By Jaime Landinez, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University
Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2024 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists. We asked them to outline the argument they made in their submission and to situate their work in relation to the field of environmental anthropology.
ABSTRACT: Bird knowledge, birding, and the circulation of concepts from scientific ornithology like endemism, bird waves, and boreal migration have facilitated human and more-than-human encounters in a region recuperating from the devastation of war in rural Colombia. Through ethnographic engagement with Nasa and campesino communities and guerrilla rebels turned birders, the paper examines the generative potential of birding as a practice, not only by describing it but rather focusing on what Stengers (2005) calls the “practical identities” of practices. This means examining the new possibilities of practices “to be present,” with attention to what these practices “may become.”
I borrow the concept of hybrid zone from scientific ornithology to explore the emerging “new possibilities” of bird knowledge within a birding community in rural southern Colombia. A concept that describes regions in which distinct populations come into contact (Harrison 1993), hybrid zones foreground the dynamics through which different “lineages” encounter and the multiple, unanticipated outcomes of this process. These may include the emergence of novel species, merging of existing ones, and even extinction (Taylor et al. 2015).
A hybrid zone is a project in the making (Tsing 2015). Moreover, it is a territorial project in the making: the configuration of “lineages,” their evolutionary histories, and the natural barriers that obstruct or facilitate contact do not replicate anywhere else. The contours of a hybrid zone are fluid: the configurations of the encounter are too heterogenous and uncertain to define boundaries with precision. I draw on ornithologists’ invitation to consider that understanding how natural barriers become incomplete is as important as describing how such barriers produce differentiation (Cespedes et al. 2021).
In the paper I examine how birding has facilitated the emergence of hybrid zones between humans set at odds because of the long history of armed confrontation as well as between humans and avian life forms. I focus on (para)taxonomic experiments that describe and name an endemic bird in Nasa Yuwe (the Nasa indigenous language), strange forms of kinship with boreal migratory birds, and metaphorical peace agreements between more-than-human communities recuperating from war. By showing how these hybridizations result from the partial, fragmented, and asymmetrical encounters between practices, aspirations, and sensibilities around bird knowledge, I argue that these emerge as sites for interspecies alliances (Chao et al. 2022) and ground for negotiation around collective visions of multispecies, post-conflict environmental futures.
Birds are making a triumphant comeback in post-conflict Colombia. Considered the world’s second-most biodiverse country and the richest in bird species with around 20% of the world’s avian biodiversity (BirdLife International 2024), Colombia is witnessing what I describe as bioenthusiasm. This is a form of sociotechnical imaginary (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) that consists of institutional, scientific, and political arrangements aimed at promoting the study and use of biological diversity as a major mechanism for addressing social issues and advancing peace. In this context, entire regions once considered off-limits because of the presence of armed actors are emerging as repositories of untapped biological resources with unparalleled bioeconomic potential. My dissertation work examines what futures this bioenthusiasm makes possible and how rural communities recovering from war in some of the country’s most biodiverse landscapes have interpreted and mobilized it.
Although Colombia’s prolonged civil war hindered the development of a bird tourism sector, the 2016 peace agreement emerged as a historical opportunity to extend not only knowledge about birds but its potential uses. Different programs, platforms, and state initiatives have enthusiastically positioned the post-peace agreement scenario as a unique opportunity to consolidate the expansion of bioeconomic and ecotourism ventures that tap into the country’s unexplored biological richness. Conservationists, bird tourism agents, and bird enthusiasts from all over the country designed and launched a remarkable National Bird Conservation Strategy (ENCA in Spanish) in 2023 to protect birdlife and promote bird tourism.
Echoing a growing literature that analyzes multispecies dynamics in times of war and peace, I argue that ethnographic attention to interspecies alliances in Colombia’s post-conflict landscapes reveals that the affective encounters between humans and birdlife are central to the imagined futures of communities recuperating from the legacies of war. Moreover, the partial engagements of indigenous and campesino birders with bird science reveal the uses and malleability of science in contexts of historical, sedimented asymmetries of power. What forms of justice and reparation are conceivable when considering the entanglements of bird and human lives before and after the 2016 peace agreement? Within the birding communities that I examine in this paper, birding is becoming a “cultural resource” that enables coming to terms with the intricate interweaving of armed conflict, nature, and environmental knowledge. In other words, it offers a sensibility—a shared language that activates, in the words of Chao (2022), “new ways of being and hoping together.”
BirdLife International. 2024. Colombia. Country profile. Retrieved from: https://datazone.birdlife.org/country/colombia
Cespedes, Laura N, Andrés M. Cuervo, Elisa Bonaccorso et al. 2021. “Extensive hybridization between two Andean warbler species with shallow divergence in mtDNA.” Ornithology, 138 (1): 1-28
Chao, Sophie, Karin Bolender, Eben Kirksey (eds.) 2022. The Promise of Multispecies Justice. Duke University Press
Chao, Sophie. 2022. In the Shadow of the Palm. More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua. Duke University Press
Harrison, Richard G. 1993. Hybrid Zones and the Evolutionary Process. Oxford University Pres
Jasanoff, Sheila, and Sang-Hyun Kim. 2015. Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. University of Chicago Press
Stengers, Isabelle. 2005. “Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices.” Cultural Studies Review 11 (1): 183-196
Taylor, Scott, Erica Larson, Richard G. Harrison. 2015. “Hybrid zones: windows on climate change.” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 30 (7): 398-406
Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press
