Talk: Working with snakebite: feral subsumption in Costa Rica’s palm oil plantations

Amid the simplified ecologies of southern Costa Rica’s palm oil plantations, venomous 'terciopelo' vipers proliferate. While the terciopelo’s bite poses a grave risk to the lives and limbs of palm labourers, the viper's presence has been embraced by plantation management as a form of 'natural’ rodent pest control and a valuable marker of sustainable palm's biodiversity. Drawing upon ethnographic research within palm plantations, this talk attends to the work through which the risk of snakebite is distributed and snakes become enrolled into processes of monocropping. In doing so, it intervenes in social scientific discussions of the ruination of plantation ecologies, offering a lens of feral subsumption to conceive of the contingent re-absorption of plantation pathologies into productive processes. Ultimately, through engagement with the perspectives of plantation labourers, the talk considers how agricultural labour relations with toxic non-human others may be rendered less pathological for more just multispecies futures.

Bio:
George Kirkham is a visiting doctoral student from the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment. For the past eight years, George has engaged in research and advocacy concerning the global health issue of snakebite envenomation: a Neglected Tropical Disease engendered by toxins in the bites of venomous snakes. In his academic work, George engages more-than-human geography, medical anthropology, and political ecology to investigate how humans and snakes live and work together.

George’s doctoral research stems from a partnership with the Instituto Clodomiro Picado, an influential Costa Rican public antivenom producer and snakebite research centre. As part of this collaboration, George employs ethnographic methods to study non-human care and labour in Central American antivenom laboratories; the role of plantation agriculture in configuring snakebite’s emergence; and regional infrastructures of snakebite governance.

Prior to starting his DPhil, George worked for the Wellcome Trust’s Snakebite Priority Area and Digital Team. This experience led him to his earlier research which studied the implementation of SARPA, a snake translocation and antivenom access smartphone application developed by the Kerala Forest Department. This research inspired an interest in the digital mediation of multispecies health, an area George has developed through the notion of ‘digital disease ecologies’. George’s work also engages with the geographies of toxicity, having published on the need to re-situate animal- and plant-derived toxins within social scientific theorisations of environmental toxicity, as well as issues of pharmaceutical and atmospheric pollution.