A study published late last year offers fresh insights on how planners can use a more-than-human (MoTH) approach in planning policy and practice, one that does not stress on human exceptionalism and also includes nonhuman animals.
The study, titled Towards eco-political becoming: Planning rural livelihoods in a more-than-human world, has been authored by Vinisha Singh Basnet, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the United States.
She notes that while emerging literature within planning has invited scholars “to engage with a MoTH approach”, it is yet to gain acceptance within planning communities.
The reason for this, she says, is “that the issue of acceptance is rooted in a lack of clear focus on how a more-than-human approach can have concrete effects on accepted domains of planning”.
Basnet shows how nonhuman animals can indeed affect planning rural livelihoods. Through her case study, she shows how nonhumans and their relationship with humans affect two key sociopolitical categories and processes—gender and caste.
Basnet’s study was part of a larger project, Unlocking the Value Potential of Non-Timber Forest Produce (NTFP), undertaken by the Center for Development Practice at Ambedkar University Delhi in collaboration with non-profit PRADAN.
“The larger goal of this project was to improve livelihood opportunities for Indigenous rearers, collectors, and gatherers by addressing the gaps and analyzing the linkages between downstream and upstream activities and actors in the value chain of NTFPs, such as lac resin and silk,” she noted in her paper.
From February 2017-August 2019, as part of this larger project, she was in two villages for fieldwork — Jamposhi, Odisha, and Narayanpur-Tasaria, Jharkhand.
While the former is dominated by the Ho Adivasi community, the latter is largely populated by Santhal and Paharia communities. People in both villages practice sericulture. They rear the non-mulberry silk moth, Antheraea mylitta, on leaves of Terminalia elliptica and Terminalia arjuna, and Shorea robusta respectively.
It was during these fieldwork visits that Basnet noticed the absence of crows in the villages.
“What started as a random curiosity evolved into a more organized inquiry,” she writes.
What the residents told her about the absence of crows allowed her to look, through the lens of gender and caste, at how they had a peculiar effect on social hierarchies in the two villages.
The residents of Jamposhi and Narayanpur-Tasaria considered crows to be ‘pests’ as they fed on their precious silk moths.
The residents tried several methods to ward off the crows from their moths.
“To prevent crows from eating moths, villagers often use strategies like setting up scarecrows, employing catapults and bow-and-arrows, and assigning children to drive the crows away. Over time, however, crows learned to dodge these tactics, rendering them ineffective. This pushed the rearers to more extreme measures like using poison,” the paper notes.
Scientists have noted that corvids or the crow family is among the most intelligent of nonhuman animals. While the crows in Jamposhi took the poison-laced bait offered by the residents, those in Narayanpur-Tasaria learned that the residents were offering them poison to eat. And they refused to take the bait.
The Adivasi silk moth rearers then embarked on something unique. They conducted a fake puja, similar to sraddha, a Hindu ritual of paying homage to dead ancestors. The ceremony consists of offering ritually blessed food or prasad to crows, who are considered dead ancestors by those performing the rite.
The villagers fashioned cow dung to resemble dough, applied tilak (religious vermilion mark) to the trees they worship, and lit incense sticks.
“This elaborate performance was carried out to convince the crow to consume the poisoned food. Perhaps crows had discerned that religious ceremonies were safe for them, possibly linking it to the genuine performance of sraddha. Thus, it took an actual ceremony and its offering, prasad (a food offer to spiritual entity), for the crows to consume,” writes Basnet.
But there was another charade the villagers did to scare the crows away. This time, it mostly involved the women of the villages.
Basnet was told that the crows usually were able to discern and differentiate between male and female villagers. While they were afraid of the men, this was not the case with women.
“Crows would avoid the rearing site when men worked or guarded the field. But since most men would work different jobs during the day or would migrate seasonally to nearby cities for income, the responsibility of caring for and rearing tasar moths would fall largely on women. Thus, in their attempt to control the invasion of crows, women rearers came up with the strategy to disguise themselves as male family members,” the paper notes.
The researcher writes that the two provisionally successful methods of deterring crows show “a performative disruption of the rigid social hierarchies in village life — gender and caste”.
Gender and caste, she adds, are two major anchors of social equity in India, and the target of many developmental projects that focus on overcoming the oppression that results from them.
The crows forced the Adivasi villagers to take up a caste Hindu ritual. In the process though, the community disrupted the logic of the ritual and lured the crows to their own death.
“This multispecies entanglement can be read as a symbolic challenge to historical caste oppression. However, given this new counter signal of threat to the crows, it remains unknown how or if this practice has affected the actual sraddha puja in the nearby places. The act of ritualized poisoning creates a rupture in the prevalent sociopolitical process of Sanskritization and caste-based subjugation,” writes Basnet.
She adds that the cross dressing was also “a symbolic challenge to the long history of social subjugation faced by Santhal women”.
The entanglement with crows both solidifies and blurs the gender dynamics of village life. “But the act of cross-dressing creates a disruption, as it runs counter to the usual social stigma of women becoming and acting like men. The demands of economic activities normalize women being in the shoes of men. Therefore, multispecies entanglement between crow-moth-human creates peculiar effects for sociopolitical processes that we might often fail to notice or consider for planning practice and theory,” according to the paper.
Basnet argues, Eco-political becoming, can serve as an analytical tool to better understand issues stemming from human-nonhuman interactions.
“It could engage with issues like environmental degradation, natural resource management, urban pests, extreme weather, and climate patterns which could well be situated under the established domain of environmental, land-use, economic development, or even transportation planning,” as per the study.
Basnet further invites planning scholars working on issues stemming from human-nonhuman intersections “to use eco-political becoming as a tool to foreground the influence of a MoTH approach on socially constructed identities and hierarchies”.
The paper has been published in the journal Planning Theory.