‘I wouldn’t want to be a cow’: An ethnographic exploration of more-than-human relational praxis on a New Zealand dairy farm

<p>This thesis aims to understand how industrial farmers perceive and relate to the nonhuman world. A small-scale ethnographic focus of a 250-cow dairy farm in New Zealand’s Rangitikei district is presented as a proxy for approaching the underexamined field of farming ontologies. A common narrative exists that western ontology is characterised by human exceptionalism, a belief in humanity as singularly subjective beings amid a mute and objective world. Contrary to this discourse, this thesis finds that farmer relations to the nonhuman world are multiple, complex and contingent. This thesis employs Annemarie Mol’s (2002) understanding of ontology as established through practice, and thereby multiple, in conjunction with a material analysis of the farm as a composite ecology of human and nonhuman agents. I argue that industrial agricultural practice is informed both by transcendent, objectivist logics, and by co-constituted, informal knowledge formed through co-habitation of multispecies lifeworlds. The unruly agency of lively materials, and the affective and intersubjective qualities of interspecies interactions, are shown to figure conditionally in farming practice. These components are managed within the bounds of industrial agriculture’s outwardly utilitarian and anthropocentric systems through responsive practices of care and attentiveness, revealing that an attribution of nonhuman agency and subjectivity is essential to industrial farming practice.</p>

‘I wouldn’t want to be a cow’: An ethnographic exploration of more-than-human relational praxis on a New Zealand dairy farm

<p>This thesis aims to understand how industrial farmers perceive and relate to the nonhuman world. A small-scale ethnographic focus of a 250-cow dairy farm in New Zealand’s Rangitikei district is presented as a proxy for approaching the underexamined field of farming ontologies. A common narrative exists that western ontology is characterised by human exceptionalism, a belief in humanity as singularly subjective beings amid a mute and objective world. Contrary to this discourse, this thesis finds that farmer relations to the nonhuman world are multiple, complex and contingent. This thesis employs Annemarie Mol’s (2002) understanding of ontology as established through practice, and thereby multiple, in conjunction with a material analysis of the farm as a composite ecology of human and nonhuman agents. I argue that industrial agricultural practice is informed both by transcendent, objectivist logics, and by co-constituted, informal knowledge formed through co-habitation of multispecies lifeworlds. The unruly agency of lively materials, and the affective and intersubjective qualities of interspecies interactions, are shown to figure conditionally in farming practice. These components are managed within the bounds of industrial agriculture’s outwardly utilitarian and anthropocentric systems through responsive practices of care and attentiveness, revealing that an attribution of nonhuman agency and subjectivity is essential to industrial farming practice.</p>

Distributed Skills in Camel Herding. Cooperation in a Human-Animal Relationship in Somaliland

This article examines interspecies cooperation in camel herding in Somaliland. It presents the case of a particular joint activity in this task-scape: moving a camel herd, by leading and driving it, from the night-camp to the daytime grazing area and back. The analytical aim is to clarify the role that skills and nonhuman agency play in the constitution of cooperative human-camel relationships. On the basis of empirical data, collected in a multispecies ethnographic project by following and observing one herd and herder closely, this article demonstrates how nonhuman agency, as an individual capacity to engage in an activity and an epistemological potential, manifests in this human-camel cooperative task. Cooperation is made possible through human-camel sociality and intersubjectivity, through the ability to interpret and respond to each other, and it depends on the empathetic acknowledgement of the enabling or disabling powers of each counterpart, her or his agency. Leading and driving camels is a skilled practice requiring the responding and enabling capacities of the cooperation partner. Hence, it is a case of distributed skills – distributed in the sense that skills of humans and nonhumans are intertwined in this practice, that they complement each other.

Performativity and Political Ecology, Matter’s Politics

This chapter considers the work of Karen Barad, placing her account of the need for a concept of agential realism beside the performative account of racial difference in the work of Saidiya Hartman. Chapter 2 shows that there are not one but two concerns with performativity: (1) a political ecology concern about the lack of attention to “nonhuman” agency in the sense of technology, in the work of Barad, and (2) a performativity concern about whether performativity can contain the intensity of the bodily conscription that whiteness requires, in the work of Hartman.

