Can Wild Boar Save the Lynx

Delavnica s projektno skupino Divjad v mejnih regijah in predavanje Can Wild Boar Save the Lynx? Transformations of Game Management and Nature Protection in Serbia’s Geopark Đerdap.

André Thiemann (Charles University, Faculty of Arts, Institute of Ethnology and Central European and Balkan Studies, Prague, Czech Republic)

Can Wild Boar Save the Lynx? Transformations of Game Management and Nature Protection in Serbia’s Geopark Đerdap

In 1974, the Socialist Republic of Serbia promulgated the National Park ‘Đerdap’ (NP). The NP was extensively managed until the early 1990s, when local charcoal burners and poachers depleted it. Newly employed foresters and rangers eventually stopped this post-socialist frontier situation, but under neo-liberal funding constraints, they had to generate funds for their own salaries. While contriving a sustainable management of the NP’s resources through timber production, trophy and recreational hunting, they also set aside ecological patches as specially protected zones. More recently, they began to adapt these practices within the recently established UNESCO Geopark Đerdap. The article ethnographically hones in on the rangers’ wild boar game management techniques to prevent poaching, create hunting revenue, and finance the protection and research of strictly protected species, such as lynx. It spotlights how wildlife, viruses, and humans co-produce the emerging hierarchies, exclusions and cooperative relations within a Southeast European, semi-formal community-based conservation model.

André Thiemann is a social anthropologist who conducts research in the fields of political ecology, global value chains, infrastructures of value, care, kinship and the state. Part of his current research examines how, in contemporary Serbia, domestic and wild pigs navigate frictions between veterinarization, environmentalism, recreational hunting, African-Swine-Fever, a globalising meat sector, and the resultant, often toxic ecologies on different scales. This research is grounded in an appreciation of the longue-durée of how pigs have shaped politics since the Serbian nation state emerged in the early 19th century.

Predavanje omogoča projekt Divjad v mejnih regijah (ARIS, J6-70232), v sodelovanju s projektom TiCToC: Times in Crisis, Times of Crisis: The Temporalities of Europe in Polycrisis (HERA-CHANSE).