Cannabis (Cannabis sativa or C. indica) Agriculture and the Environment: A Systematic, Spatially-Explicit Survey and Potential Impacts.” Environmental Research Letters 11 (4): 044023. https://doi. org/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/044023. Center for Biological Diversity. 2020. “Humboldt County Agrees to Prioritize Nonlethal Solutions to Wildlife Conflict [Press release].” https://biologicaldiversity. org/w/news/press-releases/humboldt-county-agrees-prioritize-nonlethal-solutionswildlife-conflict-2020-05-05/. Danz, Nicholas P., Lee E. Frelich, Peter B. Reich, and Gerald J. Niemi, 2013. “Do Vegetation Boundaries Display Smooth or Abrupt Spatial Transitions along Environmental Gradients? Evidence from the Prairie–Forest Biome Boundary of Historic Minnesota, USA.” Journal of Vegetation Science 24 (6): 1129–40. https://doi. org/10.1111/jvs.12028. Davies, Thom. 2018. “Toxic Space and Time: Slow Violence, Necropolitics, and Petrochemical Pollution.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 108 (6): 1537–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2018.1470924. Franklin, Alan B., Peter C. Carlson, Angela Rex, Jeremy T. Rockweit, David Garza, Emily Culhane, Steven F. Volker, Robert J. Dusek, Valerie I. Shearn-Bochsler, … Katherine E. Horak. 2018. “Grass is Not Always Greener: Rodenticide Exposure

150  Gordon Ulmer et al. of a Threatened Species Near Marijuana Growing Operations.” BMC Research Notes 11 (1): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13104-018-3206-z. Frederick, John M. 1998. “Overview of Wild Pig Damage in California.” Proceedings of the Eighteenth Vertebrate Pest Conference, 82–86. Gosz, James R. 1993. “Ecotone Hierarchies.” Ecological Applications 3 (3): 369–76. https://doi.org/10.2307/1941905. Haraway, Donna J. 2007. When Species Meet (Vol. 1). Madison: University of Minnesota Press. Kent, Martin, Wendy J. Gill, Ruth E. Weaver, and Richard P. Armitage 1997. “Landscape and Plant Community Boundaries in Biogeography. Progress in Physical Geography 21 (3), 315–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/030913339702100. Kirksey, Eben. 2020. “Chemosociality in Multispecies Worlds: Endangered Frogs and Toxic Possibilities in Sydney.” Environmental Humanities 12 (1): 23–50. https:// doi.org/10.1215/22011919-8142198. Malone, Nicolas, Alison H. Wade, Augustín Fuentes, Erin P. Riley, Melissa Remis, and Carolyn J. Robinson 2014. “Ethnoprimatology: Critical Interdisciplinarity and Multispecies Approaches in Anthropology.” Critique of Anthropology 34 (1): 8–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X13510188. Mazhary, Hibba. 2021. “Distancing Animal Death: Geographies of Killing and Making Killable.” Geography Compass 15 (7): e12582. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3. 12582. Mbembé, J. Achilles. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. https:// doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11. McMillin, Stella C., Robert H. Poppenga, Shannon C. Chandler, and Deanna L. Clifford. 2018. “Anticoagulant Rodenticide Residues in Game Animals in California.” Proceedings of the Vertebrate Pest Conference 28: 243–46. Michelfelder, Dianne P. 2003. “Valuing Wildlife Populations in Urban Environments.” Journal of Social Philosophy 34 (1): 79–90. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9833 .00166. Middleton, Beth R., Sabine Talaugon, Thomas M. Young, Luann Wong, Suzanne Fluharty, Kaitlin Reed, Christine Cosby, and Richard Myers. 2019. “Bi-Directional Learning: Identifying Contaminants on the Yurok Indian Reservation.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16 (19): 3513. https:// doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16193513. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen (2001) A Possessive Investment in Patriarchal Whiteness: Nullifying Native Title. In Bacchi, C & Nursey-Bray, P (Eds.) Left Directions: Is there a Third Way? University of Western Australia, Western Australia, Crawley, pp. 162–177. Nading, Alex M. 2020. “Living in a Toxic World.” Annual Review of Anthropology 49: 209–24. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-010220-074557. Odum, Howard T. 1983. Systems Ecology; An Introduction. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Ogden, Laura, Nik Heynen, Ulrich Oslender, Paige West, Karim-Aly Kassam, and Paul Robbins. 2013. “Global Assemblages, Resilience, and Earth Stewardship in the Anthropocene.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 11 (7): 341–47. https://doi.org/10.1890/120327.

Ecotones in the Emerald Triangle  151 Radeloff, Volker C., Roger B. Hammer, Susan I. Stewart, J. S. Fried, S. S. Holcomb, and J. F. McKeefry. 2005. “The Wildland-Urban Interface in the United States.” Ecological Applications 15 (3): 799–805. Ramos, Seafha C. 2019. “Sustaining Hlkelonah ue Meygeytohl in an Ever-Changing World.” In K’am-t’em: A Journey toward Healing, edited by Kisha Lara-Cooper and Walter J. Lara Sr, 85–93. Temecula: Great Oak Press. Reed, Kaitlin. 2021. “Cannabis, Settler Colonialism, and Tribal Sovereignty in California.” In The Routledge Handbook of Post-Prohibition Cannabis Research, edited by Dominic Corva and Joshua Meisel, 53–62. Milton Park, Routledge. Salisbury, E. J. 1927. “Aims and Methods in the Study of Vegetation.” Nature 120: 359–60. https://doi.org/10.1038/120359a0. TallBear, Kim. 2017. “Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking, and the New Materialisms.” In Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, edited by Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal, 179–202. Cambridge: MIT Press. Todd, Zoe. 2016. “Fish Pluralities, Refraction and Decolonization in Amiskwaciwâskahikan.” Lecture Presented at Daniels Public Lecture in University of Toronto. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO-WvCQ3PJU. Tsing, Anna L. 2004. Friction: A Global Ethnography of Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tsing, Anna L. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tsing, Anna L., A. S. Mathews, and N. Bubandt. 2019. “Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology: An Introduction to Supplement 20.” Current Anthropology 60 (S20): S186–S197. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1086/703391. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1): 1–40. Van Dooren, Thom, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster. 2016. “Multispecies Studies Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness.” Environmental Humanities 8 (1): 1–23. https:// doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3527695. Waithman, John D., Richard A. Sweitzer, Drew Van Vuren Dirk, Brinkhaus John D., Gardner Amy J., A. Ian, and Walter M. Boyce. 1999. “Range Expansion, Population Sizes, and Management of Wild Pigs in California.” The Journal of Wildlife Management 63 (1): 298–308. https://doi.org/10.2307/3802513. Walker, Susan, J. Bastow Wilson, John B. Steel, G. L. Rapson, Benjamin Smith, Warren M. King, and Yvette H. Cottam. 2003. “Properties of Ecotones: Evidence from Five Ecotones Objectively Determined from a Coastal Vegetation Gradient.” Journal of Vegetation Science 14 (4): 579–90. Wang, Ian J., Jacob C. Brenner, and Van Butsic. 2017. “Cannabis, an Emerging Agricultural Crop, Leads to Deforestation and Fragmentation.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 15 (9): 495–501. https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.1634. Wengert, Greta M., J. Higley, Gabriel Mark, Rustigian-Romsos Mourad W., Spencer Heather, Clifford Wayne D., Deanna L. Deanna, and Craig Thompson. 2021. “Distribution of Trespass Cannabis Cultivation and Its Risk to Sensitive Forest

152  Gordon Ulmer et al. Predators in California and Southern Oregon.” Plos One 16 (9): e0256273. https:// doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0256273. Yazzie, Melanie K., and Cutcha Risling Baldy. 2018. “Introduction: Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Water.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 7 (1): 1–18. Yurok Tribal Council. 2019. Resolution Establishing the Rights of the Klamath River. Resolution of the Yurok Tribal Council no. 19–40. http://files.harmonywithnatureun.org/uploads/upload833.pdf. Zheng, Zhonghua, Kelsey Fiddes, and Liangcheng Yang. 2021. “A Narrative Review on Environmental Impacts of Cannabis Cultivation.” Journal of Cannabis Research 3 (1): 1–10.

9 “Cheese” and “Cheez”? On the Relation between PlantBased and Dairy-Based Cheeses Sarah Czerny

What makes a cheese “cheese”? According to European Union legislation, cheese is made from milk which is defined as a “normal mammary secretion obtained from one or more milkings without either addition thereto or extraction therefrom” (Paxson 2008, 2013). As a result, in legislative terms, anything that does not come from a “normal mammary secretion” cannot be called cheese. A judgement by the Court of Justice of the European Union states that “purely plant-based products cannot, in principle, be marketed with designations such as ‘milk’, ‘cream’, ‘butter’, ‘cheese’ or ‘yoghurt’, which are reserved by EU law for animal products.” Due to this, plant-based milks and plant-based cheeses cannot legally be sold as milk or cheese since they have not come from “mammary secretions.” Nevertheless, as scholarly writing on milk has shown, “milk” is not a stable singular substance. Scholars who have written about the materiality of milk (Atkins, 2010), questions of modernity (Nimmo, 2010), human/animal relations (Simun, 2014; Cohen, 2017), food hygiene (Mincyte, 2014), law (Eisen, 2019) and gender relations (Gaard, 2013) have all explored how it is shaped in different ways in different social contexts. Thus, whilst plant milks are excluded as milk in the European legislative sphere, we cannot instantly dismiss them as not being milk based solely on these legislative determinations. Furthermore, we should not do so since they raise interesting questions about what makes a milk “milk.” As Tobias Linné and Ally McCrow-Young (2017) have argued, at “an ontological level, the development of plant milk raises many questions” (Linné and McCrow-Young, 2017, 211), where one of the issues is that “it signals the emergence of a post-dairy generation in the sense that milk is no longer defined as the substance secreted by mammary glands” (Linné and McCrow-Young, 2017, 211). Subsequently, when we put these legislative interests to one side, we can ask the question of whether a product made from plant milks can be considered to be the same as a product made from the mammary glands of some animals? Or are these products, the “cheeses,” too different, where they cannot be considered to be the same things at all? Considering these questions is important because when thinking about how we might develop alternative, more sustainable futures, we need to think about how we can incorporate local, small-scale methods of production into DOI: 10.4324/9781003439011-10

154  Sarah Czerny global foodways. To do this, I propose that we need to think carefully about how we might refashion our own conceptual apparatus about food. In this chapter, I want to explore this through an exploration of how three different cheeses are produced in Croatia. Two of these cheeses, Pag cheese and Grobnik cheese, are made from ewe’s milk, whereas the third cheese, a cashew cheese, is a cheese made from plant milk. I propose that when looking at these cheeses, it would initially appear that the negotiation of what makes a cheese a “cheese” turns on the ways that humans negotiate the relation between the material, i.e., the actual ingredients that make the cheeses, and the social, i.e., how these ingredients are produced and brought together by human cheese-makers in order to form the cheeses into a distinctive product. But the point I want to make in this chapter is that these interests in sociality are very much interests in human sociality, where the sociality of other beings who are involved in cheese-making is very often not considered. As I argue at the end of this chapter, this is a loss, because as some authors (Paxson, 2012) have pointed out, animal sociality particularly microbial sociality is a critical part of cheese-making and should be considered in its own right. Furthermore, when thinking about the work of microbes in this way, a novel avenue opens up through which to consider the relation between plant-based and dairy-based cheese-making that goes beyond these limiting legislative definitions. Paški Sir [Pag Cheese] There is a local saying in Croatia that for winter to have ended and for spring to have arrived, bura needs to blow three times in March (tri marčane bura). Bura is a katabatic wind that comes from the northeast, and in the coastal parts of Croatia, it is caused by a difference in air temperatures between the temperatures on the Velebit mountain range that runs along the length of the coast, and the air temperatures at sea level. On the island of Pag, bura is an important part of life and a reason that many people give about why Pag cheese is so unique. As is visible in the image below, bura blows in gusts whipping up the sea into a fine spray that is then carried inland to fall on the coastal areas. The spray affects the taste of the plants growing there, which affects the taste of the ewe’s milk, and in turn, this affects the taste of the cheese. Furthermore, due to the harsh growing conditions that are caused by bura, only certain plants grow in those places where it blows at its strongest, which includes many aromatic plants. One shepherd told me that the plants on the island of Pag have an unusually high concentration of essential oils, which also helps to give the milk its distinctive taste. Another aspect of Pag cheese that people say makes it unique concerns the sheep whose milk is used to make the cheese. The Pag sheep breed is a breed that is autochthonous to the island, where only very rarely are sheep of other breeds (for instance, Awassi) brought to the island to prevent in-breeding. Thus, Pag cheese gets some of its distinctive qualities due to the weather

On the Relation between Plant-Based and Dairy-Based Cheeses  155 conditions, and the plants that grow on the karst landscape, as well as the breed of Pag sheep. In terms of who produces Pag cheese, not all shepherds are producing the cheese themselves. Whilst some do it for home consumption, or to sell to tourists on a very small scale, many shepherds sell the milk to the local sirana (cheese-making plants). After milking their ewes, they either deliver the milk to the sirana themselves or the milk is kept in refrigerated boxes for its daily collection by the milk lorry. Several shepherds said that since the milk must be kept uncontaminated from unwanted bacteria, they delivered the milk to the sirana themselves to ensure its safe transport from the pastures. Then, depending on where the cheese is being made and who is making the cheese, the milk is heated up and coagulated using rennet, whereupon dried microbial cultures are added, or raw milk is used to culture the milk. After this, the cheeses are left to dry for a minimum of two months before they can be consumed. After many years of campaigning, in 2019, Pag cheese became a product with a protected designation of origin (PDO). The PDO clearly lays out the conditions in which Pag cheese needs to be made. For example, the cheese must be made from milk that has come from ewes who are a part of the Pag sheep breed, the cheeses must be aged for at least 60 days, and if coarse fodder is used to feed the ewes, then 65% of this fodder must come from the Pag area. Only the milk of those ewes who have grazed on the island of Pag or the smaller islands of Maun or Skrda can be used to make the cheeses. Thus, locality has a central role in narratives about Pag cheese, both in terms of where it is made and in terms of the local knowledge that is used to make it. Although this is not stipulated in the PDO regulation, most people presented the making of Pag cheese in terms of being a “family tradition” where knowledge about how to make Pag cheese is something that is passed down through the generations in families. As well, this knowledge is not just related to the production of the cheeses themselves but also relates to shepherding techniques. Shepherds said that they had inherited their flocks from other family members and continued to use the same methods of sheep rearing and sheep keeping from earlier times. One farmer told me that the only difference between how he kept the flock and how family members in previous generations had kept the flock was that nowadays rather than milking the sheep by hand as had been done before, he used a milking machine. Thus, in sum, in those narratives that people offered as to what makes Pag cheese precisely Pag cheese, they presented it as being based on the locality where the sheep graze, as well as where the cheeses are produced, and the knowledge that is needed to produce these cheeses in the “traditional” way. Grobnik Cheese The next cheese I want to consider here is Grobnik cheese, which is a white salty cheese made from ewe’s milk that is stored in brine and produced by transhumant shepherds. In the summer, these shepherds take their sheep up

