David Bello explores the fraught struggle between humans and locusts for occupancy of the agricultural niches created by farmers during China’s Qing dynasty.
The categories and the types of care we assign are very often tenuous and troubled in nature. The articles in this volume explore some of the intricacy, ambiguity, and even irony in our perceptions and approaches to “multispecies” relations.
Jean Langford discusses what happens “when species fall apart” in the relationships of care at primate and parrot sanctuaries. Care involves an improvised orchestration of social life—through spatial arrangements and regulation of movement—to facilitate often nonnormative, intraspecies, and cross-species intimacies.
Harriet Ritvo’s article complicates the categorical separation of “wild” and “domesticated” that has organized much Western thought on species distinctions. Ritvo invites us to think beyond the boundaries and fixedness of dominant concepts.
Daniel Münster takes us to the troubled history of improving dairy production in India, from the crossbreeding and high-cost industrialized care of delicate hybrids to the equally complex implications of a native-cow revival.
Caring for one set of species at the cost of another is the subject of Amir Zelinger’s article about bird conservation and its implications for the life of cats in Imperial Germany.
Emily O’Gorman focuses on the Australian pelicans of South Australia’s Coorong region to examine how historical and contemporary ways of protecting these birds have been entangled with class politics, cross-cultural relationships, and the law.
Etienne Benson considers the role that material interventions into the vernacular landscape play in solidifying our understandings of bodily difference across species.
Thom van Dooren draws on his current research on people’s shifting relationships with crows around the world to outline some of the core questions and approaches of “field philosophy.”
Ursula Münster shows us in her essay on silenced and silent practices of avian care in a postcolonial conservation landscape of South India, that care is never innocent, it plays out within established hierarchies and power relations, and it can reinforce long traditions of imperialism and exclusion.
