Materials

Several decades of futile efforts to eradicate the giant hogweed, categorised as an invasive alien species, raise questions about the relationship between the plans of modern Man and the unruliness of the non-human world, and thus the nature of Anthropocene dynamics. Around the menacing vitality of the hogweed in the West Bohemian borderlands, a power apparatus based on a necropolitical form of governance, imbued with a collective warlike atmosphere, was established over time. In my ethnography, I examine the workings and operations of this apparatus, which is based on a logic of discursive figures, fixed boundaries, and a spatial perspective. However, the prism of human failings that this mode of governance generates is not the whole story, explaining why necropolitics fails to live up to its commitments. It is also undermined by the very vitality of the hogweed, proliferating amidst the spatiotemporally specific nature-cultural entanglements of the (post-)socialist borderland and shaped by an essentially corporeal movement along dynamic lines. Tracing both these contexts, power and its “refusal”, will subsequently help me to think through the limits of anthropological discourse of more-than-human entanglements that may encounter systematic and productive efforts towards disconnection.

The Faculty of Humanities has conducted interview about the ResisTerra project. Here, Bob Kuřík states the main argument as well as challenges of more-than-human resistance with its possible application in environmental politics and broader anthropological and artistic contexts.

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. 

In the 7th issue of Kontradikce journal, a member of our team, Michael Polák, published a collection of texts by North Bohemian anarchist miners. Several of them make it quite clear how much influence life underground had on the miners. Alongside excerpts from texts dealing with strike struggles, the women's question or working conditions, there are also texts about the way miners perceived the landscape and how rocks, coal and underground were inscribed in the lyrical perception of the miner's everyday life.

Limity jsme my (We are Limits) organized a climate ride in the Moravian-Silesian Region in August 2024, when dozens of people cycled between examples of good and bad practices of the region's transformation. Snippets from this event are recorded in the collective zine. The zine is co-authored by Sara Hájková - in her contribution she tries to open up the topic of multi-species justice in the context of coal regions' transformation through a series of questions.