CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 31, Issue 4, pp. 545–570, ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. ᭧ by the
American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.14506/ca31.4.05
IS ANOTHER COSMOPOLITICS POSSIBLE?
MARIO BLASER
Memorial University of Newfoundland
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5613-6669
Cosmopolitics is now the common situation for all collectives. There is no
common world, and yet it has to be composed, nonetheless.
—Bruno Latour
On January 28, 2013, the government of Newfoundland and Labrador announced
a five-year hunting ban on caribou. The ban was imposed after several
surveys showed that the population of the George River Herd had been dropping
precipitously, from eight hundred thousand individuals in 1990 to only twentyseven
thousand in 2012. While uncertain about the causes, the provincial government
understood that a continued caribou harvest was not sustainable, even
for the Innu and Inuit indigenous communities that live in Labrador. The day
after the announcement, Prote Poker, the Innu Nation grand chief, said that the
ban was unjustifiable; that Innu elders did not agree with it because it was a threat
to their way of life; and that the communities would continue to hunt as they
always had (CBC News 2013). Among other concerns, the Innu refusal to accept
the ban was based on the insistence of knowledgeable hunters and elders who
saw the decline in population as a symptom of the deteriorating relationship
between the Innu and Kanipinikassikueu, the master of atıˆku (the word Innu use
to refer to what Euro-Canadians call caribou).1
The extent to which established
protocols for hunting are followed—such as the treatment of bones and the
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sharing of meat, among other prescriptions—determines the health of that relationship
and the willingness of Kanipinikassikueu to keep giving animals to, and
generally bless, the Innu. Hunters and elders had been complaining for several
years by then that younger generations of Innu were not following these protocols,
calling on the young people to recommit to them. In this context, for hunters
and elders, the hunting ban would make it impossible to repair the relationship
with atıˆku and its spirit master. In short, while for the wildlife managers in the
provincial government hunting could mean the disappearance of the caribou, for
the Innu hunters and elders, being prevented from hunting according to protocol
almost assuredly would mean the disappearance of atıˆku.2
Thinking about possible ways to grapple with this seemingly intractable
conflict calls to mind the concept of cosmopolitics. This concept, first proposed
by Isabelle Stengers (1997), differs from Kantian cosmopolitanism, according to
which a cosmopolitan is one who rejects parochial allegiances and embraces the
common world (the cosmos) as the grounding to work out differences among
humans. In this conception the cosmos is transcendent and requires no discussion.
What is debated (and has to be resolved) are the different views that, given their
allegiance to their cultures and traditions, humans have about that cosmos. Returning
to our example, a cosmopolitan call to resolve the disagreement between
the Innu and the provincial government would appeal to the parties to abandon
their respective parochial perspectives and focus instead on what is common to
both: the “thing” they worry about, a thing that one calls caribou and the other
atıˆku. In a discussion with Ulrich Beck, and mobilizing Stengers’s notion of cosmopolitics,
Bruno Latour (2004a) points out that humans do not go into conflicts
with their perspectives on things; they go into them along with the nonhuman
things that make them act. In this sense, caribou and atıˆku would not refer to
different cultural perspectives on the same “thing,” but to altogether different
(albeit not unrelated) things. Thus, Stengers and Latour locate the problem with
cosmopolitanism in its assumption of an already unified cosmos, a single world
(the common “thing”), when we actually inhabit a pluriverse. Such a pluriverse
requires a cosmopolitics.
Stengers (2005, 995) recounts that she came up with the term cosmopolitics
when she found herself at risk of turning a type of practice into a universal neutral
key. On her account, “the so-called modern sciences appeared to be a way of
answering the political question par excellence: who can talk of what, be the
spokesperson of what, represent what?” The risk, she says, was forgetting that
the category of politics with which she was working derived from a particular
IS ANOTHER COSMOPOLITICS POSSIBLE?
547
tradition, and thus, she decided to articulate it with the term cosmos. Far from
referring to a “particular cosmos, or world, as a particular tradition may conceive
it,” in her usage “cosmos refers to the unknown constituted by these multiple,
divergent worlds, and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable”
(Stengers 2005, 995; my emphasis). The reference to the possible articulations
that divergent worlds might develop connects cosmos back to politics in two
ways: 1) it interrupts its universality (politics is our signature; we do not know
the procedures that other worlds have devised to constitute themselves as common),
and 2) it enrolls politics to explore the possibility of those divergent worlds
articulating with each other to become a common world.3
Latour (2004a, 454)
captures succinctly what Stengers’s invention of the word cosmopolitics achieves:
The presence of cosmos in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of politics to mean
the give-and-take in an exclusive human club. The presence of politics in
cosmopolitics resists the tendency of cosmos to mean a finite list of entities that
must be taken into account. Cosmos protects against the premature closure
of politics, and politics against the premature closure of cosmos.
Conceived thus, cosmopolitics speaks to the intersection of two topics that
have enlivened anthropological debates lately: on the one hand, under the labels
of multispecies ethnography (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010) and new materialism
(Coole and Frost 2010), the revaluation of agency as an attribute distributed across
heterogeneous assemblages of humans and nonhumans; and, on the other hand,
under the label of the ontological turn (Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de
Castro 2014; Kohn 2015), the revaluation of radical alterity as an index of multiple
ontologies or worlds rather than cultures. Each of these interventions coincides
with a politics and a cosmos that are expanded by cosmopolitics. Yet they
still run the risk of becoming closed if they are not connected to one another.
For instance, as Christopher Gad, Casper Bruun Jensen, and Brit Winthereik
(2015) argue, some scholars enrolled in the ontological turn give too much weight
to the concepts of human informants, while paying little attention to the role of
nonhumans.4
Conversely, Danielle DiNovelli-Lang (2013) and I (Blaser 2014)
have pointed out that multispecies ethnography and new materialism tend to rely
heavily on the natural sciences as spokespersons for the nonhumans admitted into
politics, and thus they continue to delineate a cosmos with a limited number of
legitimate entities.5
The kind of conflict I described above short-circuits any premature
closure of politics and cosmos, even if these are expanded, and thus forces
us to retain the two components of cosmopolitics in tension.
