On coming into animal presence with photovoice

Introduction

The sub-disciplinary field of more-than-human geography is now 20 years in the making. Whatmore and Thorne (1998, 2000) are credited with coining “more-than-human geographies,” later popularized in Whatmore’s (2002) book Hybrid Geographies. In it, and in related texts, Whatmore (2006) sets out a thesis that geographers need new modes of theorizing cohabitation in landscape to attend to the “livingness of the world” (602). Whatmore (2006: 602) argues for a more expansive approach to materiality concerned with “the intimate fabric of corporeality” and the intra-actions that produce subjects in relation to one another through their connections (Barad, 2003). These “more-than-human” ways of doing research interrogate landscape as co-produced bio-geo-graphies (Barua, 2014a)—what Tim Ingold (2000, 2005) calls landscapes of dwelling, full of lives with their own agential capacities for enacting social worlds (Whatmore, 2006: 604). Alongside these efforts to expand human geographies’ ontological and epistemological perspectives are embedded questions of practice. As Whatmore (2006) compelled over a decade ago:

The experimental demands of “more-than-human” styles of working place an onus on actively redistributing expertise beyond engaging with other disciplines or research fields to engaging knowledge practices and vernaculars beyond the academy in experimental research/politics (607).

In this paper, I assess how a collaborative photography practice, photovoice, engages with two related questions emergent from themes assessed by Buller (2015) and later Hovorka (2017, 2019) in their respective progress reports on animal geographies: (1) what insights do modes of “redistributing expertise” hold for enquiring into power relations within more-than-human geographies; and (2) how can such approaches find purchase with critiques that more-than-human geography remains anemic to questions of interspecies justice, violence, dispossession, and inequality? My argument is that photovoice advances visual sensing as an affective methodology attuned to politics of dispossession, inequality, and power. Photovoice re-works researcher–subject distinctions and binaries, and as a result, the process of how directions of enquiry are pursued (Wang and Burris, 1997). At the same time, as an active method of creative practice, photovoice offers a visual means for exploring affective dimensions of human–animal entanglement, and as I will argue, opportunities to engage with animal presence.

In what follows, I draw on textual and visual materials produced in 2015–2016 in Karnataka, India, around Bandipur National Park. The motivation for the project was to document and publicly communicate about the everyday experiences of individuals and rural communities living with wildlife in a politically contested landscape. This resulted in a set of photoessays published as “The Book of Bandipur” in 2017 by the project participants archived through the People’s Archive of Rural India (https://ruralindiaonline.org/articles/book-of-bandipur). The project authors, Jayamma Belliah, Nagi Shiva, K Sunil, KN Mahesha, M Indra Kumar, and N Swamy Bassavanna, produced a series of photoessays offering insightful critiques and analyses of wildlife conservation management in India within a landscape fraught with deadly and destructive encounters between humans, their property and domestic animals, and a variety of wild animals. The photoessays speak to conservation in Bandipur as a practice of territorialization rooted in colonial histories of dispossession. They reveal means by which the spatial ordering of conservation space in Bandipur reshuffles hierarchies of human and animal life whose effects are differently felt across axes of gender, race, caste, class, species, and animal breed. They also demonstrate how becoming attuned to animal presence, the ways in which human life is always affecting and affected by other animal lives, can be approached through absence and uncertainty as modes of relating.

I have written this paper from my vantage point as project facilitator. In reflecting on the project’s outcomes and process over a year after its completion, I found resonances with discussions about experimentation with visual methods within more-than-human geographies (Dowling et al., 2017, 2018; Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2015; Lorimer, 2010; Pitt, 2015). In particular, I became interested in how these methodological discussions intersect with questions about power, social difference, and inequality in crafting more-than-human geographies that feature nonhuman animals and their territories as central subjects (Hovorka, 2017, 2019; Margulies and Bersaglio, 2018). I therefore draw on the project’s approach and results as a means to reflect on the sticky intersections of these methodological and political questions. Engaging with photovoice as more-than-human practice advances debates about whose voices emerge through more-than-human scholarship, what are the means by which they do so, and the stakes involved in furthering decolonizing efforts within more-than-human geographies.

