The Animal Turn
Animals are increasingly at the forefront of research questions – Not as shadows to human stories, or as beings we want to understand biologically, or for purely our benefit – but as beings who have histories, stories, and geographies of their own. Each season is set around themes with each episode unpacking a particular animal turn concept and its significance therein. Join Claudia Hirtenfelder as she delves into some of the most important ideas emerging out of this recent turn in scholarship, thinking, and being.
The Animal Turn
S7E5: Marginalized Multispecies Collectives with Oswaldo Santos Baquero
Join us for a conversation with Oswaldo Santos Baquero about marginalized multispecies collectives. He explains the complexities of biological taxonomy and challenges traditional definitions of species to instead think about how collectives operate. By critically analyzing health practices through the lens of multispecies marginalization, Oswaldo challenges us to reconsider the economic interests that often overshadow the well-being of both animals and humans.
Date Recorded: 28 August 2024.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero is a professor in the Department of Preventive Veterinary Medicine and Animal Health at the School of Veterinary Medicine of the University of São Paulo and in the Peripheries Research Group at the Institute of Advanced Studies. He coordinates the Multispecies Health Network (MUHE Network), dedicated to the (re)production of the good life (buen vivir) of marginalised multispecies collectives. He has a degree in veterinary medicine (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), a PhD in epidemiology from the University of São Paulo (USP), a post-doctorate in public health (USP) and a specialisation in data science (Johns Hopkins University). He works with and had published on matters related to decolonisation, biopolitics, political ecology and science and technology studies.
Featured:
- MUHE Network
- On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
- Staying with the Trouble by Donna Harraway
- Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad
- Wildlife Conservation Society
- Animal Rights/Human Rights by David Nibert
Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics for sponsoring this podcast; Remaking One Health Indies for sponsoring this season; and the Phoenix Zones Initiative for sponsoring this episode. Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo, Rebecca Shen for her design work, Priyanshu Thapliyal fo
A.P.P.L.EAnimals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.
Remaking One Health (ROH) Indies
This project investigates people-dog interactions, dog ecology, and rabies prevention efforts in urb
Phoenix Zones Initiative
An organization on a mission to change the policies and practices that drive the exploitation of vul
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The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. It can also be found on A.P.P.L.E, X, LinkedIn, You Tube, BlueSky and Instagram Learn more about the show on our website.
Well, marginalization has health consequences and health lends itself to being a marginalizing apparatus. As with the definition of who is part of collectives, treat as end and not just as means. Health issues are permeated by biopolitical decisions who can have health, who should have health, who says what health is and how it should be cared for?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:you, you, you, you, you. Hi, oswaldo, welcome to the Animal Turn podcast. It's going to be exciting to talk to you today about marginalized multi-species collectives. I'm very much looking forward to it, but, as always in the show, let's get started with learning a little bit about you. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and how you became interested in animals?
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :For sure, claudia, and thank you for inviting me. I'm currently in Sao Paulo, brazil. I have lived here for 14 years. I have lived here for 14 years and, to give you an idea, the entrance to my house has a seven-meter-long fence, barely perceptible between the leaves of a climbing plant. Behind it it is a garden with banana trees and Atlantic forest vegetation, a type of small tropical forest. What follows is the building with the living room, kitchen, bathroom and bedrooms. At the back is another garden with fruit trees and vegetable patch. The diversity of arthropods that live in the garden is significant. They enter the other areas of the house. The birds that come are also varied. They are even some sarwes, a kind of opossum, that come at night and sometimes live in the roof lining, that come at night and sometimes live in the roof lining. In the house also live a cat, my partner, eva, and our seven-year-old daughter, maya.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :In terms of certain stereotypes about tropics and Brazil, it may seem like an ordinary house. However, it should be noted that Sao Paulo is the largest metropolis in Brazil and in all of America, the fourth most populated city in the planet. It is a city dominated by concrete, high-rise buildings, cars and a scarcity of green areas. My house is quite unusual in that it doesn't have a garage, and the lush garden makes it even more unusual. However, it is not just the house that deviates from Sao Paulo's standard. The middle-class neighborhood is also very particular. Its green areas contrast with the gray that prevails in the rest of the city. This particularity is not coincidence. It is the result of another characteristic of the neighborhood the collective organization in defense of common good, which tries to resist the neoliberal onslaught that seeks to turn every corner of the city into a source of profit. I, maya, and especially Eva, are involved in the neighborhood's community initiatives.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :The University of Sao Paulo, another huge place with a community of 120,000 people, is also located in the neighborhood. I work there. I am professor of epidemiology and public health at the School of Veterinary Medicine and the Institute for Advanced Studies. In the vicinity of my neighborhood and the university is the San Remo favela, a slum, a community with a very powerful history of resistance and collective organization. I have been following and trying to contribute to the community's initiatives for about six years now. So the network I coordinate at the university, the Multispecies Health Network.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Much of the work I have been doing in the Multispecies Health Network has to do with the intersection of other than human living beings and urban peripheries, and this is now, coincidentally, I was born and grew up on the urban periphery of Bogota, colombia, another South American metropolis. Like many other people from the periphery, I know practically nothing about the history of my grandparents, but I do know that my maternal grandmother came from a family that lived off of substance farming before being fragmented by violence associated with land grabbing and concentration. As a child, my grandmother had to flee and end up in the city alone. Although she remains in Bogota until now, she has maintained an emotional bond with her rural origins.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :When I was a child, I enjoyed going to her house, among other things because it always had animals things because it always had animals. She often visited her homeland or was visited by family members. These trips were used to bring wild animals into the city, especially turtles and birds. Before I was born, she even had a monkey and a deer. She kept chickens chickens for consumption, and discovering this was shocking for me. I remember a chick I saw growing up and one day, after having lunch, I realized that the meat I was eating was him.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That must have been a shock, I'm sure.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Yes, I also remember family outings where she broke live chicken and then slaughtered them to prepare the meal. It was shocking for most of the family, as she was the only one who had rural background. On the other hand, dogs were becoming more popular as pets in the city. I got fascinated every time I saw a dog. Once I saw a street dog entangled in a rope. He cried a lot and the more he tried to escape, the more trapped he got. I was very distressed and didn't know how to help him until, luckily, an adult arrived and managed to free him.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :My grandmother stopped keeping, while animals and my contact with other species ended up being restricted to urban fauna. We had dogs at home and I couldn't be indifferent to the ones I saw on the streets. In my adolescence and early adulthood, I was heavily influenced by urban culture, but also by indigenous cultures. I ended up studying veterinary medicine at the National University of Colombia, where these influences continue. It was very difficult to complete the degree. I did well academically, but the systematic violence against animals used in teaching was difficult to bear and to counter. The ideological insistence on naturalizing and normalizing the use of animals was pervasive. Then I came to Brazil and did a PhD in which I took a demographic and epidemiological approach to the population management of companion animals. I went on to do a postdoctorate in public health and I am currently a professor of epidemiology and public health at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Sao Paulo where, as I said, I coordinate the Multispecies Health Network.