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But beyond academic debates, by keeping open the question of who and
what might compose the common world, cosmopolitics offers a way to grasp
these kinds conflicts while avoiding the pitfalls of what I call the problem of
reasonable politics. I will expand on this below; for now it will suffice to indicate
that the problem with reasonable politics lies in defining in advance what kinds
of differences are at stake in such conflicts (as cosmopolitanism does), thereby
reinforcing a state of affairs whereby some concerns (rendered as perspectives)
can be sidelined—like the claim that Innu are given atıˆku by a spirit master—
because they are deemed unrealistic and, therefore, unreasonable or irrelevant.
Figuring the common world as its possible result, rather than as a starting
point, cosmopolitics disrupts the quick recourse to rule out concerns on the basis
of their deemed lack of reality. Indeed, the primary purpose of the cosmopolitical
proposal was to “slow down reasoning and create an opportunity to arouse a
slightly different awareness of the problems and situations mobilizing us” (Stengers
2005, 994). And yet, as my epigraph from Latour indicates, the common world
must be composed. Thus, although Latour and Stengers denote distinct senses of
urgency, for each of them cosmopolitics remains oriented to the composition of
the common world, even if they insist on the lack of guarantees for such a project.
In this article I argue that such an orientation limits the capacity of cosmopolitics
to address the kinds of conflicts I described above. To substantiate my argument,
I will submit cosmopolitics to a pragmatic test by diffractively reading it (Barad
2007, 200) through ethnographic materials. My concern is not primarily with
endorsing or rejecting the concept of cosmopolitics, but rather with seeing what
elements of it are useful to tackle this conflict as a politico-conceptual problem
and where the ethnography suggests a need to expand the concept. I will first
present a general outline of the problem of reasonable politics, highlighting those
aspects for which cosmopolitics, and the material semiotics in which it is
grounded, seem to offer some handles. I then move on to the test proper, exploring
the extent to which cosmopolitics provides a fruitful concept for the
conflict that concerns me. Finally, following the contours of what cosmopolitics
seems unable to adequately address in my ethnographic materials, I advance a
series of suggestions for another cosmopolitics.
THE PROBLEM OF REASONABLE POLITICS
What I call the problem of reasonable politics resembles a typical ethnographic
puzzle, that is, how to gauge utterances that appear to the researcher as
manifestly counterfactual. The classic example would be the Nuer declaration that
IS ANOTHER COSMOPOLITICS POSSIBLE?
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twins are birds when the researcher knows that they are human siblings. Usually
the resolution of the puzzle involves explaining how and why the Nuer would
think that twin human siblings are birds. Martin Holbraad has pointed out that
such a resolution reflects the analyst’s prior assumption that different cultural
representations of twins are at stake (Carrithers et al. 2010). Smuggled into this
assumption is the implicit claim that the analyst gets it right (i.e., twins are actually
human siblings), while the Nuer get it wrong (i.e., they produce cultural representations
of twin human siblings that are a bit off the mark and require explanation).
The problem of reasonable politics becomes most visible when, rather
than in the realm of ethnographic encounters, the puzzle of counterfactual utterances
occurs in the realm of conflicts where matters of life and death are at stake,
or when certain kinds of lives are deemed possible while others are not. Conflicts
surrounding entities that states and corporations treat as resources and that others
take as nonhuman or suprahuman persons with whom they sustain various social
relations—as is the case of the Innu with atıˆku and its spirit master—are thus
exceedingly apt to make evident the problem of reasonable politics.
Elsewhere, and through ethnographically inspired discussion, I (as well as
other colleagues) have addressed the conceptual problems these kinds of conflicts
pose. Marisol de la Cadena (2010, 342), for example, has argued that these
conflicts bring to the fore a conceptual challenge to politics as usual. The presence
of nonhuman persons, in her case earth-beings, in politics disavows “the separation
between ‘Nature’ and ‘Humanity,’ on which the political theory our world abides
by was historically funded.” In turn, I have argued that by deploying the concept
of culture in trying to empower those who foreground entities’ status as nonhuman
persons, we find ourselves at an impasse (Blaser 2013a). By presenting
nonhuman persons as culture, we end up treating these conflicts as epistemological,
that is, as between perspectives on the world. (One cultural perspective sees
persons, while the other sees resources.) This move reinstates and reinforces the
ontological assumptions implicit in the modern constitution (i.e., the nature/
culture divide and its cascading binaries). The alternative, I have argued, is to
treat these kinds of conflicts as ontological conflicts rather than cultural differences
(Blaser 2009, 2013b).
The core of the problem here is that the modernist assumption of one world
with multiple perspectives on it is constitutive of what I call reasonable politics
and its operations. In a nutshell, reasonable politics operates on the basis of turning
differences into perspectives on the world. Differences made into perspectives
are amenable to be ranked according to putative degrees of equivalence between
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perspectival representations of the world and the factual world itself. This ordering,
in turn, makes it possible to deem some perspectives irrelevant, erroneous,
or dangerous, and thus dismissible or, worse, destroyable (see Povinelli
2001, 2002). The process of attributing factuality is extremely contested. Yet the
power of reasonable politics rests precisely in its capacity to set the terms of
contestation (or disagreement) as a matter of perspectives competing for factuality.
This is particularly problematic for those who do not adhere to the epistemology
derived from the ontological assumption of one factual world; because
they are not engaged in a contest over factuality on the terms set by reasonable
politics, their claims are automatically disqualified as being unreasonable or
unrealistic.
Precisely because of the primacy of an epistemology predicated on the notion
that knowledge is a relation between a real world out there and representations
of it, Universal Science plays the primary role of arbiter in reasonable politics,
especially in the exercise of ranking the putative factuality of different perspec-
tives.6
Universal Science is an always shifting and situated material-semiotic assemblage
in which the state, law, and knowledge practices claiming scientific
status are entangled. Such a configuration makes plausible, mobilizes, and protects
an implicit equivalence between technological prowess and apprehending reality
as it is. In very simplistic terms: we know that science knows better because we
can send a man to the moon, and if you want to prove otherwise you will have
to enroll the services of a natural or social scientist! Universal Science is of course
not the only criteria mobilized to rank competing factualities, but it does tend to
be the primary one.
