Wildlife in Borderlands

Description:

This anthropological study – in Slovenia and its neighbourhood – sets wildlife at the centre of border research. It will examine the contradictions in the relations between human borders and animals. Unaware of our border convention, animals cross borders freely, which prompts borderwork, i.e. specific human activities of demarcation (through narratives, physical barriers, hunting, landscape ecosemiotics etc.). But by marking boundaries in their environment, people affect animal movement and behaviour, which – in turn – has an effect on their own everyday life. The project will ethnographically explore the relations between borders and wildlife, as border effects affect the movement of wildlife and wildlife affects human borderwork, which plays out differently on different borders.

Project objectives:

The project’s objective is to ethnographically theorize borders as relational, more-than-human entanglements, with special emphasis on forms of borderwork as stimulated by animal movement and behaviour. Its partial objectives are:

1. To conduct ethnographic research in six border regions of Slovenia and its neighbouring countries (Austria, Croatia, Hungary, Italy), focusing on human relations arising from animal movement and behaviour.
2. To identify and examine the political, economic, and demographic processes rooted in socialist Yugoslavia that generated specific borderland environments and the long-term effects of these processes on animal presence and on the related activities of contemporaries.
3. To research discourses on nationality stimulated by animals’ migration. The impacts of wildlife border crossings inspire locals to ascribe animals with the (other) nationality, which in turn gives rise to debates about responsibility for animals in national spaces. The project aims to examine these often heated and affective discourses and relations.
4. To study hunters and hunting in border areas, where animals have a different administrative status when they cross the border, which is why cross-border cooperation between hunters is important. How various actors – including hunters themselves – view hunting and hunters as well as how hunters negotiate on the role they play with other actors? The project aims to provide a deeper understanding of hunters, who are uncharted territory in contemporary anthropology of Europe.