1 thought on “Animal Capital”

1. The selection that we’ve read this week is so theoretically, and empirically rich that I hardly know where to begin. I’ve never read anything specific to animal geographies before; its exciting to have so much new terrain to explore.

   Obviously, one key aspect that emerges in these selections is the matter of agency, which seems to be a primary concern of both Mitchell and Sundberg. Sundberg argues that we have to understand agency beyond intention, positing agency as a “doing-in-relation, a collective enactment rather than an individual attribute or intention” (331). Similarly, Mitchell asks us to question our assumptions about agency and understand the “kinds of hybrid agencies…[that] are able to portray their interactions as history, as human expertise overcoming nature” (53). Over and over in this class we’ve run up against the question of how we understand nonhuman agency and what place it has within political ecology. Conversely, I think we’ve talked little as to how introducing different notions of nonhuman agency call us to question how we understand our own. How do our conceptions of human agency change when we do not privilege the human? Is that even possible?

   In contrast, Emel and Wolch seem less interested in matters of agency; rather, I would posit that their aim is to ‘make visible’ the “the thoroughly modern instrumental rationality that characterizes contemporary human-animals dependency [that] has rendered animals both spatially and morally invisible” (527). Essentially, they’re I think trying to treat animals in a similar way to how poststructuralists feminists/postmodernists have treated matters of race, class, gender and other fields of difference. I find this approach useful, but I also find it troubling, in that it deconstructs without offering new actions. In contrast, thinking about agency as a ‘doing-in-relation’ is appealing. In some sense, it grants us agency by compelling us to reconsider what it means.

   One thing I noted in Escobar is that a few of his sources make references to the role of spirituality in conceptions of nature, such that the spiritual is on equal footing with the biophysical and social in some cultures. This is interesting, and I wonder if it’s because of Escobar’s training as an anthropologist that he’s more likely to incorporate nature/spirituality than a Geographer considering similar issues. In the end though, I can’t stop thinking about an art project that I’ve encountered the past two summers when I’ve been in Churchill, Manitoba. The project is titled ‘Becoming Beluga’; it’s a group of artists whose primary objective is to explore interspecies interaction with a school of beluga whales that summers at the mouth of the Churchill estuary. In essence, the artists experiment with different ways of ‘performing’ for the whales, primarily through music, though past performances have included a contortionist. When I was there, they were also in the process of making a whale-sized neoprene suit in order to be able to swim with the whales as a whale. On the one hand, I think this is an interesting moment of exploring and playing with the boundaries that separate whales and humans. On the other hand, it just, well, strikes me as ridiculous. The project itself sits in a really interesting context as well; much of Churchill’s tourist industry is built on animal sight-seeing. I don’t yet have a concluding statement to offer, but I do think there’s a lot there to think about.

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