Besides screening out putatively unreasonable or unrealistic concerns, reasonable
politics poses another problem for the analyst who wants to escape its
confines, namely, how to account for the differences at stake in conflicts like
those above if one wants those differences to make a difference in the way they
are accounted for. The problem emerges from a particular notion of politics that
takes some inspiration from Jacques Rancie`re. Rancie`re (2011, 4) has argued that
disagreement is both foundational to politics and holds the possibility to generate
a “re-partitioning [of] the political from the non-political.” Building on this, I treat
politics as a placeholder for: 1) differences that, while being potentially the ground
for disagreement, are yet to be defined, and 2) the various possible ways in which
these differences might (or might be made to) relate to each other. Reasonable
politics (or politics as usual) takes for granted its universal applicability and, more
important, assumes that it has exhausted categories of difference (such as culture,
IS ANOTHER COSMOPOLITICS POSSIBLE?
551
class, gender, race, sexuality, and so on). Moving away from this position which
presupposes that disagreements are easily recognized, in my politics as placeholder,
the very nature (and existence) of differences qua differences can be what
is at stake, and constitutive of, the disagreement. For example, some parties and
analysts might maintain that the conflict over caribou is a class conflict over the
control of a resource. In this case the difference/disagreement is about who owns
or controls the resource. Perhaps that is the case, and the conflict will play out
in relation to such disagreement. But maybe there are other parties and analysts
that view the conflict as a cultural conflict involving competing knowledges. In
that case the difference/disagreement is premised on who got the problem right,
and the conflict itself will unfold differently. Given that conflicts unfold differently
depending on the kind of disagreement at stake, defining the very nature of the
disagreement—is it about control of resources or is it about competing knowledges?—can
become the mediating principle at work in the conflict. Yet there
might be another twist. Let’s say that yet another party claims (as we will see
later) that the conflict involves protecting the web of relations that sustain the
life of the Innu, while other parties, in turn, entirely reject the idea that such a
thing could be at issue; they care about the life of the Innu as well. In this case,
it is the very existence of the disagreement about which the parties differ and
disagree that is operative. Of course, all these disagreements (and others still to
reveal themselves) might be operating simultaneously. For this reason, it is important,
in principle, to remain as agnostic as possible about what kinds of differences
might constitute the political in a given situation.7
In part, this holds
because the task of the analyst cannot be disentangled from how the disagreement
unfolds. Whether and how the differences at stake make a difference, at a minimum,
implies that such differences be articulated and made visible, not the least
by the analysts themselves. As I have pointed out, an analysis in terms of representations
or perspectives on a factual world does precisely the contrary, as it
stipulates from the beginning what kinds of differences are at stake and, in so
doing, ends up playing into the hands of reasonable politics and its exclusionary
operations.
The material-semiotic versions of science and technology studies on which
the concept of cosmopolitics is empirically grounded offer a way to address the
exclusionary drive of reasonable politics and the analytical need to remain agnostic
to the differences at stake in politics. Material semiotics postulates factuality as
an always emergent enactment of heterogeneous assemblages; only a posteriori
might they be purified as pertaining either to facts or to representations (Haraway
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1988; Latour 1999; Law 2009). This formulation has been greatly informed by
what transpires in the sites where scholars study scientific practices. These are
locations of construction and of ontological uncertainty; they are sites defined by
concerns or issues that are contoured by the presence of actants that, if they are
able to articulate successfully, might become a matter of fact. To put it briefly
borrowing from one of Latour’s (1988) examples, before everything articulates
successfully into the fact of microbes, what we have is a matter of concern. This is
an issue or a concern that (so to speak) gathers an assembly composed by Louis
Pasteur and his collaborators, by the social hygienists and their detractors, by
yeast and so on. The trajectory of a thing from a matter of concern to a matter
of fact involves a process of singularization of the multiplicity and contentiousness
of the assembly. This trajectory is of course reversible, as a stabilized fact may
again become an issue, thus making visible the presence of the entire assembly
that constitutes it. It is important to bear in mind, however, that we are talking
of visibility here. Even a fact, a stabilized entity, is always a multiplicity. A
multiplicity does not imply many units but rather, in the words of Annemarie
Mol (2002) and Marilyn Strathern (2004), more than one but less than many.
Latour (2004a) has argued that, in contrast to a mode of critique that pivots
around (what we could call) realist factuality, the point of material-semiotic analyses
showing how things are assembled or enacted is not to disavow their reality
but rather to show (and, through the analysis, participate in) how they become
real in the layering and knotting of multiple concerns; this equally involves how
they derealize as their assemblies scatter or turn contentious. Thus, where reasonable
politics stands for a politics of hierarchically stratified perspectives on an
already existing factual world, material semiotics enables a politics of worlding,
that is, a politics concerned with the processes through which a world is being
brought into existence. This formulation deactivates the basic premise of reasonable
politics—an already existing factual world—and its capacity to adjudicate
who and what can be part of the political in terms of their adherence to this
particular version of factuality.
As Latour (2007, 813) expresses it:
From now on, politics is something entirely different . . . it is the building
of the cosmos in which everyone lives, the progressive composition of the
common world. . . . Hence the excellent name Isabelle Stengers has proposed
to give to the whole enterprise, that of cosmopolitics.
