‘They’re part of what we are’: Interspecies belonging, animal life and farming practice on the Isle of Skye

Abstract

This article develops the concept of interspecies belonging: a process of co-habitation between humans and non-humans achieved through material, affective and situated practises. This dynamic is generative of an intimate, personal sense of belonging and a socio-spatial politics of belonging. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork amongst hill farmers and the animals they live alongside on the Isle of Skye, North-West Scotland. It considers how farming work is an embodied and sensorial immersion in more-than-human worlds, undergirded by affective intensities that produce a feeling of being right with the world, but also of the farming self as producer of commodity goods. Within the fraught political ecologies of a post-productivist uplands, and the growing influence of nature conservation in farming life, they animate a political belonging aimed at protecting access to natural resources. I demonstrate how the imbrication of animal behaviours, mobilities and bodies within this dynamic of belonging shapes how they are understood as legitimate or illegitimate presences within upland landscapes. Through this, I consider how the recently reintroduced sea eagle is engaged with by farmers as an exemplar of exogenous institutional intervention that marginalises an already precarious way of life.