Multi-Species Knowledge and Practices

Rewilding addresses shifting politics of conservation knowledge in the context of human-nonhuman entanglements.

Earlier conservation practices in southern Africa operated at spatial and material, as well as symbolic and discursive levels, to produce particular “natures”. They involved the physical (often violent) exclusion of people from certain spaces (segregating culture and nature) and the marginalization of their religious engagements with the environment, while they institutionalized hegemonic forms of knowledge and belief. This work package aims to critically engage with colonial and post-independence politics involved in creating and imagining “nature”, especially through emerging conservation ideologies, imaginaries, and practices that relate to conflicts over land-use. This work package also explores religious ties to nature, which often call into question the sharp divide between culture and nature. In many rural communities, ancestral cults connect people to wilderness areas, and ideas of divine kinghood (e.g. the Lozi king on the northern edge of the KAZA TFCA) are often connected to ideas of nature. Contemporary churches often interpret socio-ecological changes along Biblical lines. By tracing divergent multispecies assemblages, as they emerge and are contested by different actors (humans and non-human), organizations, and epistemic communities, work package 3 will trace local and cross-scalar knowledge-scapes in the making.
This work package addresses three sets of interrelated questions:

1.  How are various conservation strategies defined and valued? Are such understandings embedded within specific spiritualties and/or religious practices? What kinds of multispecies pasts and futures animate local epistemologies and moralities?
   
   
2. How do categories such as conservation, nature, wildlife corridor, game, transboundary, or ecology translate locally? What forms of knowledge emerge as technologies of gaining knowledge change?
   
   
3. In what ways are local knowledge-practices gendered and embedded within power relations? What do such intersectionalities imply for the re-imagining, co-creation, and valuation of specific multispecies communities?