156  Sarah Czerny to higher pastures above the Grobnik plain in the Gorski kotar region. The cooler ambient temperatures in these higher areas, and the increased rainfall in the summer months mean that the upper pastures are more nutritious for the sheep during the summer where there can sometimes be a drought down on the plain. The upper pastures are only grazed by the sheep, and are mainly inaccessibly by road, so the sheep can wander freely whilst they are up there. The walk up to the upper pastures takes the shepherds and their sheep about a day, and when they reach them, the shepherds live up with them in small farmsteads whilst they are up there. They do this because it is more convenient for milking, since some shepherds milk their sheep three times a day, and also to protect them from local predators such as wolves and bears. The shepherds told me that whilst they are up on the upper pastures the sheep have a very specific order in terms of the plants that they graze on. For example, the sheep will not eat nettles when the plants are very young but will eat these plants later in the summer when they are older and less potent. One shepherd explained that his sheep were like bees, where he followed their lead in terms of where they wanted to graze on the upper pastures. As a result, although the shepherds organise their day in terms of when they milk the sheep and what times they are on the pastures, whilst they are out grazing, the shepherds say they follow the ewes’ lead (Figure 9.1). The ewe’s milk is then used by the shepherds to produce the cheese, which is made by heating the milk up and adding rennet to form curds. It is then cut with a wooden stick, shaped into a cheese form, and stored in a brine solution to age. All the shepherds who produce Grobnik cheese make it in the same way, and all make it up on their farmsteads on the upper pastures. Nowadays there are only a few shepherds who work like this, and the production of Grobnik cheese is very much seen as a traditional form of cheese making that is dying out. The shepherds explained to me that younger generations do not want to work like this because it means they must live upon the pastures with their sheep, and they can earn a better income elsewhere in much easier conditions. Not one of the shepherds I met sold their cheeses to shops or other outlets but sold them directly to their customers who knew about their cheeses through word of mouth. Subsequently, all of them sold their cheeses on the grey market, and since they were selling their cheeses in this way, they did not adhere to food hygiene regulations in the same way as the cheese-makers on Pag do, who are selling it in shops all over Croatia and beyond. As a result, the milk used to make Grobnik cheese is pasteurised and the microbes that are already in the milk are the ones who ferment the cheese. Thus, the issue of “who” is in the cheese depends on who is in the milk at the time of the cheese’s production. When I asked a shepherd why he didn’t use microbes from elsewhere he told me that he had no need to, and also that he didn’t want to add anything from “elsewhere” into his cheeses. He compared his cheeses with other more commercial forms of cheese production, saying that whilst such cheese makers may say their cheeses are authentic, he doesn’t think they are because of all the extra things that go into them. He explained

On the Relation between Plant-Based and Dairy-Based Cheeses  157

Figure 9.1  Filtering the milk for cheese production with a cheese-cloth

that his cheeses are made using just his hands and knowledge, the milk of his ewes’, which is made from the plants on the pastures and that is it. Another shepherd told me that he makes his cheese in exactly the same way as his grandfather made his cheese, and that as a result, his cheese is “authentic.” He told me that because of its “authenticity” he never had problems with selling it, where consumers reserve his cheeses months in advance, and he can never produce enough to satisfy demand. As he told me: “my cheeses go to Germany, they go to the United States, the diaspora come to Croatia on their holidays and want to take some back home with them,” explaining that the reason why there is such demand is because his cheese is the “real thing.” In many ways, the interests of the cheese-makers of Pag and Grobnik cheese are very similar. They both place a focus on the locality where the cheeses are made and the traditional ways of making them. But there are a few slight differences in the way these cheeses are made. Firstly, regarding Grobnik cheese, the shepherds are involved in the production of the cheese

158  Sarah Czerny from start to finish: they look after the sheep and spend time with them on the pastures, do the milking, and also make the cheese. In contrast, Pag cheese is made in a series of stages and involves different people, from the shepherds who are looking after the sheep who produce the milk to the people working in the cheese plants. Furthermore, in the production of Pag cheese, and because Pag cheese makers are working in accordance with national food hygiene regulations, the cheeses are sometimes made with pasteurised milk and sometimes with microbes that have been brought in from elsewhere. In contrast, Grobnik cheeses are made using the microbes that are already in the milk. Another difference is related to the bodies of the animals who are producing the milk from which the cheese is made. According to PDO regulations, Pag cheese must be from the milk produced by ewes from the Pag sheep breed, where this breed is central to the making of “real” Pag cheese. Since Grobnik cheese is not regulated in the same way as Pag cheese, where it does not have to be made using the milk of a specific sheep breed, shepherds stress that it is the plants and microbes that are in the milk, as well as the way it is made, that are the most important. Shepherds say that each farmer has their own preferences as to which sheep breed they find the most preferable. As a result of these differences in production, it would be difficult to say that these cheeses are both produced in exactly the same way, although they are both presented as the “authentic” products of their respective areas. Cashew-Based Cheese In Croatia, cashew-based cheeses are made by individual cheese-makers who on the main make them at home for their own personal consumption, whereas at the time of writing, there are no commercial cashew cheese-­making plants in Croatia. As well, and in contrast to Grobnik and Pag cheeses there are no traditional recipes that are associated with a specific locality. Instead, recipes on how to make these cheeses are widely available on internet portals but are also shared by social media groups that focus on vegan cheese production. Outside Croatia, those cheeses that are made by commercial producers have names such as Cashewbert, but home producers often use generic names such as Vegan Blue cheese, where these names are chosen according to the “type” of cheese they are and what microbes are being used in them. For example, the Vegan Blue cheese is made using a starter culture and Penicillium roqueforti. The steps that are taken to make these cheeses follow quite a similar form. The cashews are firstly soaked overnight or for a few hours and then mixed into a paste with a mixer. Some recipes call for transforming this paste into milk by adding water, which is then filtered using a cheesecloth. The milk is then heated, and some form of coagulant is added that will activate because of the milk’s increased temperature. In some cases, people use vegetarian rennets, such as those made from thistle as well as the mould Mucur miehei, or they may add transglutaminase which helps to bind the milk solids together. In other versions, this “milk” stage is skipped, where

On the Relation between Plant-Based and Dairy-Based Cheeses  159 cheese-makers work directly with the paste that is made from the cashew nuts. The microbes are then added to the cheese, either from a mother starter culture that the producers have developed themselves or a starter culture they have purchased from one of the firms that produce starter cultures.1 Most often these microbes are commercial ones that are in Europe sold by a handful of companies, who are also producing non-vegan cultures. After the cultures have been added, the paste or curds are then left for a day for the microbes to activate and are then placed into a cheese mould for them to age. One extremely important difference between cashew-based cheeses and Grobnik and Pag cheeses concerns their relation to locality. In the European context, the milks used to make the cheeses are made from cashews that are grown elsewhere, mainly in Vietnam or India. As a result, and differing from Grobnik and Pag cheese-makers who place a high importance on the locality where the milk is produced, cashew-based cheese-makers do not place too much importance on the localities where the plants are grown. Nevertheless, one cannot say that locality is entirely absent in plant-based cheese makers’ interests. The cheese makers I spoke to were interested in producing cheeses made from locally grown plants, such as potatoes or beans. This was for several reasons, firstly the cheeses would be cheaper to produce, and also the carbon footprint of the cheeses would be much less because the raw ingredients would not have to travel so far. Furthermore, some cheese-makers commented on the ethics of importing cashews because they were concerned about the conditions that the people working on cashew farms were working in. But the problem, they said, with using other plants was not only become some had distinct flavours, such as cheeses made with soya beans, but also that it was more difficult for some milks to bind and hold together during the fermenting process. It is for this reason that many felt that at the current time, cashews were still the optimum ingredient with which to make plant-based cheeses because their milk could be used in a way that followed dairy-based cheese recipes the most closely. Nonetheless, not all plant-based cheesemakers use methods that appear analogous to the methods that dairy-based cheese makers are using. In the introduction to her recipe book “Plant based Cheesemaking” Karen McAthy (2017) discusses the terminology surrounding plant-based cheeses. Here, she makes a distinction between plant-based “cheese” and “cheez,” stating that “cheeses” are those products that follow traditional cheese-making methods in their production, such as fermentation and ageing. “Analog cheeses” or “cheez” “generally aim to capture something of the nostalgic texture, taste, and feel of dairy cheese” (McAthy, 2017, 10), but they are not made using culturing or ageing processes. As such, they are “cheez” but not “cheese.” Therefore, according to McAthy (2017), only some of the methods used by plant-based cheese-makers are similar enough to dairy cheese for them to be considered as cheese, where the fermentation process has a very important role. This interest in fermentation is something that is visible in the exchanges between plant-based cheese-makers in social media forums and online. In

160  Sarah Czerny

Figure 9.2 A selection of plant-based cheeses

their exchanges, cheese-makers compare recipes, ask questions about their cheeses, and show pictures of the cheeses they have made. Often these discussions focus on the cultures and moulds themselves, where cheese-makers discuss the colours of the moulds on their cheeses and ask others whether they think that these moulds are harmful to human health or not. For example, they may share pictures of black or pink moulds growing on the surface of cheese and ask whether they think this is a “good” or “bad” mould. Those answering will give their opinions on whether these cheeses can be consumed or should be thrown away. Others will also offer remedies, such as cutting out the part of the cheese that has the mould on it, to make the cheese salvageable. There are also exchanges about the optimum conditions for the ageing of cheeses and how to avoid contamination between moulds. Here people will share images of makeshift cheese caves, such as how they have converted an old fridge for storing wines and offer advice on whether a cheese has been contaminated or not. Therefore, with regards to plant-based cheeses, what becomes apparent is that the principle focus of the cheese-makers’ interest is predominantly on the fermentation process, and how the “right” microbes can be best supported in their work to transform the plant milks into cheese. As a result, plant-based cheese-makers consider the microbes to have a central role in transforming these milks into cheese (Figure 9.2). Analog, Terroir, and the Absence of Animals Having now offered these three examples, for the next part of this chapter I want to discuss the relation between plant-based and dairy-based cheesemaking in more detail. A useful entry point into thinking about this is Strathern’s (1992) writing on merographic connections (Strathern, 1992, 72–81). Strathern has argued that for two domains to appear connected, they need to

On the Relation between Plant-Based and Dairy-Based Cheeses  161 appear to be analogous to one another where “each operates in a similar way according to laws of its own” (Strathern, 1992, 73). From the perspective of how the cheeses are made, there does seem to be a close connection between them. As I have just outlined, some plant-based cheese-makers use very similar methods to the ones that dairy-based cheese-makers use to make their cheeses. Nevertheless, the absence of locality in plant-based cheeses raises certain questions. As is visible in the interests of Pag and Grobnik cheesemakers, locality is a critical concept in the production of dairy-based cheeses. Here, it is useful to bring in the concept of terroir since it seems to be almost absent in considerations concerning the production of plant-based cheeses. Scholars (e.g., Barham, 2003; Gade, 2004; Trubek, 2008; Paxson, 2010; West, 2012; Demossier, 2018) writing on terroir have argued that terroir is a way of relating food products to a particular place, which West has described in terms of being made up of the triad of “people–place–products.” Elizabeth Barham (2003) describes terroir as “an area or terrain, usually rather small, whose soil and microclimate impart distinctive qualities to food products” (Barham, 2003, 131), and similarly, Daniel Gade (2004) has said that the idea of terroir “claims that the special quality of an agricultural product is determined by the character of the place from which it comes” (Gade, 2004, 849). Thinking about this explicitly in terms of cheese, which Heather Paxson (2010) has done, terroir could encompass pasturelands whose flora are selected for ruminant grazing and human management; practices of animal husbandry; ambient micro-organisms, directly or indirectly selected for by hygienic practices, that make their way into cheese; and recipes and artisan methods of making cheese. (Paxson, 2010, 445) Thus, terroir asserts that “place and context matter” (West, 2022), which challenges the impression that “anything can be made anywhere” (West, 2022). Concerning plant-based cheeses, and due to the multiple origins of their ingredients, it seems much harder to describe them as having a terroir. Furthermore, the “local traditions,” the people, in the “people-place-­ product” triad are absent in plant-based cheese-making. Due to their production in manifold different locations, plant-based cheeses are not made from local knowledge that has been passed down through the generations, where often this knowledge is shared and acquired in the virtual sphere. As a result, in terms of the relation between the two domains of plant-based cheese-making and dairy-based cheese-making, it seems difficult to describe them as analogous where the relation between domains appears to be more of disconnection than connection. Yet, this is not the only way to think about the relation between these two domains. Another way to consider the relationship between plant-based and dairy-based cheeses is to think about the absence of the animal in plant-based

162  Sarah Czerny cheeses. More precisely this concerns the relation between vegan cheeses and dairy-based cheeses.2 Making a distinction between plant-based and vegan cheeses is important here since the motivations and interests of those who consume plant-based cheeses are not singular. Some consume plant-based cheeses due to dietary reasons, such as lactose intolerance, whereas others consume them for ethical reasons. Vegan cheeses remove the animal from them, not just in terms of the milk from which they are produced but also regarding the additional ingredients that are used to make the cheese. For instance, rennet, the enzyme used to curdle cheese, is most often of animal origin and comes from the stomach lining of calves. The rennet used in vegan cheeses is made from plant-based substances. As well, the microbes that are added to the cheeses in vegan cheeses are vegans themselves in that they are not cultured in substances of animal-based origin but are grown in plant-based mediums. As I discussed at the outset of this chapter, in European Union legislation, the absence of the animal in these cheeses has serious connotations for how the relation between the two domains of plant-based and dairy-based cheeses is constructed. For dairy-based cheese-makers, the absence of the animal renders plant-based cheeses as not-cheese. However, for vegan cheese consumers, the critical point about the absence of animals in these cheeses is not that it turns these cheeses into something which is not cheese, but that it makes them consumable. From this perspective, therefore, it becomes quite clear that the link between the two domains is dependent on whose perspective has been foregrounded as the relevant one. As a result, the relation between the two domains of plant-based cheese and dairy-based cheese seems to constantly shift, where different connections and disconnections come to the forefront according to whose perspective one takes. In all three cheeses’ different aspects of their production are foregrounded. For instance, regarding Pag cheese the sheep breed is considered critical in terms of making this cheese Pag cheese. Concerning Grobnik cheese, the breed of sheep that produce the milk for the cheese is not seen as being so important, as there is no autochthonous breed in the Grobnik area. Where Grobnik cheese, however, gets its quality as Grobnik cheese is from the methods and traditions that are used to make it. Traditional Grobnik cheese is made using the specific method of salting, and in conversations with people in the Grobnik area, it is a technique that is passed down through the generations. Thus, whilst “outsiders” can make the cheese, their lack of traditional knowledge about making the cheese raises questions about the authenticity of this cheese. Cashew-based cheese with its imported ingredients, as well as the lack of “family tradition” appears to sit beyond the usual social qualifiers of making cheese. Indeed, cashew-based cheese-makers are more interested in presenting their cheeses as “real” cheese, rather than promoting the authenticity of their cheeses in relation to what is seen as a local tradition, as the cheese-makers of Grobnik and Pag cheese are. Thinking about this from the perspective of the material and the social, I think it starts to become evident that the two are very closely entangled in both plant-based and dairy-based cheese making, which is a point that sits

