Abstract
Contemporary biosecurity relies on a military mode of thinking. Notwithstanding, what ideas about the nature of war itself permeate social reactions to biological threats, such as invasive alien species? Drawing on an ethnography of wild boar management in Southern Brazil, I argue in this article that both the discourse on biological species and its criticism are inspired by a strategic, exclusional, paradigm of military conflict, which is in turn based on a territorial imagery of ecological relations. Alternatively, in line with symmetric anthropology and several Levi-Strauss’ meditations on cannibalism, I suggest that other models of what a war is can be mobilized to think about the conflict between society and biological risks, closer to the logic of predation that characterizes the agonistic relation with the dangerous Other in Amerindian cosmologies.
Keywords:
biosecurity; alien invasive species; war; wild boar