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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Jeremy Brice
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
What place might killing occupy in a more-than-human world, where human life is always-already entangled among nonhumans? In this article I attempt to unsettle the assumption that only individual organisms can be killed, and to render other sites and spaces of killing visible. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among winemakers in South Australia I examine pasteurisation, a killing practice that acts not on organisms but on the fluids within which they live. Examining the pasteurisation of wine damaged by the fungus Botrytis cinerea, I argue that this practice shifts the locus of killing from botrytis’ body to metabolic life processes which embrace extracellular enzymes diffused throughout the wine. I suggest that pasteurisation thus displaces killing into spaces, such as wine-in-the-making, within which many metabolic lives coexist and interpenetrate. Pasteurisation therefore renders killing an intervention into the metabolic relationships that tie together numerous species of microbes living within wine. In acting on wine as a whole it kills rather indiscriminately, simultaneously terminating multiple lives that relate to humans in different ways. Pasteurisation therefore both protects and spoils wine, reconfiguring multiple human-nonhuman relationships in conflicting and sometimes economically costly ways. In so doing, it illustrates that in a more-than-human world killing becomes difficult to confine to a single unwanted organism or species. Killing instead becomes disturbingly mobile and communicable, prone to rebound upon the valued human lives of those who kill in unsettling and potentially harmful ways.
Author(s): Brice J
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Environmental Humanities
Year: 2014
Volume: 4
Pages: 171-194
Online publication date: 20/05/2014
Acceptance date: 24/08/2013
Date deposited: 20/03/2016
ISSN (electronic): 2201-1919
Publisher: University of New South Wales
URL: http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol4/4.9.pdf
