Kymberley Chu
Image Description and Credits: A photo of a rhinoceros at the Kaziranga National Park. Pexels, shot by Ravi Mittal
On the winding roads through mountainous terrain on the way to Kaziranga National Park, a feast of savannah and tropical woodlands, elephants dot the highway. They drink water and wag their tails facing the road. The elephants are adorned with floral strings as people pet and care for them. Numerous coach buses, roadside shops, and restaurants play the musician Zubeen Garg’s songs, such as Suwali Joni. Light notes of acoustic guitar, flute and dhol echo along the roads during our bus trip.
Here at Borgos Resort, covered by lush bamboo and banyan trees in the courtyard with rhesus macaques occasionally roaming around, from March 8th to March 11th, 2026, the Company of Biologists facilitated the Integrative Ecology in the Global South workshop. Bringing together over 20 early-career researchers, the interdisciplinary workshop addressed issues of integrative ecology along diverse and multiscalar levels, from examining the granular details of organismic biology, mammalian animals and their behavioral adaptations, climate change mapping, ecosystem management, and the role of science and technology studies (STS) in public outreach.
In this article, I reflect on the structural barriers of doing ecological research in the Global South. In the latter half of this essay, I respond to my friend and colleague Dhritimoni Mahanta’s PhD project at Cotton University in Guwahati, Assam.
Anthropologists Tim Ingold and Gísli Pálsson remind us that integration is not about producing and completing the individual silos of intellectual disciplines. Rather, cross-disciplinary conversations give rise to addressing and situating various political interventions and socio-ecological landscapes that researchers must negotiate and contend with (Ingold and Palsson 2013).
During the workshop’s experiential learning activities such as mind mapping, group discussions, and artistic drawing sessions, opportunities for collaboration and asymmetrical frictions unfolded. Many Global South-based scientists pointed out various structural inequities: the uneven circulatory flow of procuring lab equipment, skewed authorship dynamics (mostly where Global North scientists were first authors), financial difficulties in hiring and retaining operational fieldworkers in data collection, and more. Our mind maps revealed that the entangled circulatory flows of Global North-Global South intellectual labor exchange and lab equipment capital are not abstracted units equal in weight (Armenteras 2025). Rather, these flows illustrate how uneven geopolitical dynamics (Maide 2023), specifically where Global North institutions asymmetrically benefit mostly, can shape the pursuit of studying particular ecological landscapes. For example, a scientific paper pointed out how 40% of conservation case studies published between the years 2011 until 2015 dominantly featured temperate forests in Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom (Di Marco et al. 2017).
On the ground, however, many Global South-based academics are creating and maintaining infrastructural networks of community-based support alongside institutional spaces they work in. For example, Professor Narayan Sharma’s pivotal citizen science initiatives transform local audiences into community-based knowledge producers (Sharma 2023). During nature walking tours (Kalita 2024) of Cotton University’s campus grounds in Guwahati, Sharma asks participants to carefully observe the behavior of individual trees, such as the rhythmic patterns of nyctinasty, which is the bending of leaves in the evening due to adjustments in darkness levels. Citizen science is both an immersive learning experience and a community-based policy tool in addressing everyday environmental issues[1]. Outside of the laboratory, places such as secondary forests and community parks become open-ended classrooms where immersive and experiential learning activities remind layperson participants about the everyday richness of peri-urban biodiversity and landscapes co-constructed by social histories and ecological dynamics (Sinha 2025, Ramakrishna, Joshi, and Sinha 2025). Phenomenological approaches such as experiential learning in citizen science teach us that the holistic factors of anthropogenic activity, development plasticity, urban behavioral adaptations, and so on can mutually and unevenly shape local landscapes (Merleau-Ponty 2010, Bateson 1972).
Contemporary Reflections on Xakoni Landscapes and Xaak-Based Gastronomic Cultures
Dhriti’s presentation unpacked literary tropes of extinction-driven narratives and shared interview anecdotes about how xakoni (homestead) garden farmers bear witness to the structural dynamics of climate change and rapid urban development. Dhriti vividly described the seasonal imagery of how monsoon floods and heatwave spells entangle ecological, linguistic, and gastronomical landscapes of xakoni gardens in compact and precarious ways. During the presentation, I became curious about the ways in which the power dynamics of climate change management worsened structural inequities, especially regarding Assam’s Adivasi communities (Barua 2022, Barua 2024)[2].
Cooking and consuming Xaak (leafy greens), for Dhriti and her key interlocutors, is an expression of collective joy and therapeutic nourishment, especially during the Rongali Bihu (Assamese New Year) holidays. Although I did not get the chance to consume the traditional 101-herb xaak dish of Assam, Dhriti showed us around her bustling hometown of Guwahati, and we ate many delicious dishes such as pumpkin sabzi, duck curry with diced ash gourd, and even an Assamese-style thali meal with xaak-based dal. Dhriti’s pivotal research and her generous spirit of hospitality highlight how community wellbeing, especially in eating heartwarming meals together, is nourished and sustained even in the face of climate change and rapid development politics.
Inspired by Rob Nixon’s definition of slow violence[3] and Maan Barua’s vegetal geographies[4], as human-vegetal relationships are rapidly changing in Assam, how do urban adaptations in gastronomic traditions and homestead farming techniques narrate and index stories of contemporary development politics? Although development is dominantly situated as an antagonistic formation in relation to ecological realities, thinking beyond extinctionist narratives can help unsettle the colonial and casteist politics of demarcating a purity order on food politics. Most importantly, without rose-tinted glasses, what do the precarious and nourishing sensitivities of xaak plant cultivation teach us about ourselves in relation to an ever-changing world?
