Bringing animals within political communities: the citizens/swans association that fractured Chile’s environmental framework

Abstract

Overflows that interrupt the ‘normal state of affairs’ are generative events that make visible the agential force of nonhumans. Practitioners of posthumanist disciplines – such as STS, ANT, economic performativity and animal studies – have exposed how nonhumans take part in the making of ‘the social.’ Due to their predominantly small-scale perspective, these efforts have left broader sociopolitical effects mainly unattended. Here I explore how the political agency of nonhumans can provoke sociopolitical consequences when approached through political ontological lenses. I argue that by conceiving reality as the precarious effect of struggles between competing ways of performing the world, human/nonhuman associations can be understood as part of non-dominant ontologies, revealing the world’s multiplicity and expanding the borders of political communities. To do so, I study a citizen/swans association that emerged in Valdivia, Chile, in response to a disaster that since 2004 has affected the Río Cruces wetland and its colony of swans, following the installation of a new pulp mill by Arauco. This unprecedented mobilization provoked the breakdown of Chile’s environmental framework and forced reform. I find that the suffering of the swans was ‘the’ most agentive force within the struggle, leading all sorts of actors to act in response. Based on an ontological reading of Rancière’s understanding of ‘the properly political’ and on Critchley’s notion of the ethical call that drives political action, I show how, through their ‘doings,’ the swans – previously unaccounted – became overtly political actors, ontologically reconfiguring the political community

Keywords:

• Animals
• political ontology
• local movements
• multiplicity
• ecological struggles
• animal suffering

Acknowledgments

She also thanks her doctoral supervisor at the Department of Geography of the University of British Columbia, Dr Juanita Sundberg. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Dr Roberto Schlatter.

Notes

1. This ontology – classified by Philippe Descola (2005) as ‘naturalism’ – is characterized by the separation between ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ the domination of ‘nature’ by ‘culture,’ and the exclusion of ‘God’ from the agencies that take part in the constitution of reality (Descola, 2005).

2. Modern science developed a mode of knowing guaranteed to be objective, controlled, and replicable. The scientific observer was enacted as a reliable and detached witness, able to narrate with analytical distance the experiments that gave birth to modern science in the late 1700s (Haraway, 1991, 1997; Latour, 2001).

3. As Blaser (2009) describes, indigenous ontologies reveal nature/culture entanglements that have no translation into modern categories.

4. Not only realist and critical-realist traditions, closest to the natural sciences, subscribe to the idea of a singular ontological matrix, but also constructivist approaches.

5. The Constitution of Ecuador (2008), in its Article 71, grants Pacha Mama the right to be integrally respected in its existence and the maintenance and regeneration of ifs life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.

6. The account of this episode in based on the testimonies of various interviewees.

7. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

8. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

9. These include La Tragedia del Río Cruces [The Río Cruces Tragedy] (2005) directed by Boroschek and Eduardo Israel, and Ciudad de Papel [Paper City] (2007) directed by Claudia Sepúlveda-Luque.

10. See Emilio Cartoy (2006), Historia de las dos orillas [History of two shores], documentary on the conflict caused by a European pulp mill on the Uruguay River. Retrieved: 25 September 2013 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faX8_MQbqZg, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXKxBVL8H-Q).

11. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

12. Given the lack of transparency in political donations, by 2004 the donations that Angelini made to political parties and candidates linked to the governing Concertación were only a rumour. However, this practice has been recently confirmed as a major political scandal revealed the systematic financing of politicians by major corporations, including Arauco and others owned by Angelini.

13. On July 2007 Boroschek was warned that he would be sued if a second video of an agonic swan, which had also gone viral, was not removed from YouTube (La Tercera, 2007). The video was republished by Acción por los Cisnes and still generates unpredictable effects. The 2007 video can be retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg6hX0ADd3 M.

14. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

15. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

16. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

17. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

18. People living close to the industry reported respiratory problems, skin allergies, impacts in their vegetables and signs of acid rain. Economic activities related to the sanctuary disappeared, such as a fluvial touristic route and touristic projects by indigenous associations.

19. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

20. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

21. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

22. Black-necked swans were listed as an endangered species and their hunting was prohibited by the CITES Convention (ratified as national law in 1975) and the Convention on Migratory Species (ratified in 1981). In 1996, Chile proposed to list the Chilean population of black-necked swans in Appendix I of the Bonn Convention on Migratory Species (CMS). See: Corti and Schlatter (1996).

23. While Hellmayr and Conover (1948) described their migratory habits as similar of those of the northern swans, which was repeated by many others (Ogilvie, 1972; Blake, 1977; Madge & Burn, 1988), in the 1990s it was accepted that, at least, they wintered in their southern range (Vuilleumier, 1997) and some migrated regularly to northern zones (Venegas, 1994).

24. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

25. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

26. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

27. Andrés Muñoz-Pedreros (2004) reports that in the years prior to the disaster, visitors to the sanctuary grew from 2922 in 2000, to 7534 in 2001 and 16,220 in 2002.

28. According to Silva (2006), Chile’s technocratic tradition can be traced back to the 1920s and has been characteristic of both conservative and progressive administrations.

29. These were enacted by Los Cuello Negro [The Black-Necked], a street performance group who performed highly publicized actions.

30. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

31. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

32. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

33. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

34. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

35. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

36. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

37. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

38. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

39. Documentary directed by Claudia Sepúlveda (2007), accounting the story of the Valdivian struggle.

40. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

41. In a note on page 4 of Animal Liberation (1975), his foundational work on animal rights, rescued in 2001 by Paola Cavalieri (2001), Singer includes a quotation from Jeremy Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789, 1948). The same quotation inspired Derrida’s work on animals. Bentham’s work was first published in 1789 (Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Retrieved 9 May 2014). http://www.iep.utm.edu/bentham/).

42. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

43. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.

44. Interview conducted by the author for her doctoral research.