Senior Research Seminar 17th October with Professor Sarah Green (University of Helsinki)

Senior Research Seminar 17th October with Professor Sarah Green (University of Helsinki)

 

European Border Bystanders: Animals, Plants and More Than European Borders

 

European borders exist everywhere, providing traces of colonial, among other, histories. Those European borders also leave traces of cross-border travels, both by people and other living things: livestock, crops and accompanying pets and pests that spread across many parts of the world, and a variety of wild animals, microbes and other living things have been regular European border crossers, in all directions. They have all been bystanders in European political border-making, in the sense that the borders were not designed for them. Nevertheless, they were the focus of an alternative kind of European border-making: the Linnaean classification system. This system identified, named and located them using a distinct logic, placing all plants and animals within particular taxonomies and habitats. This generated a crosscutting border regime existing in parallel with the European political border regime. It also set the conditions necessary to regard some living things as being transgressive - for example, as invasive species. Yet, that designation is one indication that non-human living entities often fail to keep within their designated European border regimes. A brief overview of the way these bystanders (the border-crossing animals and plants) became involved in, and transgressed, European border-making activity suggests that European borders are also always more than European.

 

Sarah Green is a professor of anthropology at the University of Helsinki. She is a specialist on the anthropology of space, place, borders and location. In an ERC project called Crosslocations, she developed a dynamic and relational understanding of location along with a research team (see An Anthropology of Crosslocations ­- https://www.hup.fi/site/books/m/10.33134/HUP-23/ ). Her own part of this project involved studying both the geometries that might be involved, and the way that non-human living things encounter human borders: livestock, wild animals and microbes. She is developing further research on human and nonhuman relations across space.