On the Relation between Plant-Based and Dairy-Based Cheeses  163 very closely with Peter Atkins (2010) writing on the materialities of milk. In it, he has troubled the neat division between the material and the social, where he thinks about milk using Mol’s “radical empirical philosophy in which the focus is on what she calls ‘praxiographies’ of the multiplicity of material reality” (Atkins, 2010, 22). As he says, Mol’s ontological politics is relevant to milk since it helps to capture the “elusiveness of knowing milk.” When one looks closely at milk, he argues, milk has a “remarkable variation in its composition” where the term is “in effect is a homonym for liquids containing more or less butterfat or more or less solids-not-fat” (Atkins, 2010). As such, we should not think of “milk” as one uniform homogenous liquid, but rather see that there are many different milks that over time have been homogenised into a more singular form through processes of standardisation and scientific discovery. Thus, in terms of the material and the social, one should see milk as a material that takes many forms that are thoroughly intertwined with the social, which is a point that can be easily transposed onto similar considerations about cheese. In their discussion about the multiplicity of materiality, Law and Mol (1995) suggest that “the world is a kind of kaleidoscope in which materiality is continually being organised and reorganised” (Law and Mol, 1995, 286). As they explain “[T]there are multiple materialities performing themselves in manifold ways” (Mol and Law, 1995, 287). One question they say that arises from looking at materialities in this way, and one that is highly pertinent to my discussion here about the relation between plant-based and dairy-based cheeses, concerns the way that these materialities fit together. Mol and Law (1995) make the point that these different materialities fit together through strategies where “strategy is a narrative method for pulling material differences together into a single kind of story.” And it is “here [where there] are endless stories to tell. Endless stories about practices. About interactions. About designs. About coincidences. About sequences. About logics. About inclusions and exclusions. Endless stories about the kaleidoscope of materialities” (Law and Mol, 1995, 291). Certainly, the relation between plant-based and dairy-based cheeses can be seen in this way, where the relation between the material and social shifts in form according to the different interests in the stories about cheese.3 Indeed, one could go on to provide an entire series of cheese stories that are in essence simply different permutations of this relation between the social and the material, which is a point that goes hand in hand with what Mol and Law (1995) have said about there being endless stories to tell. Bringing in the Microbes So, when we consider the relationship between plant-based and dairy-based cheeses, is there anything new we can add to these discussions? Any story we offer about the relation between plant-based cheese and dairy-based cheeses is in fact adding just one more story to all the other stories. Furthermore,

164  Sarah Czerny each story shores up the position and interests of the person narrating it. Nevertheless, one possible avenue, which is what I want to spend the last part of this chapter discussing, is that in our considerations of cheese production, we keep on thinking about the relation between the social and the material, but when doing so we go beyond the human and consider animal sociality more closely. Considerations of animal sociality in dairy work initially appear tricky because animal sociality is most often treated as being organised and shaped by human interests. Yet, it is there. The shepherds I visited often spoke about their interactions with the sheep in mutualist terms, where they were following the ewes whilst they were on the pastures because “they know what is best for them” or were talking about the need to respect the hierarchy in the flock. In their accounts, they stressed the importance of accounting for animal sociality in their work with their sheep. And as Nimmo (2010) has discussed in his writing about the modernity of milk, there is a need to consider “a more concrete notion of species practice” (Nimmo, 2010, 159). He writes “[a]s social scientists we now need animals, and studies of animal ‘social’ behaviour, to help us to transform our ways of knowing, because our own foundational pact with modern dualism runs too deep” (Nimmo, 2010, 163). Considering the current environmental crises the world is facing, Nimmo’s suggestion has become more pertinent than ever. Taking this on board, we need to start to think about animal sociality in cheese-making. And if we consider animals in their widest sense, in a way that does not rely upon phylogenetic definitions of animality, we can also include those other living beings who are involved in cheese-making: the microbes. As I mentioned in the introduction, microbial sociality has a critical role in those cheeses that have been fermented, regardless of whether they are vegan or non-vegan, and regardless of whether the cheeses are made from plantbased or dairy-based milks. As Paxson (2012) has discussed in her writing on cheese making in Vermont, post-Pasteurians adopt a “selective partnership with microscopic organisms” where they “move beyond an antiseptic attitude to embrace mold and bacteria as allies” (Paxson, 2012, 162). Not only is the work of microbes transformative for the cheeses themselves, but when we shift scales like this to consider these tiniest living beings in cheese production, I think we can say that they are also analytically disruptive. For instance, they destabilise the notion of terroir as being fixed to one particular place. An example of this can be found in Paxson’s (2021) consideration of the transportation of cheeses from one geographical continent to the other (Europe to the USA). As she describes, the movement of cheeses over long distances is a delicate process because their transportation needs to be carefully timed and organised by cheese importers so that they are not “ruined” by the time they arrive in the shops where they are sold. The reason why the cheeses are changing the constitution on their journeys to the shops is that the microbes are still actively doing their “cheese work” and transforming the constitution of the cheeses as they all travel. To try to halt this process, Paxson (2021) describes how importers select which import hubs they will

On the Relation between Plant-Based and Dairy-Based Cheeses  165 use, and how they harness the mechanics of refrigeration. The microbes’ work upsets the close association of cheese with a particular location where the people–place–product triad of terroir is disturbed. Moreover, when we make such a shift in scale, and consider the sociality of microbes, we can see that the human cheese-makers are not the only social beings who are making cheese. Whilst humans may present cheese-making as a human interest and human occupation, the microbes are themselves cheese-makers, even if we don’t frame them as such. Indeed, the liveliness of cheeses comes precisely from this microbial sociality, where the human cheese-makers I spoke to often spoke about their cheeses as living beings. For instance, people were speaking “about having to look after them,” or about not being able to leave them “on their own” for a long time. Furthermore, they spoke about their cheese’s lifecycles, where they said that when they are young, they are much more demanding and need more care than when they are old and can be left by themselves for longer periods. Those cheese-makers who did not age their cheeses in careful humidity and temperature-controlled spaces were also worried about the weather conditions and how their cheeses would respond, particularly in the summer months. One person told me that her cheeses really “hated” the warm summer weather (Figure 9.3). In the Croatian social context, interests in microbial sociality are most often focused on how this sociality affects food hygiene regulations. Principally due to the invisibility of microbes, and the inability of humans to easily know who is inhabiting their cheeses, aside from signs of their effects (such as their smell and colour), their sociality is much harder to follow and control. Indeed, as Paxson (2012) has discussed, controlling the sometimes “unruly” and unpredictable behaviour of microbes presents a considerable challenge for human cheese-makers. At a much wider level, one can see in the

Figure 9.3 Microbes (Pencillium roqueforti) transforming cashew milk into cashew cheese

166  Sarah Czerny COVID-19 pandemic that microbial sociality can present an extreme challenge for humanity at a global level. As scholars (e.g., Bassler, 2002; Bassler and Losick, 2006; Cornforth and Foster, 2013) working in the microbial sciences have shown, microbes have complex social lives where they engage in social exchanges with other microbes. These scholars have described their communal living, kinship relations, chemical warfare, and interests in foraging. Furthermore, their sociality stands beyond the human. Whilst they may enter into a “becoming-with” relationship with humans, their relation with humans is not a pre-requisite for them to be able to have a social life. Microbes can exist more than comfortably without humans. Therefore, in terms of the relation between plant-based and dairy-based cheeses, as well as in considerations of the relation between the material and the social, thinking about microbial sociality enables us to look beyond the human. When one returns to considerations about the merographic relation between the domains of plant-based cheeses and dairy-based cheeses, the way the microbes are doing their cheese work is very similar irrespective of whether the cheeses are made from dairy milk or plant milk. In both cases, microbial sociality transforms the ingredients that humans are using to make cheese into something else. Thus, although for some, the work of the microbes in plantbased milks may appear to be an enactment or an analogue of cheese-making, or an enactment or analogue of the “real thing,” actually at the microbial level the microbes are doing similar work, work that blurs the boundaries between the material and the social. In those cheeses that are plant-based, but not vegan, they can even sometimes be the same as the ones used in dairy-based cheese production since they often come from the same producer or source. Their social lives may be different due to the different mediums they are living in, but one can respond to this with the point that human social lives can differ according to the different social contexts they live in. As a result, the constant negotiation and exchanges between the human and microbial cheesemakers are transformative and turn the ingredients that are being used into a very similar product, where it is a very human concern whether we want to call this product “cheese” or “cheez.” As such, whilst plant-based cheesemaking may go “against the grain” of what many might consider being “real” cheese-making, when looking at it from the perspective of the microbes, their work challenges dominant conceptualisations of cheese-making. This opens up novel analytical avenues in which to think about food production. Notes 1 Sometimes kefir is used in a starter culture either water-based kefir or dairy-based kefir that has been trained to live in coconut milk as opposed to dairy milk. But the fact that the milk-based (as opposed to water-based) kefir has at some point in the past been fed with dairy milk is an issue for some vegans. 2 I rely here on the definition of veganism as presented by Dutkiewicz and Dikstein (2020). In their survey of different approaches to veganism, they advocate for a

On the Relation between Plant-Based and Dairy-Based Cheeses  167 practice-based definition of veganism as a pattern of action that abstains from consuming animal-derived products. 3 In their account about cuts of meat, Yates-Doerr and Mol (2012) write that meat is not singular but multiple.

References Atkins, Peter. 2010. Liquid Materialities: A History of Milk, Science, and the Law. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Barham, Elizabeth. 2003. “Translating Terroir: The Global Challenge of French AOC Labeling.” Journal of Rural Studies 19 (January): 127–38. Bassler, Bonnie. 2002. “Small Talk. Cell-to-Cell Communication in Bacteria.” Cell 109 (May): 421–24. Bassler, Bonnie and Richard Losick. 2006. “Bacterially Speaking.” Cell 125 (April): 237–46. Cohen, Mathilde. 2017. “Regulating Milk: Women and Cows in France and the United States.” American Journal of Comparative Law 65: 469–526. Cornforth, Daniel and Kevin Foster. 2013. “Competition Sensing: The Social Side of Bacterial Stress Responses.” Nature Reviews Microbiology 11 (April): 285–93. Demossier, Marion. 2018. Burgundy. The Global Story of Terroir. Oxford: Berghahn. Dutkiewicz, Jan and Johnathan Dickstein. 2021. “The Ism in Veganism: The Case for a Minimal Practice-Based Definition.” Food Ethics 6 (April): 1–19. Eisen, Jessica. 2019. “Milked: Nature, Necessity, and American Law.” Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice 34: 71–116. Gaard, Greta. 2013. “Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies.” American Quarterly 65 (September): 595–618. Gade, Daniel. 2004. “Tradition, Territory, and Terroir in French Viniculture: Cassis, France, and Appellation Controlee.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94: 848–67. Law, John, and Annemarie Mol. 1995. “Notes on Materiality and Sociality.” Sociological Review 43: 274–94. Linné, Tobias and Ally McCrow-Young. 2017. “Plant Milk: From Obscurity to Visions of a Post-Dairy Society.” In Making Milk: The Past, Present and Future of Our Primary Food, edited by Mathilde Cohen and Yoriko Otomo, 195–212, London: Bloomsbury Academic. McAthy, Karen. 2017. The Art of Plant-Based Cheesemaking. How to Craft Real, Crafted, Non-Dairy Cheese. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers. Mincyte, Diana. 2014. “Homogenizing Europe: Raw Milk, Risk Politics, and Moral Economies in Europeanizing Lithuania.” In Ethical Eating in the Postsocialist and Socialist World, edited by Yuson Jung, Jakob Klein, and Melissa Caldwell, 25–43. Berkeley: University of California Press. Law, John, and Annemarie Mol. 1995. “Notes on materiality and sociality.” The Sociological Review (May) 43: 274–94. Nimmo, Richie. 2010. Milk, Modernity and the Making of the Human: Purifying the Social. London: Routledge. Paxson, Heather. 2010. “Locating Value in Artisan Cheese: Reverse Engineering Terroir for New-World Landscapes.” American Anthropologist 112 (September): 444–57.

168  Sarah Czerny Paxson, Heather. 2012. The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Paxson, Heather. 2021. “Protecting Perishable Values: Timescapes of Moving Fermented Foods across Oceans and International Borders.” Current Anthropology 62 (October), Supplement 24: s333–42. Simun, Miriam. 2014. “Human Cheese.” In Multispecies Salon, edited by Eben Kirksey, 135–44. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trubek, Amy. 2008. The Taste of Place. A Cultural Journey into Terroir. Berkeley: California University Press. West, Harry. 2012. “Je m’appelle….Cheese.” Food, Culture, and Society 15 (March): 7–11. West, Harry. 2022. “Terroir Products: A Movable Heritage Feast.” Review of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Studies 103 (March): 1–27. Yates-Doerr, Emily and Annemarie Mol. 2012. “Cuts of Meat. Disentangling Western Natures-Cultures.” Cambridge Anthropology 30 (Autumn): 48–64.