In the next section, I review recent engagements with experiments in crafting and visually sensing more-than-human geographies before describing the particular methods employed in this project. This is followed by a brief introduction to Bandipur’s conservation geography followed by the paper’s main analysis, advanced through discussing “The Book of Bandipur” and the particular advantages of photovoice for engaging with the affective, embodied capacities of human–animal entanglements.

Visual matters

A variety of geographers have noted that application of novel methods in more-than-human geographies lags behind the field’s more developed theorization (Barua, 2014a; Bastian et al., 2016; Bell et al., 2018; Buller, 2015; Dowling et al., 2017, 2018; Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2015; Hovorka, 2017; Lorimer, 2010; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2016). This gap between theory and practice is especially striking in the context of research focused on human–wildlife encounters often marked by injury, death, and destruction (Collard, 2012; Dowling et al., 2017). In the instances where critical geographers have incorporated more-than-human perspectives into analyses of violent encounters between different human actors and nonhuman animals, such as cougars (Collard, 2012), small felines (Sundberg, 2011), elephants (Barua, 2014b; de Silva and Srinivasan, 2019), lions (Barua, 2017), tigers (Doubleday, 2018; Margulies, 2019), and bears (Jampel, 2016), the data collection and analytical methods employed in these studies remain primarily textual in their approach (but see Barua, 2014a; Evans and Adams, 2018). The contributions of these papers to the field are meritorious and many, but in summary, more-than-human geography remains open for creative experimentation, especially in the context of studying the political ambit of spatial contestations with a host of lively actors.

Photovoice in Bandipur

This project took place over six months between December and May 2015–2016. The project authors came from diverse socioeconomic, cultural, and class backgrounds, including two different indigenous (adivasi) communities, and held a diversity of past and present occupations (and often multiple roles at once) including agricultural day-labor, household work, livestock rearing, and commercial and subsistence farming. ¹ The authors included two women and four men. After an initial project orientation meeting and group discussion, the group settled on framing the project through the theme of “living with wildlife,” to be interpreted by individuals as broadly as they saw fit. At this time all authors received a digital camera (Fujifilm FinePix S8630) to use for the duration of the project.

The authors and I met as a group about twice per month over the course of six months (though more frequently at the start of the project), beginning with an introduction to basic digital photography, as several of the group members had never used a camera before. During the next phase of the project, project authors began taking photographs at their convenience. At meetings we held group discussions and they shared photographs with one another. Throughout the duration of the project, I was aided by a tri-lingual research assistant (English, Tamil, and Kannada). The continuity of working with the same assistant was invaluable for developing trust and rapport between group members, the assistant, and myself. After several months, I began facilitating individual sessions with the authors to help them curate a final set of photographs, which they then narrated with text.

After early group discussions, group members decided a local exhibition of the final work would not reach the relevant conservation stakeholders and general public whom they wished to communicate to. The group decided they were most interested in communicating to urban-dwelling Indian citizens and foreigners who travel to Bandipur for wildlife tourism, whom they felt did not appreciate the perspectives of rural people whose lives are most impacted by conservation. For these reasons, I contacted the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), a noncommercial online archive, to become the permanent repository for the project’s outcomes. Founded in 2014, the mission of PARI is to document “the everyday lives of everyday people” in every administrative district of rural India, accessible in a growing number of languages (www.ruralindiaonline.net). ² Several of the photoessay authors also presented their photoessays in 2016 in Bangalore, Karnataka, at a major national wildlife photography festival at the invitation of the festival organizers. As a result, their presentations and photoessays were also highlighted in several national and regional Indian newspapers and in online news outlets.

