In FORAGENCY, we aim to research lived experiences of colonialism and capitalism at the crossroads of microhistory and more-than-human approaches. On the one hand, we study how Central Africans could manage to counter, alleviate or minimize their encroachment by outside forces through practices such as hunting, fishing and foraging. On the other, we regard these activities as complex ecological entanglements, involving manifold relationships between humans and non-humans.
At its very core, colonialism denotes a form of political and social organization where rights and duties are unevenly distributed around a ‘racialized’ hierarchy. In a colony, outsiders violently demand lands, labor, taxes and resources from populations who found themselves relegated at the lower echelons of an order set up and dominated by foreigners. FORAGENCY aims to study the act of colonizing in the field, and to understand how the aforementioned structuring principles were effectively enforced and challenged in specific biotopes. We believe that by researching the environmental dimensions of colonial endeavors, we will be able to shed light on how given ecosystems, resources and (non)-human populations collectively shaped these violent historical dynamics, and could put dents into the colonizer’s longing for hegemony. To do so, the project is articulated around four cities (Kisangani, Bujumbura, Brazzaville and Kinshasa), divided between three ecosystems (the Cuvette Centrale, Lake Tanganyika, and the Malebo Pool). These different environmental settings and their specific human history will allow us to make productive cross-regional and diachronic comparisons.
We thus hope to render the complexity of the lived experiences of colonization, by replacing human experiences in a more-than-human framework. We regard world-making, the very topic of historical research, as an ecological endeavor, in which landscapes, climates, plants, animals, and invisible forces also played a crucial part. To do so, our project is divided in four different sub-studies, at the intersection of two conceptual frameworks: foraging, and more-than-human agency.
Foraging
We use the term “foraging” to embrace a whole range of non-agricultural ecological relationships, including activities such as picking fruits and fungi, fishing in lakes and rivers, or hunting for subsistence. These practices allowed Central Africans to “work” the structurally oppressive colonial system “to their minimal disadvantage”, to paraphrase Eric Hobsbawm (1973). Indeed, consuming, transforming and selling foraged or hunted products constituted sources of income outside of capitalist wage labor, thereby allowing individuals and their kin to at least partially avoid employment contracts in order to eke out a living. Furthermore, these practices necessitated the maintenance and diffusion of (ecological) knowledge within vernacular social structures such as initiation societies, which could remain elusive to colonial cooptation and control. Finally, the production and consumption of local intoxicants, medicines and stimulants, as well as the hunting of “protected” species, ran against colonial moral and legal frameworks. These forms of “foraging” thus render human agency in its complexity, as small-scale ecological endeavors responding to the structural challenges wrought by imperialism and capitalism.
Furthermore, studying foraging as a series of activities taking place on the porous frontier between vernacular economies and capitalism builds on a blooming line of enquiry in environmental humanities. Anna Tsing (2015) famously coined the term ‘salvage accumulation’ to speak of the commodification of wild-growing matsutake mushrooms for the global gastronomic market. Kathleen Millar (2018) for her part studied scavenging for recyclables in a Brazilian landfill as forms of precarious survival articulated to the multibillion dollars ‘green’ industry. Martin Saxer and his team currently study foraging ‘at the edge of capitalism’, both as a coping mechanism for vulnerable communities and as a highly profitable process, generating private wealth out of common resources. FORAGENCY aims to bring both historical dimensions and Central African contexts into these ongoing multidisciplinary conversations.
More-than-Human agency
We also understand foraging practices as forms of agency beyond the human, in two interconnected ways. First, at its very core, agency supposes a form of ‘freedom’, the possibility for human agents to act in meaningful ways to achieve their own goals, in spite of and often against the will of the powers that be. However, if we consider foraging as a form of agency, we have to take into account that such performances of human autonomy rest by essence on the involvement of non-humans. Hunting and fishing entail building a relationship with one’s prey, and might involve companion animal species and/or specific plants as adjuvants. Plucking mushrooms, fruits, barks and roots also requires manifold interactions with and knowledge of one’s immediate environment. Therefore, we regard foraging as a series of heteronomous processes involving an extended network of life forms, rather than displays of human autonomy, disconnected from their environments (Latour 2019).
Second, we do not consider agency as the sole premise of human beings. In FORAGENCY, we study how non-humans could actively take part to world-making processes and to the dynamics of historical change. To do so, we intend to weave their umwelt back into our research. By umwelt, biologist Jakob Von Uexküll (1934) understood the unique being-in-the-world of animals; how their senses, goals and capacities shape how they grasp the world and manage to act upon it. By crossing historical and life science data, we aim to bring a multispecies dimension to the study of colonialism in Central Africa.
Photo Credits: Fishing in the Stanley-Falls, collection KMMA Tervuren; picture A. Mahieu, 1905.