10 Microbes and Biocultural Diversity in the Ganges Antibiotic Modernity and the Revival of Phage Therapy Victor Secco Since the first scientific discovery of an antibiotic substance—penicillin, in 1928—commercial antibiotic drugs have changed the genetic codes of bacteria and the social dynamics of humans across the globe. The discovery of antibiotics has not only transformed modern medicine but also allowed for many of the large-scale processes inextricably associated with the idea of modernity, such as urbanisation and industrialisation. Therefore, increasing resistance to antibiotics (in which bacteria develop features that render antibiotics ineffective) not only threatens the health of living beings, it also endangers the social dynamics that have become dependent on this form of medicine. Even so, the current revival of phage therapy, a treatment in which viruses are used to attack bacterial infections, suggests that there are ways of living with more-than-human diversity rather than against it. Antibiotic resistance reveals the centrality of antibiotics to modern medicine, according to Clare Chandler (2020), as it can be understood as a moment of inversion (Bowker and Star 2000) that makes evident the role of antibiotics as infrastructure for modern medicine. Chandler (2020) further argues that antibiotics are infrastructural not only for clinical practices but also as part of modernity at large. Antibiotic substances in this sense can be understood as products of and conditions for modern ideas of industrialisation, public health, and global capitalism more broadly. Here, I follow Jamie Lorimer (2020) by taking modernity itself as an antibiotic and thus considering antibiotic relations beyond pharmaceutical substances and into biopolitics. According to Lorimer, “Being antibiotic describes systematic efforts to secure the Human through the control of unruly ecologies. It involves efforts to eradicate, control, rationalize, and simplify life that are common across landscapes, cities, homes, and bodies” (Lorimer 2020, 2). Antibiotic modernity is thus a historically specific mode of managing life on the planet that is driving much of the current loss of biosocial diversity and the disruptive changes that are collectively described through the idea of the Anthropocene. In response to these antibiotic modes of managing life, Lorimer and others have pointed to an emerging “probiotic turn” (2020). Here, the term probiotic is to be understood beyond the idea of “good bacteria,” like those DOI: 10.4324/9781003439011-11

170  Victor Secco present in fermented dairy drinks like Yakult and kefir. Instead, it designates, more expansively, modes of human interactions with more-than-humans that entail “using life to manage life” (Lorimer 2020, 2). It includes efforts such as rewilding, permaculture, bioremediation, and fermentation, all of which draw upon lifeforms that align with human projects to manage specific ecological dynamics. Considering the liveliness of bacterial viruses explored in this chapter, these can be understood as an effort to manage life using its own tools, creating alternative possibilities to nurture relationship with microbial more-than-humans. In this chapter, I set out to explore antibiotic and probiotic modes of relations with more-than-humans on the basis of ethnographic fieldwork carried out with microbiologists and Hindu devotees who intimately interact with the Ganges River in Varanasi, North India. I argue that antibiotics are part of the infrastructure of the neoliberal and capitalist modes of dealing with more-than-humans (in this case microbes, the river, and the deity), and threaten biosocial diversity in the Ganges and beyond. Despite the antibiotic threats to riverine life, I show how pluribiotic modes of dealing with morethan-humans are unexpectedly brewing in the same waters, while also considering the hurdles to escalating these alternatives to deal with larger issues of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) from within antibiotic infrastructures. Living with Gods and Microbes The water of the Ganges, or gangajal, is considered the purest of substances in Hindu scriptures. It is the goddess Ganga1 herself, flowing across the sacred geography of India (Eck 1983) from the gods’ abode in the Himalayas down to the Indian plains, then on towards the sea and the Hindu underworld. The Ganga is considered a benevolent mother (Ganga Maa), washing away the sins of her children and accepting all forms of impurity without judgement. Sanskrit literature on the Ganga stresses her capacity to clear karma from past lives and thus allow for immediate liberation (moksha) upon death (Eck 1983), which is why many Hindus choose to die near the river and be cremated on its banks (Parry 1994). Here the water is of such power (shakti) that anything that touches or is touched by a drop of it is purified and cleansed straightaway in terms of ritual purity; gangajal is “liquid shakti” (Eck 1983, 218). Understood as such, gangajal is used for daily rituals on the river’s banks as well as taken into homes and temples across India and beyond. However, the Ganges is also notorious for being one of the most polluted rivers in the world (Alley 2002; Colopy 2012). An important source of water in North India, the Ganges Basin runs through the most populous areas of the subcontinent. While it offers water and subsistence to around half a million people, it also carries much of the waste produced in the region, mainly raw sewage and industrial waste from the cities it passes through. In Varanasi, the main problem is untreated wastewater flowing directly into the river because

Microbes and Biocultural Diversity in the Ganges  171 of the city’s overloaded sewage treatment system (Alley 2002, 2014). Water quality measures are based on faecal coliform counts, which are alarmingly high around the city, and according to microbiological standards, the water is largely unfit for bathing, let alone drinking. While the current government has injected money into new initiatives to clean the river and subsequently claimed on the basis of their own data that parts of the Ganga were fit for bathing (The New Indian Express 2022), some of the people living on its banks are sceptical about these purported successes. Strolling around Varanasi, one can easily identify sewage entry points by the sight and stench along the river, as well as piles of garbage around the city. Doron (2020) argues that smells are a way of navigating the political and biological landscape of the city, in between cultural sensibilities, pathogenicity, and waste management politics. Odours that might be unpleasant or otherwise culturally significant to humans attract all sorts of animals that subsist on waste; in India, the most common among these are cows, dogs, pigs, rats, crows, and other bird species. The acrid stench of garbage piles and raw sewage also indicates the presence of microorganisms thriving in waste matter. As Doron explains, such intense encounters between species create plentiful opportunities for zoonotic spillover2 and the development of resistance in microbes. In Varanasi, it is easy to observe how dogs and cows, for example, move in between waste piles, the river, and people’s hands, exchanging invisible matter that can serve as a potential vector for infectious diseases. The current overuse and abuse of antibiotics, which are readily available on India’s unregulated pharmaceutical market (NAP-AMR 2017), add to this threat, and it has become apparent that antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria are now common in the waters of the Ganges River (Niveshika et al. 2016; Mishra and Nath 2020) (Figure 10.1). Yet in spite of such alarming microbiological conditions, thousands of people still step into the Ganga every day, from sunrise to sunset. Not only step in, but bathe, swim, play, pray, wash clothes, drink the water, bottle it, carry it to temples, and take it home with them. The river is not only the focus of much of the religious life for Hindus across the region, it is also a source of subsistence for fishermen and boatmen as well as a site of recreation for the local population (Doron 2013). As Alley (2002) has shown in her study of wastewater along the Ganga, gangajal is an eternally pure (shudh), purifying, and curing substance that transcends environmental notions of pollution (pradushan) for the pious Hindus who come to pray and bathe in it. For some devotees, “pollution in the Ganga is like oil in water,” writes Barrett (2008, 45); in their understanding, the purity of the water remains unaltered by the presence of any form of waste. As these authors show, pollution and goddess do not mix in people’s minds. Such attitudes underpin a strong separation between religious practices and political actions that have hindered religious-based environmentalism in relation to the Ganga (Alley 2002).

172  Victor Secco

Figure 10.1 Waste piles in front of houses on the Assi River bank. Humans, dogs, cows, pigs, and crows are commonly seen sharing space in Varanasi among waste and water. Photo by the author

During my fieldwork, I found that discussions of physical impurities (gandagi) were not uncommon among the daily bathers, visitors, and government bodies in charge of water quality and public health. Ganda pani (dirty water) or gandagi ki mehek (smell of garbage) were phrases I often heard among people engaging with the river every day, but this did not stop them from bathing in and sipping the waters of the river for ritual purposes. Others, mostly the educated middle classes and people who were not living immediately near the river were either cautious or avoided the Ganga altogether. Some of the latter stated that they used to swim and bathe in the holy river in the past but now found the water to be too polluted. Those who felt they had to perform rituals with gangajal but were concerned with pollution would use wet wipes, avoid drinking it, and might even take another bath with tap water and soap to wash off any contaminants (see also Kedzior 2015). Nonetheless, the cultural life around the river remains vibrant, and the rules that local governments have tried to impose on the use of the river, such as fines for the use of certain polluting materials and substances when bathing/praying, are rarely enforced, if at all. Very few people seem to complain about the widespread use of soap and shampoo by those bathing in the river or the practice of throwing plastic bags that contain offerings directly into the water. Even less would challenge the mortuary rituals that take place on the cremation grounds (mahashmashan) lining the river in Varanasi. Bodies are normally washed in the river before being cremated on a pyre, and the ashes are thrown into the river after the rituals are concluded (Parry 1994). Certain categories of people and most animals that die in the vicinity are not burned

Microbes and Biocultural Diversity in the Ganges  173 but instead put directly in the river to be carried away by the goddess (Parry 1994), a practice which makes itself noticeable by the occasional presence of bones and cadavers on the banks of the Ganga. This fact has drawn the attention of many chroniclers throughout history and even more so recently due to the conspicuous numbers of bodies cremated and submerged in the Ganga during the heights of the COVID-19 pandemic (Pandey 2021). In keeping with the theme of death and its remains, it is worth mentioning the recent disappearance of vultures in the subcontinent, as there are parallels with the threats to biosocial diversity I explore here. Thom van Dooren (2011, 08) has explained how the increased use of an anti-inflammatory drug called Diclofenac in livestock has unintentionally poisoned and killed around 95 percent of the vulture population in the region, creating problems that go far beyond the loss of biodiversity. In a book dedicated to vultures, van Dooren shows how it is not only a question of ecological change, with other species taking the space left by vultures, but also how human rituals, cultural practices, and ultimately health are affected by the disappearance of these birds. Taking Parsi mortuary rituals as a primary example, van Dooren explores how the loss of vultures is disruptive for the whole funerary system. Parsi death rituals involve placing the body of the diseased person in openair “towers of silence” (dakhma) where vultures carry out the work of consuming corporeal remains, leaving only bones behind in a process that can take less than an hour. Without the vultures, however, the bodies are instead eaten by smaller and less specialised birds and occasionally dogs which have filled the ecological space left by the vultures. The incomplete handling of bodies by these less specialised scavengers triggers processes of putrefaction and proliferation of microbes that were previously uncommon, increasing the smells and the risks of disease in similar ways to those explored above with Doron on urban waste (2020). It is not just the Parsi community that suffers from the vanishing of vultures; the whole biosocial system in place is undermined, with animal bodies putrefying in the vicinity of villages, dog populations increasing, and the risk of rabies escalating. Ritual practices that once sustained the life of a thriving ecosystem, in which vultures played an essential role in mediating between death and liberation for the Parsis, start to pose a problem when dead bodies are left to rot in close contact with living ones. Both van Dooren’s work and my own ethnographic case study suggest that transformations in modes of relating with more-than-humans in India have put not only living beings and environments at greater risk but also unsettled religious and cultural practices. The disappearance of vultures or the increased antibiotic resistance of bacteria in the Ganges poses novel challenges and opportunities for more-than-human assemblages. The Ganges in particular is understood to host a range of diverse and possibly pathogenic microbes that pose a risk to public health and therefore should be avoided, isolated, treated chemically, or subjected to any other form of a technical process that

174  Victor Secco might allow for the separation of clean river from contaminated sewage. That is not to say the changes provoked by this antibiotic modernity have created these risks, but it has certainly accelerated the pace and reach that these processes might otherwise have had. An outbreak of antibiotic-resistant infections from the Ganges might easily spread across a much larger area in a short time. As the current coronavirus pandemic has taught us, emergent infections can benefit from the increased movements and exchanges in which humans engage through the infrastructures of globalisation (Kirksey 2020; de Chadarevian and Raffaetà 2021; see also Mitchell 2002). For instance, with the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020, bathing in the river was forbidden during some of the most auspicious days for Hindus, to avoid the concentration of people around the river and to contain the spread of the virus (Kumar 2020). The whole riverfront was off-limits and people were advised to carry out rituals at home instead. As this precedent indicates, certain microbiological or other environmental hazards might propitiate changes in policy and social attitudes towards the river and the social life around it. Further upriver, Delhi has already physically turned away from the heavily polluted stretch of the Yamuna on which it sits (Maitland 2019). Antibiotic practices that have allowed for the congregation of people in large cities across the world, through sanitation, separation, and extermination of risks, now threaten the micro-biosocial lives of rivers everywhere. Within this context, it may be surprising that contaminated rivers that have been a source of antibiotic resistance have also lately become central to treating it. Phage Therapy and Antibiotic Modernity From the microbiology laboratory of the Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, Professor Gopal Nath and his team go around the city collecting water samples from the river and other water sources in order to isolate ­bacteriophages—­viruses that infect bacteria. They tag their samples with labels that refer to the places where the water samples were collected, on the lab bench I noticed two large plastic bottles with the tags “Manikarnika” and “Harishchandra,” the two famous cremation grounds (mahashmashan) alongside the Ganges in Varanasi which are a central part of Hindu mythological narratives and funerary rituals. The team applies these water samples onto Petri dishes and searches for the bacteriophages that can help cure bacterial infections in cases where antibiotics simply don’t work anymore (Figure 10.2). Bacteriophages have a historical association with the Ganges. In 1896, English biochemist Ernest Hanbury Hankin carried out experiments with Ganges water after hearing the local stories about its healing and non-putrefying qualities (Hankin 2011 [1896]; Summers 2012; Kochhar 2020). Following his experiments, Hankin wrote, It is seen that the unboiled water of the Ganges kills the cholera germ in less than 3 hours. The same water, when boiled, does not have the same

Microbes and Biocultural Diversity in the Ganges  175

Figure 10.2  Sampling water from the Ganges River. Photo by the author

effect. On the other hand, well water is a good medium for this microbe [i.e. cholera], whether boiled or filtered. (2011 [1896], 118) To explain such phenomena, Hankin theorised that there was some sort of “volatile agent” in Ganges water that could not survive heating and filtration, and that was not present in other bodies of water in the region. This led Hankin to recommend that local people use river water instead of well water in order to avoid cholera and other water-borne diseases (Hankin 2011 [1896]). Microbiologists now know that phages are virtually everywhere, being one of the most, if not the most, abundant biological entities on the planet, preying on all sorts of bacteria (Rohwer et al. 2014). Ganges water (as any other river water) can be used to treat bacterial infections through phage therapy and is currently most often used in antibiotic-resistant infections. Despite their ability to kill bacteria, phages cannot be equated to antibiotics, as their modes of existence and potentialities are radically different (Brives and Froissart 2021). To describe the kinds of relations between phages and bacteria, anthropologist Charlotte Brives has drawn on the concept of pluribiosis, or “the recognition of the existence of multiple relational spectra between entities forever in the process of becoming, constantly shaped and transformed by their interactions with other living beings, and by the context in which they occur” (2021, 249). Being viruses, phages are obligate parasites that need a host organism to reproduce. Outside the host, viruses are inert molecules, “on the edges of life,” but once inside a cell, viruses act as living entities, co-opting the host’s metabolism in order to reproduce themselves. Viruses thus challenge simplistic divisions between life and non-life and demand an understanding

176  Victor Secco of life that is fundamentally relational rather than based on fixed entities that are either at war or peace with each other, as the dichotomy between anti- and pro-biotics implies. A pluribiotic view, by contrast, entails thinking about the “quality of relations” that shape health, disease, and all the possibilities in between (Brives and Froissart 2021). The potential affordances of phages as treatment are thus completely different to those of antibiotics, and yet, as I will explore further below, both the history of and current research into phage therapy have been shaped in relation to antibiotics. The first question that comes to mind once one comes across phage therapy is: why is it not more widely known and available? There are many answers, but here I focus specifically on the histories and relative potentialities of phages and antibiotics. Both of these factors play an important role not only in defining the fate of phage therapy, but more broadly of life and diversity on our planet. Historically, phage therapy has been intensely researched in countries that were part of the Soviet Union, and the largest research facility is still to be found in Tbilisi, Georgia (the Eliava Phage Therapy Centre3). Historians of phage therapy note how the connection with “communist technology” made it less acceptable in the Cold War context of capitalist Western Europe and the United States, where the largest pharmaceutical industries were and are still located (Kuchment 2012; Summers 2012). This Soviet connection thus relates mainly to the successful commercialisation of antibiotics in Western Europe and the United States after the Second World War but also follows the career trajectory of Félix d’Hérelle, phage therapy’s first advocate. D’Hérelle is a controversial figure in the history of scientific discoveries, not only for the contentious simultaneous discovery of phages with the English bacteriologist Frederick Twort but also for his temperament and political positions (Kuchment 2012; Summers 2012; Myelnikov 2018). After leaving a position at Yale University to join the opening of a new centre of microbiology focused on bacteriophages in Soviet Georgia, d’Hérelle moved his zone of influence decidedly across the Iron Curtain, making no effort to hide his sympathies for the Soviet state. Myelnikov (2018) argues that phage therapy fitted ecological models of disease that were current in the Soviet Union at the time and that it was protected from Western criticism by the growing isolation of the Soviet Union. With the later and more gradual introduction of antibiotics to the USSR, phage therapy survived in a few pockets largely due to the conviction of individual doctors, nurses, and scientists that this “alternative cure” should not be completely forgotten (Myelnikov 2018). As already mentioned, a major reason why phage therapy was not pursued by Big Pharma in Western countries was the discovery of broad-spectrum antibiotics—chemical substances that interfere with the metabolic processes of bacteria, ultimately killing them. Phages are a narrow-spectrum therapy, i.e., the virus only infects a particular species and sometimes even only a specific strain of a given species of bacteria. Antibiotics, by contrast, may destroy many different species of bacteria at once, making them a good fit

