Precious reptiles: Social engagement and placemaking with saltwater crocodiles

Abstract

In this paper I take up the call to expand the boundaries of social and physical landscapes in order to recognise the creative agencies of human and non-human actors. In doing so, I wish to draw attention to the ways in which relations between both individuals and collectives combine to shape multi-dimensional sociality in particular places. The place in question is a crocodile farm in tropical Australia. It is a curious place in that it was fostered by modes of objectification which serve to commoditise and conserve crocodiles at a species level with little attention to individuality. However, the particularity of crocodiles at the farming level compels their human handlers to make concessions to their demands. Crocodiles, by their refusals, attachments and individualities, elicit attention to their needs, which translates into practices and structures that are often at odds with profitability. In this way it is as much social processes as it is practicalities of producing skins which affect the farmed landscape and the beings it produces, creating a nexus of multispecies place-making where individuals matter.animal agency, co-shaping places, crocodile farming, domestication, human-animal relations, niche construction 1 | INTRODUCTION My project here is to expand the bounds of sociality in order that more-than-humans might be regarded as engaged in social relations. More specifically, my focus will be on the "varied trajectories" (Tsing, 2013, p. 34) along which particular humans and, in this case, crocodiles engage to co-construct landscapes in ways both conceptual and physical. Rather than a carefully planned landscape of human intention, the crocodile farm is a result of what happens when crocodiles and humans are "socially engaged" (Baynes-Rock, 2013). It is a place of crocodile and human "becomings," where threads of materiality connect individuals within formative processes (Ingold & Palsson, 2013); where the landscape is "co-fabricated between more-than-human bodies and a lively earth" (Whatmore, 2006, p. 603). The layout and structures of a crocodile farm are not simply the offspring of human norms, ideas and practices, but emerge as social constructions. They are unplanned places that result from the ways in which humans and crocodiles are engaged socially. Following this vein, I hope to draw attention to the lived experiences of individuals and collectives and how these co-shape practices and places in a farming context.With regard to framing the crocodile farm as a place of making and being made by interspecies relations, I am drawn to the concept of niche construction. Fuentes (2010) applies this concept to better appreciate how humans and others combine to shape the parameters within which selective processes operate. This overturns the notion of domestication as a process of human control over a passive natural other and reassembles it as essentially social and reciprocal (Clutton-Brock, 1989, p. 7). The concept of niche construction holds that organisms are not simply subject to the selective pre...