Because the rights to use the photoessays remain with the authors in accordance with PARI’s Creative Commons licensing, they are not reproduced here. Rather, readers are encouraged to read this paper alongside engaging with the online archive itself as an alternative form of research communication and visual archival engagement: https://ruralindiaonline.org/articles/book-of-bandipur. In what follows, I reflect on the practice of working with photovoice for examining more-than-human geographies, at times referencing particular images or stories that are found through the web link to the archive. My suggestion is for readers to first explore the archive, then read what follows, referring back to individual photoessays as they are discussed in the text. In the next section, I briefly describe the geographic context of the project, before turning to the photoessay authors’ materials.

The conservation geography of Bandipur

This work was situated within a geographic region of great importance for Indian biodiversity conservation, home to the largest breeding populations of Asian elephants and tigers in the world (Jathanna et al., 2015; Karanth et al., 2011). This region is also the site of on-going political contestation in response to exclusionary conservation practices and “accumulation by conservation,” as wildlife tourism has become a valuable revenue stream for Indian National Parks at the expense of communities either dispossessed of lands in the name of conservation or under new forms of governmental regimes controlling access to natural resources and land use (Büscher and Fletcher, 2014; Rai et al., 2019). Local debates about who or what benefits from wildlife conservation in the region continues to result in violent altercations between members of the public and elements of the state (Margulies, 2018), alongside forms of everyday resistance to undemocratic forest governance regimes, such as setting fire to Bandipur’s forests.

The project participants lived within the buffer zone of Bandipur National Park in Gundlupet Taluk of Chamarajanagar District at the southernmost end of Karnataka State (Figure 1). There are 123 villages that fall within the buffer zone along Bandipur’s northern border (597.45 km ² ), though the photoessays primarily focus on the Eastern portion of the buffer zone abutting Bandipur’s Kundakere Range. Economically, most inhabitants of this area earn income through a combination of seasonal crop cultivation, livestock rearing (for dung or milk), and/or manual casual labor. Many residents, especially adivasis, work as casual laborers for the Forest Department on a temporary basis and without permanent work contracts. Chamarajanagar is the third poorest of Karnataka’s 30 districts, with 76% of rural residents earning less than 5000 rupees per calendar month (77 USD). Half of rural households in Chamarajanagar own agricultural land (Socio-Economic and Caste Census of India (SECC), 2011). The buffer zone region surrounding Bandipur is home to a large population of Government Scheduled Tribes (adivasis)—including significant populations of Soliga and Jenu Kuruba adivasis (SECC, 2011). OPEN IN VIEWER

Bandipur was designated as a National Park in 1974 and at the same time was notified as one of India’s original Tiger Reserves through a significant expansion of the 90 km ² Venugopala Wildlife Park, which had been the exclusive hunting grounds of the erstwhile Mysore Maharajah (Hosmath, 2015: 12). ³ Several of the region’s adivasi communities formerly inhabited or relied on resources from the land now designated as Bandipur (Narayanan et al., 2012). ⁴ During the British Raj era following the death of Tipu Sultan in 1799, Bandipur’s forests were managed for timber production, primarily teak. The ecological memory of Bandipur as a timber plantation turned “inviolate” space for wildlife is imprinted across the landscape (Hosmath, 2015: 9). Today, swaths of Bandipur remain essentially monoculture timber plantations reclassified as wilderness. ⁵ Despite the transformative ecological changes of the Bandipur forest for capital-intensive timber production, Bandipur remains a culturally significant landscape—local inhabitants as well as pilgrims are permitted to enter the park to visit several temples now found within its confines, while other sites within Bandipur of cultural and religious significance to the region’s adivasi communities, such as particular caves and hilltops, are not.

Bandipur is a popular wildlife tourism destination, with bus and jeep safari rides available in the park’s tourism zone. With the exception of paying tourists, human populations are excluded from entering Bandipur. Damage and destruction of agricultural crops by wildlife, especially elephants and wild boar, is pervasive around Bandipur, and attacks on livestock by leopards and tigers is common in the region (Karanth and Ranganathan, 2018; Karanth et al., 2013). While policies are in place for local communities to file for compensation following incidents of crop and livestock loss, or human injury and death following encounters with wild animals, communities complain that the compensation system is deeply inadequate. Forest Department response times are slow, compensation often never materializes, and the cost of customary “fees” paid to park staff to ensure claims are appropriately filed often means the monetary amount of compensation claimants receive is negligible compared to the financial losses they incur in filing for compensation (Karanth and Nepal, 2012; Margulies and Karanth, 2018).