Microbes and Biocultural Diversity in the Ganges  177 for capitalist processes of mass production, distribution, and consumption— part of the industrialisation of pharmaceuticals that developed exponentially during the second half of the 20th century. Soon enough, antibiotics were everywhere, and the use of phage therapy dwindled. In The Forgotten Cure (2012), Anna Kuchment writes that by the 1940s, the “field had been all but forgotten in the West” (2012, 42), with most phage therapy laboratories in the United States and Western Europe being shut down and scientists making the move to synthetic drugs. The geopolitics of the post-war period, the material qualities of phages, and the discovery of antibiotics all evidently shaped the microbiopolitics4 of phage therapy in the 20th century. The triumph of germ theory, the idea that infectious diseases are caused by microbial agents, following Louis Pasteur’s 19th-century discoveries (Latour 1988) gave a rationale for “antibiotic ways of managing life” across the globe (Lorimer 2020, 2). This particularly combative mode of relating to microbes has been defined by anthropologist Heather Paxson (Paxson 2008) as the Pasteurian regime and has set the tone for relations with microbes in the 20th century. The efficiency of antibiotics in the war waged against germs allowed biomedical practice to flourish during the second half of the 20th century as never before (Nerlich and James 2009). Infections were at last treatable with high success rates and complex surgical procedures, and immunosuppressing therapies developed as a consequence of the ability to control bacterial infections. It is in this sense that Chandler suggests that “antibiotics have become part of the health infrastructure such that they shape possibilities and constraints in pathways to health” (2020, 9). Beyond their role in constructing a public health regime, antibiotics and the “antibiotic way of managing life” might also be understood as infrastructure for industrialisation, urbanisation, and modernity as such. Antibiotics allowed for the processes of separation and purification that Latour (1993) defines as integral to his understanding of modernity, not only in terms of “purifying” the biological body but also for defining a mode of biopolitics that is based on the elimination of elements considered “pathogenic,” with little regard for ecosystemic relations that might be jeopardised in the process. In this manner, antibiotics play into modern conceptions of immunity and militaristic analogies that understand biological bodies as needing protection from inimical germs and a threatening environment. The coming about of such an understanding of bodies, health, and immunity has been explored in detail by Martin (1994) and Cohen (2009). Cohen (2009) has shown how the concepts of immunity and self-defence, which originated in politics and law, migrated into biomedicine by the late 19th century and went on to shape the ideas of biological immunity that dominated much of biomedicine throughout the 20th century. Originally used in the Roman juridical system, immunity referred to specific exceptions to the otherwise universal law. Certain categories of people were considered immune from the common law and thus did not need a defence, whereas self-defence,

178  Victor Secco as defined by Thomas Hobbes, is the “natural right” of the individual who is not immune to the law (Cohen 2009, 3). For Cohen, the idea of immunityas-defence is a particular biopolitical hybrid that makes possible the latest iteration of what he calls the “modern body”—as the title of his book, this is a body worth defending: After the advent of immunity-as-defense, bioscience affirms that living entails a ceaseless problem of boundary maintenance. Less modern ideas about living beings ensconce organisms in a material world whose vital elements form—and whose fluxes and flows inform—their aliveness. With immunity as its avatar, modern biomedical dogma holds to the contrary that as organisms we vitally depend on a perpetual engagement against the world to maintain our integrity or indeed our selves. (Cohen 2009, 8, italics in the original) Martin (1994) goes in a different direction, pointing out how ideas about the immune system have changed in the United States during the 20th century from the “castle of health” model in the 1940s and 1950s—a body that needs to be defended from germs lying outside of it, and a strong focus on hygiene and antimicrobial substances—to the adaptable and selective immune system that started to take shape in the second half of the 20th century. For Martin, after the 1970s, the language of flexible systems connects a variety of fields from computer software to psychology, also reaching immunology. She focuses on how a flexible idea of the immune system came about roughly at the same time as major economic shifts towards late capitalism were taking place, something which she identifies as flexible specialisation (1994, 40). For Martin, the language of flexible labour and products that are able to attend to the specific needs of highly mobile markets coincides with the changing views of the body as permeated by constant exchange with its surroundings and the immune system as a flexible tool that selects battles and partners as it adapts to an environment in flux. In both versions of immunity, antibiotics play an important role in defending human bodies, seen as individual and singular, against a multitude of invading germs. Antibiotics are, in this logic, external aids to the immune defence. As such, antimicrobial substances have since their discovery become household items in ever-increasing quantities. Framing modernity as an antibiotic in itself allows us to see more clearly the linkages between certain modern ideas, such as hygiene and eugenics, and helps us to identify the dangerous aspects of the desire for purity and homogeneity as it moves in between biosciences and biopolitics. To go beyond antibiotic ways of managing life requires thinking against purity (Shotwell 2016), reframing bodies, environments, and the very idea of the cure.

Microbes and Biocultural Diversity in the Ganges  179 The Probiotic Turn: Resistance, Revival, and Relapse Since the early 2000s, with the increase in antibiotic resistance across the globe, interest in bacteriophages and phage therapy has been growing again. This uptick has coincided with a broader “probiotic turn,” identified by Lorimer as a movement away from an antibiotic regime and towards the management of life with life itself (2020). Conferences, trials, start-ups, research, and media on bacteriophages are all increasing as phage therapy promises a cure to antibiotic resistance (Brives and Pourraz 2020). Anthropologist Heather Paxson frames this as a shift towards a post-Pasteurian regime, where Pasteurian ideas of hygiene are still taken seriously, but where people also “work hard to distinguish between good and bad microorganisms and to harness the former as allies in vanquishing the latter” (Paxson 2014, 118). The efforts of those who, like my interlocutors in India, seek to promote phage therapy as a viable treatment fit into this framework and historical moment. The “forgotten cure” of phages is resurfacing in pockets around the globe, wherever antibiotics and the Pasteurian regime have themselves become the problem to be solved. However, making phages available as a treatment in contexts organised through “antibiotic modes of managing life” is not a straightforward task. In GangaGen—a biotechnology company based in South India working with phages—I was told about the hurdles in the adoption of phage therapy by industrial capitalist pharmaceutical production. My interlocutors in the company told me how difficult it was to make phages profitable and how they had to move away from phage therapy itself towards phage-derived products, to stand a chance of commercialising their products within the pharmaceutical industry. Phage therapy does not fit the industrial models of production, distribution, and consumption set by antibiotics and Big Pharma, nor does it conform to current intellectual property regulations and their associated market logic. As “naturally occurring entities,” phages largely cannot be patented, rendering phage preparations unattractive to pharmaceutical companies. As I have already mentioned, phages are also highly specific in their action, in contrast to the broader spectrum of most antibiotics. This makes it difficult to engage in large-scale industrial production of phages, which could be sold “over the counter” like other common drugs. What can be produced and sold over the counter are so-called phage cocktails. Described in the literature as prêt-a-porter, phage cocktails contain a variety of phages that might be active for a particular infection and in a sense replicate the action of broad-spectrum antibiotics (Brives and Froissart 2021). However, because ready-made phage cocktails are targeted to the specific bacterium causing infection, they might not be as effective. More than that, these cocktails might actually increase the resistance of bacteria to phages just as antibiotics do, thus perpetuating the cycle of antibiotic resistance. Therefore, GangaGen’s strategy was to isolate and work with particular phage proteins (lysins) that target the bacterial cell wall. Their most advanced

180  Victor Secco protein is able to degrade MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) cells and was moving into the clinical trial phase at the time of my fieldwork in 2019 (Hariharan et al. 2020). Their goal is to produce a gel for topical use on the nasal passages, mainly as a prophylactic for medical staff to apply before interventions, to prevent the spread of MRSA. While this strategy circumvents some of the issues with phage therapy, it does transform phages into another kind of antibiotic substance that can be produced on a large industrial scale in the prêt-a-porter model. Despite claims that these proteins have a low propensity to bring about resistance in the bacteria they encounter, it is important to recall the aforementioned pluribiotic potentiality of lifeforms as a cautionary tale (Brives 2021). As Brives and Pourraz (2020) have argued, phage therapy tends to be understood as an umpteenth antibiotic, having to abide by pharmaceutical regulations and medical practices that were shaped by and for antibiotic substances. They follow Chandler’s conceptualisation of antibiotics as technical-material infrastructure for modern medicine with AMR as the moment of infrastructural inversion (Chandler 2020). They expand on this conceptualisation and further argue that antibiotics are also an epistemological infrastructure that shapes the understanding of infection and healing in biomedicine. For them, phages are “disruptors, revealing the limitations imposed by the existing infrastructures” (Brives and Pourraz 2020, 2). Phages are categorised as medicinal products and drugs in Europe and the United States respectively, and as such need to follow the same processes as other industrially produced drugs, based on good manufacturing practices (GMPs), demonstrated efficacy and safety via randomised controlled trials (RCTs), and marketing authorisation. As discussed above, phages are biological entities on the edges of life in the sense that while they can be understood as merely a bundle of molecules outside of their hosts, inside their hosts phages are very much alive. This means that the GMPs in place for industrial drugs, which require medicines to be standardised, are not easily applied to mutable and pluribiotic viruses. When it comes to RCTs, the specificity of phages makes it hard to produce robust evidence of efficacy. For example, all patients in a trial would have to be infected with the same species (or even strain) of a bacterium for sufficient evidence to be gathered within the current frameworks. Brives and Pourraz also note that the assessment of the efficacy of drugs is based on an antibiotic epistemology and thus focuses on the eradication of bacterial colonies as a standard understanding of “cure.” In the case of phages, this is again not so straightforward, as infections can be controlled to a degree at which they do not trigger symptoms in the patient, without it always being possible or even necessary to achieve the total eradication of an infection in the same timeframe as with conventional broadspectrum antibiotics. This can be illustrated through the case of Pranav Johri, founder of an initiative called Vitalis Phage Therapy, which helps people in India gain access

Microbes and Biocultural Diversity in the Ganges  181 to phage therapy from the Eliava Centre in Georgia. In search of a cure for a prostate infection that was largely unresponsive to antibiotic treatments, Pranav came across phage therapy and went to Georgia to get himself treated. As he describes in his talks and on his website, the process was not as simple as taking a course of antibiotics at home. Samples had to be taken, then there was a long treatment period, and a couple of return visits to Georgia for more samples and treatment before the infection could be considered cured or eradicated. The process took over two years. Pranav’s experience demonstrates how phage-based approaches to curing bacterial infections depend on a variety of factors and particular time frames, with the possibility of resistance, relapse, and reinfection being ever-present. “Cure” in this sense is better understood as a promise that can be broken, or, as Bharat Venkat (2016) puts it, “as endings lacking finality” (2016, 477). Venkat’s understanding of cures comes out of his research on tuberculosis in India and the troubling fact that people are still dying from a disease understood as curable. Drawing on the history of tuberculosis treatments, which also involved the first RCTs, Venkat shows that the cure has been defined and objectified statistically as degrees of treatment efficacy, “a promise of cure but not a guarantee” (Venkat 2016, 486). The evidence provided by RCTs also includes the limits of cure; relapse and resistance are statistically expected, and thus “a cure could fail and yet remain a cure” (Venkat 2016, 483). Understanding cure as it is statistically shaped by RCTs, Venkat describes an ending that is not final; the cured might relapse and need further treatments that will then provide renewed promise. Phages hold out their own promise for treating bacterial infections, and yet, because viruses do not fulfil the same kinds of scientific standards set by chemical antibiotic substances, they remain elusive as a cure. Unable to fulfil the bureaucratic obligations that apply to drugs, phages are mostly used on a case-by-case basis when infections do not respond to antibiotics anymore, following the logic of compassionate use, as in the case of Professor Gopal Nath’s work in Varanasi. This kind of phage therapy follows a sur-mesure approach, in which samples are collected from the infected tissue and compared in the laboratory with the bank of phages available. If an active phage is found that seems to match the particular pathogenic bacteria, it is tested (phagogram). If no phages are active, the laboratory must either “train” a banked phage or “hunt” for new phages in the ­environment—most commonly, in local contaminated waters such as sewage and rivers, including the Ganges. This process has been proposed as the ideal way forward for phage therapy, as it is targeted, reduces the chances of resistance, and avoids all the intricacies of drug development according to the framework described above (Brives and Froissart 2021). However, this depends on regulatory changes in relation to phages so that they are not considered as another industrial drug, but as, for example, ingredients in individualised pharmaceutical preparations (Brives and Froissart 2021).

182  Victor Secco While bacteriophages are not a panacea for all ailments, they can offer one possibility for dealing with resistant infections in conjunction with other therapies (Loc-Carrillo and Abedon 2011; Brives 2021). However, as I have tried to show, the hurdles to phage therapy are multi-layered and intrinsically connected with the material, epistemological, and financial antibiotic infrastructure. Antibiotics have transformed not only bacterial genes but also the very parameters through which health, cure, and efficiency are judged (Chandler 2020). Once these infrastructures are exposed as such and no longer taken for granted, it is possible, according to Chandler (2020), to rethink these systems and their fluxes: This opens up possibilities for reconfiguring AMR (antimicrobial resistance) research and action by shifting the focus of attention across scales and enabling different forms of care, and different publics, to come into view. Such shifts enable us to conceive of AMR not only as ‘The End of Modern Medicine’ but as an invitation to an era of medicine beyond that defined through modernity. (2020, 10) Phage therapy supposes a different understanding of medicine and the microbial world, one that is closer to Lorimer’s (2020) probiotic turn—“using life to manage life”—and that focuses on the effects of different kinds of relationships between species, working with diversity and not against it. A probiotic or postPasteurian approach implies a more nuanced understanding of microbes and their interactions with the world around them. The focus shifts to the kinds of relationships being made and the types of microbes that would be more beneficial in fostering mutualistic rather than antagonistic relations, finding balance within diversity. Going beyond the dualism of anti- and pro-biotic approaches, Brives (2021) suggests that phages open the possibility of developing a “pluribiotic medicine” that is attentive to the creative power of the living: The deeply relational nature of living things is a forgotten element in antibiotic therapy. Phages, by their particularities, help us to remember this dimension and to develop, as many agents in the phage therapy hope, a medicine that actively takes pluribiosis into account. (Brives 2021, 265) However, Brives reminds us that the choice is still ours, as phages could become just another form of antibiotic substance engulfed in the capitalist logic of Big Pharma and more broadly in antibiotic modernity, where they might replicate and even exacerbate the cycle of cure, resistance, and relapse ad infinitum. Since phages are lively viruses and cannot be controlled, despite human fantasies of control over nature, there is no real way to predict the precise outcomes for human and environmental health once they are deployed in large numbers.