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In Latour’s version of cosmopolitics, the only requirement for things to legitimately
be part of the political task of building the common world is that they be
an issue, a matter of concern that gathers a public, an assembly. But this rather
quick equivalence between cosmopolitics and the progressive composition of the
common world seems to rest on Latour’s formulation being inspired primarily
by scientific controversies; in these cases the multiplicity at stake in a matter of
concern that gathers an assembly is already visible and legible, so to speak. Attending
more closely to Stengers’s version of cosmopolitics, and her insistence
on not losing sight of the victims (those with no power to represent themselves
or who do not want to take part in the composition of the common world because
there is something more important than the proposed issue), Maria Puig de la
Bellacasa (2011) has called for the staging of matters of care. At the center of
matters of care is the recognition that in deeply stratified worlds, “erased concerns
do not just become visible by following the articulate and assembled concerns
composing a thing, nor does generating care happen by counting the participants
present in an issue” (de la Bellacasa 2011, 94). In this context, feminist notions
of critical standpoint become crucial for making visible absent issues. In contrast
to deconstructive critique that would wield absences as a weapon to attack the
veracity of the assemblage constituting a matter of concern, a critical standpoint
foregrounds the absences to foster new attachments and care for heretofore absent
participants and concerns. A critical standpoint contributes to cut the shape of an
issue otherwise. This is a powerful corrective to Latour’s formulation, a corrective
that informs my subsequent analysis.
CARING FOR ATIˆKU/CARIBOU: More than One but Less than
Many
Since 2009 I have been involved in a collaborative research project with a
group of Innu people from Labrador. The Innu communities are located both in
Labrador and Quebec, and are subject to those provincial jurisdictions. The project
I describe here started to take shape when I met a group of Labrador Innu
elders and hunters from a nonprofit called Tshikapisk.8
This group was concerned
about the precipitous decline of atıˆku, which by that time had started to become
obvious. As I mentioned before, for many hunters and elders, this population
drop signified the deteriorating relationship between the Innu and Kanipinikassikueu,
the master of atıˆku. The concerns of Tshikapisk’s members were compounded
by the proposal, starting to be advanced by some biologists and an
increasing segment of the Labradorian public, that caring for a declining herd of
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Figure 1. Innu communities in Labrador and Quebec. Map courtesy of Damian Castro.
caribou, in the context of landscape changes, warming temperatures, and resource
extraction, demanded that all hunting be halted.9
Attending to practices of care
that the relationship with Kanipinikassikueu elicits from Innu hunters made evident
to us that atıˆku were quite different from what biologists and Euro-Canadians
would call an animal species.
According to an atanukan (stories that narrate the origin of things), an Innu
man whose group was starving went to live with the atıˆku, married the daughter
of the herd’s leader, turned into atıˆku himself, and eventually became Kanipinikassikueu.
Since then, Kanipinikassikueu persuades atıˆku to give themselves to the
Innu so that the latter can survive. However, this generosity is not guaranteed.
As numerous ethnographies have shown, atıˆku have a will of their own, therefore
hunting (nataun) is not centrally about outsmarting animals in order to kill (nipaieu)
them, but rather about enticing these fully volitional beings and their leader
to be generous with their bodies. This is achieved through practices that show
respect and recognition of these altruistic acts. Among these practices are protocols
to dispose of the bones of hunted atıˆku (from which new specimens will
regenerate), the injunction not to waste any part of their bodies, and the requirement
that meat has to be generously shared among people. Other prescriptions,
IS ANOTHER COSMOPOLITICS POSSIBLE?
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like keeping Kanipinikassikueu in one’s thoughts through storytelling, singing,
drumming, and celebrating a ceremonial meal (mokoshan) are in place to receive
his blessings for general well-being (see Armitage 1992; Henriksen 1973, 2008).
Hunting is thus a set of connected caring practices that ensure the ongoing realization
of generosity and respect within this collective of human and nonhumans.
Yet hunting is also a moment richly indicative of the health of these practices: a
decrease in the frequency of atıˆku giving themselves to hunters is a symptom that
Kanipinikassikueu is angry. Reporting on one such circumstance, Georg Henriksen
(1977, 7) wrote:
The search for reasons to explain Katipinimitautsh’s anger amounts to a selfexamination
to find possible failings in [the Innu] spiritual and moral relationship
with nature, among themselves, and between themselves and animals.
. . . It may be something which is very serious: someone may have
breached the rules of sharing, or someone may have been careless when
handling the marrow from the caribou long bones.
Most of the elders and hunters whom my colleagues and I engaged in the project
understood the declining presence of atıˆku in this key. They claimed that disrespect
for atıˆku was rampant among younger generations. They spoke of atıˆku remains
being carried away by dogs, of people selling meat, and of a general lack of
interest about life on the land among younger people. For most of them the
consequences of this were obvious not only in the decline of the herds but also
in the epidemic of addiction, suicide, and diabetes that has plagued younger
generations of Innu for the past twenty years (see Samson 2003). In a workshop
we held in 2010, the elder Ponas Nuke expressed the problem thus: “Without
atıˆku we are nothing. If we are not in the land, hunting, the day will come when
Kanipinikassikueu will not know us, it will ask ‘who are you people?’ . . . and if
we do not have his blessing, things will get worse.”
In 2009, the governments of Newfoundland and Quebec agreed to commission
a study to evaluate the status of the George River Herd. For this, new
radio collars were attached to a number of animals in the herd to allow tracking
and counting from helicopters during the summer months. This aerial count,
corrected according to established biometric criteria (see Rivest, Couturier, and
Crepeau 1998), provided the basis for an estimate of the population. This assessment
was then combined with previous studies, as well as other factors known
to affect population cycles, to propose a series of measures for the sustainability
of the herd that were presented to local stakeholders. These measures hinged on
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the conclusion that hunting was “now significant and cumulative to natural mortality”
(Newfoundland and Labrador Wildlife 2010). In other words, caring for
the caribou population would require hunting restrictions. In the presentation
given to all local stakeholders it was also made clear that, from the government’s
perspective, conservation efforts held precedence over Aboriginal rights to hunt.
Since that meeting, non-Aboriginals began mounting pressure on the government
to put a ban on all hunting of the species.