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I've looked at some of your work on the Multispecies Health Network online and it's really fascinating and interesting. And you know, on the show we've spoken a number of times to vets and people who have done veterinary medicine and who have, I think, many ways said similar things to you that undertaking that degree can be really traumatizing in its own way and sometimes the intensity of the requirements of the degree, like you said, it's not easy. The intensity of the requirements can almost make you dull to the kind of suffering that's happening and the things you have to do. So really interesting. But I couldn't help in listening to you talk about your home and your home in Sao Paulo reflect a little bit on what my home looked like in South Africa.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So I'm from South Africa and currently I'm in Europe. And I think when I tell like in South Africa, so I'm from South Africa and you know, currently I'm in Europe and I think when I tell people in South Africa and people hear that in South Africa we have big fences everywhere, that's really shocking for them and they always think there's really just different idea of South Africa, that it's green and that there are many animals. But I come from Johannesburg, a big city like Sao Paulo in many ways, but also very different. So a really fascinating backstory there about your connections and how you've moved through your academic degree. But today we're going to be talking about a very specific concept and that's marginalized multispecies collective. Before we get to the marginalized, maybe we can just start with what is a multi-species collective.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Okay, let's look at each of these words in order to say something about this expression. A collective is nothing more than a group or collection of entities. Thus, a multispecies collective is a group of several species. The most common connotation of species is that of biological taxonomy. When living beings are classified according to a hierarchy, the species is the basic unit of categorization, also used as a measure of biodiversity. The idea is that all organisms of a species have approximate ancestors in common, which, in taxonomic terms, is equivalent to saying that they are of the same genus, is equivalent to saying that they are of the same genus. In turn, all organisms in a genus are from the same family, and so on. A domestic cat is of the species Felis catus, of the genus Felis and the family Felidae. In this sense, a group of trees, birds and worms is a multi-species collective, in the same way as a collective of cows and humans exploited in a slaughterhouse or a group of mice and humans in a research laboratory.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :However, it should be noted that the classification of life into discrete categories of hierarchical classification is nothing more than an attempt to order life by fitting into a model created in recent Western history. It is an ordering schema that allows us to understand many things, but also limits understanding when it is taken as the right and only order that can be seen in life. Right and only order that can be seen in life. What's more, this order in which we try to fit life has several impulses. Let's think about a common definition of species, the largest group whose members have characteristics in common and in which two organisms of the appropriate sex or reproductive type are also able to generate fertile offspring. To begin with, this definition does not apply to organisms that reproduce asexually. In genetic terms, a hierarchical system in which the connection between species is solely through common ancestors is incompatible with the horizontal gene transfer which happens when genes move from one organism to another who is not her offspring. Horizontal gene transfer occurs between very dissimilar species. There are even expressions that refer to cases in which this definition of species is problematic, for example, aggregates of microspecies, species complexes, ring species, quasi-species, among others. In addition, there are dozens of other definitions which resolve some inconsistencies but run into others.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :In the Origin of Species, darwin wrote no one definition has satisfied all naturalists. Yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species. Today, imprecision continues to challenge efforts toward their living beings into discrete categories. Whatever the definition, a species is a collective of living beings. If a collective is a group with several entities, the opposite tends to be defined as that which is one, an individual, a non-divisible entity. This lends itself to think of the living members of a species as individuals.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :You and me are living members of the human species, but are each of us a single entity? Our bodies have more bacterial cells than human eukaryotic cells. The relationship between these cells co-produces embryological, physiological and immunological processes on which we depend. So we too are multispecies collectives. It is not different with other living beings. They are multispecies collectives co-produced between and through another multispecies collectives.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :A word that allows us to refer to such collectives without reducing them to individuals or unitary entities is holobionts. Donna Haraway clearly summarizes this complexity when she says critters interpenetrate one another, loop around and through one another, eat each other, get indigestion and partially digest and partially assimilate one another, and thereby establish sympoietic arrangements that are otherwise known as cells, organisms and ecological assemblages. On the other hand, the connotation of the term species is not only biological. This is perhaps clear in Portuguese and Spanish languages, in which species is often used in place of kind and type, but in English we also talk about things that are special cases, precisely because of this connotation. So we can think of multispecies collectives made up of living and non-living entities. This is interesting because it shows that multispecies collectives are also environments, territories.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Returning to the example of our body. Isn't it also an environment inhabited by countless microorganisms and a territory framed by biopolitical regimes? Here I can't help but think of feminist and indigenous thinkers, who talk about hyphenated bodies, territories. The complexity and plurality of multispecies collectives materialize and make sense in specific situations. While it is appropriate to refer to multispecies collectives abstractly, it's also necessary to define partial ad hoc compositions of multispecies collectives involved in a given situation. For instance, mineral extraction from a forest causes deforestation and pollution that affects multi-species collectives in various ways. The composition and agency of these collectives is extremely complex and the task of detailing the process that emerged from the relationship between mining and these collectives, the relationship between mining and these collectives is inexhaustible, but at the same time, a situated approach can work with a collective of, for example, human children and fish of a particular species that live in the territory to determine the toxic effects of mercury and articulate forms of resistance against the extractivism that feeds on the commodification of life.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Some of what you said makes me think a little bit about things like actor network theory and biocentrism, which I know I've had some criticisms of on the podcast in the past.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I sometimes struggle, I think, a little bit with biocentrism. But if I understand you correctly, I think you're saying that multi-species collectives as a concept is a way of acknowledging both the limitations and opportunities of thinking about species and animal relations also as concepts, because species is an improper kind of term as well. We think it's normal and natural, but actually it's much more fluid and complex than what many of us think. And then multispecies collectives as a concept allows us to appreciate that individuals, at whatever scale you want to talk about that, so whether it's a microbe or a human, individuals are embedded inside collectives and that collectives exist at a variety of scales, so whether it's microbial collectives or mammalian collectives or mammal fish collectives. And I mean it seems to me that geography is quite important here in terms of how you maybe are defining, how you look at collectives. But implicitly it seems that you're challenging both the concepts of species and of individuals by showing that both concepts are perhaps necessarily ambiguous and have flaws. Would you agree? Is that kind of a fair assessment?
