Eco-xenophobia among rural populations: the Great-tailed Grackle as a contested species in Guanacaste, Costa Rica

ABSTRACT

The meanings attached to animals speak to context-specific socio-political differences that are crucial to the success of conservation and wildlife management programs. The social construction of animals, however, remains underrepresented in wildlife management scholarship and practice. We conducted 31 semi-structured interviews with farmers and urbanites, and analyzed the case of the Great-tailed Grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus) in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. People had negative perceptions of this species that revealed three themes about its labeling: (a) the bird as foreign; (b) the bird as a threat to livelihoods, the nation, and other species; and (c) the bird as a criminal. We have identified this phenomenon as an example of eco-xenophobia, which describes how non-human species come to be classified as foreign or as “other” and not the “rightful” occupants of a territory. We concluded that the narratives associated with animals cannot be ignored, especially when species become focal in wildlife management and conservation efforts.

KEYWORDS:

• Human-animal studies
• speciesism
• social construction of animals
• eco-criticism
• biodiversity conservation
• wildlife management
• Great-tailed Grackle

Acknowledgments

We thank the farmers and local communities in Costa Rica for sharing their time and stories with us. We thank Grethel Rojas for transcribing interview material, Jim Zook for sharing insights about this bird, and Claude Blanc for fieldwork assistance. We also acknowledge our funders for financial support. Specifically, we thank the University of British Columbia for a Four-Year Doctoral Fellowship to DD and MC, and a Doctoral Global Graduate Leadership Fellowship and a Killam Doctoral Fellowship to AE, and a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship to DSK. We also thank the National Geographic Young Explorers Grant (#C335-16) for providing funding to AE to collect data in the field. We thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for an Insight grant (435-2013-2017, Environmental meanings and ecosystem services: the social risks of ecological change) to TS, which funded fieldwork data collection.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [435-2013-2017]; National Geographic Young Explorers Grant [C335-16].