The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish: The Understory of the Understory
5th & 6th December 2020
Online at themind.fish
The Understory of the Understory is the fourth instalment in an ongoing series of festivals on consciousness and intelligence across species, part of the Serpentine’s General Ecology project. With The Understory of the Understory, we go to that place which is simultaneously ground, land, soil and Earth, that is to say, the place where diverse species come together, collaborate, communicate and constitute one another but also where complex systems of redistribution of toxicity, logics of extraction and geopolitics meet.
Marisol de la Cadena
‘Cow sex’ in translation: what if what we see as ‘cow sex’ they (cows) engage in as play?
Marisol de la Cadena’s conversation with Filipa Ramos and Kostas Stasinopoulos assays a thought experiment. It starts with a very general proposition: cows – de la Cadena’s generic word for all cattle – acquired sex in the process of their domestication by humans. The process was anthropomorphic because the sex we granted them was the sex we knew, i.e. human sex; anthropomorphism can be generous, and it can be enormously selfish, it can become ruthless anthropocentrism, and this is the case of the current industry of cow reproduction.
Marisol de la Cadena was trained as an anthropologist and locates her work at several interfaces: those between Science-and-Technology Studies (STS) and non-STS, between major and minor politics (and what escapes both,) between history and the a-historical, and between world anthropologies and the anthropologies of worlds. In all these areas, her concern is the relationship between concepts and methods, and interfaces as analytical sites. Most specifically, de la Cadena is interested in ethnographic concepts – those that blur the distinction between what we call theory and the empirical, and can indicate the limits of both. Her current field sites are cattle ranches, peasant farms, slaughter houses, cattle fairs, breed-making genetic laboratories, and veterinary schools in Colombia. There she engages practices and relations between people, cows, plants, and things. Thinking at divergent bio/geo interfaces, de la Cadena is interested in “the stuff” that makes life and death in conditions of dramatic ecological and political change as the country endures extreme droughts and floods and wants to transition between the violence of war to a condition of unreachable peace that might not be without violence. Her most recent book is Earth Beings. Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (2015).
@marisoldelacad1
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