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Yes, if we want to think in terms of individuals and scales, it's one way of looking at multispecies, collectives.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I can't help but think in scales. I'm trained as a geographer, so it just naturally comes up for me. All right, so does multispecies collective, then challenge the tendency of thinking about animal relations often exclusively through the lens of individuals and or species. So are you trying to challenge this tendency of focusing on animal relations through the lens of individuals and or through the lens of species?
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Yes, but not necessarily. In order to work with the idea of multispecies collectives, we don't need to presuppose that individuals are the fundamental unit of life and precede the relationships they establish with each other in such a way that species is the secondary result of a certain type of reproductive relationship between individuals, type of reproductive relationship between individuals. We can do without this assumption or problematize it, as I suggested earlier. This is important as part of the political production of other vocabularies and grammars that allow us to think and act differently and in accordance with the challenges of the catastrophic times we are experiencing. However, the notions of multispecies collective, individual and biological species are not incompatible, and this is also important. And this is also important In order to respond adequately to catastrophic times. We need to act in concrete situations, which have their own vocabularies and grammars for organizing and making sense of living experiences. In order to incorporate the notion of multispecies collectives into these situations, a practical and simple meaning is initially decisive, and this can involve the notions of individual and biological species. For instance, when we start to talk about multispecies collectives in favelas and other peripheries, we use expressions that can implicitly be mapped on the usual meaning of individual and biological species. Brazilian urban peripheries, it is common to talk about communities, or even as a synonym for urban periphery. It is also common to talk about organized groups working for the common good as collectives. We have been able to convey an initial notion of the species collective by saying that a collective is nothing more than a group or community whose members are not only human. In a given favela, for instance, there may be humans, dogs, cats, rats, pigeons, scorpions, cockroaches, trees and small plants, among others. All these living beings form a group, community or multispecies collective, although we are talking about members or living beings rather than individuals. And not all these categories mentioned here are exactly a biological species. After all, there are several species of rats, scorpions and trees.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :At first, some people tend to refer to the idea of individual and biological species, but progressively these ideas can become more complex. We can even find interesting conceptions of what is an individual. I am thinking of what Karen Barad calls intra-action. For her, the phenomena that make up the world are particular material relations that are not restricted to humans. It is within these phenomena that the properties and limits that define what we call individuals emerge and make sense. Thus, rather than being an interaction between two or more pre-existing indivisibles. The existence of individuals emerge and is situated in an entanglement of interactions. Individuals are always relatives, in other words, in relation. They are implemented and constituted by an entanglement of forces, by interactions.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Karim Barad's been used a couple of times on the show and I hear you. So we're never really to be human or to be being is often to be in relation. So the idea of being kind of isolated and alone, it's a bit of a fallacy. It's something that's difficult to comprehend and I really appreciate what you said there about needing. What did you say? We need to look at our own vocabularies and grammars for organizing and making sense of living experiences, and this certainly seems like it's also an empirical question.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:How people would talk about multi-species collectives in the favelas where you are might be different to how people talk about multi-species collectives in Vienna or how people might, and even then different people in the favelas and different people in Vienna would have different vocabularies and ideas for thinking about these collections. But then this brings me to the other word that's in consideration today and that's marginalized. In your work with Multispecies Health Network, you seem to focus not only on multispecies collectives but on a very specific type of collective marginalized multi-species collectives. So what is a marginalized multi-species collective and why is it important?