The study and the proposed measures relied on a series of assumptions about
caribou that are standard in wildlife biology and management. Thus, the survey
was conducted on a specific caribou herd demarcated according to their range
and genetic variability. Similarly, the survey relied on the assumption that caribou,
driven by instinct, behave in a predictable manner. For example, in the summer,
caribou gather in compact groups to protect themselves against blood-sucking
insects, so by following the radio-collared animals, surveyors could access the
groups and enumerate the animals. In a recent ethnography, Damian Castro
(2015, 54–55), one of our project’s associates, reports an incident that shows
how these assumptions about caribou can stand in stark contrast to the views
about atıˆku held by Innu hunters:
One day, while I was in the Innu Nation office, a very experienced hunter
who had been recently charged with illegal hunting came to the office where
I was working and told me, “they found a Red Wine [a herd then protected
for more than fifteen years] collar close to Lake Kamistastin; see, atıˆku wants
to go there.” Lake Kamistastin is located about four hundred kilometers
north of Sheshatshiu, very far from the Red Wine Herd range, and right in
the migration area of the George River Herd. This information, as he and
other Innu argue, shows that the Red Wine woodland herd and the George
River migratory herd intermingle. Therefore, there is no point in declaring
the hunt illegal on the basis of the assumption upheld by government scientists
that the herds are different: for the Innu there is only atıˆku. Furthermore,
the words of this hunter obliquely indicate differences in how
the collar information is used. The government uses it to obtain the information
the scientists need to learn about caribou behavior, such as their
whereabouts, while the Innu use this information to know what atıˆku wants.
In other words, while the government administer the collars to satisfy their
will to know, the Innu use it to know the will of atıˆku. Like human beings,
atıˆku has will.
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The differences between atıˆku and caribou do not mean there are no connections
between them. For instance, the GPS signal sent by the collars to monitor caribou
demographics and movements was, until 2010, fed by the Quebec Ministry of
the Environment into maps that were available online. Consulting these maps,
Innu hunters identified areas where they were likely to come across atıˆku. This
information was extremely important for hunters who wanted to keep their relation
with atıˆku but that have, since the 1970s, found themselves increasingly
time-constrained by job obligations in the permanent settlements. Similarly, biologists
and wildlife managers had often relied on the support provided by Innu
hunters to affix collars and make observations about the caribou. And yet, notwithstanding
their mutual entanglements, atıˆku and caribou remain different. The
most obvious way in which this difference manifests is that the former is a nonhuman
person that has will, while the latter is an animal driven by instincts. But
how to grasp these differences without resorting to notions of different perspectives
on a single thing and thus falling into the trap laid by reasonable politics?
The conceptual resources of material semiotics discussed in the previous section
offer a way. Atıˆku/caribou is multiple; it is more than one and less than many.
Yet the multiplicity at stake here is not exactly the same as that envisioned by
Latour or Mol—that is, the idea that a thing is always the stabilized result of a
potentially contentious gathering, an assembly or assemblage of actants. In this
case, the meaning of multiplicity as being more than one but less than many might
be better evoked by the following figure.
Figure 2. The duck-rabbit illusion.
Here we have a bird looking to the left and a rabbit looking to the right;
more than one but less than two. There is a bird and a rabbit, and yet they are
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not two units; and while the traces overlap, there is not just one drawing. If we
imagine that the bodies of the bird and the rabbit do not overlap as neatly as their
heads, we can grasp the idea that there might be partial co-occurrence of the
entities, but the difference is not cancelled. In a similar fashion, the materialsemiotic
assemblages from which the more than one less than many atıˆku/caribou
emerges partially co-occur (most evidently in bodily presence)—and at points
this co-occurrence may even be mutually enabling (as in the collaring)—but they
remain distinct. Atıˆku emerges from an assemblage that involves atanukan, hunters,
the sharing of meat, generosity, a spirit master, and so on; caribou emerges from
an assemblage that involves the discipline of biology, wildlife managers, predictive
modeling, calculations to balance environmental and economic concerns, and so
on. The difficulty in rendering this multiplicity singular, for example through an
agreement on how to address declining numbers, should make atıˆku/caribou a
matter of concern. Yet this is not always the case.
ATIˆKU/CARIBOU: The Strange Trajectory of an Issue
As we will see, the (more-than-one-but-less-than-many) atıˆku/caribou has
become an issue in Labrador now. It was not so before, and yet, it was not quite
a matter of fact either. The strange trajectory of this issue raises interesting
questions about how the specificity of the multiplicity revealed in this case might
affect a politics of worlding. To make this trajectory visible, I have to bring into
the picture the controversy generated around the proposal for the Lower Churchill
Project, a $6 billion hydroelectric project and its relation to the complex dynamics
of the Labrador Innu comprehensive land claim.
In Canada, comprehensive land claims are geared to trade diffuse Aboriginal
title over a territory for clearly defined rights and privileges over more circumscribed
areas and resources. Diffuse Aboriginal title over large territories does
not deter provincial governments from granting corporations permits to exploit
their natural resources. Thus, although carrying the price of extinguishing any
right to their entire territory, a land-claim settlement implies legal certainty and
a substantial (albeit short-lived) flow of money and jobs from resource development
to the communities. Given the trade-offs, comprehensive land claims often
produce divisions within communities (see Samson and Cassell 2013). The Labrador
Innu land claim is no different. The possibility of settling the land claim
became somehow conditional on the Innu accepting the building of the Lower
Churchill Project, which was (and continues to be) an extremely contentious issue
within communities. Elders and people who retain strong connections with the
IS ANOTHER COSMOPOLITICS POSSIBLE?
559
land (of course, including atıˆku) rejected the project in opposition to a group of
leaders inclined to sign a deal.
In spite of these contentions, steps toward the execution of the project
continued, including a formal Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), which is
mandated by law and requires a process of consultation with multiple stakeholders.
During an EIA, a review panel evaluates the biophysical, social, economic,
and cultural effects of the project and the mitigation measures required to offset
them. The assessment process generates a report that is submitted to the federal
minister of the environment for final approval. The assessment for the Lower
Churchill Project started on January 2009 and was rife with controversiesbetween
biologists and other wildlife management experts, both governmental and nongovernmental,
who disagreed on several points, including the criteria each used
to estimate impacts, the selection of indicator species, methods of research, and
the like.10
Innu concerns entered into the assessment process through a report
on land use, commissioned by the Innu Nation and submitted to the review panel,
and consultation meetings organized in the communities by the joint review panel.