Microbes and Biocultural Diversity in the Ganges  183 Phages also guide us towards the less industrialised and more sur-mesure forms of medicine and care that are necessary to tackle antibiotic resistance and to produce more efficient healthcare systems—a medicine beyond antibiotic modernity and neoliberal Big Pharma. Building phage banks from local sources and keeping a constant exchange between field and laboratory, body and pharmacy, phage therapy could provide an efficient way of controlling infections and enabling a better life alongside the diversity of microbes that shape our very beings. Reducing the use of antibiotics and targeting only the necessary pathogens, phages could provide new ways of healing from and living with microbes that are not defined by antibiotics and germ theory, but that take into account the pluribiotic potential of lively entities. For this to happen, phage therapy practitioners would need to resist the capitalist drive to become a niche medical treatment available only to those who can afford private care and travel expenses, risking a relapse into an even more neoliberal age for medicine. Having the means to cure resistant infections and not being able to provide it because of systemic and economic factors highlights the failings of the profit-guided pharmaceutical industry, and capitalism in general, when it comes to providing better health for humans and the planet. A pluribiotic medicine might go further, and help redefine not only health beyond the human but also the drive for profit and related economic values that guide much of human interactions with more-than-humans. Conclusion In this chapter, I have suggested that modern, capitalist, and neoliberal modes of interaction between humans and more-than-humans are damaging the biosocial diversity of the planet. In particular, I focused on how pharmaceutical treatments (antibiotics) aimed at the destruction of certain life forms have created even more complex phenomena (resistance) that jeopardise both the biological wellbeing of humans and more-than-humans as well as socio-cultural practices. I followed authors who are rethinking antibiotics and probiotics beyond the substances themselves, instead connecting bioscientific ideas to biopolitical outcomes to consider the local multispecies relations that might nurture alternative futures for microbes and humans. Taking the Ganges in Varanasi as an ethnographic case, I have briefly shown how antibiotic substances and attitudes have created a precarious situation in and around the river, and how that could threaten the health of living beings as well as human religious and cultural lives. In spite of antibiotic resistance threats, I have argued that alternative approaches can be found in the same contaminated waters. I have followed the history and contemporary hurdles of phage therapy, exploring the promises and perils of this “forgotten cure” and emphasising its entanglements in antibiotic infrastructures of health. Phage therapy can be helpful in fighting antibiotic resistance, but it requires approaches that go beyond the antibiotic infrastructures of modern neoliberal capitalism to nurture alternative futures. For a pluribiotic

184  Victor Secco approach to succeed, it must also challenge the modes of production, distribution, and consumption that have been shaped by Big Pharma and modern medicine thus far. This is not a naïve return to pre-antibiotic times, but rather an understanding that health depends on diversity in complex ways. The case of the phages and the Ganges River provides the beginning of an alternative possibility for the relationships between humans and microbes that is not based on fear and antibiotics but on understanding and the management of microbial community diversity for better futures to be nurtured in common. Notes 1 Here I will use the English (Ganges) and Hindi (Ganga) names interchangeably when referring to the river, however, it is worth noting that when referring to the Hindu goddess the most common term used in Varanasi is Ganga, normally followed by the respect particle Ji or Maa (mother). 2 The transmission of pathogens from other animal species to humans. 3 https://eptc.ge/. 4 Microbiopolitics is a term coined and defined by Heather Paxson as: “the creation of categories of microscopic biological agents; the anthropocentric evaluation of such agents; and the elaboration of appropriate human behaviours vis-à-vis microorganisms engaged in infection, inoculation, and digestion.” (Paxson 2008, 17).

References Alley, Kelly D. 2002. On the Banks of Ganga: When Wastewater Meets a Sacred River. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. ———. 2014. “Varanasi’s Ganga Wastewater Management : Why Has It Remained Such an Intractable Problem?” South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People 1–18. https://sandrp.in/2014/09/25/varanasis-ganga-wastewater-managementwhy-has-it-remained-such-an-intractable-problem/. Barrett, Ronald. 2008. Aghor Medicine: Pollution, Death, and Healing in Northern India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. 2000. Sorting Things Out: Classifications and Its Consequences. Cambridge: MIT Press. Brives, Charlotte. 2021. “Pluribiosis and the Never-Ending Microgeohistories.” In With Microbes, edited by Charlotte Brives, Matthäus Rest, Salla Sariola, 247–67. Manchester: Mattering Press. Brives, Charlotte, and Rémy Froissart. 2021. “Evolutions et Involutions Dans La Biomédecine, Thérapie Phagique et Traitement Des Infections Bactériennes Antibiorésistantes.” Revue d’Anthropologie Des Connaissances 15 (3). http://journals. openedition.org/rac/24239 Brives, Charlotte, and Jessica Pourraz. 2020. “Phage Therapy as a Potential Solution in the Fight against AMR: Obstacles and Possible Futures.” Palgrave Communications 6 (1): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0478-4. Chandler, Clare I.R. 2020. “Current Accounts of Antimicrobial Resistance: Stabilisation, Individualisation and Antibiotics as Infrastructure.” Palgrave Communications 5 (53): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0263-4. Cohen, Ed. 2009. A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. https:// doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv121028v.4.

Microbes and Biocultural Diversity in the Ganges  185 Colopy, Cheryl Gene. 2012. Dirty, Sacred Rivers: Confronting South Asia’s Water Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press. de Chadarevian, Soraya, and Roberta Raffaetà. 2021. “COVID-19: Rethinking the Nature of Viruses.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (1): 1–5. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s40656-020-00361-8. Doron, Assa. 2013. Life on the Ganga: Boatmen and the Ritual Economy of Banaras. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2020. “Stench and Sensibilities: On Living with Waste, Animals and Microbes in India.” Australian Journal of Anthropology 32 (S1): 23–41. https://doi. org/10.1111/taja.12380. Eck, Diana L. 1983. Banāras: City of Light. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hankin, ME. 2011. “The Bactericidal Action of the Waters of the Jamuna and Ganges Rivers on Cholera Microbes. Ann. Inst. Pasteur 10:511–523 (1896).” Bacteriophage 1 (3): 117–26. https://doi.org/10.4161/bact.1.3.16736. Hariharan, Sukumar, Shashimohan Keelara, Vivek Daniel Paul, Bharathi Sriram, Aradhana Amin Vipra, and Tanjore Balganesh. 2020. “Phage Therapy—­ Bacteriophage and Phage-Derived Products as Anti- Infective Drugs.” In Drug Discovery Targeting Drug-Resistant Bacteria, edited by Prashant Kesharwani, Sidharth Chopra, and Arunava Dasgupta, 301–59. Elsevier Inc. https://doi.org/10.1016/ B978-0-12-818480-6/00011-4. Kedzior, Sya Buryn. 2015. “Pollution and the Renegotiation of River Goddess Worship and Water Use Practices among the Hindu Devotees of India’s Ganges/Ganga River.” In The Changing World Religion Map: Sacred Places, Identities, Practices and Politics, edited by Stanley D Brunn, 557–76. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9376-6_28. Kirksey, Eben. 2020. “The Emergence of COVID-19: A Multispecies Story.” Anthropology Now 12 (1): 11–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/19428200.2020.1760631. Kochhar, Rijul. 2020. “The Virus in the Rivers: Histories and Antibiotic Afterlives of the Bacteriophage at the Sangam in Allahabad.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 74 (4): 625–51. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2020.0019. Kuchment, Anna. 2012. The Forgotten Cure: The Past and Future of Phage Therapy. New York: Springer. Kumar, Shivani. 2020. “Ghats in Varanasi Remain Deserted on Ganga Dussehra.” Hindustan Times, June 1, 2020, Online edition. https://www.hindustantimes.com/ cities/ghats-in-varanasi-remain-deserted-on-ganga-dussehra/story-6DvhyHFPHHxL62bcbzguhM.html. Latour, Bruno. 1988. The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Loc-Carrillo, Catherine, and Stephen T. Abedon. 2011. “Pros and Cons of Phage Therapy.” Bacteriophage 1 (2): 111–14. https://doi.org/10.4161/bact.1.2.14590. Lorimer, Jamie. 2020. The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Maitland, Padma D. 2019. “The Religious and Affective Actualities of the Yamuna: Conversations with Pandit Premchand Sharma, Nigambodh Ghat, Delhi.” In Water Histories of South Asia, edited by Sugata Ray and Maddipati Venugopal, 245– 59. Routledge. Martin, Emily. 1994. Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture— from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

186  Victor Secco Mishra, Raghvendra Raman, and Gopal Nath. 2020. “Detection of Bacteriophages against Eskape Group of Nosocomial Pathogens from Ganga River Water during Community Bath at Various Rituals: Since 2013–2019.” Journal of Applied Pharmaceutical Sciences and Research 1: 17–21. https://doi.org/10.31069/japsr.v3i1.5. Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520928251. Myelnikov, Dmitriy. 2018. “An Alternative Cure: The Adoption and Survival of Bacteriophage Therapy in the USSR, 1922–1955.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 73 (4): 385–411. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jry024. NAP-AMR. 2017. “National Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance.” Government of India. Nerlich, Brigitte, and Richard James. 2009. ““The Post-Antibiotic Apocalypse” and the “War on Superbugs”: Catastrophe Discourse in Microbiology, Its Rhetorical Form and Political Function.” Public Understanding of Science 18 (5): 574–90. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662507087974. Niveshika, Savita Singh, Ekta Verma, and Arun Kumar Mishra. 2016. “Isolation, Characterization and Molecular Phylogeny of Multiple Metal Tolerant and Antibiotics Resistant Bacterial Isolates from River Ganga, Varanasi, India.” Edited by Lian Pin Koh. Cogent Environmental Science 2 (1): 1273750. https://doi.org/10.10 80/23311843.2016.1273750. Pandey, Geeta. 2021. “Covid-19: India’s Holiest River Is Swollen with Bodies.” BBC News, May 19, 2021, sec. India. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asiaindia-57154564. Parry, Jonathan. 1994. Death in Banaras. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paxson, Heather. 2008. “Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of RawMilk Cheese in the United States.” Cultural Anthropology 23 (1): 15–47. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2008.00002.x. Paxson, Heather. 2014. “Microbiopolitics.” In Multispecies Salon, edited by Eben Kirksey, 111–21. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822376989-005. Rohwer, Forest, Merry Youle, Heather Maughan, and Nao Hisakawa. 2014. Life in Our Phage World: A Centennial Field Guide to the Earth’s Most Diverse Inhabitants. San Diega, CA: Wholon. Shotwell, Alexis. 2016. Against Purity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Summers, William C. 2012. “The Strange History of Phage Therapy.” Bacteriophage 2 (2): 130–33. https://doi.org/10.4161/bact.20757. The New Indian Express. 2022. “Water Quality of Two Ganga Stretches Improved, of Bathing Standard Now: Official.” Accessed May 29, 2023. https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2022/mar/12/water-quality-of-two-ganga-stretchesimproved-ofbathing-standard-now-official-2429296.html. van Dooren, Thom. 2011. Vulture. London: Reaktion Books. Venkat, Bharat Jayram. 2016. “Cures.” Public Culture 28 (3): 475–97.

Afterword Rethinking “Green” Energy Futures through Avian Landscapes Sara Asu Schroer

It’s springtime in Spain in 2023 and I am accompanying Anselmo, a biologist, on his way to count bird carcasses on the grounds of a new small wind energy park in Soria province. We are surrounded by the wide-open high planes of the autonomous community of Castile and León, strong winds blowing, productively turning the turbine blades. Soria, a bit more than an hour’s drive northeast of the sprawling capital Madrid, constitutes Spain’s most depopulated area. The “empty land” attracts renewable energy investors. Anselmo and his team usually find dead birds here – the small bodies, nothing more than a pile of grey-brown feathers, difficult to spot on the dry ground partly covered with wheat seedlings. The biologists take note of the finds as part of monitoring the effects of the wind turbines on bird life for an environmental impact report. Spending 45 minutes to an hour at each of the 12 turbines (two days a week over several months), Anselmo walks in a routinized and meticulous manner up and down the turbine fields, his eyes fixed on the floor. The longer we do this work the more the soundscape of wind and moving blades becomes disorienting; the turning turbines cast their large moving shadows on the surrounding agricultural fields that extend far into the distance. Nevertheless, we still hear birds – at the high time of their spring courtship rituals – larks are busy attracting each other, building new ground nests on the edges of the fields. Pausing our work, we observe a lark taking off for a “helicopter flight,” propelling itself in tight circles up into the air in an attempt to impress a partner. “Calandra larks,” Anselmo speaks loudly against the surrounding noise, “it is mating season – if they fly too high the blades strike them down…they are so small it is difficult to find them, you have to watch out for the feathers.” Bodies of larger birds, such as vultures, buzzards or eagles, are of course easier to locate. Griffon vultures regularly cross the area. Spain is home to a large majority of Europe’s griffon vulture population, with several colonies across the country. As is true for many other bird species, the collision with energy infrastructure such as cables or wind turbines is the prevalent reason for human-caused death of these large, wide-ranging scavengers (closely DOI: 10.4324/9781003439011-12

188  Sara Asu Schroer followed by poisoning). On our way across the turbine field, we see a couple of dead vultures. Now and then Anselmo points to a place where he found a vulture in the past. If they are found, their bodies are counted and subsequently left in the field. Attracted by the reliable supply of carcasses, a badger has built a den on a slope adjacent to one of the turbines. On irregular intervals, the sound of the turning turbine blades is dominated by a harsh, hammering siren-like sound. It is supposed to discourage approaching birds from flying too close to the turbine blades. The consultancy firm, hired to monitor the turbines, came up with this idea, installing loudspeakers and cameras on the more deadly turbines. In principle, the sound is to discourage the birds from coming too close and the camera system to alert people to problematic bird movement in order to halt the blades to avoid a collision, “Of course it does not work,” Anselmo dryly comments, “the sound means nothing to the birds, they may not even hear it. And nobody actually guards the cameras so the turbine will never be switched off.” The wind park we are visiting is one of several hundred new renewable energy projects springing up all over Spain in the rush to sustainable energy futures. Green energy is a lucrative investment. Spurred on by subsidies from the European Union and legitimized in the name of urgency to curb global carbon emissions, national and international corporations profit from “green” infrastructural projects. Geared towards extracting as much energy from wind and sun as possible, to keep the global economy going, the urgency of the climate crisis leads to rushed decisions over land use and the ecological consequences. The Spanish government, for instance, has released a policy according to which it is now possible to build renewable energy projects in thus far protected areas of the Natura 2000 network. To reduce bureaucracy for developers, the once obligatory environmental impact assessments of prospective sides can now be skipped altogether. The uncontrolled expansion of the renewable energy grid in the name of reducing global emissions, however, has serious consequences for already strained ecosystems where myriad living beings already struggle for survival. On my trip to Spain, this point was also brought home by Carmen, a veterinarian working for a wildlife hospital in a region characterized by intensive agriculture and industry. In our area solar panels are shooting up like mushrooms, every land owner, who has a bit of space left to use tries to invest in them, or lets others do it on his land. It is too much and too fast…The animals cannot keep up, she noted pointing to the many owls and other birds that populate the aviaries of the small NGO’s hospital. Of course, the animals we see here are the “lucky ones,” most of the animals that arrive at the hospital are already dead or so badly injured that they have to be euthanized. Most of the deaths

