“Golden Snail Opera” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 31 No. 4 (2016)

Tsai, Carbonell, Chevrier, and Tsing’s contribution to Cultural Anthropology‘s experimental “Sound + Vision” section performs what it argues: that multispecies entanglement requires multispecies form. The golden apple snail (Pomacea canaliculata) was imported to Taiwan from Argentina in 1979 for an imagined escargot industry, declared invasive when that industry failed, and is now the subject of competing eradication and cohabitation strategies. The piece centers a generation of “friendly farmers” in Yilan County who resist herbicide-based control and instead build knowledge of the snail’s ecology, behavior, and social life — drawing on traditional calendars, bird-watching, scientific literature, and local cosmology simultaneously. The snail’s trajectory — imported, surplus, unwanted, persisting — runs parallel to the logics that govern human migration, and the piece’s operatic form refuses the distancing that “invasive species” discourse demands.

The golden snail’s story is a migration story, and the piece makes that parallel impossible to ignore without ever collapsing one into the other. The language used to manage invasive species — eradication, control, threat assessment — echoes the language of border enforcement and migrant criminalization with uncomfortable precision. What the “friendly farmers” offer, and what the piece performs, is an alternative: a media form that insists on proximity, attention, and cohabitation rather than distancing and elimination. For M2Lab, this is one of the clearest articulations in the dataset of how media form — the choice to make an opera rather than a policy brief — is itself a political intervention in how migration (human and nonhuman alike) is understood and governed.

— SG

 

Original Publication available to view online: 

https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/ca31.4.04/628