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Let's now look at marginalization from a biopolitical and political ecology perspective. Who is part of a given collective? Who decides what the composition of that collective is, and what are theiscursive practices, institutions and artifacts that make it possible to manage, control and shape collectives? Apparatuses marginalize when they establish and legitimize margins that distinguish between lives with intrinsic value and lives with instrumental value, whose interests matter little or not at all. Those who draw the margins arrogate themselves the prerogative of deciding who is worth more and who is worth less. In this way, they legitimize biopolitical regimes to maintain their privileges by exploiting marginalized lives relegated to symbolic and geographical peripheries. Racism, patriarchy, cis-heteronormativity and classism are among the many marginalizing apparatuses, as are colonialism, speciesism and animalization. Animalization is a marginalizing apparatus that establishes a category of beings that can be exploited for human benefit. It is applied to other than human animals, but also to certain humans, as I mentioned in a publication as recently as 1920, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the same institution that decades later proposed the One Health concept, was responsible for exhibiting Otabenga, a young black man, at the Bronx Zoo, is structural to racism a way of creating subhumans who can be legitimately oppressed to satisfy the desires of those who set themselves up as superior humans. Even if it is not as explicit as it once was, the animalization of humans continues to operate through language and its fundamental role in creating technologies of inferiorization and oppression of humans. The interaction between marginalizing apparatuses is not restricted to racism and animalization. They feed back on each other in complex ways, which is why the idea of intersectionality, as worked on by black feminism, is relevant and needs to be expanded. Black feminism is relevant and needs to be expanded Schematically. The marginalization suffered by a black woman is not equivalent to the marginalization of black men plus the marginalization of white women.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :The simultaneous operation of marginalizing apparatuses results in a specific ways of living, falling ill and dying. All living beings can dynamically be relatively marginalized by one apparatus and relatively privileged by another. For example, a Somali boy, despite being human and male, can suffer from food insecurity and neglected health problems, while a cat living in Switzerland, despite being female and not human, can receive high-quality food and the best health care available. Being porcine and female is often a sentence of extreme perpetual confinement. A healthy breeding bull that has been well cared for can be killed and replaced by another if it develops certain diseases or becomes too old, despite the ecology of violence that affects marginalized multispecies collectives, the living beings that make them up learn tactics of resistance, survival and fruition through peripheral pedagogies and fruition through peripheral pedagogies. The creativity and capacity for reinvention of marginalized multispecies collectives is well illustrated by the indigenous peoples of Abiyala, the continent that white colonizers came to call America. These peoples and their multispecies collectives, through their peripheral pedagogies, have resisted colonial brutality for more than five centuries. Of course, not all marginalized multispecies collectives have been able to resist.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :After all, we are at the beginning of the sixth mass extinction. What is lost with extinctions is much more than biodiverse mass. We also lose ways of life. When a species disappears, the relationships it made possible are lost, as are the ways of living and seeing the world of its members. There's a situation told by philosopher Juliana Fausto that it is interesting to think about disappearing. She talks about the construction of Brasilia, the capital of Brazil.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :The building construction of the modern project was carried out by migrant workers from the northeast of the country in very precarious conditions. When they were leveling an area, they found some rat nests that turned out to be of an unknown genus. One day there was a disagreement between the workers in the company canteen. The police intervened, and then there were reports of lovelies carrying bodies and 93 suitcases that were not claimed by the owners. The next day, the bodies of the murdered workers were never found. Of the rats declared extinct, only eight bodies were found. The way they lived and the world they had built was lost, buried by the modern city. That's why Juliana says if development is one of the engines of the Anthropocene, then the massacre of subhuman and non-human populations is its fuel. We need peripheral pedagogies to learn how to break margins and live in other ways.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, we need them to kind of have a status quo and an established way of thinking about the ways in which humans and animals interact, and peripheral pedagogies can help to, I guess, challenge the established ways of how one's intersection or interaction, as you said earlier, can shift depending on who they're talking with and where they're talking. So, as a white woman from South Africa, my race often privileged me in interactions in South Africa, whereas maybe my gender did not. But then in other situations or places my gender might actually be a benefit or an assistance to me in helping to achieve a particular goal because of that kind of collective, that social collective. So, going back to your point of just how important context is in thinking about how these relationships work and these violences work, and it makes me think a lot about this, about the concept of entangled oppressions I think I first heard it from David Nybert but it's very similar to a lot of what you're saying here about how oppression is entangled. And some other ideas came to mind as you were talking. So the first related to who would be considered privileged versus marginalized in a given environment or ecology.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Earlier you mentioned how our bodies consist of multi-species collectives. Could my eating poorly, right. So, thinking about the microbes in my body, could my eating poorly be thought of as marginalizing their needs? Or what about if we remove humans from the equation for a bit and just think about animal relations? Could predators be thought of as marginalizing the needs of the animals who they prey on? And this is a common argument that's put against vegans, and I've got my own thoughts about it. I think it's pretty tricky terrain, but what are your thoughts?
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Let's remember that a marginalizing apparatus is a set of discursive and non-discursive practices, institutions and artifacts mobilized to administer collectives with the aim of conferring privileges to those who arrogate to themselves the role of administrators through the legitimized exploitation of those who are administered.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :The legitimized exploitation of those who are administered. If we look at the ultra-processed food industry, for instance, we will find an arrangement of institutions, operations and discourses to legitimize the profits of an oligopolyopoly, systematically disguising the damage caused by this type of food system. In this sense, the provision of inadequate food is a form of marginalization. If, on the other hand, we imagine a scenario restricted to a single person eating poorly, it becomes more difficult to think in terms of marginalization. First, we will have to consider that, on the one hand, there is a person and, on the other, there are microbiota. Second, we would have to assume that this person. Second, we would have to assume that this person, by eating poorly, is mobilizing marginalizing apparatuses to take advantage of the exploitation of this microbiota. In the case of other than human predators, I also find it difficult to think that it is the case of a collective that is using marginalizing apparatuses to legitimize the exploitation of its prey.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, this is definitely tricky terrain, but earlier on I asked you. So we've got marginalized multi-species collectives. We've got marginalized multi-species collectives, and you mentioned that they are marginalized because there's, I guess, structural forces that are both discursive and non-discursive, and it's not just an individual that's marginalized, but an entire collective that's marginalized. And you mentioned extinction earlier, and this is often why people will cite, why we have to intervene and protect animals. So then I just want to come back to the second part of that question why is it important to look at marginalized collectives?
