Bob Kuřík, That's why it's called a 'national' park and not any other park

Ondřej Šebestík spoke with anthropologist Bob Kuřík about the twists and turns in contemporary anthropology, the more-than-human politics he sees unfolding on the borderlands between Czechia and Slovakia, and discussed the meaning of resistance in the late Anthropocene.

Let's start with the term 'nature.' Do we still use it in social sciences and social anthropology?

The Germans would say "jein," ja and nein together. It's an extremely complicated term. I don't see a more complicated term in terms of its genealogy and history. It has this double meaning: On the one hand, there is nature as something which should encompass everything nonhuman, from plants to fungi, to rocks. On the other hand, it also involves nature as what we call in Czech "přirozenost," which includes the human as well, something we are given from birth, something which is ahistorical, like human nature and these things. It has such a biased and very much western cosmology, a loaded trajectory that in anthropology has become a problem from the 1980's onward. On the one hand, there is a tendency to keep it alive, because it's an extremely used term, although there are societies outside Europe which do not use such a term or they do not understand it as something outside of human life. It's very much part of language of many different groups, from locals through experts to activists, including indigenous activists embracing "Mother Nature." And it is good to have some terms functioning as bridges for communication among each other. 'Nature' as well as, for instance, 'the Anthropocene' are such terms. We want to have a common conversation, for example, with the biologists and natural scientists.

But critical social scientists don't speak so much about nature, but about regimes of nature, or socionatures or culturenatures. Another problem is not only that the term is complicated per se, but it's complicated also because of what kind of relationships have been established around it. It brings a binary: usually it's nature on one hand and culture on the other hand. This is very much an idea of European cosmology – culture, that is the world of humans, stands apart from nature, that is the world of the nonhuman. It's a very limited understanding and it comes with lots of biased perspectives which are not common in other societies and, when for example applied to nature conservation policy, it may create lots of tension with locals.

The social sciences have been full of turns in recent years. One of those turns is also the multi-species turn in anthropology, and you also write and think a lot about more-than-human resistance. What are these more-than-human and multispecies dimensions?  

You're right. We are going from turn to turn and it's almost like we cannot go straight for a while. One of the latest turns is exactly this multispecies turn, which is, let's say in anthropology, kind of heretical. As you see from the term consisting of anthropos-logos, it means the study of humans. Suddenly we are trying to burn the bridges of the idea that science should focus only on very particular slots of expertise. Like rocks and what we call here inorganic nature should be only for geologists and biological life should be only for biology and anthropology has got this indigenous slot of analyzing the human. Suddenly we try to derail this slot and we say – why not focus as well on analyzing this kind of complicated interspecies relation? It's a kind of tendency to cross the borders towards other disciplines, which I think is important for the present.

Anthropology obviously has a long history of analyzing how humans understood non-humans – plants, animals. Usually, it tends to presume that the story goes that the human is the actor of history and those other entities are either objects, resources, food or totemic symbols; somehow considered passive – to be interpreted by humans, to be eaten by them, to be overcome by them, to be extracted. It's very oriented on the human story. Since the 80's and 90's, and mostly in the last 10 to 15 years, we have started to focus much more on how different human societies and cultures understand and relate to non-humans and treat them as active agents. Not only as obstacles but as co-creating histories. This is kind of a big shift. It goes as well with the huge shift in focusing not so much on the differences of humans from others. Modern science was very much established with this Cartesian idea of sharp a difference between the world of human culture, which is res cogitans, and the rest, which is res extensa. And now comes the time to focus rather on symmetries. What do we have in common? Humans are not the only ones who think. As we know from Gregory Bateson, thinking is rather a quality of the environment – one thinks by moving and dwelling in an environment. Thinking here rather means creating meanings, communicating, deciding etc. From this starting point, new dimensions suddenly occur. How to do anthropology of the environment? Somebody speaks about 'anthropology of nature,' somebody calls it 'multi-species ethnography.' I tend to prefer 'more-than-human anthropology' because species in the term 'multispecies' is a scientific category and many people around the world don't think about the non-humans in terms of species, in terms of Linneaus classifications, Latin terms and stuff like that. 'More-than-human' to me captures better that we live in the Anthropocene, which is very much an era with significant human impact. But impact does not necessarily mean domination. On the contrary, many human attempts to dominate fail and we live in the consequences of those failures, its side-effects. Global warming is such a side-effect to the bold, modern projects of industrialization.