The author of the land-use report stressed that the information provided in it had
a crucial limitation: it did “a poor job of conveying the deep meaning and emotion
that many Innu have for the land and living entities that reside in the Study Area”
(Armitage 2010, 16). Yet something of that meaning and emotion surfaced in the
public consultation meeting organized by the review panel. Either directly in
English or through an interpreter, several Innu made impassioned presentations
about the dam’s consequences: “When I think about it, it’s like you destroy—
not only [do] you destroy the land or the animals, you also destroy our lives—
the life of the Innu” (JRP 2011b, 148–49). In addition to these overall assessments,
Innu presenters had specific concerns about the project’s impact on migration
patterns and the ability of atıˆku to travel in a changed landscape. Some participants
explicitly wondered about the reactions that powerful nonhumans might have to
all this. For example, one of the elders participating in the consultations said:
I don’t like the idea of damming the Muskrat Falls. What I know about
Muskrat Falls, there’s a hole in the falls somewhere. Probably the spirit in
the spirit world used that waterfall for a reason, whoever being lives in that
hill. Probably the spirit that lives in the mountain probably will destroy the
dam itself, somehow. . . . I think that the animal beings who live in that
mountain will destroy the dam (JRP 2011b, 71–72).
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 31:4
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Not all Innu gave the same weight to these concerns. A sector of the leadership
stressed the benefits of the project and cast the concerns of elders and hunters as
a romantic and unrealistic yearning for a way of life no longer possible (JRP
2011b, 103–23). The younger generations thus found themselves having to gauge
the concerns of elders and hunters against the promises of jobs and the prospect
of ending the legal limbo in which the Innu of Labrador live without a settled
land claim. In any case, when the elders’ and hunters’ concerns were transferred
to the report being prepared by the review panel, all mention of nonhumans as
something other than animals got translated into culture and addressed as matters
of spirituality in the “Heritage and Culture” section (JRP 2011c, 184). In contrast,
and with the exception of noting “the moral value” of caribou, the contents of
“Traditional Environmental Knowledge” that were amenable to scientific corroboration
(e.g., migration patterns, seasonal behaviors, and the like) were included
in the section entitled “Impacts to Terrestrial Environment and Wildlife” (JRP
2011c, 114–17). In short, in the report, Innu concerns were split (and implicitly
ranked) according to supposedly commonsense criteria that distinguish reliable
environmental information from cultural beliefs. After the panel finished the consultations
and submitted its report to the federal minister of the environment,
the federal government “determined that the expected significant energy, economic,
socio-economic and environmental benefits outweigh the ‘significant adverse
environmental effects’ of the Project that had been identified in the Panel
Report (Government of Canada 2012, 6).
Environmentalist organizations opposed to the project found in the position
of Innu hunters and elders a point of resonance, and thus, in some of their press
releases stressed, among other issues, the Aboriginal spiritual values at stake.11
Yet this coincidence only went so far. The outrage generated by a protest hunt
organized by Quebec Innu is a case in point. These communities organized a hunt
among a protected herd in Labrador to make the point that the province of
Newfoundland and Labrador should include them and not only the Labrador Innu
in the discussions about the Lower Churchill Project. From the Quebec Innu
perspective, there was no contradiction between their claim of caring for atıˆku
and hunting them to enforce the notion that, even if the provincial boundaries of
the colonial state said otherwise, they were relevant interlocutors in the fate of
the territory. The tenor of responses to this action largely resembled that of one
reader’s comment on the CBC News website:
IS ANOTHER COSMOPOLITICS POSSIBLE?
561
This whole situation just blows my mind. I really can’t wrap my head around
their mentality. What happened to everything having a spirit and being one
with the land? They are raping the land. I bet their ancestors are rolling in
their graves. They should be arrested, plain and simple.
Many Euro-Canadians saw the hunt as proof that claims about spiritual connections
with atıˆku were just a ruse that “modernized Aboriginals” were using to extract
benefits from the proposed project. In other words, if the spiritual connection
with caribou did not translate into what Euro-Canadians would recognize as care,
then there was no such connection.
In splitting Innu concerns between acceptable and unacceptable, or between
those that could stand alongside science-based knowledge and those that were just
“cultural,” we can see the work of reasonable politics. But in terms of a politics
of worlding, or matters of concern, we can also see that the split makes another
distinction. On the one hand, some concerns can compose an issue and therefore
aspire to become part of that which might eventually become a matter of fact, a
part of the common world. On the other hand, other concerns simply do not
constitute an issue. And this of course signals an asymmetry. Being amenable to
a form of more or less formalized calculation that rationalizes, among other
practices, hunting regulations and massive transformations of the landscape, caribou
(and more generally, animals) do affect the composition of atıˆku. In the most
immediate way, this occurs through hunting quotas, the demarcation of protected
areas, and the alteration of the herd’s migration routes that enforce a recomposition
of Innu hunting and meat sharing, practices that partly constitute atıˆku. In
contrast, the presence of atıˆku has not affected the way in which caribou has been
composed, either as a matter of concern during the Lower Churchill controversy
or as a quasi–matter of fact, more generally. In other words, Innu concerns for
atıˆku have not been an issue; at least not until recently.
After the environmental review panel conducted its hearings, the Innu communities
had a ratification vote on the Tshash Petapen (New Dawn) agreement that
the Innu Nation and the provincial government had been negotiating. The agreement
contained three parts: a land-claims Agreement-in-Principle (AIP) stipulating
the rights that the Innu would retain within a specified territory; economic
compensation for the Upper Churchill Project that had been constructed in the
late 1960s without regard for Innu rights; and an Impact and Benefits Agreement
for the proposed Lower Churchill Project. Overall, the agreement set the general
terms under which the Innu land claim would be settled and the construction of
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 31:4
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the Lower Churchill Project could proceed. The overall agreement and its three
components, however, had to be ratified separately by the Innu communities.
The ratification vote for the overall agreement took place in June 2011. Largely
with the support of the younger generations of Innu, the agreement was ratified.
This allowed the government of Newfoundland to move on to other crucial
aspects of the project, such as financial engineering.