Afterword  189 are caused by roads, cables, turbines, fences and generally diminishing landscapes remain unseen and unnoticed. My observations of ongoing research into avian conservation in changing European landscapes are in many ways connected to the central emphasis of this book. As the introduction highlights, the main aim of this edited volume is to trace the grounded transformations of social and ecological relationships, brought on by the effects of the global market economy. Following Eriksen (2021), the volume sees the predominant effect to be a process of homogenization of cultural and biological diversity rooted in ongoing histories of imperialism and colonization. Created in relation to global decision-­making and economic flows, the resultant monocultures and degraded ecosystems create poor living environments for human and ecological communities alike. The editors highlight that, at the same time as capitalism is based on a modern conceptualization of nature as a resource, distant from the human realm, it also creates new unintended intimacies with the more-than-human world. Exploring this paradox of cultivating “proximity through distance,” the contributors too explore alternative modes of coexistence that are sustained within, outside or despite degraded landscapes dominated by practices of, for instance, modern industrial agriculture, intensive livestock keeping, deforestation and extraction. Based on the environmental humanities and multispecies anthropology, the volume argues that paying attention to the experiences, practices, narratives and concepts of local and Indigenous communities as well as their wider multispecies entanglements, may contribute to “nurturing alternative futures” through the sharing of diverse future imaginaries and narratives. Indeed, amidst our current moment of multiple interconnected crises, ecological, climatic, democratic, economic, social and more, the question of how we may imagine and thus act towards more just and livable futures is an urgent one. It is a widely recognized truth that the dominant mode of capitalist production with its inherent logic of perpetual economic growth will ultimately lead to the collapse of global capitalist societies as we know them. The responsibilities for and consequences of this ongoing human-caused ecological and climatic breakdown are unequally distributed and hit the most vulnerable nations, communities and individuals the hardest. Severe floods, droughts and disease outbreaks have caused more suffering in nations of the Global South, where violent histories of colonialism, weaker social and economic infrastructures and unstable political systems meet unprecedented climatic and environmental conditions. In Europe, once the centre of colonial power, a felt experience of the lived realities of climate change has only recently begun to manifest in wider public awareness. An ongoing drought in Europe begins to make palpable what climate change means; dwindling water resources and already exhausted soils threaten food production of some of the key food exporters in Europe, record heatwaves plague millions of residents in overheated urban environments and wildfires destroy thousands

190  Sara Asu Schroer of hectares of forest and wildlife. How may a nurturing future for all be achieved, given these dire circumstances? In mainstream public discourse, promoted by diverse societal actors from Fridays for Future to neoliberal conglomerations, the predominant answer to this question is the rapid expansion of renewable energy infrastructures and with it the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. While it is without doubt that renewable energies have to be part of imagining the future, it is also evident that similar to other processes of homogenization that follow the template of the global market economy – landscapes disrupted by wind parks or solar energy infrastructures put yet another remarkable imprint of exploitation on already strained ecosystems. The narratives of proponents of the green shift, such as the European Union, are deeply entangled with those of sustainable development, for instance, formulated in the UN’s sustainability goals. As Kavesh (Chapter 2, this volume) emphasizes, these narratives and their foundational beliefs in economic growth and technological innovation, have been espoused by scientists and activists as contradictory in themselves and inherently counterproductive to creating just, livable futures for all. Without a holistic, coordinated approach, which links degrowth, ecological (including human) health and climate change mitigation together, the heavily subsidized “green shift” in Europe runs the risk of losing credibility as a solution and of becoming just another form of exploitative extraction – exacerbating what some are calling the Sixth Extinction that is already long on the way (Kolbert 2014). As Celermajer and her collaborators (2022) point out, today we are confronted with differently positioned future narratives circulating in public discourses that inherently shape the ways we imagine and act towards the future. They identify three key climate imaginaries: the “technofix imaginary” (the belief that technology will fix everything); the “apocalypse or doom” imaginary (the belief that humanity is doomed and every action would come too late); and the “business as usual imaginary” (the attitude that nothing has to change in the face of the climate crises). Yet, none of these narratives seem to have the potential to create the types of future imaginaries that motivate people to act and take action in their everyday lives. Why do not more people mobilize against destructive practices, if the reasons for and consequences of climate change, extinction and ecological destruction are clear and confirmed by an overwhelming majority of scientists and organizations? Why are there not more communities turning away from harmful behaviours and acting differently? Responding to these pressing questions of our time, this volume highlights the importance of paying attention to alternative narratives and future-oriented practices in places where biological and socio-cultural diversity are intertwined. Through grounded empirical research, the contributors explore what kind of future imaginaries and potentials for action are revealed in local and Indigenous responses to life in degraded landscapes.

Afterword  191 Based on a wealth of research in anthropology and multispecies studies, the chapters share a concern for bridging the gap between the natural and the cultural, by acknowledging the “biosocial” (Ingold and Pálsson 2013) constitution of life. Together they help to challenge the idea of human control over nature and explore practices and narratives of more-than-human co-habitation that point to alternative ideas and practices beyond an “objectified nature.” By exploring diverse contexts in which the flourishing of more-than-­ human communities is at stake, the volume argues for an understanding of multispecies coexistence as living with others despite their alterity. However, coexistence is seldom a purely mutualistic or harmonious affair and includes ambivalent relationships of care (Schroer 2021; Schroer et al. 2021). Like the description of the entanglements of avian lives with infrastructures of the “green” energy shift, the ethnographic narratives of the contributions show that in anthropogenic landscapes, where livable spaces decrease, new, unintended intimacies with a myriad of different creatures from microbes to wildlife come into being. Diversity in these contexts is seldom stable but is constantly shaping and reshaping in relation to the emerging configurations of life in the Anthropocene. Through cultivating “arts of attentiveness” (van Dooren et al. 2016) and by paying attention to alternative future-oriented ideas, practices, and relationships, this volume contributes to new imaginative horizons that may enable action towards more just and nurturing futures. In doing so this edited collection offers a vital contribution to ongoing debates in multispecies anthropology and the environmental humanities more widely. Acknowledgements I am grateful to everyone who has so far participated in my current research project “Living with Vultures in the Sixth Extinction,” thank you for your time and collaboration. My project receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 896272. References Celermajer, Danielle. 2022. “Episode 1 What Are Climate Imaginaries?” In Reimagined Futures Podcast Series, edited by Aston Brown, Genevieve Wright. https:// www.sydney.edu.au/sydney-environment-institute/our-research/environmentalimaginaries-and-storytelling/future-climate-imaginaries/grounded-imaginaries/ reimagined-futures.html Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2021. “The Loss of Diversity in the Anthropocene Biological and Cultural Dimensions.” Frontiers in Political Science 3: 743610. https://doi. org/10.3389/fpos.2021.743610. Ingold, Tim and Gísli Pálsson 2013. Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

192  Sara Asu Schroer Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2014. The Sixth Extinction. An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt. Schroer, Sara Asu. 2021. “The Arts of Coexistence: A View from Anthropology.” Frontiers in Conservation Science, Perspectives 2. https://doi.org/10.3389/ fcosc.2021.711019. Schroer, Sara Asu, Thom van Dooren, Ursula Münster, and Hugo Reinert. 2021. Introduction: Multispecies Care in the Sixth Extinction. Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, January 26, Editor’s Forum of Cultural Anthropology. Van Dooren, Thom, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster. 2016. “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness.” Environmental Humanities 8 (1): 1–23.

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. A‑bomb survivor (hibakusha) 93 Acampora, Ralph 148 Act on Special Measures Concerning Conservation of the Environment of the Seto Island Sea 94 Act on Temporary Measures for Environmental Preservation of the Seto Inland Sea 94 agricultural labour 113 agrobiodiversity conservation 28–29, 123–27 alfalfa, insectary plant 141 Allen‑Paisant, Jason 114 Alley, Kelly D. 171 “allochthones” 113 altan gagnuur (Rhodiola spp.) 77 American Birding Association 63 AMR see antimicrobial resistance (AMR) analog cheeses 159 Anderson, David 76 animal procreation forms 20 animal sociality in dairy work 164 Anthropocene 2, 3, 8, 43, 44, 86, 100n4, 123, 169, 191; sustainability 33–34 anthropology 5, 51, 64, 107, 123, 191 antibiotics 182; modernity 9, 174–78, 183; resistance 169 anticoagulant rodenticides 142, 143, 145 antimicrobial resistance (AMR) 170, 182 aquaculture 85, 90 aquatic environmentalist 94–95 Arendt, Hannah 59

Ashe juniper (Juniperus ashei) 53, 57, 59 Arkhangai 70, 71, 77, 74, 79 Asia‑Africa Growth Corridor 37 Asian Development Bank 45n2 associations 21, 112–13, 117; positive 24 Atkins, Peter 163 Australia: breed conservation in 29; commercial breeders in 21; feral donkeys in 45n3; heritage breeds in 15, 16, 25; Indigenous and non‑Indigenous Australians 18; oyster aquaculture 87 “autochthones” 113 automated feeder 52, 57, 61, 63 bacteriophages 182 Baldy, Cutcha Risling 147 Barham, Elizabeth 161 Barrett, Ronald 171 Bellacasa, María Puig de la 4 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) 34–36 Benjamin, Ruha 108 Bennett, Richard 40 Big Bend National Park 61 “biocultural” approaches 3 biocultural diversity conservation (Yucatan, Mexico) 123; indigenous engagements with 122, 127–33; research framework of 123; threats to 132–33; transdisciplinary research field of 122 biocultural landscape, Mongolia 67–70; biodiversity of medicinal plants

194 Index 75–77; medicinal approach, changes in 78–80; mode of transport, change in 73–75; peony, as medicinal plant 77–78; seasonal mobility with oxen 70–73 biodiversity 122; crisis 122; of medicinal plants 75–77; ruptures 110–11 biological reproductivity 117 “biosocial becomings” 3 biosocial system 173 Birding (Gray) 63 Black feminist Science and Technology Studies scholarship 108 blue gentian (khukh degd) 79 Boissy, Alain 24 Bolender, Karin 43–44; The Unnaming of Aliass 43 BRI see Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Brives, Charlotte 175, 180, 182 Brown, S. 69 bura 154 Bureau of Land Management 142 California Department of Fish and Wildlife 143 Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) 140 Cannabis: cultivation 146; production 140–42 capitalism 1, 2, 9, 33, 145, 169, 178, 183, 189 capitalist 1, 2, 6–10, 90, 97, 98, 104, 106, 107, 117, 122, 126, 138, 147, 148, 170, 176, 177, 179, 182, 183, 189 carefree feeding 58 Carsten, Janet 15 cashew‑based cheese 158–60, 162 castrated yak‑cattle hybrids (khainag) 71 Castro, Viveiros de 4 Celermajer, Danielle 190 Chacoan (Catagonus wagneri) peccaries 53 Chandler, Clare 169, 177, 180, 182 Chao, Sophie 5, 99n1 cheese 153–54; analog cheese 159; cashew‑based cheese 158–60, 162; dairy‑based cheese 154, 159, 161–63, 166; Grobnik cheese 154–59, 161, 162; human cheese‑makers 154; Paški Sir (Pag

cheese) 154–55, 158, 159, 161; plant‑based cheese 154, 159, 160, 161–63, 166; traditional cheese‑making methods 159; vegan cheeses 158, 162 chemosociality 142–45 China: ambitious BRI 38; Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) 34–38; infrastructural initiatives 37 China‑Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) 34; and Donkey Skin Trade 38–42 Chinook salmon 145–46, 149 Chrulew, Matthew 19, 23 Chudakova, Tatiana 76 coastal waters, dead zone in 92–94 Cohen, Ed. 177, 178 collared peccaries (Dicotyles tajacu) 52, 53–54 colonial: habitat 107; settler project 34 community; of persons 76; resource management 86; “tsukuri sodateru gyogyō” 97 conventional animal studies 91 COVID‑19 pandemic 23, 131, 166, 173 CPEC see China‑Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) Croatia 154, 156–58, 165 crop diversity 124, 126 cultural heritage of nomadic pastoralism 81 Czerny, Sarah 9 dairy‑based cheeses 154, 159, 161–63, 166 Dave, Naisargi 4 Davis, Janae 106 dead zone, in coastal waters 92–94 deep ecology 35 Descola, Philippe 4 desertification 111, 113, 115, 117 d’Hérelle, Félix 176 Diclofenac 173 disposable animals 142–45 diverse societal actors 190 domestic and wild multispecies diversity 67–70; biodiversity of medicinal plants 75–77; medicinal approach, changes in 78–80; mode of transport, change in 73–75; peony, as medicinal plant 77–78; seasonal mobility with oxen 70–73

Index  195 Domestication Gone Wild (Swanson et al.) 6 Donaldson, Sue 53, 62 Donkey Skin Trade 38–42 Dooren, Thom van 6, 173 Doron, Assa 171 Douglas, Mary 51 ecological change, local descriptions of 109–11 ecological matricide 117 ecotones, in Emerald Triangle 137–42, 145–49 eelgrass 92 ejiao, traditional Chinese medicine 34, 40, 43 Emel, Jody 17 Emerald Triangle 139–40, 143, 147; animal species in 138; cannabis growing community in 143; ecotones in 137–42, 145–49; human communities in 139; landscape in 143; more‑than‑human relationships in 147; “zones of intermingling” in 149 Endangered Species Act 142 The End of Nomadism? (Humphrey and Sneath) 70 environment 55, 61, 68, 88, 89, 91–96, 98, 99, 107, 109, 111, 122, 124, 126, 133, 142, 145, 147, 148, 177, 178, 189 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland 2, 189 Eshun, Kodwo 117 Ethics: of “nearness and farness” 1; of resistance 10 ethnography 3, 42, 51, 99, 99n1, 133 ethology, in human‑animal studies 52 Euro‑American “natural order of things” 6 Euro‑centric philosophy 7 European Union 68, 153, 188, 190 Evans‑Pritchard, Edward E. 51 Faier, Lieba 55 Federal Law for the Promotion and Protection of Native Corn 126 Ferdinand, Malcolm 107, 113, 115 Fijn, Natasha 6, 9 First Nations communities 19 fonoli 115–17 The Forgotten Cure (Kuchment) 177

