Who resists and who is in solidarity with whom? Who is demanding freedom and justice, how and against whom? What rights and responsibilities arise from the recognition of the capacity to act politically? These questions have long been considered exclusively human. However, in the Anthropocene, the age of humankind’s defining influence on the Earth, they are increasingly revealed as more than human. Wars are being declared on viruses. Alliances are cultivated with the beaver to retain water in the landscape. Livestock running wild are tracked and traced to help or prevent their escape from farms and slaughterhouses. “Weeds” or “pests” like the bark beetle are made into heroic conservationists as well as enemies of the Republic. The concept of “rights of nature” is being reconsidered, along with new ways of understanding and valuing non-human labour and property owned by a place or the Earth itself. How to make sense of similar situations, in which other-than-human beings or materials become more often conceived of as not only food, resources or symbols but as allies or enemies in more-than-human struggles?
Stine Krøijer explains main concepts around Amerindian perspectivism, equivocation, recursiveness and ontological politics. She is an associate professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The video has been produced in collaboration with Artyčok art collective and you can see it HERE.
In light of the Plantationocene, a term recently elaborated to capture the magnitude of power of plantation systems from European Colonialism and plantation slavery to industrial animal farming and plant monocultures in the present climate crisis, political anthropology faces new challenges in noticing resistance. While plantation struggles have been crucial for conceptual innovations since the late 1960s as well as new arts of noticing, the related crises of climate change, extractivism and exterminism garner a new urgency to rethink resistance in the light of the multispecies turn. Examining recent anthropological examples of resistance in, around, and against plantations, this article opens the concept of resistance to include the agency of nonhumans and their capacity to make social and political changes, fight back, form alliances and co-produce rebelliously charged effects, meanings and interpretations. The article discusses the emerging field of anthropology of more-than-human resistance and helps in re-calibrating the anthropologist’s art of noticing it. In doing so, the text elaborates three challenges – the risk of romanticizing resistance, of reifying it, and of conceptual stretching. To cope with the challenges in forging anthropology of more-than-human resistance, two particular strategies are further outlined – of focusing on the articulations of resistance, and fostering a closer affiliation to activism and organized protest.
V březnu 2024 vláda schválila zahájení příprav výstavby gigafactory v Dolní Lutyni. Tento projekt neznámého investora ve výši až 200 miliard je prezentován jako příležitost pro rozvoj a transfor- maci Moravskoslezského kraje. Usilujeme-li však o spravedlivou transformaci, nelze setrvat pouze v úzkém technokratickém pojetí transformace, v němž jsou hlavními ukazateli úspěchu snížení emisí, objem investic či počet nově vytvořených pracovních míst. Navíc, pokiaľ hľadáme cestu ven zo vzájemně se prolínajících a podporujících krizí v čele s krizí klimatickou, musíme proměnit i naše porozumění a způsoby vztahování se k jiným-než-lidským „přírodním“ entitám. Jak vyplývá z výzkumu, tato změna nemusí mít nutně podobu radikálních ontologických obratů. Často probíhá skrze drobné každodenní posuny – například tehdy, když lidé navazují sousedské vztahy s kuňkami, netopýry či čápy, což pak může vést k chápání krajiny jako sdíleného domova. A pokud Dolní Lutyně není domovem pouze pro lidi, ale i pro tyto jiné-než-lidské entity, proč by i oni neměli být zahrnuti do procesu spravedlivé transformace?