Visualizing more-than-human contact zones, enclosures

In what follows, I draw on the “Book of Bandipur” as an affective archive, highlighting the ways in which the photoessays offer a variety of critiques of Bandipur’s management whose effects are most viscerally and economically experienced by rural communities living at Bandupr’s edge. I wish to make clear that the analysis I present below, drawing on “The Book of Bandipur,” is my own, and I make every effort to distinguish between where I am presenting the authors’ photoessay text or interview materials from that of my own interpretations of their materials. My own analysis is informed by my conversations, interviews, and experience collaborating with the photoessay authors, as well as from the vantage point of concurrently conducting 10 months of qualitative research in the region on wildlife conservation politics and human–wildlife relations.

Decolonizing more-than-human contact zones

The photoessays of Jaymma, Mahesh, Indra, and Swamy share a common engagement and concern with violent encounters between people and animals, and how uncomfortable, painful, and deadly animal encounters intersect with forms of social difference. In the context of Bandipur, therefore, coming into animal presence demands attention to fraught entanglements between animals and people in shared yet politically contested landscapes. In her photograph, “The Leopard,” Jayamma depicts a wary encounter between herself and a leopard:

The leopard was sitting on the rock on the slope of the hill behind the place where I work. I was going back home in the evening when I spotted it. It was very close to me, maybe a distance of 4–5 meters. My husband had come to pick me up, so I wasn’t very scared. If the leopard comes close, we cannot do much. I took this photo because I wanted to take a picture of the leopard. I would have taken it even if my husband wasn’t there. I am scared of the leopards and tigers. When I took the picture, the leopard saw us and lowered its head slowly behind the rock.

My argument for reading “The Leopard” in this way is situated in the momentary connection between Jayamma and the leopard caught in their reciprocal gaze, the claim they both make to Bandipur as home. Coming into animal presence in “The Leopard” means acknowledging the photographer as an active participant and presence in the image while recognizing with equal measure the dwelt presence of the animal. The image makes visible the capacities of both human and animal alike to assert their presence and affect one another. ⁶ “The Leopard” also speaks to how participatory visual methods bring questions both about social difference and attuning to more-than-human actors into the same frame through the connection of the photographer to animal subject. Unlike the omniscient, “western” gaze of traditional photographic methods in ethnographic studies (Edwards, 2011), photovoice enables the relationship between the image and the photographer to emerge as a central subject, or their intra-action (Barad, 2003). Jayamma’s use of a technology adept at reproducing the colonial imaginary of wilderness absent of human presence through selective visual curation becomes a critique of this very practice and its attendant spatial delineations of wilderness at the exclusion of people who call Bandipur home.

I approach Jayamma’s photograph “The Leopard” and accompanying text as an expression of a dwelt political ecology (Barua, 2014a; Ingold, 2005). Her visual representation of encounter with the leopard brings matters of indigeneity, gender, and politics to bear on the more-than-human frictions felt where conceptualizations of “animal spaces” and “beastly places” meet (Philo and Wilbert, 2000). Her photoessay contests a reading of the Bandipur landscape as territorialized wildlife space without human presence (“animal spaces”), while offering a deeply affective vision of Bandipur as a “beastly place” through her experiences of loss, trauma, and anxiety which cut across human and animal lives. In this way, Jayamma’s work resonates with Cindi Katz’ (1996) urging for a continued engagement with minor theory in geography, one which “attends to the differentiated concrete realms in which gendered racial capitalism is encountered, known, and felt” (Katz, 2017: 599). ⁷ Just as “the minor” begins from the place of expression rather than conceptualization (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986), Jayamma’s critique of Bandipur is an embodied one, visually expressed through her close engagement with the animal other.