Fuentes, Agustín 1 future 1–5, 33–36, 44, 51, 64, 79, 81, 86, 147–49; convivial multispecies futures 18, 28–29; decolonized future 8; entangled multispecies future 10; “green” energy 187–91; intertwined future 9; interwoven future 8; uncertain future 89, 94, 99 Gade, Daniel 161 Galloway, Anne 17 GangaGen 179 Ganges, microbes and biocultural diversity in 169–70; Gods and microbes 170–74; phage therapy and antibiotic modernity 174–78; “probiotic turn” 179–83 “generalized domestication” 3 General Law on Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples 126 germ theory 177, 183 Gertenbach, Lars 100n14 Gibson, James J. 58 Gillespie, Kathryn 26 Glissant, Édouard 7 good manufacturing practices (GMPs) 180 Great Hiroshima Reconstruction Plan 94 “green” energy 187–91 Gressier, Catie 4 Grobnik cheese 154–59, 161, 162 Guterres, Antonio 35 habituation 55, 56 Hage, Ghassan 3 “half‑farming and half‑fishing” (hannō‑hangyō) approach 96 Hankin, ME. 174–75 Hanson, Katherine T. 55 Haraway, Donna J. 2, 5, 7, 8, 11, 18, 28, 42, 43–44, 60, 64, 106, 138 Hartigan Jr, John 52 Harvey, Graham 76 Hayashi, Takao (Hayashi‑san) 87–89, 93, 98 Heidegger, Martin 58 Heldke, Lisa 25 Herders, Mongolia 67, 69, 70–72, 74–80 heritage breed farmers/farms 16, 18–21, 23, 24, 27–29

196 Index Hiroshima Bay 86, 87, 94 Hiroshima, oyster restoration in: dead zone in coastal waters 92–94; makeshift domus, seafloor cultivation as 90–92; multiscalar unknowings, thinking through 85–86; satoumi assemblages 87–90; uncomfortable unknowings, seafloor cultivation as 94–98 Hobbes, Thomas 178 homeland (nutag) 76 hondawara 92 Howell, S. 17 human/humanity 1; human‑animal framework 147, 148; human‑animal relations 51; human‑centred development models 34; human–nonhuman “symbiopolitical” relationalities 92; human‑peccary encounters and perception 55–59; human‑peccary relations 63; labour 111–13; sociality 154; universalism 17 Humboldt County, California 137, 139, 141, 142, 145 Humphrey, Caroline 68, 70, 72, 74; The End of Nomadism? 70 Hussain, Shafqat 5 hybrid: biosocial communities 3; domus 92; Mongol cattle with yak (khainag) 74 Ibn al‑’Arabi, al‑Shaykh al‑Akbar 2 Indigenous: Australians 18; engagements, with biocultural diversity conservation 127–33; habitus 124; language 125–26; Mongol breeds of herd animal 67; sovereignty 145–47; transspecies engagement 122; Yucatec Mayan 8 “infrastructure development” 42 Ingold, Tim 3 Inner Asian pastoralism 70 intangible cultural heritage, Mongolia 68 intentional disturbances 91 intergenerational transmission of cultural knowledge 126 International Monetary Fund 37 “Iron Brother” 38

Japanese coastal aquaculture 90 Japanese Fisheries Agency 96 javelinas 3, 52, 54 62; human‑javelina interactions 54 Jewsiewicki, B. 116 Jigozen 98; case of 91–92, 97; Jigozen Fisheries Cooperative Association 87–88, 97; more‑than‑human ocean in 93; oyster domus in 91; oyster producers in 89, 96, 97, 99; sediment condition in 88 Johnson, Adam 6 Johri, Pranav 180, 181 Karuk community 145 Karuk Tribe 145–46 Kavesh, Muhammad 5 Khangai, deity 78 Khangai (region), Mongolia 9, 68, 70, 74, 76 Khan, Dera Ismail 40 “The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa‑China Sustainable Donkey Development Program” 39 killability 142–45 kinning and killing, on Australian heritage breed farms 17, 20–23, 28 Kirksey, Eben 8, 142 Kisangani, Democratic Republic of Congo 104, 110; hinterland 105, 106, 108, 109, 112–18; inhabitants of 106; landscape of 106; peasants of 108; school in 114 Klamath River 145–46, 149 Kohn, Eduardo 4, 5 Kuchment, Anna: The Forgotten Cure 177 Kymlicka, Will 53 #LandBack movement 147 landscape ruptures 111 Latour, Bruno 3, 177 The Law Concerning Special Measures for Environmental Preservation of the Seto Inland Sea 85, 95 law enforcement 140 Law, John 23, 163 Levinas, Emmanuel 5 Lien, Marianne 6, 23, 90, 91 lifestyle immigrants 140

Index  197 Likaka, Osumaka 112 likelemba labour systems 112, 117 linguistic diversity 122, 126 Linné, Tobias 153 livestock sector 15 Lkhagvadorj, Dorjburgedaa et al. 74 local agrobiodiversity 124 local polyculture farming 129–30 Lorimer, Jamie 9, 169, 179, 182 maize diversity 127–29 makeshift domus, seafloor cultivation as 90–92 mammary secretion 153 Martin, Emily 177, 178 Mathur, Nayanika 5, 99 Mayan societies 123 Maya‑speaking communities 124 McAthy, Karen 159; “Plant based Cheesemaking” 159 McCrow‑Young, Ally 153 medicinal plants: biodiversity of 75–77; changes in 78–80 Meijer, Eva 53, 60, 64 Meserve, Ruth 78 Methicillin‑resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) 180 Michelfelder, Diane 148 microbes (Pencillium roqueforti) 159, 163–66, 165, 183 microbes and biocultural diversity, in Ganges 169–70; Gods and microbes 170–74; phage therapy and antibiotic modernity 174–78; “probiotic turn” 179–83 microbial: cultures 9, 155; sociality 164, 166 microbiopolitics 184n4 Miller, Theresa 5–6 milpa agriculture 123–25, 125, 126, 127–32 multispecies diversity see domestic and wild mode of transport, change in 73–75 mokili mobimba 110, 117 Mol, Annemarie 163 Mollett, Sharlene 106 Mongolian Plateau 68–69, 75, 81 Mongolia’s biocultural landscape 67–70; biodiversity of medicinal plants 75–77; herders 67, 69, 70–72, 74–80; medicinal approach,

changes in 78–80; mode of transport, changes in 73–75; pastoralism 74; peony, as medicinal plant 77–78; seasonal mobility with oxen 70–73 monotheism 115 more‑than‑human 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9–11, 19, 33, 34, 38, 42, 44, 51, 55, 59, 64, 86, 90, 93, 98, 99, 105–7, 114, 134, 138, 143, 144, 147–49, 169, 170, 173, 183, 189, 191 MRSA see Methicillin‑resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) Mucur miehei 158 multiscalar unknowings, thinking through 85–86 multispecies: anthropology 189; ethnographies 6, 70; futures 28–29; mobile pastoralism 80, 81; politics, intimate 55, 59–63; relational approach 34, 145–47; relationality, models of 145–47; studies 191 multispecies entanglements: in communities 127–28; shift in 128–29 mundialization 114 mutuality and individuality, tensions between 111–13 Myelnikov, Dmitriy 176 Nading, Alex 143 Nath, Gopal 174, 181 National Institute for Agronomic Study 104 Natura 2000 network 188 “naturecultures” 7, 106 necropolitics of wildlife management policies 145 Negrocene 107 “Negro‑Plantationocene” 106–8, 117, 118 ngonda 111 Nihon Sankei 87 Nimmo, Richie 164 non‑contact agonism 54 nonhuman labour 109–11 non‑Indigenous Australians 18 non‑traditional parameters 43 Northern California 137, 143; Cannabis cultivation in 141; ecotones in 138; Emerald Triangle of 138;

198 Index ethnographic fieldwork in 139; human–environmental relations in 145; more‑than‑human neighbours in 138; Native Nations of 146; redwoods in 147; residents 142; rural communities in 148; self‑sufficiency in 140; tri‑county region of 139; Wild boars (Sus scrofa) in 141 Northern Spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) 142 Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 106, 108 ocean cultivation: dead zone in coastal waters 92–94; makeshift domus, seafloor cultivation as 90–92; multiscalar unknowings, thinking through 85–86; satoumi assemblages 87–90; uncomfortable unknowings, seafloor cultivation as 94–98 olfaction 55, 57, 58 ontological integration 35 ovoo 68, 79 oxcarts, wooden (ukher tereg) 69, 71, 72–75, 93, 96, 156 oxen, seasonal mobility with 70–73, 81n3 oyster restoration in Hiroshima: dead zone in coastal waters 92–94; makeshift domus, seafloor cultivation as 90–92; multiscalar unknowings, thinking through 85–86; satoumi assemblages 87–90; seafloor cultivation as 94–98 oysters: aquaculture 7, 91; boats 88; ontological distinctiveness of 85; restoration in Hiroshima (see oyster restoration in Hiroshima) Pacific oyster (Magallana gigas) 87 Pag sheep breed 154 Pálsson, Gísli 3 Parreñas, Juno 6 Paški Sir (Pag cheese) 154–55, 158, 159, 161 Pasteurian approach, post‑ 9, 164, 177, 182 Pasteur, Louis 177, 179 Patchy landscape 140–42

Paxson, Heather 9, 161, 164, 165, 177, 179 paysannats indigènes schemes 109, 112 “Pay the Rent” initiative 19 PDO see protected designation of origin (PDO) peccaries 52, 53–63 Penicillium roqueforti 158 Peony (tseene), as medicinal plant 77–78, 82n6 people–place–product triad 165 perception and politics, in Texas Hill Country 51–53; collared peccaries 52, 53–54; human‑peccary encounters and perception 55–59; intimate multispecies politics 59–63 Pfuderer, Simone 40 phage therapy 9, 169, 174–83 planetary hydrological cycle 90 Plantationocene 106–7, 111 plant‑based and dairy‑based cheeses 153–54, 159, 160, 161–63, 166; cashew‑based Cheese 158–60; Grobnik cheese 155–58; microbes 163–66; Paški Sir (Pag cheese) 154–55; terroir 160–63 “Plant based Cheesemaking” (McAthy) 159 Plumwood, Val 1, 7 “pluribiotic medicine” 182 political ecology 90 population conservation program 29 polytheism 118 polytheistic beliefs 114 Pourraz, Jessica 180 Powers, Richard 21, 28 prickly pear cactus (Opuntia sp.) 53 “probiotic turn” 169, 179–83 “pro‑growth approach” 35 protected designation of origin (PDO) 155 Quadrilateral Security Dialogue 37 Quiché Maya People 123 Ramos, Seafha 146 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) 180, 181 Reading, R. 69 Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programme 109

Index  199 Reed, Kaitlin 146 relational sustainability 42–44 Riley, Erin P. 55 rodenticides 142–45 Rofel, Lisa 55 Rose, Deborah Bird 5 Sahlins, Marshall 4 Saladino, Dan 16 Salmon People 146 Sargassum fulvellum 92 satoumi 86–92, 98 satoyama 91, 92 Schroer, Sara 10 Science and Technology Studies (STS) 90 SDGs see Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) SDGs–BRI synergy 34–38, 37 sea buckthorn (Chatsargana, Hippophae ramnoides) 80 seafloor cultivation (kaitei kou’un) 86–88, 98; ethnographic case of 86; as makeshift domus 90–92; oyster boats in 88; practice of 93–94; as uncomfortable unknowings 94–98 seasonal mobility, with oxen 70–73 Secco, Victor 9 Seele, Barbara C. 69, 75, 77 serpulid worms, tube‑forming (kasane kanzashi) 95 Seto Inland Sea (Setonai‑kai) 92, 98 sharing diverse substances 22 Silk Road 38–39 sirana 155 skunk pigs 52, 57 Sneath, David 70 socio‑ecological: change 113; engagement 68 sociomaterial transformations 114 speculative fabulation (SF) 43 spiritual beliefs 118 Stépanoff, Charles 3 Strathern, Marilyn 4, 5, 86, 160 Strong, Thomas 1 sur‑mesure approach 181, 183 sustainability 44; of donkey farming 40; through China‑Pakistan donkey trade (see sustainability, through China‑Pakistan donkey trade) sustainability, through China‑Pakistan donkey trade 33–34; CPEC and

38–42; relational sustainability 42–44; SDGs–BRI synergy 34–38, 37 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 33, 35, 36 Suzuki, Kiyotaka (Suzuki‑san) 93–96 Swanson, Heather 90, 91 systematic cryo‑preservation 29 TallBear, Kim 138 technofixes 8, 33 technological interventions 90 terroir 161, 164, 165 Texas Hill Country, perception and politics in 51–53, 63; collared peccaries 52, 53–54; human‑peccary encounters and perception 55–59; intimate multispecies politics 59–63 Texas persimmon (Diospyros texana) 53 Todd, Zoe 146 tooth chattering 54, 56 “towers of silence” (dakhma) 173 traditional system: of agriculture 129; belief system 105; cheese‑making methods 159; ecological knowledge 124; peasants’ beliefs 105 tree‑planting festival (shokujusai) 91 trilateral security partnership 37 Trnka, Susanna 1 tseene (peony, Paeonia spp.) 77–78 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt 5, 8, 42, 138, 141 Twort, Frederick 176 umwelten 55 UNESCO 68, 69, 75 United Nations (UN) 33; General Assembly 36, 45n1; sustainability goals 190; working group 35 The Unnaming of Aliass (Bolender) 43 U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services program 145 Van Dooren, Thom 19, 23 Van Horn, Gavin 17 Varanasi 170–72, 172, 174, 181, 183 vegan cheeses 158, 162 veld (Afrikaans “Field”) 137 Venkat, Bharat 181

200 Index Verschuuren, B. 69 Vigne, Jean Denise 3 Von Uexküll, Jakob 55 Wakefield, Stephanie 100n5 Watters, Rebecca 68 Western‑centred emphasis on transparency 7 white‑lipped pecarry (Tayassu pecari) 53 Wild boars (Sus scrofa) 141 wildland–urban interfaces (WUIs) 139–40 Windey, Catherine 7 Wiyot tribe 147 WUIs see wildland–urban interfaces (WUIs) Wynn, Lisa 1 Xi Jinping 35, 38 X‑nuuk Nal 127–28

Yamasaki, Eriko 8 Yangambi 7, 104, 105 Yoshida, Mariko 6 Yucatan, Mexico: agrobiodiversity and language vitality in 123–27; Indigenous engagements with biocultural conservation in 127–33; language 8; local agrobiodiversity in 123; Maya‑speaking farmers in 122; Yucatan Peninsula 123–27, 133; Yucatec Mayan language 123, 124–26, 132–33 Yurok: community 145; culture 146; tribe 145, 146 Yusoff, Kathryn 7 Zanzibari‑Arab slave trade 105, 108, 116 zoonotic diseases 1