Rebellious Ecologies?
Towards Anthropology of More-than-human Resistance
Bob Kuřík, (Charles University, Prague)
Corbett Hall, 278 - Anthropology dept.
September 28, 10am - 12pm
Whereas the anthropology of resistance experiences a kind of resurrection, the related times of
climate crisis, extractivism, and exterminism garner yet a new urgency: to rethink resistance in
the light of the turn to multispecies ethnography, in which attention is given to the agency of non-
humans beyond their reduction to sources, symbols, or food for humans. The main goal of this
talk is to open the concept of resistance in political anthropology to include the agency of non-
humans and their capacity to make social and political changes, fight back, co-produce
rebelliously charged effects, meanings and interpretations, deny being controlled or dominated,
affect more-than-human others in a political way, and form alliances. With the help of several
anthropological examples of others as well as from my ongoing research of “landsliding
resistance” in the Western Carpathians, the aim is to rethink resistance underscoring its more-
than-human contours as well as outline several risks and challenges connected to it. How to
notice, approach and analyze more-than-human forms of resistance in which people are not
only fighting for food, nature, or fighting against resource extractions, but fighting together with
various biological and/or geological allies in struggles and ecologies where resisting agency is
recognized and redistributed along multispecies lines?
Bob Kuřík is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology,
Charles University in Prague, the European Union. His research captures issues from political
and environmental anthropology ranging from power, resistance and protest, to post-humans,
geological worlds and infrastructures. Together with his students, he has just started developing
a new project entitled: The Carpathian Bestiary of More-than-human Resistance. He is the co-
editor of Mike Is Our Bomb: Politics and Youth Music Subcultures in Post-Socialist Czechia
published in Czech by Togga in 2018. His texts appeared in Czech Sociological Journal, Journal
of Urban Affairs, and The SAGE Handbook of Resistance.