Nurturing Alternative Futures: Living with Diversity in a More-than-Human World
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’. It examines 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 era of current planetary crises. 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.
Contents
Introduction: Storying Cultural and Biological Diversity ~ Muhammad A. Kavesh & Natasha Fijn
Blood Ties: Kinning and Killing on Australian Heritage Breed Farms ~ Catie Gressier
Demystifying the Promise of Sustainability through the China-Pakistan Donkey Trade ~ Muhammad A. Kavesh
Of People and Peccaries: Perception and Politics in the Texas Hill Country ~ Adam P. Johnson
Mongolia’s Biocultural Landscape: The importance of domestic and wild multispecies diversity ~ Natasha Fijn
Cultivating the Ocean: Reflections on Desolate Life and Oyster Restoration in Hiroshima ~ Mariko Yoshida
Entangled (after)lives: naturalcultural matricides and reproduction in northeastern DR Congo ~ Catherine Windey
Threatened maize, threatened language: Indigenous engagements with biocultural conservation in Yucatan, Mexico ~ Eriko Yamasaki
Ecotones in the Emerald Triangle: Zones of Multispecies Co-occupation, Coexistence, and Conflict in the California Redwoods ~ Gordon Ulmer, Dara Adams, Rhiannon Cattaneo & Ricki Mills
“Cheese” and “Cheez”? On the relation between plant-based and dairy-based cheeses ~ Sarah Czerny
Microbes and biocultural diversity in the Ganges: antibiotic modernity and the revival of phage therapy ~ Victor Secco
Afterward: Rethinking "Green" Energy Futures through Avian Landscapes ~ Sara Asu Schroer
Comparison Between Drafts
“This book offers stories of relationality and coexistence, in proximity and distance, through the self and the other, contemporary and alternate, dominant and marginalized, and those that assure our survival in the world and those that commit life’s survival on the planet. Its point of departure is the contrast between materialistic, profit and market-oriented forms of engagement with more-than-humans and other kinds of coexistence with life on earth, such as local ways of being and conceiving others, sustaining life in collaboration, uncelebrated relationalities, and obscure affiliations. This permits the book to explore how a post-industrial approach, including habitat destruction for commercial gain, Western-centric forms of conservation, intensive agriculture, or industrial-scale wet markets, can be detrimental to more-than-human relatedness that structures our relationship with others. What would it mean for nonhumans to flourish in a human world and how human can explore the possibility of an ethical life in a more-than-human world? Or, echoing Donna Haraway’s (2016, 12) point for staying with the trouble, “what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories”?”
“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? Or, echoing Donna Haraway’s (2016, 12) juxtaposition, “what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories”?”