Multispecies Disobedience. Vegetables-activists relation in Italian social movements

Abstract

Over the last few years, the fight against global warming has been embraced by several social movements worldwide. This chapter argues that an alliance between the anthropology of social movement and multispecies ethnography is helpful to better understand the relation between activism and the nonhuman entities for which it advocates. I focus on a case study in Padua (Italy), where I’ve been personally involved as an activist and as a researcher in an occupied space called La Tana. Experimenting with auto-ethnography and multispecies ethnography, my case examines the so-called ‘recupera,’ which consists of recovering a sizable number of vegetables considered unsaleable by the food trade system, fresh food that is redistributed for free in different neighbourhoods. Even if the main ideology that justifies this practice is its sustainability, I argue that there is a more complex, more-than-human relationship between activists and vegetables. I will interpret this entanglement relying on different posthuman theories, in particular on the concept of companion species (Haraway 2016).

Keywords: More-than-human resistance, Multispecies, Companion species, Activism