Inhabiting Extinction
Discover the winning 2026 project "Inhabiting Extinction: Scientific Classifications, Survivance, and Pluriverses of Disappearance around the Clouded Leopard" from the Louis Dumont Fund, which supports research in social anthropology.
"This project proposes an ethnographic inquiry into the ways contemporary natural sciences define, administer, and reconfigure the extinction of animal species. Based on two field sites conducted in Europe — an international scientific workshop on the conservation of the clouded leopard (Denmark) and an ethnographic investigation in a zoological park (the Netherlands) — this project analyzes the categories, discourses, and dispositifs through which a species declared extinct in certain contexts is nevertheless maintained through forms of biological, genetic, and symbolic presence.
I will analyze the multiplicity of discourses surrounding the concept of extinction in order to show that it does not refer to a fixed and homogeneous definition, but rather to varied conceptions and realities depending on the actors who engage with it and the interactions woven between humans and non-humans. Situated within the fields of social anthropology and extinction studies, this research draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2018 among the Paiwan Austronesians of Taiwan, for whom the clouded leopard continues to exist through spectral and relational forms. By bringing these different worlds of extinction into dialogue, this project proposes to think disappearance not as a homogeneous fact, but as a plural situation, revealing tensions between scientific classifications, biopolitical regimes of the living, and forms of survivance."
Agathe Lemaitre
Agathe Lemaitre holds a PhD in Anthropology from the College of Indigenous Studies, Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan, where she graduated in July 2023. Her doctoral research explored the relationships between the Austronesian Paiwan people and two animal species: the locally extinct clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa) and the endangered mountain hawk-eagle (Nisaetus nipalensis). Through social, political, and environmental perspectives, her work examines human–animal relationships in contexts of conservation and extinction.
