Dear Colleagues (apologies for cross-posting),

Please contact us if you're interested in contributing a paper to this AAA
 panel. Please e-mail proposed paper titles and abstracts (max. 250 words)
to Andrew Flachs ([log in to unmask])
<[log in to unmask])> and Daniel Münster ([log in to unmask]
ni-heidelberg.de)  by Wednesday, April 5th.  If you have any questions or
comments, please do not hesitate to contact us.

CFP: AAA 2017 “Anthropology Matters!”

American Anthropological Association Meeting

Washington, DC

November 29 - December 3



Organizers:  Andrew Flachs (Heidelberg University) and Daniel Münster
(Heidelberg University)


Discussant:  Jim Veteto (Western Carolina University)



*Session Title:  Politicizing Naturecultures:
 The Political Ecology of Multispecies Encounters*



Scholarship in multispecies studies has provided a new way to theorize
human-environmental interactions in a non-anthropocentric way, but has been
criticized for it inadequate attention to political economy. In this panel
we invite ethnographic contributions located at the intersection of
multispecies studies and global political ecology. We are interested in the
multispecies encounters that occur in emerging fields of labor, climate
engineering, technoscientific innovations in agriculture, and practices of
resource extraction in the Global South and elsewhere. This approach gives
anthropologists a lens through which to better understand how
naturecultures are
continually shaped as situated actors engage with fields, forests, natural
resources, and assemblages of agricultural species, including cultivars,
microbes, and animals.  By bridging these approaches to environmental
anthropology, this panel aims to develop a theoretical model to both
politicize multispecies engagements and ontologize ecological management
and extraction.



The need to consider the influence of social beings inhabiting
anthropogenic landscapes alongside the political ramifications of
multispecies engagements is a recurrent theme in the study of ecological
knowledge and resource management (Nazarea 2014; Dove 2011).
Political ecologists
 (Bryant and Goodman 2004; Galt 2009) give anthropologists a means to
understand the affective labor and care involved  in deriving livelihood
from fields and forests, as structured by larger political economies.
However, politicalecology’s focus on institutional reward structures and
the economic outcomes of environmental interactions can overlook the
more-than human affect, care, creativity, or anxiety that define farming,
fishing, extracting, collecting activities of human economies in the “web
of life” (Moore 2016).  Mulitspecies  approaches to human-environmental
relationships have been criticized as apolitical, because they do not fully
consider the role of power or political economy as a structuring force in
encounters between beings.  Haraway (2008), whose ideas of natureculture
inspire this panel, herself recognizes that descriptions of ‘becoming with’
agility-trained dogs or confined chickens reflect systems of privilege and
political economy that are structured as much by boundaries as by
becomings.  Feminist and postcolonial theory that places identity and the
subject as a precondition of knowledge and practice in agrarian or
extractive landscapes (Gupta 1998; Ramamurthy 2004; Vasavi 1999) can also
help to inform a politically engaged ontology in the analysis of ecological
management because these approaches draw attention to the process of
creating, adapting, and translating knowledge within this multispecies and
transcultural milieu.  Stengers (2010) has called this inextricable link
the ecology of practices, arguing that knowledge is always a function of
the particular actors who engage with it.  Papers may consider agriculture,
fishing, forestry, extractive industries, and other human-environmental
interactions as sites of multispecies encounters, and we encourage
panelists to think creatively about the intersections of more-than-human
worlds and the global political economy.



Bryant, Raymond L, and Michael K Goodman. 2004. “Consuming Narratives: The
Political Ecology of ‘alternative’ Consumption.”*Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers* 29 (3): 344–66.
doi:10.1111/j.0020-2754.2004.00333.x.

Dove, Michael R. 2011. *The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal
Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo*. Yale Agrarian Studies Series. New
Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press.

Galt, Ryan E. 2009. “‘It Just Goes to Kill Ticos’:  National Market
Regulation and the Political Ecology of Farmers’ Pesticide Use in Costa
Rica.” *Journal of Political Ecology* 16 (1): 1–33.

Gupta, Akhil. 1998. *Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making
of Modern India*. Durham: Duke University Press Books.

Haraway, Donna. 2008. *When Species Meet*. Minneapolis, Minn: University of
Minnesota Press.

Nazarea, Virginia D. 2014. *Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers: Marginality
and Memory in the Conservation of Biological Diversity*. Reprint edition.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Ramamurthy, Priti. 2004. “Why Is Buying a ‘Madras’ Cotton Shirt a
Political Act?
A Feminist Commodity Chain Analysis.” *Feminist Studies*30 (3): 734–69.
doi:10.2307/20458998.

Stengers, Isabelle. 2010. *Cosmopolitics I*. Translated by Robert Bononno.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Vasavi, A. R. 1999. *Harbingers of Rain: Land and Life in South Asia*. Oxford
University Press, USA.

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