Bats, Biodiversity and Ecological knowledge

As part of a European Research Council project, a team of anthropologists is working on interspecific relations between humans and chiropterans in the Indo-Pacific. Following the special issue entitled “Ethnology of bats” published in the Journal of Ethnobiology (2021), the team intends to open a discussion based on empirical field studies. From the depths of caves to treetops, from church steeples to barns, these synanthropic but often discrete beings populate many ecological environments. Around the world, chiropterans inspire imaginaries, practices (of hunting, cooking, medicine, rituals, tourism, arts, etc.) and narratives (cosmogonic, nursery rhymes, mediatic and political discourses, etc.) that reflect the specificities of their morphology and behavior. These ambiguous beings are at the heart of current ethno-biological concerns: preservation of environments and valorization of local/indigenous knowledge. Dracula, Batman and Halloween monsters are not the only symbols triggered by bats. The session welcomes contributions on interactions with chiropterans around the world, but also invites to the study of interspecific cohabitation and its theoretical and epistemological debates.