Dr. Gillian Bogart presents CROCODILES AND CRONIES: Making Multispecies Alliances in Kupang Bay

CROCODILES AND CRONIES: Making Multispecies Alliances in Kupang Bay, Gillian Bogart

Indonesian national development programs have, over the last half century, brought cronyism, con artists, and property schemes to the coastlines of Kupang Bay, Timor. This talk contributes, first, to understanding the processes through which resource frontiers are made by examining the combination of legal forms, political strategies, and coercion deployed to convert collectively held coastal wetlands into property for land concessions. I next turn to how bay residents apprehend and respond to the threat of dispossession by state-backed corporate actors. Particular attention is paid to how this response is shaped by vernacular epistemologies and stories wherein multispecies kin relations between humans and crocodiles figure importantly. What comes into relief is a more-than-human political economy characterized by reciprocity and risk. Finally, I consider the potential multispecies alliances might have for slowing the devastating effects of capitalist extractivism and anthropogenic climate change.

Monday, April 1,4-5 pm
Tokioka Room (Moore 319)
Reception to follow. 

Gillian Bogart is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC). She has been an American Fellow of the American Association of University Women and a Chancellor’s Fellow in the UCSC Department of Anthropology. A specialist of political anthropology and multispecies worlding, she has contributed to Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene (Stanford 2020), and most recently to the forthcoming special issue “Entangled Areas: Rethinking Southeast Asia in the Anthropocene” in Engaging Science, Technology, and Society.