Beyond Loving Nature: Affective Conservation and Human-Pig Violence in the Philippines. Issue 5 (20th October 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Smith, Will
• Is Part Of: Ethnos. Volume 87:Issue 5(2022)
• Page Start: 874
• Page End: 892
• Publication Date: 2022-10-20
• Subjects: Conservation -- affect -- posthumanism -- indigeneity -- Southeast Asia; Ethnology -- Periodicals; Archaeology -- Periodicals; 305.8
• DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2020.1828970
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0014-1844

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Contemporary social theory has forcefully argued for a 'loving' postenvironmentalism based on intimate care and making kin with the non-human world. These arguments are a central part of an influential and cross-disciplinary scholarly discourse, increasingly adopted by environmental anthropologists, that envisions a universal moral ecology of 'care, love and kinship' as the solution to the near-apocalyptic social and environmental conditions of the Anthropocene. Drawing on ethnographic work in the Philippines, I explore how this narrowed affective repertoire maps awkwardly onto indigenous Pala'wan explanations of their relationship with the non-human world where reciprocity and respect are held in tension with fear, violence and death. I focus, in particular, on the Palawan bearded pig ( Sus ahoenobarbus ), an endemic species that has become an emblematic conservation species while also being extensively hunted by indigenous peoples across the Island.