Vinciane Despret (Liege) and Michel Meuret (INRA)

Cosmo-ecological Sheep and the Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet
In recent decades, some young people from urban backgrounds have chosen to become shepherds and to learn to reconnect with the herding practices that many livestock breeders had abandoned under the pressure of agricultural modernization policies. In some cases they have found themselves entrusted with sheep that are as naïve about herding as they themselves were. Before their introduction to transhumance – a process of seasonal movement between pastures – these animals were primarily confined and fed indoors or in small fenced areas. The shepherds had to learn how to lead, how to understand other modes of living, how to teach their sheep what is edible and what is not and how to form a flock; the sheep had to learn how to compose with dogs and humans, to acquire new feeding habits, new ethos, and moreover, new ways of living in an enlarged world. These practices do not amount to a livestock economy, shepherds consider herding as a work of transformation and ecological recuperation — of the land, of the sheep, of ways of being together. Learning “the arts of living on a damaged planets”, as Anna Tsing has termed it, humans and animals are making their own contributions to a new cosmo-ecology, creating cosmo-ecological connections, and therefore contributing to what Eduardo Kohn (relaying Ghassan Hage) calls “alter-politics”: “a politics that grows not from opposition to or critique of our current systems but one that grows from attention to another way of being, one that involves other kinds of living beings.”

Vinciane Despret is philosopher of sciences and Maître de conferences at the University of Liège and at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium. Her first fieldwork was in the Negev desert, Israel, where she explored the possibility of making an "ethology of the ethologists." She has since worked with animals, and with the humans who observe them, live with them or simply know them. From September 2007 to January 2008 she was the scientific curator of the exhibition "Bêtes et Hommes" held at the Grande halle de la Villette, Parc de La Villette, Paris. She is the author of numerous books and articles - most of them not yet available in English. Her most recent book Que diraient les animaux si… on leur posait de bonnes questions? will be translated into English in
2015.