Dealing with the devil: An ethnographic study of human-animal relations and the making of the wild and the domestic.

In this thesis I will take a dip into the world of multi-species ethnography, and through this explore the relations between humans and Tasmanian devils in captivity. Tasmanian devils are at risk of becoming extinct, due to habitat loss, road kill accidents, but most importantly due to a deadly disease called Devil Facial Tumor Disease. To preserve the Tasmanian devils as a "wild" species in captivity there have been enacted practices by animal keepers and volunteers resembling those of domestication, which leads to new ways of interaction with and perception of this species. Based on a five-month fieldwork in Tasmania in 2015, my ethnography is centered around two conservation parks for Tasmanian devils that are partaking in the national breeding program and conservation work of marsupial carnivores. First, through ethnographic descriptions and with a performative approach I will show how different devils are “created” through practices of interaction, and how a performance of the wild coexists alongside the domestic practices in the captive devil population. I have looked at specific breeding practices and how practices of feeding, breeding and confinement entangles human and devil lives. I have also explored different ways of enacting care, from close and embodied by animal keepers, to emotional and imagined by tourists, and how different animals make the keepers and volunteers into different types of caregivers. By focusing on the nexus of practices that go into Tasmanian devil conservation, my aim is to use empirical descriptions to argue for networks of relations in a process of becoming and the world in the making, in that the world is not fixed, but is made through human and non-human practices