Animal performativity: Exploring the lives of donkeys in Botswana

Abstract

Donkeys provide affordable and accessible means of transport, draught power and food security for smallholder farmers in and around Maun, Botswana. Their role and welfare is often compromised by people's extensive use of and inability to care for their animals given their individual or broader circumstances. Our paper explores the lives of donkeys and donkeyhuman relations in Botswana. We apply a feminist posthumanist iteration of performativity to illustrate and explain who the donkey is, what they experience, and the context within and through which these performances are constituted. Methodologically we merge tools from animal welfare science with social science to unearth donkey physical and emotional states of being, as well as the ways in which humans use, care for, and value donkeys in this particular context. Our findings reveal donkey subjectivities (experiences) characterized by relative drudgery, hardship, and compromised physical and emotional welfare; donkey subjects (identities) grounded in their marginalized status within government and everyday livelihood realms; and donkey spatiality (contextual factors) emerging from their performances as working animals, lesser than cattle, and pathways out of poverty. Contributions of our work include empirical insights on donkey-human relations, theoretical exploration of animal performativity, and methodological innovation investigating the lives of animals.

Understanding the Attitudes of Communities to the Social, Economic, and Cultural Importance of Working Donkeys in Rural, Peri-urban, and Urban Areas of Ethiopia

“…Donkeys provide owners with empowerment through independence, status, employment, health, and happiness; however, the donkeys' assigned roles in Ethiopia can perpetuate societal inequality such as being viewed as 'a poor persons' vehicle'. Donkeys' very nature (their ability to survive drought, their physical strength, and their perceived stoical nature) can also potentially affect their own wellbeing; these characteristics result in societal perceptions that can encourage neglect (7).…”

“…To this end a qualitative approach founded on social science methodologies was adopted. Social science provides tools for examining sites where human-animal interactions occur and for understanding the human processes of valuing, caring for and treatment of animals (6,7). To date, both natural science and social science methodologies used to understand the value and impact of working donkeys have generally consisted of gathering owners' own accounts of the donkeys' health status, self-measured livelihood reports, and researchers' assessments of the impact donkeys have on owners' income generation and work load (2,(8)(9)(10)(11).…”

Attuning to laboratory animals and telling stories: Learning animal geography research skills from animal technologists

“…While storytelling has featured in animal geographies as a methodological approach (Lorimer, 2006a) and mode of writing (Van Dooren, 2014) we argue much greater use could be made of the stories narrated by research participants as a means of evidencing the complex and ongoing negotiation of human-animal relations, and as a means of balancing out the often politically flattening nature of work that focuses on multiplying and cataloguing different sites and modes of human-animal encounter. While previous work has drawn attention to the conceptual significance of acknowledging the suffering, harm and death of nonhumans as a consequence of more-than-human living (see Haraway, 2008;Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012;Van Dooren, 2014), and to the significant impacts of political-economic structures on the lives and livelihoods of marginalised animals and humans (Geiger and Horkova, 2015), here we argue for attention to the ways in which human-animal relations are storied by those engaged in them. By sharing these laboratory animal stories, as told by those who live and work alongside them and are most attuned to their welfare, we hope to offer a vehicle through which such relations might begin to be reconceptualised and renegotiated.…”

Compassionate Conservation: Exploring the Lives of African Wild Dogs (Lycaon pictus) in Botswana

“…Compassionate conservation and animal geography, a sub-discipline of human geography, share two important foundational tenets: (1) both bodies of scholarship developed as a response to the ethical and political responsibilities we hold toward the animals we share our world with [42,44]; and (2) both bodies of scholarship seek to ensure that (individual) animals’ needs are not simply ignored or unthinkingly placed below humans’ needs [7,15,44]. However, animal geography also moves beyond these anthropocentric concerns and attempts to understand the lives of animals in and of themselves, not only as individuals, but as beings who have lived experiences and agency [37,38,43,45,46]. Animal geography is therefore well-positioned to contribute to extending the field of compassionate conservation by highlighting these aspects.…”