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :What I just said in the previous answer is one of the reasons why it's important to look at these collectives. We need peripheral pedagogies to learn how to break margins and live in other ways. This is a matter of survival, because the modern Western way of life is unsustainable. If all humans had the consumption patterns of the elites of the global North, we would need several planets full of resources. Even today's consumption patterns, and even considerably lower ones, are incompatible in the long term with a planet with finite resources and regenerative processes that take place on different time scales processes that take place on different time scales. The marginalization of multispecies collectives is a condition of possibility for capitalist modernity, whose principle is the accumulation of wealth and unlimited progress. Many marginalized multispecies collectives, in their finiteness, are pushed to their limits in order to extract maximum profitability from them. This is particularly clear in the case of animals industrialized to make them food commodities to the precarious labor that marginalized people have to endure. For this reason, deconstructing and marginalizing apparatuses is an indispensable task in order to chart other courses and make other ways of life possible. Beyond survival strategies, looking at marginalized multispecies collectives is of the utmost importance because it is a question of justice.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :There are various ways of understanding justice, and the capabilities approach developed by Martha Nussbaum is one way of dealing with justice from a multi-species perspective, focusing on sentient beings. Dignity, intuitively conceived, is a key idea in the capabilities approach. Living beings with diverse capacities to carry out activities that are good for them have dignity when they are treated as ends and not only as means, without being prevented from realizing these capacities. Where dignity is lacking, justice fails. The living beings perceive and evaluate the world. They experience it relationally, discriminating some things as beneficial and others as harmful. As active living beings, they give value to plural goods, take an interest in them and endeavor to enjoy them. Capabilities are basic goods. Justice requires that all capabilities be guaranteed at least at a minimum level, without compensating for deficiencies, in some with an excess of others.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Since the realization of capabilities depends on a network of agencies, justice cannot be reduced to the treatment of isolated individuals.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :In this context, marginalization has a significant impact on the opportunities that creatures have to live in dignity. The capabilities approach poses the challenge of deciding which living beings are sentient and what is the minimum in terms of capabilities that we should guarantee for a given species. In other words, it is an approach that extends the sphere of moral consideration beyond humans but at the same time, delimits this sphere and therefore updates the marginalizing potential of the institution of limits by deciding who can and cannot suffer injustice and what this suffering consists of. It's an unavoidable challenge, but no one to be faced in any way to be faced in any way. Good intentions do not guarantee justice, while some decisions taken in the name of the common good can end up being harmful to someone. For this reason, the establishment of the frontiers of justice, as well as the solutions presented in the name of justice, need well as the solutions presented in the name of justice named to be provisional and, above all, continually problematized.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Okay. So, analytically and conceptually, thinking of human and animal groups, especially vulnerable ones, as multi-species collectives is important, because failing to think about animals and their many relations is in and of itself an injustice. Add to that a failure to think across these relations and how it's contributing to massive global challenges like climate change and extinction. But you would argue that, even if they are imperfect, we need to have frontiers of justice. Is this, I don't know, like this makes me think a little bit of the Universal Human Declaration of Rights, imperfect, but necessary to make sure that even the most vulnerable are heard and considered? Is what you're saying here something like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :There are some similarities between the capabilities approach and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In both cases, dignity is a core component and it is assumed that there is a minimum set of requirements to guarantee it. There are even partial overlaps between these requirements in the case of humans. Although I'm not well acquainted with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it seems to me that the guiding principle of the declaration is not the guarantee of opportunities to exercise basic capabilities exercise basic capabilities Interesting, and so how can you determine who is marginalized and what challenges come with doing?
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :so In many cases, I think it's quite obvious. Think of agribusiness, whose main objective is to accumulate capital through the production of food commodities. To do this, it industrializes and tortures billions of animals and exploits human workers to the point of producing situations analogous to slavery, as happens in Brazil and other countries slavery as happens in Brazil and other countries. In the process, it destroys countless wild multispecies, collectives and their habitats. It has a lot of suffering and planetary destruction to enrich a handful of corporations. But there are other circumstances that are not obvious, in which, although we can better situate ourselves by problematizing and marginalizing apparatuses and defining species-specific capabilities to be guaranteed, it's not possible to assume a comfortable position. In any case, we need a lot of empathy, caution and persistence to dynamically update our responses, to identify and work for those who need it most.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, I hear you. So I mean, in some cases, like you say, it is obvious. You know, the destruction of the Amazon rainforest to serve agribusiness is a clear example of multi-species collectives and areas that are struggling in response to the demands of meat eating, soy production and agribusiness. I suppose in some situations it's maybe less obvious. You know, especially as politics get involved, you know you could think about rats in cities and how extermination campaigns have often been leveled against rats, which have then included things like poisons that have hurt numerous other animals, not just rats. But then people would say, well, this is done in service of protecting public health, keeping humans health, for example and this brings me back to thinking a little bit about our focus for the season and, if we could come back to that for a minute, which is multi-species health, how is the concept of marginalized multi-species collective connected to the question of health?