And about the more-than-human resistance issue which has been my interest in last years: I did lots of anthropology of resistance and protest. This idea of what resistance is and who resists and why was very much dominated by the idea that humans are the only actors of protest. The multispecies turn to more-than-human anthropology enables us to better see that we have entered the Anthropocenic times full of more-than-human resistances – some to be worried about, such as antibiotic resistances, others to build hope around for times of trouble, such as resistances of mountains to be extracted in the very same logic which brought us into the planetary catastrophe.

Me and my colleagues and students thus started a project called ResisTerra in which we study how resistance is distributed among more-than-human lines. Such resistance is not only about fighting for nature or fighting against resource extraction or fighting for the protection of ecosystems, but fighting with and together with allies, like pests as well as nearly extinct plants or butterflies, entire landscapes, slow moving mountains, fast-growing weeds etc. As Yoruba-African philosopher Bayo Akomolafe says "Times are urgent, let us slow down." Slow down in order to see and learn how to understand non-humans not only as objects to be protected, but as subjects, or better as allies or enemies in more-than-human assemblages, tackling all the important issues of contemporary times – from biodiversity loss to climate crisis.

Since people realized in the dawn of the Anthropocene in the nineteenth century that they are not only creating their environments but also damaging them, they have been trying to protect nature. What is the historical background or the first nature reservations like Yellowstone National Park? What stands in the origins of national parks?  

It's a complicated history. The idea of protecting nature in the form of so-called national parks comes very much from American history of settler colonialism. We are talking here about the mid-nineteenth century, about the settler colonialist state, which is in search for its national mythology to be grounded as a sovereign state. It has been founded in what environmental historian William Cronon called "frontier ideology." There was this idea of a frontier between the civilized world, where settler colonialists already lived, and the wilderness which was non-colonized, where lived wild animals and wild people – meaning indigenous people. The true American was the one who left the civilized world and went into the wilderness to settle there and to colonize the area to make it habitable for his own endeavors – he worked his butt off to settle down and fought all the enemies, from alligators to indigenous people, from bogs to mosquitoes, in order to build farmland there. The movement came obviously from east to west. This is the time when they almost reached the Wild West. "Wild" here stands for the last non-domesticated area. They already knew that the time when everything would be settled and colonized was coming. They were searching for some spots of wilderness to preserve, to be able to access anytime the origins of their own American nationality. Therefore, protected areas were established as so-called national parks – it was meant to be the source of their national mythology and helped in the construction of nationalism. That's why it's called a 'national' park and not some other park. Nature as wilderness without humans, protected in natural parks, was supposed to be a place for Americans to come contemplate, re- create , touch God as well as the origins of their nation with its crucial pillars, like the idea of a self-made man.

And the first national parks appear at the same time when indigenous people lost their war with the settlers. This is the story of Yellowstone National Park. The area was a home for indigenous people, but they lost in the war and were resettled into reservations. In other words, the place was home for people, but they were kicked out in order to transform the place into pristine wilderness untouched by humans where rich white Americans from the east coast could come visit. In the origin of national parks you can see in very concrete terms what western cosmology of Nature opposed to Culture means in reality. From there on, the vision and set of practices for making and maintaining national parks was distributed all around the world, including the Czech lands, where it was plugged into different histories and context. As it is a set of practices established within a particular historical context entangled in a particular cosmology, it created lots of tension all around the world with indigenous people because it was a legal framework enabling to kick them out from their homes in order to protect nature from all humans.

I'm trying to compare the origins of American national parks with the story of a protected area now in the Czech lands, which is Žofínský prales. It was established almost at the same time in the first half of the 19th century by one of the Buquoy aristocrats. And there wasn't this story of building a national identity through virgin nature – it was really meant to protect a piece of forest for scientific purposes – to see how it was going to develop without human involvement. Almost all of the virgin forests of so-called Silva Nortica had disappeared during history. So what are the origins of protecting nature as nature?