In between breaks from the formality of conference presentations, my friend Dhriti and I walked outside. Surrounded by rice fields, secondary forest, and countryside houses, in my head, I counted the number of goats, chickens, and cows spotted. Many of the houses were built with mud walls, matted bamboo roofs, and wooden wall framings. Banana trees line the roads and xaak garden patches are growing. This walking experience resonated with me. It was a defining moment of the conference because it reminded me that ecological knowledge is not just cultivated in the lab, but also found in the lived experience of cultivating plants and tending to animal companions (Govindrajan 2018, Dave 2023, Dave 2025).
[1] Citizen science is a participatory service where public audiences participate and collaborate to produce scientific research. As a research methodology, many public volunteers help in routine data collection and classification practices such as bird watching or tracking primate behavioral observations.
[2] As a further reference, I recommend Maan Barua’s Plantationocene: A Vegetal Geography article (Barua 2022) and Plantation Worlds (Barua 2024), where Barua unpacked his ethnographic research on the Adivasi community, elephants, and tea plantations in Assam, India. Both pieces extensively discuss the colonial histories of British indenture and contemporary realities of how Adivasi communities navigate their labor politics in tea plantations.
[3] In my interpretation, Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence entails various forms of destruction that occur on different temporal scales and manifest across multiple material, bodily, and political forms. These forms of destruction, such as exposure to chemical pollution and climate change-exacerbated heat waves, provoke gradual and implicitly harmful consequences.
[4] In my interpretation, Maan Barua’s concept of vegetal geographies is a multiscalar approach to studying human-plantation interfaces. Vegetal geographies trace the uneven power dynamics on plant circulation in plantations, plant labor economies, and landscape ecologies.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to friend and colleague Dhriti Mahanta for our collaboration and the enriching conversations we had about the shared and entangled features of peri-urban ecologies and delicious, heartwarming gastronomies in India and Malaysia. I thank Professor Narayan Sharma for his insightful comments on reframing human-primate interfaces. Thank you, organizers and participants from the Integrative Ecology in the Global South Workshop for letting me present my findings. The conference travel was made possible by the Company of Biologists. I thank Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Royal Anthropological Institute Emslie Horniman Fund, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute Hack Award for funding my ongoing dissertation research.
References:
“On ‘Indifference’: A Conversation with Naisargi Davé.” 2025. Society for Cultural Anthropology. September 16, 2025. https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/interview-naisargi-n-dav%C3%A9-on-conceptualizing-and-writing-indifference-winner-of-the-2024-gregory-bateson-book-prize.
“Integrative Ecology in the Global South.” 2026. The Company of Biologists. March 26, 2026. https://www.biologists.com/workshops/global_south_2026/.
Armenteras, Dolors . 2025. Review of Equity in Science Is a Beautiful Lie — and I’m Done Pretending. Nature (blog). September 16, 2025. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02916-w.
Barua, Maan. 2022. “Plantationocene: A Vegetal Geography.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 113 (1): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2022.2094326.
Barua, Maan. 2024. Plantation Worlds. Duke University Press.
Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. University of Chicago Press.
Davé, Naisargi N. 2023. Indifference. Duke University Press.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.
Gewin, Virginia . 2023. Review of Pack up the Parachute: Why Global North–South Collaborations Need to Change. Nature (blog). July 24, 2023. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02313-1.
GUINEIS Journal. 2023. “Interview With Narayan Sharma”. GUINEIS Journal 9 (March): 236-44. https://guineisjrnl.gauhati.ac.in/index.php/guinj/article/view/134.
Ingold, Tim, and Gísli Pálsson. 2013. Biosocial Becomings : Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kalita, Kangkan. 2024. “Tree Walks’ at Cotton University to Bring People close to Nature.” The Times of India. The Times Of India. September 29, 2024. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/guwahati/tree-walks-at-cotton-university-to-bring-people-close-to-nature/articleshow/113795690.cms.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 2014. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge.
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Radhika Govindrajan. 2018. Animal Intimacies : Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas. Chicago: The University Of Chicago Press.
Ramakrishna, Ishika , Yashendu Joshi, and Anindya Sinha. 2025. Review of Of Culture and Nature: Interdisciplinary Forays into Cultural Ecosystem Services through Human–Wildlife Relationships. In The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Ecosystem Services, 213–27. Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003414896-22/culture-nature-ishika-ramakrishna-yashendu-chinmayee-joshi-anindya-sinha.
Sharma, Nachiket. 2026. Review of Clear Light of Day — Research as Everyday Literature. 2026. Anthroprospective.com (blog). February 2, 2026. https://anthroprospective.com/Clear-Light-of-Day.
Sinha, Anindya. 2025. “To Be or Not to Be Conscious: Reflections on the Phenomenological Complexity of the Macaque Mind.” Adaptive Behavior 34 (1): 35–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/10597123251356934.
Kymberley Chu is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Princeton University and a visiting fellow at Monash University Malaysia. Specifically, she examines how free-ranging primate bodies and their physiologies traverse through development politics, economic valuations, and cultural histories that all mutually intersect in Malaysia’s socio-ecological landscapes. For more information, her webpage can be found here and her Bluesky handle is @dialecticprimates.bsky.social.
