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. 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. It examines 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 era of current planetary crises. 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. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Storying Cultural and Biological Diversity 1 Blood Ties: Kinning and Killing on Australian Heritage Breed Farms 2 Demystifying the Promise of Sustainability through the China-Pakistan Donkey Trade 3 Of People and Peccaries: Perception and Politics in the Texas Hill Country 4 Mongolia’s Biocultural Landscape: The Importance of Domestic and Wild Multispecies Diversity 5 Cultivating the Ocean: Reflections on Desolate Life and Oyster Restoration in Hiroshima 6 Entangled (After)Lives: Naturalcultural Matricides and Reproduction in Northeastern DR Congo 7 Threatened Maize, Threatened Language: Indigenous Engagements with Biocultural Conservation in Yucatan, Mexico 8 Ecotones in the Emerald Triangle: Zones of Multispecies Co-Occupation, Coexistence, and Conflict in the California Redwoods 9 “Cheese” and “Cheez”?: On the Relation between Plant-Based and Dairy-Based Cheeses 10 Microbes and Biocultural Diversity in the Ganges: Antibiotic Modernity and the Revival of Phage Therapy Afterword: Rethinking “Green” Energy Futures Through Avian Landscapes Index