Sure, there are many more historical paths to protecting nature and the story of the origin of American national parks is only one of them, although it had and continues to have a wonderful career of distribution all around the world. But obviously, and as I already said, some parts of it changed by moving from place to place and connecting to vernacular contexts. Me, my colleagues and students were recently in one of the four Czech national parks called Podyjí which is actually the youngest one. And it was fascinating to listen to older conservationists who started to work out the idea of the national park from the very bottom up, adopting a clandestine approach already in the late 1980s, crossing borders to Austria to meet colleagues there etc. There was obviously not an approach of building national myths for a settler colonial state, but rather a kind of nonpolitical, expert-driven critique of late State Socialism through environmentalist means.

What I am trying to say is to pay attention to historical contexts, political connotations and thus the mutability of used categories. Take for example the idea of the wilderness. The concept of wilderness is a concept of people living in urban areas – it gains its positive meaning at a time when people resettled en masse from rural to urban areas because of the industrial revolution. Farmers don't work that much with 'wilderness,' they use words like 'surroundings,' of a concrete 'forest,' of 'home' or something like that. Do not get me wrong though. Do I think it's important to protect the natural processes without humans? Yes, I do. Especially in places with such an omnipresence of human settlements. But I would like to see more recognition that the wilderness is as well a historical concept and it's not good to disseminate this concept all around the world, saying it's nonbiased. It's very much biased. The open question remains if and how nature conservation is connected with political ideology of conservatism – you know, treating nature as a gentleman would treat women – and if and where there are any alternatives to it grounded for instance rather in post-progressive approaches.

Anthropology has long-term disputes with conservation biologists. Many of them tend to see themselves as the protectors of nature from all humans and we anthropologists tend to say – look, you are trying to protect places which are considered as home for many indigenous people. I am not trying to play the noble savage card here. Obviously, we are not talking about harmony and blah blah. But all these indigenous people have their idea of what their surroundings are. Some call it nature, some call it environment, and some call it home. Anthropology says: we have to focus not only on protecting biodiversity, but as well on the diversity of ideas of protection. What is more, I think we need to understand such protection as a more-than-human endeavor together with indigenous communities, as well as for instance beavers, as experts, and not only distribute one western modern idea of nature protection all around the world, which was very much the case in 80's and 90's and created lots of tension between locals and white environmentalists.

Let's try to move forward from critical thinking to a more speculative realm. What would be the post-progressive approach, as you've mentioned, to protect nature in cooperation with nonhuman entities? Do you have any examples of real practices any policies?

There is no coherent and ready-made vision on how to move forward with these approaches. Only bits and tiny pieces here and there in need of interweaving. We have examples from around the world where nonhuman entities obtained legal subjectivity. They’re not only objects of protection anymore, but enter a sphere of hegemony and counter-hegemony. One example is a river in New Zealand. Or in Latin America we are seeing lots of debates about the rights of nature. The conservation attitude focuses on biodiversity – this indeed is a crucial topic for facing mass extinction, but it also creates new inequalities regarding legal frameworks between privileged and non-privileged natures. Can we learn something from non-humans which are not treated as privileged and rare? For example in Prague, we have a policy of mass slaughter of pigeons. Pigeons are not on lists of endangered species, quite the contrary actually. On the other hand, their way of being able to live with humans, to be able to find a niche in any kind of hostile environment, that's something I consider inspiring. There are diverse ways for the politics of coexistence, and here we are going the brutal way with gassing pigeons.

Another thing I personally find interesting is whether we can learn something from pests and weeds. Entities which we treat exactly as unprivileged non-humans. And I think we can learn much. Especially in the Czech Republic as the plantation superpower, right? As far as I know, there is no other country which would have a plantation landlord running for President. Not to mention that our fields and our forests are super-monocultures. So this is the spot to think about these ideas. In anthropology, we have interesting examples from the world, how people manage to recognize pests and weeds as their allies. One of my favorites is the boll weevil mentioned in the Feral Atlas, a tiny beetle who likes to eat cotton. Back in the day it came from Mexico to North America and started to eat cotton plantations in its southern parts, where Afro-American slaves were working. This boll weevil managed to resist many attempts of plantation owners to eradicate it and came back to eat. After all, if you organize planting cotton into monocultural plantations, you create a banquet for them. The planters didn't know what to do. This tiny beetle had the power to help shift the colonial economy of that time. Descendants of Afro-Americans recognized this pest as a hero. There is even a statue in the town Enterprise in Alabama, where a woman is holding this beetle above her head as an ally.