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :of health. Well, marginalization has health consequences and health lends itself to being a marginalizing apparatus. As with the definition of who is part of collectives, treat as end and not just as means. Health issues are permeated by biopolitical decisions who can have health, who should have health? Who says what health is and how it should be cared for? Who is here when say something? Let's think about the relationship between health and the marginalization of multispecies, collectives.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Taking the example of poultry industrialized for the production of meat and eggs in Brazil, Brazil's Ministry of Health is the government sector responsible for healthcare. However, it doesn't look after the health of industrialized poultry. This is done by the Ministry of Agriculture, which has a national poultry health program. So not all health phenomena are looked after by the Ministry of Health. The reason for this is clear. What is meant by poultry health in the political sphere is fundamentally something that needs to be guaranteed so as not to jeopardize the economic value of the commodities produced from the bodies of the birds.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Poultry medicine books and articles are predominantly aimed at preventing the collapse of poultry in the face of so-called production diseases. Treatments therefore seek to ensure that the birds resist the pressures of the exploitation systems to which they are subjected. But prolonging this resistance does not imply prolonging experiences of a dignified life, that is, situations that offer the opportunity to minimally exercise a set of capabilities valued by the birds. In addition, industrialized poultry is replaceable, which opens up the possibility of introducing treatments based on the elimination and exchange of batches of birds. If the poultry health problem happens to be highly transmissible infectious disease, such as influenza, the therapeutic repertoire could well be the mass elimination of coneless birds, for which there are manuals with depopulation or extermination methods. Thus, the treatment of influenza in industrialized birds is very different from the treatment of influenza in humans.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:We've definitely seen this play out in recent years, not only with the mass killing of birds during COVID-19. I mean, there were incredible images showing that but also the mass killing of both farmed and wild birds currently who are being affected by bird flu. And this has been an ongoing, I think, disease situation for years now, in which birds are being implicated as what you call the health apparatus.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Yes, it's important to note that species-specific treatment has several justifications. The influenza subtypes implicated in most avian cases are different from the predominant subtypes in humans. The pathophysiological processes, clinical presentations, pharmacological responses and epidemic dynamics also vary between species. But the differences in the treatment of influenza in industrialized birds and humans is due above all to the marginalization that turns poultry into raw material for the production of commodities.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :That health practices are normative, which means that they are exercised according to an injunction as to what should be done. Someone decides what should and shouldn't be done to maintain or recover health. Someone defines a norm that justifies and directs actions in the name of health. Marginalizing apparatuses greatly influence the establishment of health norms and practices and therefore health itself. In this sense, caring for the health of marginalized multispecies, collectives, implies taking a stance on what matters in terms of health and what should be done. In view of the plurality of meanings that health has, this position should also be multifaceted.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Health has ontological meanings, whether as a state. Health has ontological meanings whether as a state process or some other attribute of those who are or can be healthy. It also has epistemic meanings that define it, establish who can have it, who should have it and how it should be cared for. It also has practical senses and concrete actions taken in its name In the multispecies health that we conceive. The ontological dimension has collective and multispecies living experiences as its main element. Whatever the state or process, whatever capacities multispecies collectives become capable of, these are living experiences, and healthcare is an effort to ensure that these experiences are consistent with what holobionts value.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :The epistemic dimension of this multispecies health problematizes the apparatuses that marginalize through practices and discourses of health. The practical dimension consists of actions informed by knowledge of the pathological effects of marginalization, as well as the production of knowledge based on this action of peripheral resistance in order to break the margins and weave attentive relationships committed to what living beings value. These three dimensions are interdependent Knowledge and actions, that is, the epistemic and practical dimensions, have a concrete existence. They are attributes of multispecies collectives. The knowledge and attributes of multispecies collectives are the products of actions. At the same time, knowledge gives meaning to attributes and practices.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Okay, so I think I'm following you. So the policies, actions and decisions that industries, governments etc. Make when thinking about health, both discursively and materially, shape whose health is considered. And because species do not exist in isolation, when one species health, like chickens, is instrumentalized for, let's say, economic gain, it can also impact other species and groups. So, for example, like you mentioned earlier, factory workers are more likely to be exposed to avian influenza and share higher risk, or builders, like you mentioned earlier, as well.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Yes, and not only whose health, but also what health. Many pathological processes are imposed in the name of health. Human workers suffer not only due to zoonosis. Their exploitation is a condition of possibility for that economic gain. So far, I have been talking about the institution of norms that define what should be done to take care of health, and this might give the impression that both the establishment of norms and the exercise of care are necessarily human. However, if we rely on George Canguilhem's epistemological work on health, we can see that both the institution of norms and care are more than human.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Any living being is, among other things, a complex and dynamic system that responds differently to particular circumstances. It has the capability to discriminate between elements of the environment, in the sense of ability of being able to do, and the capability to carry out the discrimination in the sense of opportunity. This discrimination gives rise to the possibility of choice, to a preference for what is most compatible with life. Thus there is a vital norm the living beings must be one way and not another, and, as well as following norms, they have the capability to institute new norms to adapt to the dynamism of the environment, not just conforming themselves to the demands of that environment, but transforming it. Norms are followed in health and disease, but they are different. The normative capacity is graded in the first case, and this is what allows the healthy living being to face and emerge from pathological processes in which the norms are more restrictive.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:What do you mean by normative capacity?
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Normative capacity, which is inherent to the living beings of a collective, drives variability in ways of acting and relating, thus affecting the environment of other living beings and materializing collective transformations. Humans, with their remarkable ability to interfere in the environment of other living beings, lead them to establish new norms in order to adapt to these changes, but also pathological processes. In the face of the impossibility of adaptation, it is in this context that I have placed health practices as a way of interfering in the lives of others, and also as a normative exercise, since they are guided by a notion of health and prescribe what should be done to be healthy.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And I guess that these collectives are not only vulnerable ones vulnerable collectives. You could intervene on behalf of a vulnerable collective such as chickens and farm workers. You might also want to intervene and disrupt a dominant collective, maybe the pets, humans and industries that rely on the production of those chickens. That's very interesting, yeah, so it's kind of thinking about how different collectives operate again, scale how different collectives operate in relation to one another. In your work at the collective, you have an explicit focus on decolonization. What does that mean? So, for example, you say that your network aims to decolonize health. What do you mean when you say that?
