One of FORAGENCY’s deliverables will be the PI’s second monograph. This research will tentatively propose ‘foraging’ as a conceptual framework, hereby understood as non-agricultural interactions with the environment. It will argue that through multiple forms of foraging – such as plucking, fishing and hunting – Central Africans managed to partially counter, alleviate or circumvent capitalist and/or colonial hegemonic designs. For instance, activities such as gathering firewood, harvesting copal or artisanal logging can constitute forms of ‘salvage accumulation’ – ‘the process [of amassing] capital without controlling the conditions through which commodities are produced’ (Tsing 2015: 63). These activities allowed foragers participate to the capitalist market economy without fully enganging in wage labour, avoiding therefore the invasive social control it entails.
Furthermore, foraging activities will also be regarded as crucial sites of more-than-human encounters. The collaboration between foragers and their animal companions, the mobilisation and transmission of vernacular environmental knowledge needed to forage successfully, or the multispecies entanglements inherent to hunting, fishing and plucking constitute multiple ways to weave non-human perspectives and experiences back into historical narratives.
In order to write more-than-human histories of colonialism, this book will also use the polysemic notions of territory/territoriality as a red thread, tying together case-studies anchored in specific spatial and chronological fields. Researching how humans and non-human inhabited and made sense of given territories will help shed light on the frictions, overlaps and contradictions between colonial strategies, vernacular ecologies and non-human behaviours.
Photo credits: Copal harvesters 2017.24.311, collection Africamuseum Tervuren; foto C. Dandoy (Inforcongo), 1946, © KMMA Tervuren/ C. Dandoy