A short review of Deborah Bird Rose's Wild Dog Dreaming (2011) University of Virginia Pres

Bhat, Harshavardhan

English

WestminsterResearch

7/2/2019 Reading Dingo Storieshttps://www.anthroposphere.co.uk/post/reading-dingo-stories 1/4Home About Issues Contact Us ShopANTHROPOSPHEREthe Oxford Climate ReviewCart (0) All Articles Issue I Issue II Issue III Issue IVAnthroposphereReading Dingo StoriesUpdated: Jun 18Jun 16A Short Review of Deborah Bird Rose's Wild Dog Dreaming – Love and Extinction (2011)By Harshavardhan Bhat As a researcher reading on the ways of the emergent monsoon, I am often struck by the ways themonsoon takes life, just as it gives life. The monsoon intermediates our concepts of life and death toan experience that is far more complex – where the matters of the air and the living intertwine in theproduction of dreams – where life and death entangle, as an offering of the air. At the same time,stories of drought, extreme variability and the deep modification of monsoonal ecosystems inform meof the anthropogenic and anthropocentric violence seeking a certain kind of disturbance. To seekdisturbance is to seek a methodology of violence when perhaps none is needed. Coloniality seeksdisruption as a methodology of extraction and harm centric transformation, which conditions acertain kind of irreversibility – that is inculcated by the analytic and is not contained by boundaries.Extinction is a similar crisis; its irreversibilityand an inability to repair and heal haunts anethics of responsibility and the very ability torespond, if at all. InWild DogDreaming  (2011), Deborah Bird Rose thinkswith her Aboriginal teachers and informants7/2/2019 Reading Dingo Storieshttps://www.anthroposphere.co.uk/post/reading-dingo-stories 2/4gin figuring similar themes. If settler humansview dingoes as trophies, to be skinned anddisplayed in public – performing killing as acelebratory and necessary act – how does thisunderstanding confront a world where thedingo co-produces the law? She like many, isdeeply confronted by the violence unleashedon the dingo by white settler colonial folk inAustralia. As her teacher, Old Tim asks of herto write in a letter: “Tell the white man, ‘don'ttouch any Aboriginal land… Aboriginalpeople got to stay on their own land: their ownlaw” (p. 86). Coloniality, however, refuses tostay out. There is a silence, she argues, in themoment before the “death guns” (p. 71) get the dingo. The event she opens the book with staysheavily with me, recurring again and again in the reading – of images of dead dingoes suspended froma tree, right outside Canberra, over barbed wire as a jarring display. In reference to the letter by OldTim of Yarralin protesting the air droppings of 1080, a toxic poison to bait dingoes, Rose writes ofhow chains of killing and/or extinction don’t end with the subject but foster a certain kind of deaththat extend connections and reach far beyond. 1080 poisons life. Devastation here is an active practiceof settler colonial analytics that does not acknowledge the dingo as kin or peer or more-than-human."Devastation here is an active practice of settler colonial analyticsthat does not acknowledge the dingo as kin or peer or more-than-human."The act of dreaming in the face of devastationis not perhaps a measure of normative hopehere. Bird Rose, informed by Old Tim, drawsit out as a world of tracks of creator beings –forms of multispecies kinships and theirancestors. The book takes the reader througha particular current of difference, where sheattempts to negotiate an understandingbetween certain Western philosophies andAboriginal being. Like the word ‘country’,which is used extensively in the book, theymean different things to different people.Beyond it being a spatial jurisdictional unit ora European reference to the countryside,‘country’ in this form of dreaming informs usof a certain kind of multispecies circulation. She cajoles a Western tradition to open up to the realitythat more-than-human beings are also subjects to their violence. More-than-human beings write life. There is a need to refuse nature-culture dualisms, in a multispecies world of interconnections, sheargues. One comprehends or dreams of comprehension not by exclusion but by an openness tointerconnection. In this world of flux, the earth is on the move. Just as the earth nurtures processesbetween death and life, kinships, she tells us, are of the flesh and blood of the earth. In monsoonalmatters, one learns that there are often several earths, so to speak – several grounds, different airs thathold relations within contexts. As part of her earths, co-existing with and taught by others in thosecontexts, Bird Rose writes “Where Dreaming Dingoes travelled, those tracks and sites are in thecountry of particular people; these people are the Lawmen and Lawwomen. They uphold Dingo lifeand law” (p. 99)."More-than-human beings write life.  There is a need to refuse nature-culture dualisms, in a multispecies world of interconnections." 7/2/2019 Reading Dingo Storieshttps://www.anthroposphere.co.uk/post/reading-dingo-stories 3/4Issue IVBird Rose in this book conceptually works through what she calls ‘death work’ in figuring ways ofdescribing the work of killing and some of its consequences. Akin to extinction, death is complicated.Settler coloniality unleashes in these stories a certain kind of extinction by not recognising thebrilliance and interconnectedness that grounds even their own lives. In wanting to be embodied, BirdRose suggests that life seeks to find a way – across death and air. In referring to Old Tim and hisdingo stories, we learn via Bird Rose that dingoes shape shift except in front of the human. For thehumans of the dingo, a form of human unexceptionalism meshes with the ways of the living contraryto human exceptionalism in western tradition. Death entangles with the complexity of the livingwhere even the dingo recognizes that it is coming. “Perhaps voices from the death space will speak tous," writes Bird Rose in seeking an ethics that emerges out of a meeting between life and death.Offering us the concept of ecological existentialism, Deborah Bird Rose in this book ties trouble tothe ethical nature of these times of acceleration and toxicity – its inextricable state in the deepening ofviolence learnt and reproduced as part of human exceptionalism. In thinking with these stories andthe rate of extinction today, one senses in her writing a scream, a plea at complete uncertainty – heldtogether by a certain kind of love.Harshavardhan Bhat is a doctoral researcher with Monsoon Assemblages at the University of Westminster which is a research project led by Lindsay Bremner and funded by the ERC under the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Harsha’s doctoral work is an interdisciplinary engagement on “monsoon air” thought and sensed through the New Delhi National Capital Region. He’s alumnus of the Strelka Institute postgraduate programme on ‘the city’, holds an MSc in Comparative Politics (Conflict Studies) from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Bachelors in Business Management from Christ College (Autonomous) in Bangalore. You can follow him on Twitter @harsh_co.If you like what you've just read, please support Anthroposphere by buying one of our beautifullydesigned physical copies here. All proceeds go towards printing, designing and maintaining ourpublication, and your contributions will help keep our climate journalism interdisciplinary andaccessible for all.Recent Posts See AllHow Renewable Energy Can, … Moving Perspectives: Biology … Within and WithoutLog in to leave a comment.7/2/2019 Reading Dingo Storieshttps://www.anthroposphere.co.uk/post/reading-dingo-stories 4/4Find us at...

Reading Dingo Stories

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Reading Dingo Stories

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