Contemporary and diverse debates about decolonizing knowledge and research practices (e.g. Bhambra et al. 2018; Kuokkanen, 2007; Wane, 2006; Tallbear, 2011; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999) build on decades of foundational texts on decolonization and decolonizing struggles (e.g. Achebe, 1958; Fanon, 1963; Said, 1978; Tuck and Yang, 2012; Wa Thiong'o, 1986). Despite this immense intellectual history, researchers across animal, posthumanist, and more-than-human geographies have only more recently begun to grapple with critical questions about what decolonizing this scholarship might actually involve doing as a means of supporting struggles for sovereignty by colonized peoples on colonized lands (e.g. Sundberg, 2014). In her second of three progress reports on animal geographies, Alice Hovorka (2017) calls for further engagement with the globalizing and decolonizing potentials of animal and more-than-human geographies. Hovorka (2017) reviews efforts to date in actively resisting universalizing tendencies by Anglo-European knowledge practices in more-than-human geographies, and the need to embrace onto-epistemological plurality in research on human-animal relations (Gillespie and Collard, 2015; Howitt and Suchet-Pearson, 2006; Sundberg, 2014). In the third installment of her series, Hovorka (2018) considers relations of power within animal geographies, and, “invokes difference and inequality as central tenants of animal geographies to recognize how power relations operate to shape opportunities and constraints between and within nonhuman animal groups” (1). In the case of postcolonial wildlife conservation landscapes such as Bandipur, these power relations between human and nonhuman animals cannot be separated from the politics at the heart of decolonizing more-than-human geographies. Questions of how to practice more-than-human geography as a means to support struggles for indigenous freedom demand, as she writes, “opportunities for expanding our ways of knowing, embracing subaltern perspectives, and allowing those silenced human and nonhuman voices to speak” (Hovorka, 2017: 383). Certainly there are many modes of sensing with potential for probing the lifeworlds of animals, as renewed engagement with ethology in human geography has productively demonstrated (Barua and Sinha, 2017; Bear, 2011; Evans and Adams, 2018). But photovoice seems especially suited to inquiring into the relational lines connecting bodies and geographies of dwelling attendant to critical matters of human social difference and liberatory struggles. Photovoice draws attention to questions of politics that speak to environmental inequalities, political economy, and decolonizing as an active process towards indigenous sovereignty in places of dispossession (Tuck and Yang, 2012).

Returning to Lorimer’s (2010) treatment of visual methodologies, “learning to be affected,” I would argue, is another means to become aware of different paths of sensing, knowing, and being, open to indigenous and non-Western ontologies and epistemologies. Sundberg (2014) suggests geographers work to locate “our body-knowledge in relation to the existing paths we know and walk” as a means of decolonizing more-than-human geographical scholarship and the politics such work attempts to intervene in. In reflecting on Sundberg’s prompt, I have returned to Jaymma’s photograph, “The Leopard Tree” many times. I walked the path in this image a dozen or more times in the course of my own research, and Jayamma’s photograph is a prescient reminder of the ignorance of my own body-knowledge within the Bandipur landscape. The afternoon after Jayamma told me the story of her aunt’s deadly encounter with a leopard, Rajeev (my research assistant) and I asked if we could accompany her on her walk home later that day. She agreed, and as the sun was beginning to fade, we set off on the walk to Jaya’s hamlet at the forest’s edge. Along the way she pointed out where she had taken the photograph of the leopard, the rock where the animal lay, basking in the sun. She showed us the tree where her aunt had been killed, and she took us down a short side path, just beyond the trench marking Bandipur’s border, where behind the lantana brush there was a small shrine. As we approached, Jayamma asked us to remove our chappals before approaching this sacred site. As Sundberg (2014: 40) suggests, drawing on the Zapatista tradition of walking with and Rauna Kuokkanen’s (2014: 117–118) scholarship on participatory reciprocity, learning is “an engagement with the other.” Tracing Jayamma’s experience of walking in landscape became a means of learning to be affected by animal presence in an altogether unfamiliar register.