There are other examples – such as the one described by Katarzyna Beilin and Sainath Suryanarayanan. The plant called amaranth comes from Latin America and is considered by many as a weed as well. But it's a plant which has a long-term relation with many indigenous people in Latin America. It's considered as a weed by planters who invented Roundup Ready soy. It is genetically modified soy with a changed genome to be able to survive Roundup chemical spraying. They use lots of Roundup herbicide on huge plantations to kill everything except soy. But guess what? Amaranth started to appear there in huge numbers. Planters said, okay, we need to use more herbicide and started to spray the area to hell. But herbicide overdose doesn't kill amaranth and indigenous people living near the plantation started getting intoxicated and started having health problems. They got angry and started to fight against these plantations. They recognized amaranth as their ally. They said, "we are all amaranth." It was not only symbolic. They really recognized amaranth as an ally that can do the hard work. They created, for example, amaranth balls, which is a wad of mud full of amaranth seeds, and they started to throw it in huge numbers into the plantations. It caused economic troubles for the planters. So I would go into these kinds of examples for rethinking post-progressive approaches to the issues of protection and conservation.

In your research, you are very much based in your home place, like in Beskydy, Rožnov pod Radhoštěm and so on. You're part of the project called Histories of Wildlife and People in Czech and Slovak Borderland – I think in Czechia the concept of wilderness is quite vital, especially in national parks like Šumava. Beskydy is a mountain area inhabited by beasts like wolfs and, on the other hand, there are communities of shepherds. What are the dynamics of those complicated domestic-wilderness relations?  

This is a project very much designed by our partners from Utrecht University. It's more socio-ecological than anthropological, although some students of mine do ethnographic research there as well. This research tries to analyze the new dynamics of interaction between humans and wild non-humans. Usually it is the wolf, but also wild boar and deer. Wolfs do return, but into a transformed landscape with complicated relations among other stakeholders like foresters, hunters etc. Besides, the Beskydy mountains are no longer a place with so many small sheep households. The history of modernization ran through Beskydy, not in the drastic way as in other Czech mountains, but still the ways of dwelling changed from the wolf's perspective, from the sheep's perspective, from the farmer's perspective.

For me, it's a place of multispecies xenophobia, because it's a place where competing claims about who is at home sometimes move in alignment, and sometimes create tension. Protectionists and nature conservationists say that the wolf belongs to this area. It's the original species there historically, it should have a right to live there. But farmers and the sheep coalition say that Beskydy is a cultural landscape with a "long tradition" of sheep grazing. Beskydy are the only border region in Czechia which is not Sudetenland. Modern history was not that drastic as in other Czech mountains where resettlement of whole populations took place. Thus, there is some kind of continuity in human dwelling in the mountains of so-called Wallachian people. Suddenly it's not only mountains as a geological or environmental entity, but what is called here sometimes as the "living mountains" – mountains loaded with many meanings, human and non-human alike. And this does have consequences – recently there was a victory of people in the Frenštát and Trojanovice area against a black coal mine, which was supposed to be opened there from the 1980s. There were several decades of long-term struggle and the struggle was successful. It's a victory where actually not only humans but also the non-human play their part and are recognized – like the unstable ground for landslides, as geologists consider these the youngest, "still moving" mountains. Drilling and mining would make it extremely unstable and to stabilize it would cost money.

Locals recognized that and managed to mobilize around this as well as around other issues, as they were fighting for their home. I believe, and sorry for such speculation, that if a similar struggle took place in the Ore Mountains after the Germans were expelled, it wouldn't have been that successful. Wallachians were fighting in Beskydy for their home. If you are fighting for your home, you are ready to last for a long time. And this is what I mean when I say that mountains are inhabited by meanings. People live with the mountains, they go through the landscape, establish social bonds, relate to meanings, create memories and it is very powerful. And I think this is one of the reasons why they managed to keep resisting and to actually be victorious in the end. I think we should pay more attention to this struggle, as it was successful and we are not used to seeing such wins here very much. What is the message we can learn here? What does it mean to be a winner in an environmental fight in the Anthropocene or late modernity?