Place-Making by Cows in an Intensive Dairy Farm: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Nonhuman Animal Agency

Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork at an intensive dairy farm, this chapter examines the usefulness of posthuman critical theory for developing a new sociolinguistic approach to nonhuman animal agency. We explore how dairy cows, as encaged sentient beings whose mobility is profoundly restricted by bars and fences, negotiate their environment as a material-semiotic resource in linguistic acts of place-making. Drawing on the fields of critical posthumanism, new materialism and sociolinguistics, we explain how dairy cows imbue their physical space with meaning through materiality, the body and language. By developing a non-anthropocentric approach to language as a practice of more-than-human sociality, we argue for establishing egalitarian research perspectives beyond the assumptions of human exceptionalism and species hierarchy. The chapter thus aims to contribute towards a new understanding of nonhuman agency and interspecies relationships in the Anthropocene.

Meaningful Clearings: Human-Ant Negotiated Landscapes in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

This article explores the conflicts between people and Atta leafcutter ants over the meaning of anthropogenic deforestation in nineteenth-century Brazil. As human agricultural settlement advanced, ants followed in its wake, harvesting leaves, flowers, fruits, and other plant parts from crops to supply their underground fungus gardens. In so doing, the ants, as semiotic selves, interpreted what humans had done and acted accordingly, producing historically consequential environmental change in the process. An examination of primary sources such as legislation, travel journals, agricultural manuals, government administrative documentation, and newspapers for human-ant conversations demonstrates how interspecies sense making has fueled social innovations and rearrangements, shaping technical developments, legal-administrative practices, parliamentary discussions, and even local electoral arenas. By taking written documents as surviving structures of embodied, more-than-symbolic conversations, this analysis both takes its cue from, and helps substantiate, what Ewa Domanska has termed a “multispecies co-authorship” approach to human-animal relations. It argues that such a theoretical-methodological stance helps environmental historians account for nonhuman agency by allowing the exploration of animals’ truly creative, rather than merely resistive, behavior.

Virtual Identities

Virtual identities stand in for a user or player in a virtual environment; they are social media profiles; digital subjects—of human and nonhuman agency. Virtual identities are often imagined as something distinct from the “self” of the user of digital media but technically and existentially they determine the ways a user navigates life online. Virtual identities, then, might also be a category that captures the ways identity itself is virtual; a force of existence that determines how subjects can orient themselves in the world. The questions of what virtual identities are, how they operate, and the kinds of material expression of personhood they afford and signify has been taken up in scholarship across the last thirty years from a variety of disciplines including computer sciences, critical race studies, game studies, gender and sexuality studies, literary studies, new media studies, social sciences, science and technology studies, and visual culture studies. As an imminent figure in early 21st-century life, virtual identities might describe subjects who exist in global digital media networks but who do not necessarily profit from their participation and labor, or who are not always visible. Despite the virtuality of virtual identities, their partial and fragmentary status, they exist as a technology by which to fix identity to an embodied subject—via facial recognition, or biometric scanning, or the coaxing and collection of personal data. The study of virtual identities remains an ongoing and significant task.

Out of Africa: Ecocriticism beyond Environmental Justice

This essay is an attempt to present a broader view of ecocriticism in Africa. Ecocriticism, in theory and practice, appears to have limited itself to the notion of environmental justice, with the aim of raising consciousness against institutional powers behind ecological crises. The reason for this is not far-fetched. International scholarship on African ecocriticism tends to focus on the activism of the Kenyan Wangari Mathai and the Nigerian Ken Saro-Wiwa; and on the fiction of a few writers concerned with environmentalism and conservation. This kind of ecocriticism, under the rubric of postcolonialism, is, in my view, narrow, too human-centred, and should, in fact, be decentred for an all-inclusive mapping of African ecocriticism. I attempt to shift this paradigm by foregrounding a narrative that stages the role and agency of nonhuman and spiritual materiality in practices that demonstrate nature-human relations since the pre-colonial period. I argue that for a proper delineation of the theory and practice of ecocriticism in Africa, attention should be paid to literary and cultural artefacts that depict Africa’s natural world in which humans sometimes find themselves helpless under the agency of other-than-human beings, with whom they negotiate the right path for the society. I conclude by making the point that a recognition of this natural world, and humans’ right place in it, is crucial to any ecocritical project that imagines an alternative to the present human-centred system. Keywords: African ecocriticism, natural worlds, spiritual materiality, nonhuman agency