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Yes, Modernity is a colonial order that proclaims itself to be the best, the inevitable universal destiny, the ultimate expression of progress. It is a Eurocentric ideology that presupposes epistemological and ontological superiority, as well as the obligation to modernize supposedly primitive and inferior humans, even if this means resorting to unlimited violence. In fact, if we think in terms of comparisons and identify as superior that which produces the most of a given thing, modernity-coloniality is superior in a number of ways, many of them too problematic. Now, other civilization is as bellicose, genocidal and non-surpasses the records of the world wars or comes close to the scale of the horrors produced by Nazism, enslavement or the industrialization of life that produces this category called livestock. The mass extinction of biocultural diversity and planetary climate catastrophes are fields that only modernity, coloniality, has managed to accomplish. The term Anthropocene helps us to think about some aspects of this modernity, coloniality.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :The Anthropocene as a new epoch of human origin depends on one of the following premises the first is that all humans, not just the modern ones, have caused the stratigraphic marks that distinguish the Anthropocene Not only the owners of multinational corporations and those oppressed by them, but also indigenous peoples since the origin of humanity. It's a premise that doesn't fit with the evidence that points to capitalist extractivism as responsible for this new geological epoch. In this case, the Anthropocene is an expression that sums up the custom of privatizing gains and socializing losses. The second premise is that it is only the so-called modern humans who are effectively humans, and it is they who have left their mark on the rocks. In this case, those responsible for the depredation of the planet are identified most precisely, but only after excluding from the anthropos indigenous peoples and, in general, all those who don't have the presumed epistemic and ontological superiority. In this way, the two premises are symptomatic of modernity, coloniality, which is responsible for this geological epoch that we could well call, as some do, the capitalocene or plantacionocene.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :This modern anthropos, which creates subhumans in order to distance itself from them and rise above them, also inferiorizes other living beings in order to rise above them. The criteria of superiority that he chooses are precisely those that define and differentiate him. That define and differentiate him. The criterion of superiority chosen by modern anthropos would never be, for instance, the ability to live for millennia without depredating large territories and commodifying life. This anthropos is trapped in a superiority-inferiority mentality in which progress to the top justifies anything. Thus, modernity-coloniality is extremely pathological and lethal. Is accepted, the only option left is to mitigate the damage of inevitable progress that directed and universalized by the white patriarchal anthropos of European origin.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Could you maybe be a bit more specific here? So I hear you in terms of the Anthropocene. It's a problematic concept because it puts the devastation caused on the planet on all humans and that's not in fact the case. You have to look at these apparatuses of marginalization that you mentioned earlier. What is actually causing these challenges? And then you start to come into view very specific humans, very specific practices and processes that are responsible for a great deal of this devastation. But could you maybe give me some examples here about how this relates to health and health approaches?
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Yes, in the field of health, there are several approaches that adhere exemplary to modern ideology. One of these is known as One Health. It does not question the civilizational crisis of modern decoloniality and limits itself to mitigating actions that disguise and prolong this crisis. One Health is an ideological product that reinforces the colonial order in the name of universal health. Let's take a concrete example the colonizers created medical and anthropological authorities and technologies to prevent the collapse of enslaved populations. In this way, besides legitimizing enslavement, they improved the health of the enslaved. They gave women psychological support so that they would be able to raise their children, that is, be able to reproduce the oppressed population. They looked after their diet and treat illness to maintain productivity. It was a health approach in constant search of physiological and epidemiological improvements compatible with the colonial order. Therefore, it did not contemplate the end of slavery, even if this led to a radical improvement in health.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Improvement in health. Similarly, one Health works to improve health indicators in industrialized animals, but without questioning the oligopolies that enrich themselves with agribusiness at the expense of food sovereignty and security. It seeks to reduce antimicrobial resistance, but without questioning big pharma. It proposes disease preparedness for emerging zoonoses with pandemic potential, but fails to denounce the capitalist extractivism that favors these emergencies. Extractivism that favors these emergencies privatizes health systems and massifies the poverty that prevents people from taking care of themselves and having access to quality health services. Something similar can be said of other action fronts. Although there are well-intentioned contributions, in the name of One Health and we ourselves have tried to give One Health other meanings we have ended up concluding that qualifying health as something that is one is problematic.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Sorry, can I just clarify? By we you're meaning your organization at the Multispecies Health Collective.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Yes, before we start talking about multispecies health, we were talking about one health, of peripheries, to give another meaning, to differentiate our practices from those popularized but hegemonic discourses. But, as I told you, we found that talking about something that there is only one is problematic. If there is just one health, then there's nothing such thing as health and one health, because there aren't two, there is just one. Moreover, when reviewing the epistemological literature, it becomes clear that there are many theories about the complexity of health, but there is not unified theory that synthesizes all the ways of understanding health, among other things because there are incompatible conceptions and not all of them apply to all living beings. In addition to epistemological diversity, health as a phenomenon is a different experience for each living being. There is not just one health, because every living being has singular experience of their own health. Being has singular experience of their own health. Not is it possible to guarantee health for everyone, because the life of some depends on the death of others and those who die lose their health. This last point is not to be understood as a license to justify any death stood as a license to justify any death. Moreover, one held as an approach and not as a concept of health is not the only one either.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :In addition to there being more than one concept of one health, other expressions have also emerged to deal with what is not covered by hegemonic discourses One-held of peripheries, as we did, structural one-held, just one-held, relational one-held, more than one-held, among others. Something that is emphasized in most conceptions of One Health is transdisciplinarity and intersectoriality. But think of public health, new public health, collective health, community health, environmental health, planetary health, global health, eco-health and many others. Transdisciplinarity and intersectoriality are inherent in all of them. So what remains to distinguish one health is the emphasis on certain relationships between humans, other animals and environments, notably those having to do with zoonosis and antimicrobial resistance, without questioning the modern colonial order. However, these and other issues embraced by One Health are also addressed by other approaches, although not with the same emphasis. One Health has particularities and in that sense it is unique, but the same can be said of any other approach. Perhaps this is another distinguishing feature it is the only one that proclaims itself to be the only one.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Finally, it is worth mentioning another idea that is sometimes associated with one health Everything is connected and therefore anything ends up affecting everyone's health. Therefore, there is just one health, as we know, the problem of this absolute relationality is that if something is everything, it loses specificity and becomes nothing. If everything is one health, it is irrelevant to say that you are working with it, because it is impossible for it to be any different. Faced with these conceptual problems and the universalizing ideology implicit in the idea that there is just one, we need to remember the multiplicity. As Deleuze and Guattari say, it is necessary to make the multiple, not by always adding a higher dimension but, on the contrary, in a simple way, with the strength of sobriety at the level of the dimensions available, of sobriety at the level of the dimensions available, always n minus 1. It is only in this way that the 1 is part of the multiple, always being subtracted from it. Sorry, can I just clarify?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:when you say you have n dimensions, so you're saying a way of understanding multiple is saying how can I understand the forest minus one? Would be how can I understand the forest minus the trees? Or how can I understand a city minus one? How can I understand a city minus one? How can I understand a city minus rats? Would that be how it operates or is that misunderstanding here?
