Whether through awe and wonder or death and grief, human-whale relations throw into relief important epistemic, ethical, spiritual, legal, and scientific tensions. Because whales migrate across oceans and have long been in relation with humans across the globe, they inhabit multiple and often conflicting worlds of meaning and obligation. What happens in the aftermath of a whale’s death, when a whale might simultaneously be an ancestor, a source of scientific knowledge, and a potential threat to the continuation of a local ecotourist economy? (read more...)