Cacti are now found in the most unlikely places on the planet – restaurant restrooms, vertical gardens on skyscrapers, near the North Pole – but much less so in the localities where they were once endemic. In The cactus hunters, Jared D. Margulies examines this puzzling simultaneity of global cacti and succulent mobilities, and the demise of some species. He deftly disentangles the web that connects extinction, global trade, and wildlife poaching with collectors, conservationists, and consumers seeking cuteness, through an ethnography in Brazil, Mexico, the USA, Czechia, and South Korea. He then weaves these threads into a compelling narrative whose backbone is the psychoanalytic theory of desire. The story starts with European cactoexplorers and collectors, and the processes that make them desiring subjects. The explorers and collectors are often men identifying with the masculine spines and soft cores of the cacti. Cacti create intimate and ‘lively connections’ between them, which transcend national borders and regulations that aim to govern wildlife trade. Margulies discusses the nature of licit/illicit and legal/illegal in this context of affective attachments and care for the species that drive collectors and conservationists alike in surprising ways. What underlies the production of all desires – to possess, care, or conserve – directed at cacti is the particular epistemic tradition of ‘knowing’ the species through Linnaean taxonomy. A praiseworthy achievement of The cactus hunters lies in its illustration of how the sometimes-arbitrary and often-retractable acts of naming affect markets, the circulation of plants, and, most importantly, ecologies, simultaneously rendering certain plants vulnerable to poaching and placing them on conservation lists. The second half of the book provides an extended case study of the trajectory of two species of the Dudleya genus from Mexico and California to South Korea. The author follows the plants as they grow on ocean cliffs and are poached by plant smugglers, taken over by law enforcement, and manicured by nursery workers, all the while traversing the planet. These three chapters give a detailed account of how the law tries to catch up with conservation concerns; how cuteness as an aesthetic quality emerges in capitalist networks; and how fads of consumer desire can fuel the extinction of species that attract affection. Indeed, most of the species that appear in this book are under the threat of extinction. A necessary insert between the book's two sections, chapter 4 addresses the anxieties surrounding species extinction in the Capitalocene. While the chapter ties concerns over extinction back to psychoanalysis, what I found most insightful is Margulies's poetic rendering of the temporal dimensions of extinction and response-ability in an age rife with anxieties. The cactus hunters is a testament to the power of plants over people. The collectors in Czechia; the conservationists in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States; and the consumers in South Korea are all driven by plant qualities. Margulies posits that the desiring subject is constituted through the Lacanian concept of extimacies, in processes that ‘enjoin the exterior with intimacy’ (p. 5). In conversation with Critical Plant Studies and New Materialism scholarship, one key term that emerges from this discussion is the notion of ‘lootability’ (p. 4). With their shallow roots, high resilience to exposure, and capacities to survive under unfavourable circumstances, many of the cacti and succulents score high on this index, which makes them suitable for removal from their habitats and entering into global trade. Similarly, towards the end of the book, Margulies delves into the making of ‘cuteness’ as a source of aesthetic judgement on plants (p. 289), which connects the Americas and East Asia through poachers, growers, sellers, and consumers. While the book is rich in ethnographic detail, the most striking accounts often involve Margulies himself. With analytical dexterity, he examines his own responses, desires, and articulations to make the often-dense psychoanalytical theory of desire more accessible. He does so, however, with only relative success. Margulies's attempts at differentiating desires from drives, or the Thing from the objet a (the unattainable object of desire in Lacanian psychoanalysis), within the material context of cactus collecting, poaching, and growing, often lead to more questions than enlightenment on the subject. But this is not a psychoanalysis textbook. Margulies frames the book as a ‘political ecology of desire’ (p. 11). The political ecology of cacti and succulents is so compellingly analysed that readers who are not as convinced by the psychoanalytical theory of desire still remain engaged. Therefore, despite its narrow theoretical orientation, The cactus hunters is a fascinating read for scholars and students of anthropology, human geography, ecology, and conservation alike.
Hilal Alkan (Fri,) studied this question.