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Sweet Knoll
Author(s) -
Dudley Kathryn M.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal for the anthropology of north america
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2475-5389
DOI - 10.1002/nad.12110
Subject(s) - rurality , ethnography , geopolitics , identity (music) , politics , sociology , construct (python library) , anthropocene , governmentality , geography , environmental ethics , political science , anthropology , aesthetics , law , rural area , philosophy , computer science , programming language
Rurality in the Anthropocene is a tactical mode of existence in imperiled ecologies. Neither a strategic enterprise nor an identity politics, it is rooted in geopolitical histories and a congeries of feral ontologies: ways of being, communicating, and understanding in multispecies worlds that are rife with conflict, struggles for survival, and unexpected moments of grace. As a relational construct, rurality indexes the intersubjective copresence of more‐than‐human beings who materially and affectively sustain futurity in landscapes ravaged by extractive industries and climate change. This essay, based on interviews with public land ranchers in Oregon, conjures rurality as an ethnographic encounter in three registers involving wild horses, small‐scale ranchers, and a bewitched anthropologist.