Seminars

On many rooftops in non-urban Egypt, families keep food animals such as chickens, ducks, and geese. In Arabic, the word used to describe this practice of keeping food animals is tarbiyya, which is the same word used to describe the parent-child relationship. Through juxtaposing tarbiyya in the human and nonhuman realms, I argue that tarbiyya is a form of mothering that entails world-creation wherein a mother creates, observes, and learns from a substitute world of nonhumans. This substitute world operates through different rules of mothering, offering a repository of images, metaphors, and understandings of mothering for human mothers. Unlike dominant imaginaries of motherhood in the human realm as selfless, all-loving, and sacrificial, imaginaries and experiences of motherhood in the nonhuman realm through tarbiyya expose mothering as a challenging undertaking. It is this proximity of human and nonhuman realms of tarbiyya reminds mothers that violence and struggle are foundational to mothering. As an entry point, analytic, and social theory, tarbiyya illuminates sovereignty as a maternal undertaking, one in which it is mothers who nurture and feed but also who kill and select who lives and who dies.

'Zoopolitics in the Past' considers how a zoopolitical approach to human animal relationships in the past shifts how we understand the value of domesticated animals. Archaeologists have challenged traditional approaches that locate the value of domesticated animals in their role as resources, but I argue that a simplistic division between instrumental and symbolic value is also inadequate. An action-oriented approach to the value makes it possible to investigate human-animal relations in the past, in their fullness as socially-embedded, historically- specific, and embodied practices - as I show in my analysis of human-herd relations in the Late Bronze Age South Caucasus. At the end of the talk, I reflect on how a zoopolitical approach reconfigures how we think about the present and the future by telling stories about living with animals in the past.

In interwar Burundi, successive waves of gregarious locust swarms preyed on fields and grazing grounds, exacerbating the vulnerability of its (non)-human inhabitants. The locusts also constituted an acute governance issue for the Belgian colonial administration, which struggled to devise efficient modes of acridian containment and destruction. By using the locusts being-in-the-world as a vantage point, this paper proposes to study the complex interactions between insectile hazards and the segregated human communities who had to face them. The 'interspecies contact zone’ can function as a framework to make sense of multilayered more-than-human encounters occurring in the fraught context of colonial societies.

The forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the Bible and Animals brings together 38 essays from scholars in biblical studies and adjacent fields, grappling with what it means to interpret biblical texts, contexts, and intertexts with nonhuman animals at the centre. In this lecture, the editor of the Handbook draws out pertinent themes that are suggestive of the major research trajectories in this area. These themes fall into three main groups: animals in themselves, animals in their relationships with humans, and animals in broader systems of meaning and power.