Caring for the Collective: Biopower and Agential Subjectification in Wildlife Conservation

Abstract

12 . This paper explores turtle conservation in Odisha, India, to map the complicated manners in which animal well-being is pursued in the contemporary world. Using insights from Foucault's work on biopolitics, it offers an account of conservation as population politics, questioning the entanglement of harm and care that infuses this space of more-thanhuman social change. In doing this, the paper elaborates the concept of agential subjectification in order to track the mechanisms that underlie the asymmetric circulation of biopower in human-animal interactions and to develop Foucauldian scholarship for the examination of present-day manifestations of the 'will to improve'.

Disaster Capitalism and the Quick, Quick, Slow Unravelling of Animal Life

“…This biopolitical promise of life for the species overrides any concern about the bodily violence done to insert tags, and the negative effects of tagging technologies on many species life expectancies once released. In a study of turtle management practices, like turtle tagging, Krithika Srinivasan () similarly shows that even though biopower is directed at fostering life, violence and harm do not disappear; rather, they are rationalised as necessary for the flourishing of the population. Harm and care entangle under “the sacrificial logic of population: individuals can be harmed in the name of universal well‐being” (Srinivasan :506–507).…”

Conservation, biopolitics, and the governance of life and death

“…Policies and discourses around invasive and non‐native species not only affect non‐human targets but also produce new social identities, communities of practice, and forms of citizenship as people grapple with the threat of invasive life and seek out new modes of control and/or coexistence (Atchison, ; Everts, ). In Foucauldian terms, conservation discourses, such as that of invasive threats, are sustained in part through “technologies of the self” (Foucault, : 18) that produce environmentalist subjects and regulate the actions that individuals take on behalf of and upon non‐humans (Rutherford, ; Srinivasan, ). Yet conservation discourses and the values implicit in them are not fixed but are fluid and multiple.…”

“…In sum, managing endangerment is not a straightforward, singular project but entails multiple, at times competing hierarchies of non‐human life, which render entire populations and species more or less valuable and more or less killable in the eyes of conservationist subjects (Srinivasan, ). Together, the various techniques that comprise endangered species management—species lists, censuses, population models, risk assessments, and classification schemes—work to “[draw] the observer into responsibility for Earth's many endangered species” (Fredriksen, : 691).…”

“…Together, these hierarchies justify both care and neglect, making live and letting die. But as Srinivasan () reminds us, it is not that harm is deliberately masked by discourses of care, but that conservationists, breeders, and scientists come to genuinely recognize acts of violence, neglect, and letting die as constitutive of care for a population, species, or life as a whole.…”

Killing squirrels: Exploring motivations and practices of lethal wildlife management

“…We are also interested in the distinction between killing and 'making killable' in both 79 the specific context of squirrel management and wildlife management more broadly, 80 and this work therefore also speaks to a growing literature that examines the 81 governance of wildlife, including introduced species, though the Foucauldian lenses 82 of 'biopolitics ' and/or 'biopower' (Biermann and Mansfield, 2014;Collard, 2012; 83 Fredriksen, 2017; Lorimer and Dreissen, 2013;Srinivasan, 2014; Srinivasan and 84 Kasturirangan, 2017). The broad tenets of contemporary grey squirrel control could 85 readily be identified and explored as human (though not necessarily state) efforts to 86 assert power and control over life: grey squirrels are regularly 'made to die' in order 87 for red squirrels and trees to live (see Hodgetts, 2017; Srinivasan and Kasturirangan, 88 2017).…”