Towards an Anthropology of More-Than-Human Resistance: New Challenges for Noticing Conflicts in the Plantationocene

Abstract

In light of the Plantationocene, a term recently elaborated to capture the magnitude of power of plantation systems from European Colonialism and plantation slavery to industrial animal farming and plant monocultures in the present climate crisis, political anthropology faces new challenges in noticing resistance. While plantation struggles have been crucial for conceptual innovations since the late 1960s as well as new arts of noticing, the related crises of climate change, extractivism and exterminism garner a new urgency to rethink resistance in the light of the multispecies turn. Examining recent anthropological examples of resistance in, around, and against plantations, this article opens the concept of resistance to include the agency of nonhumans and their capacity to make social and political changes, fight back, form alliances and co-produce rebelliously charged effects, meanings and interpretations. The article discusses the emerging field of anthropology of more-than-human resistance and helps in re-calibrating the anthropologist’s art of noticing it. In doing so, the text elaborates three challenges – the risk of romanticizing resistance, of reifying it, and of conceptual stretching. To cope with the challenges in forging anthropology of more-than-human resistance, two particular strategies are further outlined – of focusing on the articulations of resistance, and fostering a closer affiliation to activism and organized protest.