In Search of Quolls: Knowledge Making and Entanglement in Zoological Fieldwork

ABSTRACT

Zoological consultants in Western Australia survey northern quolls (a small, cat-like marsupial) for environmental impact assessment. Confronted by habitat destruction and on the verge of extinction, northern quolls are protected as a conservation significant species, yet their precarious ecological position is made visible only through zoological work. This article explores how consultative zoologists negotiate relationships between themselves and northern quolls in order to both craft detailed population studies and mobilise the species’ power to reframe human development. Traversing environmental legislation, zoologists nurture (rather than take for granted) quoll relations, manifesting an attentiveness that entangles the animal in fact-making and modes of environmental protection. Drawing from a growing compendium of multispecies scholarship, this article questions how attentiveness can bring new entanglements into being, and how these entanglements can be managed in order to both make sense of the world and level the playing field for those nonhumans who inhabit it.

KEYWORDS:

• Nonhumans
• entanglement
• zoology
• knowledge-making
• multispecies ethnography

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Mathew Chrulew and Emmaline Yearsley for their help editing and commenting on this work. Special thanks should be given to Philip Moore – who was incredibly encouraging and spent hours of his time reading early drafts. I am also thankful to my zoology interlocutors, who participated so readily in this research.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Donna Harraway (2003: 3) might refer to these instances as ‘naturecultures’.

2 van Dooren’s (2014) ‘Flight Ways’ discusses in part how extinction and conservation can be a question of knowledge, its form and who owns it.

3 To borrow the term ‘polite’ from Despret (2006).

4 Multispecies ethnographers are the case in point. With regard to natural sciences, take the work of Jakob von Uexküll, a detailed discussion of which can be found in the work of Loo and Sellbach (2013).

5 All names and titles in this article have been altered to protect the participant’s anonymity.

6 Following the theoretical progress made by multispecies scholarship, particularly Tsing (2015) and Haraway (2003).

7 While activity is easy to think about in terms of living things – who are, for the most part, quite mobile – even rocks, according to traditions of the North American Ojibwa, can sometimes have personhood (Hallowell 1960).

8 As Descola (2013) makes note, any system of relations between beings cannot be independent from those entities endowed with the properties required to render this relationship real.

9 This is especially true in contention to local community and indigenous imaginings. Different ways of knowing and doing often lead local Aboriginal peoples to make competing claims about the efficacy, significance and form of environmental management espoused by fly-in, fly-out zoologists (The Wilderness Society, Environs Kimberley, and Conservation Council 2012). Though the Pilbara resource boom has turned the region into a hotspot of native title activity, these claims are often disregarded by proponents or environmental managers who hold positions of power. In a recent workshop conducted by the Western Australian Department of Parks and Wildlife concerning future northern quoll research opportunities, no reference was given to tradition knowledge (Cramer et al. 2016). It is ironic then that qualitative modes of engaging with country, which are utilised proficiently by indigenous people and readily shunned by some environmental managers, are very similar in principle to the informal methods mobilised by zoologists in situ.

10 Latour and Woolgar’s (1986) influential ‘Laboratory Life’ provides a detailed analysis of how scientific fact is constructed.

11 The EPA sets minimum standards for northern quoll EIA methodology (2006). Due to competition, this assessment methodology is practised as the norm across the consultancy industry.

12 We might think of this activity as a starting point for the relational power that quolls hold over zoologists and the mining industry. A more detailed discussion of this principle can be found in Chrulew’s (2016) ‘Animals as Biopolitical Subjects’.

13 This form of methodology makes use of the standard biological technique of mark and recapture. For instance, (and I speak very generally here), over a 4-week period Environ might sample 10 quolls, mark them with an identifiable tag (a microchip) and set them free. After a period of time (within the quoll’s standard lifespan), they might return and conduct the same sampling regime, capturing another 10 quolls, only this time 5 of which are individuals from the previous round. Hence, one can logically assume that those marked initially (10), multiplied by the total in the second sample (10; = 100), divided by the marked recaptures (5) is equal to the population size (in this case the population is 20; assuming the study areas is closed and that individuals have the same probability of being captured in both rounds).

14 Of course, not all zoologists are as ‘careful’ as others.

15 See Dunn (2012). Walker (2013) describes the call-to-action that took place in response to Carson’s Silent Spring as driven by frameworks of uncertainty, forms of scientific ethos that can act as enduring forces in public debates that deal with scientific controversies. In this case, the ‘knowing’ of these entanglements was constituted by an unveiling of the ‘un-known’ and the uncertainties that came with it.

16 Admittedly, these operating conditions come with their own set of politics. Sometimes they work well, other times they can be vastly ineffective (Hayes and Morrison-Saunders 2007).

17 Some argue that zoological methods, such as ethology, should form part of the ethnographic toolset (van Dooren et al. 2016; Lestel 2014; Lestel et al. 2014).