More-Than-Human Borderlands of Wilderness— Transactional Relationships and Intra-Active Entanglements Between Wolves and Humans in the Swiss Calanda Region

Abstract

Human attempts to draw clear boundaries between the wild and the civilized are typically subject to negotiations, discourses, and conflicts between environmental authorities, environmentalists, and the local population. However, this perspective often overlooks the agency of nonhumans in b/ordering space. Against this background, this paper offers a new conceptualization of more-than-human borderlands of wilderness. They are understood as spaces of continuous negotiation processes co-constituted by complex, relational, and hybrid entanglements of humans, animals, materialities, regulations, politics, discursive-material practices and transactions, in which the boundaries between the civilized and the wild are constituted, enacted, and challenged. Using the empirical study of returning wolves to Switzerland, this paper exemplifies the transactional constitution of more-than-human borderlands of wilderness. It demonstrates that the returning animals challenge human b/orderings of wilderness by following their prey, hunting (domestic) animals or entering settlement areas, whereas humans attempt to restabilize the boundary between the wilderness and the civilized by putting the wilderness back in place through new regulations and b/ordering practices that allow, for instance, the hunting of “problem wolves.” Thus, the boundaries between the wilderness and the cultivated are always being challenged by the transactions and intra-actions of humans, wolves, and other morethan-human entities, thereby constituting the borderlands of wilderness that cut across human territorial and b/ordering claims. Therefore, investigating wolves’ actions and the intra-active human attempts to restabilize their ideas of the “right place” for the wild allows a deeper understanding of wilderness in a co-created, fluid, and dynamic way.