More-Than-Human Histories of Extraction: Violence and Care in the Technological Landscape

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

Environmental history has often centered dichotomies like the domesticated and the wild, the local and the global, and the human and the nonhuman. But telling more-than-human histories of environmental extraction reveals how often these boundaries are transgressed, particularly as technological landscapes intensify and transform existing relationships within ecosystems. This panel examines four such sites where familiar binaries are blurred. It emphasizes how more-than-human extractivism involves new forms of violence and care between species and towards the landscape. Gaby Báez traces the role of the extractive technologies of ecclesiastical visits to Indigenous communities in colonial New Spain, and how these “holy visits” informed constructions of territoriality, gender, and health. Caleb Shelburne examines the making of the Ottoman-French leech trade and industry, focusing on how the intensification of demand transformed understandings of landscapes and capital. Kat Poje addresses the way the 19th and early 20th-century humane movement in the United States framed certain human and animal populations alike as surplus, and how the humane movement nonetheless attempted to derive value from the bodies they marked as waste. Kamil Ahsan looks at how the postcolonial Sri Lankan state’s idea of the reef as absent or non-human both allowed for the commodity extraction of limestone for cement, and imposed a land/water binary on a constantly fluctuating coast.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Encomiendo mi alma (parcel my soul): Pastoral technologies of extraction in 18th-Century New Spain - Margaretta Gabriela Baez, University of Oklahoma

• Leeches Across Borders: More-than-Human Extractivism in the 19th-Century Ottoman-French Leech Trade - Caleb Shelburne, Harvard University History of Science, PhD Candidate

• Humane Extraction Technologies - Kat Poje, Harvard University

• The Reef as Rock: The History of Mining & Ecology in Sri Lanka, 1948-1998 - Kamil Ahsan, Yale University

Chair

• Dominic Dongilli, University of Iowa