As rumors began to spread at the end of the fall of 2012 that the government
of Newfoundland was about to take drastic measures regarding the caribou crisis,
the Innu Nation called a community meeting to discuss what they would do in
case a ban was imposed. Many of the people who had voted in favor of the Tshash
Petapen agreement said that a ban on hunting atıˆku would be an infringement on
the AIP. Therefore, they would now side with the group that had opposed the
Lower Churchill Project all along because of its potential effects on atıˆku and the
land more generally. The implications of this shift come into focus when we
consider that the AIP still has to be ratified by a vote in the Innu communities
and, according to the Tshash Petapen agreement, all three agreements contained
in it will become null if any of its components is not ratified by either of the
parties. As the results of the community meeting were leaked to the public, the
newspaper columnist Michael Johansen (2013) gave voice to a silenced realization:
it was yet to be seen whether the Newfoundland government would sacrifice the
$6 billion hydroelectric project to stop the Innu from hunting. In short, atıˆku
became an inescapable issue.
In contrast to the controversy over the Lower Churchill Project during the
EIA process, this time the situation is such that concern for caribou cannot be
easily composed without attending to concerns for atıˆku. However, this is not
the typical trajectory of a thing (i.e., caribou) becoming an issue, that is, going
from being a matter of fact to being a matter of concern; rather this involves the
sudden visibility and unavoidability of participants that were there all along. Yet these
participants had no part in the assembly where caribou was staged as a matter of
concern with the possibility of being articulated as a matter of fact. This points
to the particular problematic that the copresence of different (although asymmetrically
and partially connected) assemblages poses to a cosmopolitics oriented
to the common world.12
CONCLUSION: Common World and Uncommon Worlds
Although for the most part it has been treated as a discrete entity that can
be understood from different perspectives, in Labrador, caribou has never been
IS ANOTHER COSMOPOLITICS POSSIBLE?
563
just caribou, a single entity. Yet the multiplicity of the assemblage that can be
singularized into a more or less stabilized caribou (for example, in debates about
the proper criteria to evaluate the impacts of a development project on herds) is
not the same as the one where atıˆku can be stabilized (for example, in debates
about proper protocols to ensure the generosity of the atıˆku master). What is at
stake here is not only ontological multiplicity but also multiple worldings. This
raises some fundamental questions. How does a concern in one worlding become
an issue in another? What does it take to make an issue across partially connected
and stratified worldings? The questions are empirical and also have practical consequences
that bear on our roles as analysts and co-composers of matters of
concern. De la Bellacasa’s (2011) call for matters of care in order to make present
absent concerns is crucial, but our case shows that, while necessary, this move is
not sufficient to be effective. After all, atıˆku elicited care (i.e., was made visible
as a concern) during the EIA, yet it did not qualify as an issue worthy of attention
until it put at risk a multibillion-dollar development project. And even then, one
may feel doubtful that atıˆku had become a matter of concern as conceived by a
cosmopolitics oriented to the composition of a common world, that is, as a
concern that might aspire to participate in the composition of a matter of fact.
Sometimes different worldings may coexist—enabling each other or without
noticing each other—but at other times they interrupt each other. Not being
reducible to each other’s terms, when and where worldings interrupt each other,
the multiplicity at stake might not be amenable to the kind of singularization that
Latour’s constitution of the common world seems to require. Recall that, for
Latour, the composition of the common world is modeled after the trajectory
that an assembly might follow from being a matter of concern (a poorly articulated
multiplicity of actants on the brink of scattering) to becoming a matter of fact (a
gathering of actants that is so well articulated that it becomes stabilized as one
singular thing). In this regard, the commentary quoted above that called for police
to arrest the Quebec Innu hunters, and the looming threat of arrests under the
current ban, prove very telling. In effect, if we take these threats as part of the
procedure used to articulate and stabilize caribou as one thing (that is, make it a
matter of fact) in spite of the disturbances produced by atıˆku, one might ponder
the consequence of enacting a cosmopolitics as the composition of the common
world when the multiplicity at stake is not amenable to singularization.
Latour (2004b, 124) might respond that “of these excluded entities we
cannot yet say anything except that they are exteriorized or externalized: an
explicit collective decision has been made not to take them into account; they
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 31:4
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are to be viewed as insignificant.” So they remain outside the common world
being composed. Yet what the atıˆku/caribou case shows us is that worlding a
common world does not always produce just an externality; sometimes it interrupts
and destroys other worldings: caring for caribou in certain ways endangers
the existence of atıˆku. In short, rather than something entirely different and insofar
as entities that remain outside the common world become insignificant, a cosmopolitics
oriented to the common world might end up looking like a reconfigured
reasonable politics. This is something that Stengers (2005, 1003) seems
aware of: hence, her insistence that the composition of the common world should
only proceed in the presence of the victims, not because they must agree, but
rather because those who have agreed “have to know that nothing can erase the
debt binding their decision to its victim.” And yet, while Stengers makes it more
difficult and slower than what Latour (2014) seems to seek, the common world
“must be composed, nonetheless.”
But does it? Can cosmopolitics only offer the slowest possible composition
of the common world? Or is another cosmopolitics possible? Inklings of an answer
appear in some events that took place shortly before and after the hunting ban
was passed.
In response to the problem of the declining presence of atıˆku as defined by
the Innu elders and hunters, our research team had been discussing some interventions.
One of them was translating atıˆku-hunting protocols into policies that
could be enforced by the Innu Nation. When rumors of a ban on hunting became
acute, members of the research team and staff from the Innu Nation held informal
conversations with local personnel from the provincial government’s wildlife division.
Our intention was to avert the threat of a hunting ban. We argued that,
as hunting requires a substantial investment of time and work, if Innu followed
proper protocol to treat atıˆku, there would likely be a reduced number of individuals
being hunted. Our pitch to wildlife agents was to name a series of aspects
of the situation that were evident to the agents, even if they were reluctant to
speak about them openly. First, a ban based on the claim that ceasing hunting
would address the caribou crisis was unlikely to garner Innu compliance. Second,
the threat of prosecution has never deterred the Innu from hunting, and the actual
capacity of the wildlife agents to enforce the ban on the ground was limited.
