Vocality, Interspecies Conflict and the Tourist Gaze

This article examines performance as the site of interspecies bonding, cooperation and conflict resolution. Vocality, choreography (Lansley 2017) and the ‘tourist gaze’ (John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, Sage, 2011) are posited as three performative modalities by which human/wildlife collaboration is developed. Based on fieldwork in Bokonboyevo, Kyrgyzstan, this article explores the performative aspects of human/nonhuman interaction in the partnerships between Kyrgyz eagle-hunters and golden eagles, discussing birds of prey as partners in hunt and performance. The eagle is trained through a variety of human vocalisations. A highly ritualised and choreographed act involving man, eagle, horse and dog, the hunt is the embodied enactment of bonds of trust and intimacy woven through vocality. The intangible physicality of voice, inseparable from the human or nonhuman body (Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, MIT Press, 2006; Martha Feldman and Judith Zeitlin, The Voice as Something More, Chicago University Press, 2019), is functional in mediating the human/nonhuman relation. In Kyrgyzstan, hunting is sometimes staged for tourists, in the summer, as an eagle-training demonstration (winter is real hunting season). This has two levels of performativity. One is the inherent performativity of hunting and eagle training, with their ritualized gesturality. As boundaries are set through established gestures and movements, these elements construct the human/nonhuman bond, sustaining interspecies balance. The other is the performance of hunting for an audience. This currently contributes to preserving the practice, but it also partly dictates the terms of its performance. This multidisciplinary case study contributes to performance research by exploring interspecies relationality and collaboration as a form of vocal and physical performance. This is also a contribution to scientific research on interspecies cooperation through vocality and movement, and an analysis of performance in relation to postcolonial ecologies.