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :the idea is that we don't need to always, once we have multiplicity, put it in a higher dimension, which is the dimension that unifies that multiplicity, because when you do that, you in a way end up with that multiplicity, because it is, after all, only one higher thing.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So multiplicity is inherent. Like it's not multiplicity, things are multiple.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :They are multiple and to think and work with minus one. We don't need to do that all the time. Of course there's a space to processes of unification and totalization, but these processes are always partial. In that sense, there's no problem with unity, with talking about a total entity. But if we want to take multiplicity seriously and this is why I brought this citation we can do it thinking in multiplicity itself.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Okay, I'm with you. So, instead of trying to simplify like One Health, trying to come up with one answer fits all, this is the way it's done. We need to think with multiplicity.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Yes, and going back to the universalizing ideology, one of the things we feel with one head is that any time that you do something dealing with humans, other animals and environments, you automatically are put as a specific case of one head, and that's an epistemic violence, because you are not allowed to see things differently, you are just doing one health. That's a problem of always putting things in the higher dimension that unifies, universalize. You don't have opportunities to do things different, and one health in its core reinforces the separation of humans from other animals and from environments, when in fact we have many alternatives to think about the entanglements that make health and disease processes. We don't intend to make multispecies health the most modern and appropriate approach to implement on a global scale, among other things because globalization is a widespread imposition of modern provincialism, of modern provincialism. We want precisely the opposite, and it is in this sense that our aim is the colonial.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :It is an exercise of affecting and being affected in other ways, seeking to improve sensitivity in order to think more carefully about what is that we should care for and how we should do it. It is an exercise we carry out based on the relationships we experience and which situate us. What is health? Who can have it? Who should have it? How should it be cared for? Who answers these questions and who is listened to when they answer it? When these questions are asked, without reinforcing the supposedly inevitable progress of modernity, the colonial options open up for caring for multi-species health, this is what we try to do.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Well, it's very interesting work that you try to do. Thank you so much for sharing with me today some of your thoughts on multi-species health, on marginalized multi-species communities, everything from talking about the connection and the challenges of thinking across species and individuals and multiplicities, to also being critical and political about the various apparatuses that work to marginalize and repress, but also elevate and dominate, so to think about how various collectivities work together. And yeah, there's a lot to unpack, I think, in what you've said and I think I'll be cheering on it for a couple of days. But why don't we turn now to your quote? Do you have a quote ready for us?
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Yes, I have a quote which is in our webpage. The Multispecies Health Network webpage is in fact the last paragraph of the about section and it says multispecies health involves the colonial life, experiences, understandings and transformations. It is a practice of actions informed by knowledge of the pathological effects of marginalization, which builds knowledge from those actions. It is an invitation and a choice to be and live differently. Interested in the multispecies good life, which is a translation of a concept we use here, which is Buen Vivir and therefore increasingly distant from the colonial capitalist modern center that provides comfort to the few, mainly white people at the expense of the oppression of the many. Multispecies health is another way of multiplying the ongoing colonial flight.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Wonderful. I think that really captures many of the sentiments that you've shared with us today. Before we say goodbye, if folks want to find out more about you and the collective as well as the work you do, could you tell us maybe a bit about what you're working on now and how they can get in touch?
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Sure, we are making theoretical work about meanings and practices of multispecies health. Most of our current field works occur in favelas, in slums. One of them, for example, is multispecies ethnography, about caged birds and how the metaphor of the cage helped to understand the marginalization of humans living in favelas. Another is about women working to protect dogs and cats in urban peripheries, paying particular attention to the challenges they face and even put their lives at risk. We also have studies about multispecies demographies in favelas, as well as initiatives to co-produce peripheral pedagogies with children and teenagers to imagine and work for other futures for the multispecies peripheral communities communities. One of the main initiatives in this context is a project known as Community Young Agents of Multispecies Health. It is based on actions proposed and carried out by a group of teenagers to look after the multispecies communities. We also have projects with laboratory animals and one of our main objectives is to begin to work more and more with the ecologies of violence associated with agribusiness.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You said you work with lab animals. Is that doing experiments and tests in lab animals, or is that no, no, no.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Precisely the contrary. Here in Brazil, the Ministry of Health has a network of laboratories to make diagnosis. Despite there are alternatives to do that diagnosis without using mice, they continue being used, and we want to figure out why this is happening.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, that's a really good example of one of these collectives right Dogs, the virus, the mouse, the humans, the lab assistants they all create a context that we can really see multi-species relations playing out Well. Thank you so much. I will make sure that the details for your collective are in the show notes so that folks can get in touch with you, thank you, thank you. Thank you for joining me on the show today.
Oswaldo Santos Baquero :Thank you very much for inviting me.
