The Care of Migrants: Telemetry and the Fragile Wild

Abstract

Drawing on a multi-sited study of transnational efforts to safeguard the highly endangered Lesser White-fronted Goose (Anser Erythropus), the text develops an argument about a certain “biopolitics of the wild”—a particular mode of governing nonhuman life, rooted in certain conditions of visibility and engagement. As a wild avian population, the Lessers are known and managed primarily through practices of asymmetrical intimacy, such as field observation and telemetry. These practices, in turn, determine the emergence of biopower in a specific modality, as a power that takes hold of its object—and generates it— in a mode of constitutive withdrawal. Outlining the shape and parameters of this withdrawn presence, the essay locates “the wild” at a complex, awkward juncture in contemporary human-nonhuman relations: simultaneously an object of control and withdrawal, absence and intimacy, wildness and impurity; a site of complex and intractable controversies—but also, perhaps, of hope.