1st Edition
Nurturing Alternative Futures Living with Diversity in a More-than-Human World
Developing upon emerging environmental humanities and multispecies anthropological theories, this book provides a fresh perspective on how we might rethink more-than-human relationality and why it is important to "nurture alternative futures." The diverse chapters examine the life trajectories of people, animals, plants, and microbes, their lived experiences and constituted relationality, offering new ways to reinterpret and reimagine a multi-species future in the current era of planetary crisis. The ethnographic case studies from around the world feature a combination of biological and cultural diversity with analyses that prioritize local and Indigenous modes of thinking. While engaging with Mongolian herders, Indigenous Yucatec Mayan, Congolese farmers, rural Pakistani donkey keepers, Australian heritage breed farmers, Croatian cheesemakers, Japanese oyster aquafarmers, Texan corn growers, Californian cannabis producers, or Hindu devotees to the Ganges River, the chapters offer a grounded anthropological understanding of imagining a future in relationality with other beings. The stories, lived experiences, and mutual worlding that this volume presents offer a portrayal of alternative forms of multispecies coexistence, rather than an anthropocentric future.
Introduction: Storying Cultural and Biological Diversity
Muhammad A. Kavesh and Natasha Fijn
1. Blood Ties: Kinning and Killing on Australian Heritage Breed Farms
Catie Gressier
2. Demystifying the Promise of Sustainability through the China-Pakistan Donkey Trade
Muhammad A. Kavesh
3. Of People and Peccaries: Perception and Politics in the Texas Hill Country
Adam P. Johnson
4. Mongolia’s Biocultural Landscape: The Importance of Domestic and Wild Multispecies Diversity
Natasha Fijn
5. Cultivating the Ocean: Reflections on Desolate Life and Oyster Restoration in Hiroshima
Mariko Yoshida
6. Entangled (After)Lives: Naturalcultural Matricides and Reproduction in Northeastern DR Congo
Catherine Windey
7. Threatened Maize, Threatened Language: Indigenous Engagements with Biocultural Conservation in Yucatan, Mexico
Eriko Yamasaki
8. Ecotones in the Emerald Triangle: Zones of Multispecies Co-Occupation, Coexistence, and Conflict in the California Redwoods
Gordon Ulmer, Dara Adams, Rhiannon Cattaneo and Ricki Mills
9. “Cheese” and “Cheez”? On the Relation between Plant-Based and Dairy-Based Cheeses
Sarah Czerny
10. Microbes and Biocultural Diversity in the Ganges: Antibiotic Modernity and the Revival of Phage Therapy
Victor Secco
Afterword: Rethinking "Green" Energy Futures through Avian Landscapes
Sara Asu Schroer
Biography
Muhammad A. Kavesh is an Australian Research Council DECRA fellow, affiliated with the Australian National University’s School of Culture, History, and Language.
Natasha Fijn is Director of the Australian National University’s Mongolia Institute. An ethnographic researcher and observational filmmaker, she is recipient of a mid-career Australian Research Council Future Fellowship.
“Nurturing Alternative Futures engages in uniquely creative and critical ways with the situatedness and interconnectedness of more-than-human entanglements in an age of planetary unravelling. Centring the dynamics of proximity and distance in the (un)making of biocultural lifeworlds, its richly textured and varied contributions offer urgent avenues for nourishing alternative futures, anchored in an atmosphere of multispecies care, concern, and justice.” – Sophie Chao, author of In the Shadow of the Palms (2022)
“This critical and imaginative collection invites us to embrace futures that are teeming with probiotic viruses, Indigenous companion species, donkeys, peccaries, microbial cultures, aquatic multispecies assemblages, and forested ecotones. As market forces destroy cherished lifeways, this collection invites us to make worlds with new generative stories.” – Eben Kirksey, author of Emergent Ecologies (2015)
