Deborah COZ, Centre d'Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive (CNRS, UMR 5175) , France
Raphaël MATHEVET, Centre d'Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive (CNRS, UMR 5175) , France
Over the past decades, geography has helped reconsider the human-animal divide and the hierarchy that often goes with it. It has also shown how relationships between humans and non-humans vary depending on a wide array of factors including the other-than-human species involved. Some are more charismatic than others (Lorimer, 2007), some are perceived as less dangerous. These perceptions, as well as humans’ direct and concrete interactions with them lead to a variety of situations which other authors have ranged on a continuum from conflict to coexistence (Frank et Glikman, 2019).
While a number of case studies in the literature illustrate these issues looking at two-terms or three-terms relationships (humans and beavers for example, or humans, wolves and sheep), few studies take a broader approach and involve more numerous species. Building on a case study in Camargue, southern France, we address this gap by looking not only at how different species individually interact with humans, but at a network of humans (farmers, hunters, conservationists, inhabitants, tourists), birds (ducks, flamingos, common cranes), domestic and wild mammals (horses, bulls, wild boars, rabbits). We argue that multispecies hierarchies depend not only on animal relations with humans but also on animal direct and human-mediated relations with other animals (Hovorka, 2019). Examining such an entanglement requires to look at biological and material encounters as well as social and cultural processes which leads us to adopt an interdisciplinary approach rooted in geography, population ecology and conservation sciences. We argue that adopting a multispecies scope is necessary to move forward in animal geography and human-wildlife conflicts in order to enable cohabitation between humans and non-humans by helping diverse actors as well as scientific disciplines come together. Our communication will present and discuss the first outcomes of this collective exploration of human-animal interactions.
Mots clés : multispecies cohabitation|multispecies hierarchies|interdisciplinarity
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