Freedom Rangers™ and landscapes that move people

Born out of long-term fieldwork in New York's Hudson Valley, this article begins and ends with reflections on a fraught attempt to conduct ethnographic research with captive chickens, paradoxically called Freedom Rangers™, living on small-scale, organic animal farms. With no available ecological and economic justifications for their confinement, I had to turn instead to animal agriculture's long-standing role in a regional landscape tradition that generates a White sense of place and personhood. Since the dawn of the colonial period, agriculture, especially animal agriculture, has constituted a powerful landscape-making assemblage in the Hudson Valley, one both deeply dependent on racial slavery and uniquely responsible for (never complete) Native displacement. Imported European farm animals and their associate organisms remade the region ecologically, enabling the proliferation of colonial settlement. Then as now, the remaking of the land is itself a site of politics and a means of realizing possible futures. Watching as Whiteness emerges along the human/nonhuman interface, I argue that meat is but one product yielded from these confined chicken bodies and that the unspectacular terror they experience on a daily basis radiates far beyond their enclosures. Addressing the persistence of settler colonialism, antiblackness, and White supremacy requires attention to a wider range of political scenes and actors than are often considered in studies of these formations. What are the banal practices and everyday affects that secure a social order? What are the possibilities for more-than-human ethnography given the violence that saturates this venerated landscape?