Third, even if wildlife agents could mount an effective plan to enforce the ban,
it was doubtful that the upper echelons of the provincial government would give
it the green light and risk the Lower Churchill Project. In this context, we argued,
collaborating with the Innu Nation in addressing the problem as defined by the
IS ANOTHER COSMOPOLITICS POSSIBLE?
565
Innu elders was likely to have better results, even in the terms defined by wildlife
managers. Demanding and monitoring that hunters follow proper Innu protocol
was likely to generate widespread support in the communities, and consequently
fewer animals would be taken. By December 2012, local wildlife agents were
considering moving the proposal up the chain of command. But then, in January
2013 and under public pressure, the ban was issued from the ministerial hierarchy.
As we had predicted, community members went on hunting in spite of the ban
and the provincial government was remiss to enforce it. Wildlife agents monitored
the hunt from helicopters, but no hunting-related arrests were made.
The moral of the story, or its relation to another cosmopolitics, is that for
a moment we and the wildlife agents achieved what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
(2004, 5) calls “translation as a process of controlled equivocation.” Translation
as controlled equivocation is premised on the counterintuitive notion that what
needs to be kept in the foreground when translating two different terms is,
precisely, their difference. This idea contrasts with the common expectation that
translation should strive to establish equivalence between two terms through an
existing common referent; it also belies the alternative idea that a good translation
creates a new common referent. In the former case, translation resonates with
the presumption of an already existing factual reality. In the latter case, translation
becomes a progressive project to compose a factual reality out of matters of
concern and/or care. Yet, in both instances, the assumption is that what connects
and makes possible a translation (and a sustained relation) between the terms is
a common ground. In our case, rather than striving to discover or enact a common
ground, we sought to enable a set of actions that were homonymic: they addressed
different things simultaneously. Promoting and enforcing proper nataun protocol
(caring for atıˆku) also meant hunting for fewer animals (caring for caribou); neither
the Innu hunters nor the wildlife managers had to subordinate their own practices
of caring. In fact, in this translation, caring for caribou and atıˆku would have
reinforced each other. Although the ban prevented this translation coming into
future manifestations, while the proposal lasted it constituted a good example of
how cosmopolitics might be actively oriented by a vector other than the common
world. Here, the uncommon, the difference, in short, the equivocal was a productive
vector as well. And I insist, as well, for it is not a matter of either/or but
of both/and. There is, here, a fruitful terrain to continue to develop other potentialities
of cosmopolitics.
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 31:4
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ABSTRACT
The concept of cosmopolitics developed by Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour keeps
open the question of who and what might compose the common world. In this way,
cosmopolitics offers a way to avoid the pitfalls of reasonable politics, a politics that,
defining in advance that the differences at stake in a disagreement are between
perspectives on a single reality, makes it possible to sideline some concerns by deeming
them unrealistic and, therefore, unreasonable or irrelevant. Figuring the common
world as its possible result, rather than as a starting point, cosmopolitics disrupts the
quick recourse to ruling out concerns on the basis of their ostensible lack of reality.
And yet, questions remain as to who and what can participate in the composition of
the common world. Exploring these questions through ethnographical materials on a
conflict around caribou in Labrador, I argue that a cosmopolitics oriented to the
common world has important limitations and that another orientation might be
possible as well. [ontological politics; cosmopolitics; alterity; science and technology
studies; political ontology; Innu; caribou]
NOTES
Acknowledgments This paper has been long in the making and I owe thanks to many
friends who helped me to think it through, including my constant interlocutors and cothinkers,
Arturo Escobar and Marisol de la Cadena; and my collaborators in Nitassinan (Labrador),
Damien Benuen, Tony Jenkinson, Richard Nuna, Sebastian Piwas, and Damian Castro.
John Law, Juanita Sundberg, and Colin Scott had helpful comments and prodding for earlier
versions of the article. The editors of Cultural Anthropology, particularly Cymene Howe, pushed
me to improve the article further. Its weaknesses are all mine. The research on which this
article is based was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
1. The master might also be called Papakashtshihku or Katipinimitautsh (Armitage 1992).
2. As I will show, the disappearance of atıˆku implies a threat to a whole set of relations
and practices that many Innu see fundamental to their existence.
3. Stengers (1997, 75; my translation) says that cosmos is part of “the question of an
ecology of practices that brings together our cities, which invented politics, and those
other places where the question of closure and transmission has invented other solutions
for itself.”
4. Among these scholars might be Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2012), Philippe Descola
(2013), Martin Holbraad (2007), and Morten Pedersen (2007).
5. Examples might include the work of Donna Haraway (2008) on companion species, but
see Haraway 2015, Tsing 2012, and Barad 2007.
6. Universal Science refers to a variety of knowledge practices that—claiming to follow
the experimental sciences’ example, but actually distorting the nature of the so-called
truths that these produce—claim to know reality “as it is” (see Stengers 2000).
7. In this sense, my call to treat certain conflicts as ontological rather than epistemological
(Blaser 2013a, 2013b) is, above all, a call to remain agnostic as to the kinds of differences
at stake in a given disagreement. Specific ontological differences are fundamentally a
posteriori propositions.
8. The organization was established in 1997 by a group of Innu “concerned with the
disruptive consequences that the sudden change from a life based on the country to one
based on permanent settlement in villages brought to the Innu” (Tshikapisk Foundation
n.d.).
9. The ban on hunting would not be passed until four years later, in 2013.
IS ANOTHER COSMOPOLITICS POSSIBLE?
567
10. For instance, the Sierra Club Canada criticized the review panel for failing to assess the
environmental effects on the George River Herd (JRP 2011a, 291).
11. See, for instance, http://damsandalternatives.blogspot.ca/2010/12/first-nations-rally-
against-lower.html.
12. When I refer to “cosmopolitics oriented to the common world,” I am indicating that
cosmopolitics gains weight as a problematic in relation to the common world. But this
does not need to be so, especially in the case of Isabelle Stengers, whose concept of an
ecology of practices would not seem refractive to the idea that I develop in this article’s
conclusion of actively staging divergences as a cosmopolitical move.
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