Tag: multispecies

A Failure in Capture: An Experiment in Multimodal Interactive Ethnography where ‘Nothing Happens’

The video below this text is interactive. To view, click play and follow the instructions you see on the screen. As you watch, look for areas that you can click with a mouse (or tap with your finger, if on a mobile device) or see what appears when you mouse over different areas of the image at different times. What do you see? This multimodal content, due to technological limitations, may not be accessible to all. If the multimodal experience is not accessible to you, please visit the text based version for visual and audio descriptions and full-text transcription or listen to the audio narration: Audio Narration by Kara White On mobile devices, we suggest viewing the page in landscape mode and selecting “Distraction Free Reading” in the top-right corner. This is an interactive video. This video is designed to get the viewer or reader to “search” the image for (read more...)

Little Experiments in Worldmaking with Amor Mundi Lab

The AMOR MUNDI Multispecies Ecological Worldmaking Lab transpires as a collaborative space for emerging scholars, artists, scientists, and practitioners of all kinds working in the Global South with a common theme in multispecies anthropocene studies. Anthropocene and ecopolitical theorist Maya Kóvskaya, who recently joined the Faculty of Social Science at Chiang Mai University in 2020, shares their idea of the lab and extends the opportunity to students across disciplines. Through Maya’s inspiring energy as the Lab Director, our network of collaborators and interlocutors grows. Among many who join and share their scholarship from around the world, a core group of people who are already based in Chiang Mai come together to give this emerging space a chance to move forward. (read more...)

The Shitty Affairs of British Colonialism in Malaya: Manicuring “Native” Agriculture through Race-Specific Livestock Interbreeding

In January 2020, I accidentally came across a series of photographs at the UK National Archives documenting agricultural and livestock experimentation in 1930-1940s British Malaya. The peculiarity of these photographs was striking. British Malaya was infamous for a rigid racial division of displaced and relocated labor in the service of colonial extraction, with Chinese laboring in tin mines and Indians working on plantations. The Malays, indigenous communities of Malaya, were marginalized from colonial extractive industries based on the racialized myth of the “lazy native,” depicted as cultivators of padi (rice fields). Instead, these photographs depicted Indian, Malay, and Chinese as farmers or agricultural assistants operating in different sectors of the small-scale “native” agriculture of Malaya. These photographs aim to capture agricultural and livestock improvement techniques, such as plot flattening, budgrafting, or interbreeding, and are most often succinctly described in reference to food productivity, profitability, and technical innovation in the field of small-scale agrarian and animal husbandry practices. (read more...)

The Vector, the Viruses, and the “Healthy World”: Placing Aedes aegypti in Brazil

Mosquito: the “most dangerous animal in the world,” human’s “deadliest predator.” This insect is often described as the most probable target for gene-editing technologies that have the potential to eliminate the unwanted. Mosquitoes are usually presented as the number one enemy of humankind, a globally hated pest: the most killable of all beings. (read more...)

Honey, let we tell you! A speculative trans-species storytelling of the Maya Forest borderlands

Editor’s note: This is the second post in an ongoing series called “The Spectrum of Research and Practice in Guatemalan Science Studies.” Previous scholars largely confined their studies of European honey bee (Apis mellifera, including Africanized hybrids) communication to the waggle dance, with the communication range limited to food gathering, hive site selection, and other simple collective tasks. Recent advances in therolinguistic interpretation have demonstrated that a hive structure’s 3-dimensional matrix, including differentially-deposited pheromones and scent signatures laid in wax, contain additional, semi-permanently recorded content, though without a functional grammar. Rather than fully-articulated communication, the hive contains references to broader concepts—such as joy, woe, growth, care, loss, hunger, abundance, battle, defense, and so on. Reading waggle dances in hive context reveals that basic communication is often interwoven with broader narratives. (read more...)

#ExistenceOnSearch: Multispecies encounters and knowledge dialogue at the in-between space

Colombia is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world. According to Colombia’s Biodiversity Information System (SiB Colombia), the country has 51,330 species, including 1,909 species of birds, 528 species of mammals, and 1,521 species of freshwater fish. Colombia ranks second in the world in terms of biodiversity. Its territory is an interweaving of different ecosystems that favors a profusion of life, much of it endemic. However, many of these species are threatened by a variety of human-influenced factors: from the expansion of the agricultural frontier and intensive ranching to the effects of global warming on ecosystems. Humans are also protagonists in the production of life as “diverse,” at least in its existence as data. Biodiversity requires the cataloging, comparison, identification and counting of the living. Without these activities, it would be impossible to state the figures mentioned above. (read more...)

Anthropos Tomorrow: Transhumanism and Anthropology

Editor’s note: This week, we’re bringing you the first look at something slightly different. In addition to our regularly scheduled programming, Platypus has decided to experiment with guest-edited thematic series, which will bring together a range of anthropologists working on similar issues for a more theoretically-oriented conversation held over several weeks. Here, Jon Bialecki and Ian Lowrie introduce our first series, on Transhumanism and Anthropology. If you are interested in participating, please let them know; if you are interested in organizing a future thematic series, please do get in touch with the Editor.   Anthropologists, long relatively comfortable bearing the mantle of studying humanity, today find themselves working in increasingly posthuman theoretical spaces. Anthropos, as a unitary figure, had already began to crumble under the weight of postcolonial, feminist, and deconstructive critique during the eighties; lately, however, our empirical work is pushing us still further beyond the human. This is particularly, but not uniquely, true for those of us working on the anthropology of science and technology: we often find ourselves, whatever our theoretical commitments to the posthuman, grasping for an appropriate language as we try to figure the multispecies assemblages, vibrant matter, and sociotechnical infrastructures we encounter alongside the humans we interact with in our fieldwork. (read more...)

Planticide: Killing Badly Behaved Plants

Walking through the woods near Colby College, Judy Stone gestures rapidly, pointing out plants. Norway maple, bittersweet, honeysuckle, a type of rose. All invasive. We stop for a moment to examine the rose, spending time appreciating its sharp thorns, its capable defenses. She tells me that she often takes groups on walks around Colby, and when this rose was in bloom, people stopped to admire it, look at its flowers, smell it, and talk about how beautiful it is. She didn’t have the heart to tell them that it was an invasive plant. They, like most people, couldn’t see the problems the plant was causing in the forest. They couldn’t see how ugly the invasives made this forest, because they didn’t have any experience with what she termed “nice” forests. The problem is not the arrival of plants from somewhere else violating the purity of a native forest. The classificatory principle at work sorts plants not by origin, but rather, by behavior. The relevant distinction is between plants that behave well in an ecosystem, that is, those that leave space for a diversity of life forms, and plants that behave badly, dominating the landscape. (read more...)