Conclusion

Photovoice is a promising method for attuning to the affective relations between humans and animals while also reconfiguring power relations within research practices. The photoessays comprising “The Book of Bandipur” demonstrate how pursuing research open to entanglement’s affective qualities is vital for appreciating how the production of environmental inequalities resonates across species divides and is felt in bodily, visceral terms. As a mode of practice, the use of photovoice to interrogate human–animal relations also engages criticism that more-than-human geography and related scholarship remain politically anemic and averse to interrogations of conflict. I see such engagement as vital for more-than-human research approaches to gain traction among scholars expressly concerned with processes of marginalization and enactments of injustice over and through natural resources and access to space (Menon and Karthik, 2017).

In considering limitations of this paper, the first is that I did not set out to write about the creation of “The Book of Bandipur” as an academic practice at the time of the project. It therefore does not feature the analytical contributions of the photovoice participants as co-authors. I am inspired by works of collaborative writing as decolonizing practice, for instance, by Bawaka Country et al. (2015, 2016), which from the outset engage with new ways of writing, researching, and collaborating with a variety of people, places, and beings. In future work, I would like to reflect on the possibilities that this approach to collaborative writing alongside visually-driven projects might hold. A second limitation speaks to broader questions about the meaning of “participation” (Hall, 1981; Hayward et al., 2004; McIntyre, 2000, 2003; Minkler, 2004). While the authors of the photoessays participated with free prior and informed consent, this language obfuscates the larger power dynamics embedded in my relationships with all of the project’s authors as a non-Indian researcher from the United States, working across significant social, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. As one of the participants told me during an interview after the project concluded:

I wanted to [participate in the project] because you asked, and outside people [researchers] never ask us what we really think about these issues. I see now why it is good we tell our own stories and why this is important. But when we started I wanted to say yes because you asked.

The transportability of photovoice as a more-than-human method to other geographies where questions of sensing and power converge are many. To date, researchers working with photovoice in geography have tended to focus on subjects in urban and peri-urban landscapes, but this bias is more likely to do with the additional challenges posed by working with visual technologies in rural landscapes (e.g. additional time training individuals less familiar with cameras, practical considerations of electrical power supply and costs) than with the inappropriateness of these methods for research in rural environments. With few exceptions, participatory visual methods have also not engaged with questions pertinent to animal geographies or considerations of the nonhuman in contested environments (but see Alam et al. 2017; Amir, 2019; Bastian et al., 2016). I would encourage researchers interested in photovoice to consider how it can complement and work alongside other participatory action research methods, activist projects, or collaborative learning engagements that extend beyond the academy. For instance, I see exciting possibilities for combining photovoice efforts with counter-mapping projects (Peluso, 1995; Wainwright and Bryan, 2009) and the creation of alternative archives and counterpublic histories (Gilliland and McKemmish, 2014; Stephenson, 2002).

Beyond methodological contributions, the empirical material produced by the “The Book of Bandipur” creators speaks directly to the now substantial body of scholarship on the political ecology of conservation, and how this field of research is strengthened through grappling with questions about participation, voice, and researching with (Bawaka Country, 2015; Kuokkanen, 2007). These photoessays reveals ways in which absence and distance emerge as important themes in coming into animal presence: how spaces of deadly encounter are not just configured through conservation’s territoriality, but also broader political economic forces operating in and through landscape; and how analyzing the risk of deadly and violent entanglements between humans and animals necessitates engagement with matters of indigeneity, gender, race, caste, and class inequalities. “The Book of Bandipur” contributes to contemporary debates in geography and political ecology on the politics embedded in research practice. As a permanent archive documenting life along the borders of a National Park rife with deadly and destructive human–animal encounters, these photoessays demonstrate in visceral, material, and political terms the critical value of “redistributing expertise” in more-than-human geographical research.

Highlights

Photovoice is employed as method to explore human–animal relations and hierarchies in Bandipur National Park, India.