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Post-Truth and why its not all Bollocks
I am speaking to an acquaintance in the crumbling posterior of a pub when it occurs to me that the post-truth monologue coming at me is an attempt at grasping what is beyond their realm of ‘the known’. Instead of post-truth being some sort of contemporary phenomenon of talking political shit, the ‘post’ in post-truth…
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2040 FilmReview
This flash documentary attracted my attention as it explicitly describes itself as focussing on regeneration rather than conservation, protection, sustainability etc. That is it overcomes the two main principles of dominant environmental narratives; assuming people are by default exploitative and that the living environment or ‘resources’ are zero-sum and finite. Regenerative agriculture and agroforestry have…
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Its not playing god when its done so stupidly: the case of mosquito population control by genetic modification
A recent study shows that the introduction of genetically modified mosquitos to control the population of free mosquitos in south america has at best not worked, at worst made the situation a lot worse. The story goes that with the spread of the Zika virus, amongst other viruses lethal to humans, the idea to try…
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Disobedient Being – Prague Workshop
‘Despite the attempts of governing and bordering, no beings behave as they are expected to do. Indian migrants in the Gulf do not necessarily want to be naturalised, parakeets enjoy the London winter despite their tropical origins, boars eat sandwiches and roam in playgrounds despite the fact they are depicted as “wild”, and binational couples…
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Zama FilmReview
Disturbing? Beautiful? Yes. But not in an abstractly exaggerated way. In a sweat meets mud, meets atmospheres, meets skin meets other skins way. A film that starts as intriguing, moves into the kafkaesque, wriths in a disconcerting expedition and ends with the cut of exhausted acceptance. This is a film all about entanglement, that laughs…
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Hunting Studies – Research Network
In 2015 I founded the Anthropology of Hunting and Conservation Network that went on to inform Hunting Studies, a new field of research that was proposed by Professor Garry Marvin at a network meeting in 2018. Introduction to Hunting Studies Whether in newspapers, academic research or public discourse, hunting has been described as a leisurely…
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Gilet Jaunes: Mobilising to Challenge the Political Order
Across France people have been donning yellow vests (gilet jaunes) and taking to the streets to protest their government. To those outside France it may appear as just another year of French people protesting. However, the mobilizations have not been organised by labour unions nor established political groups. Instead, the signs are that many of…
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Upstream Colour FilmReview
An unusual almost verbally silent film that follows the flow of how multiple species’ lives are layered into each other. Where one life begins and one ends is not so clear, reflecting how entangled life is. It is not that there are not ‘individuals’ or ‘persons’, just that they are not bounded. This flow of…
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Regenerative Guilds
Techniques of enrichment rather than sustaining, saving, degrading or exploiting a landscape, are numerous but remain conceptually dispersed or primitivized. These techniques challenge the premise that the environment (socially conceived) is fixed and finite and humans are by default exploitative. They challenge the political dichotomy of wild and domesticated, that supports the practice of saving…
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The Dirty Nature of Paternalistic Care
The world is increasingly controlled through administration, but it is not a productive process as it often claims to be. It is the exploitation of ideas of harm in order to gain control of resources. Paternalistic ‘democratic’ and ‘caring’ processes are at the very heart of this exploitation.
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How Hunters Make Sense
It had been a long winter’s hunting season with only a few partridge shot. We had spent it strenuously combing the countryside in the day whilst sleeping restlessly with anticipation at night. Waking well before any cocks had crowed or signs of day had risen, we trudged for hours through bracken and bushes, and over…
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Fieldnotes: Hunting in Northern Cyprus
Published at Allegra Laboratory. November 2015; I proceeded ten metres behind Ertan Abi for much of the morning, a place in which I was not directly within the firing line but could also observe acutely what was going on. Before proceeding from where we disembarked from his vehicle, everyone had confirmed and asked each other in short…
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