Rewilding the Anthropocene. Human-Animal Assemblages in the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area.

REWILDING is an environmental anthropological project contributing to the budding field of environmental humanities.

It focuses on the shifting entanglements between people, flora, and fauna in the worlds largest conservation landscape, the southern African Kavango-Zambezi Transboundary Conservation Area (KAZA TFCA). Inaugurated in 2011, KAZA TFCA is a working landscape of conservation par excellence. Its green future is broadcast globally, but simultaneously bears marks of colonial and post-colonial pasts.

REWILDING is a unique attempt to grasp changing socio-ecological relations among humans and other species.

It consists of six field studies, each of which will have a comparative component and an in-depth focus on one particular multi-species assemblage.

The comparative approach examines how human livelihoods, institutions, social imaginaries, and attitudes change under and give rise to new socio-ecological conditions.

The second part focuses on six multi-species assemblages (e.g. an elephant assemblage, a Glossina/Trypanosome assemblage, a rosewood assemblage).

Each assemblage is comprised of a loose multi-scalar network consisting of different species populations, environmental infrastructures and technologies, and human actors, organizations and social institutions.

By pursuing a two-pronged comparative and in-depth approach, REWILDING will advance scholarly knowledge on refaunation and biodiversity in contexts of large-scale conservation.

The project is tied into networks of interdisciplinary research on the effects of recent population rebounds among megaherbivores, vectors of epidemic diseases tied to such refaunation, and the socio-economic ramifications of rapidly commodifying diverse flora and fauna.

REWILDING is uniquely positioned and purposefully designed to contribute to a better understanding of the complexities of recent large-scale refaunation efforts, and will thereby offer new, empirical insight for the future planning of conservation.