Modalities of movements as resistance in the Tatra Mountains

Tatra National Park, a state conservation institution, has governed the area since the mid-20th century primarily through norms and regulations. Its political power is exercised by rangers and legitimised through scientific research and public relations. Both revolve around the endemic and endangered Tatra chamois (rupicapra rupicapra tatrica), which concentrates the park’s symbolic authority as well as anxieties about extinction or hybridisation with non-endemic rupicapra rupicapra.

Despite nearly fifty years of research, park employees remain uncertain about what threatens the chamois, why its population fluctuates, and why the animal resists the imagined figure of a timid and rare endemic species. By resisting being known, chamois evade conservation epistemics rooted in protectionist and dualist relations to nature (Descola 1996: 97) and unsettle assumptions of care and justice based on “knowledge-as-illumination,” which is entangled with colonial and extractivist violence (Neimanis 2023).

Perceived as one of the threats to the fragile population of chamois, mountaineers are subjected to the park's oversight, control, and sanctions. Yet, unlike conservationists, they counter the chamois’ synanthropic behaviour against the park’s conservation and protective claims. Mountaineers' resistance emerges from the “hidden transcript” of sharing and doing bodily tactics to avoid rangers and gossiping on the park’s illegitimacy (Scott 1985).

The analysis draws on a twelve-month multispecies ethnography following researchers, chamois, and mountaineers—walking, sneaking, hiding, climbing, and collecting excrement with them.

To counterpose the western legacy of “everything is political”, I propose a narrower processual definition of politics which includes antagonisms (Swartz, Turner and Tuden 1966) and target structures of dominant order (Rancière 2003, Elinoff and Postero 2019). To avoid romanticising mountaineers and chamois as resisting heroes, I delink resistance from progressivist emancipatory teleology and subaltern heroism (Hoodfar 1997; Mahmood 2005). I position my argument within broader environmental struggles in which both the Tatras and the park are shaped by neoliberal, anthropocentric, and extractivist forces contributing to the decay of the institution and the mountain ecosystem.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Descola, Philippe, and Gísli Pálsson, eds. 1996. Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Routledge.

Elinoff, Eli, and Nancy Postero. 2019. “Introduction: A Return to Politics.” Anthropological Theory 19(1): 3–28.

Hoodfar, Homa. 1997. “The Veil in Their Minds and on Our Heads: The Persistence of Colonial Images of Muslim Women.” In Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, edited by David Lloyd and Lisa Lowe, 248–279. Durham: Duke University Press.

Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Neimanis, Astrida. 2023. “Stygofaunal Worlds: Subterranean Estrangement and Otherwise Knowing for Multispecies Justice.” Cultural Politics 19(1): 18–38. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-10232445

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